Sympathy Is an Act of Appropriation

[Mopsus]

Sympathy Is an Act of Appropriation. When the sympathetic heart encounters another in distress, its first instinct is to feel with it: through the combination of recollection and imagination, it takes up the perceived pain as its own. Its second instinct is to alleviate its pain - by offering consolation if it can, by attacking the source of suffering if it must.
From this dialectic of instinct do “moral actions” become generate.

Sympathy Is Not Only Concerned with Pain. When the sympathetic heart brings joy to one person, it shares in that man or woman’s happiness just as it would share in that man or woman's pain; the reader can imagine the ecstasy felt by that heart which lifts up a score, a hundred, or a thousand.
Such is the inducement to maximize sympathy.

Addendum. As we read the preceding assessment, a danger lurks over our shoulder: that some subtil person might place a floodgate around his sympathetic organs, to be raised or lowered as the weather fluctuates. To this malodorous, anti-social idea, I suggest the following counter: that any faculty, once maximized, is not easily closed off again.

[Antonio the Sixth]

...OK?

[Associate Justice PiT]

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     This last sentence reminds me of something. In the past, there was an idea that suggested that people should express their anger in order to let it out. It turned out that people ended up just going around being angry. They had a hard time closing off that tendency again.