The Science of Sympathy

In his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in civilized society. His idea buttressed the belief that white, upper-class, educated men deserved their sense of superiority by virtue of good breeding. It also implied that progress could be steered by envisioning a new blueprint for sympathy that redefined moral actions carried out in sympathy's name. Rob Boddice joins a daring intellectual history of sympathy to a portrait of how the first Darwinists defined and employed it. Combining the history of emotions, the history of medicine, the history of science and the history of morality, Boddice shows how specific interpretations of Darwinism sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy. Scientific and medical progress demanded that "cruel" practices like vivisection, an essential part of new research in physiology, and compulsory vaccination be seen as moral for their ultimate goal of alleviating suffering. Some even saw the so-called unfit--natural targets of sympathy--as a danger to society and encouraged sympathy for the "fit" alone, placing this emotion at the heart of eugenics. Right or wrong, these early Darwinists formed a moral economy that acted on a new system of ethics, reconceptualised obligations, and executed new duties. Boddice persuasively argues that the bizarre, even dangerous formulations of sympathy they invented influence society and civilization in the present day.