Abstract

Samuel Fleischacker's book is a very welcome addition both to scholarship on Adam Smith and to the burgeoning field of empathy studies. Fleischacker brings decades of excellent and influential work on Smith to the popular topic of empathy to show that Smithian empathy (Smith uses the term "sympathy" for this capacity), with some updates, has a crucial role to play in our ethical practices. In doing so, Fleischacker offers important responses to some perennial objections to Smith's empathy-based moral theory, and to the recent critiques of empathy from Paul Bloom and Jesse Prinz. But Fleischacker does more than just delineate and defend Smithian empathy in this book; he also makes a compelling case for an eclectic, humanistic, and empathy-based ethics.