CONCEPT
Fellow-Feeling and Sympathy
Smith's term for the foundation of moral life — the capacity to enter imaginatively into another's situation and judge the propriety of their sentiments. A concept that becomes strange when applied to collaboration with a system that does not have sentiments.
Fellow-feeling, or sympathy, is the foundation of moral life in Smith's moral philosophy. We judge the propriety of another's sentiments — their anger, their grief, their joy — by imagining ourselves in their situation and consulting our own feelings. The sympathy is not identification with the other's specific feelings but a judgment about whether the feelings are appropriate to the situation. This capacity, which Smith develops throughout The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is both the precondition for social life and the mechanism by which moral judgments are formed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept becomes strange when applied to human-AI collaboration. The AI system does not possess sentiments. It cannot imagine itself in the builder's situation, because it does not have a self to imagine with. It cannot consult feelings it does not have. And yet the collaboration described in You On AI — in which the