“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”, or “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.” –2nd century BC Roman African playwright Terence from the play Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor).
Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom wrote a book a few years back called Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Bloom argues empathy is “a poor moral guide” that can lead to bias, racism, and “weaponization” in the sense that empathizing people may want to punish those they perceive are causing the pain they relate to in others. Bloom has a point. (One of my English students a few years back had a funny malapropism to the effect that great literature should teach the reader apathy, when what he probably meant was empathy.)
My book quotes a line from Samuel Beckett’s More Pricks than Kicks where the main character quotes Dante’s Inferno that “Qui vive la pieta quando e ben morta”/”Here pity (or piety) lives when it is well dead” or “Down here piety lives only when pity is fully dead.” It can come across as a warning against showing pity for the damned, but Beckett’s character calls it “a superb pun” and wonders “why not piety and pity both, even down below?” As one critic of Beckett’s work asks, divine mercy or divine justice?
Another famous quote from Terence’s play The Self-Tormentor is “Aliis si licet, tibi non licet“/“to others it is permitted; to you it is not permitted.” This was updated by a 19th century author as “What is permissible for Jupiter is not permissible for a bull.” As my book shows, Maria Edgeworth in her Essay on Irish Bulls notes a similar double-standard in that many in England accept apparently self-contradictory statements in Shakespeare as figurative language but deride it from the Irish as non-sense.