"[T]eaching is one of the foremost of personal relations"

"It should be clear that caring requires thinking and the caring characteristic of caring relations has both cognitive and affective dimensions. Both the philosopher, Michael Slote (2007), and the psychologist, Martin Hoffman (2000), put great emphasis on the affective dimension of empathy. We respond empathically when we ‘feel’ what the other is going through or something congruent with the other’s feeling. Caring, as a way of being-in-the-world, prepares us to undergo such synchronous feelings. But caring cannot be reduced to empathy. When we care, we sometimes respond immediately to an expressed need; the need is obvious. However, there are times when we must elicit further expression. We are sometimes too quick to say, ‘I know how you feel’, and misunderstandings arise easily. For this reason, we should strive for empathic accuracy (Ickes, 1997; Steuber, 2006). We have to ask questions and reflect on the answers. Dialogue is fundamental in building relations of care and trust. Within a well-established relation, we are more likely to achieve empathic accuracy. There is a familiar difficulty here of attributing to the other feelings that we would have under similar conditions. Indeed, traditional philosophy and religion inadvertently support this error. We have been urged to ‘do unto others as you would have done unto you’, and as children we were often asked, ‘How would you feel if someone said that to you?’ Care ethics suggests that, as nearly as possible, we do unto others as they would have done unto them. Similarly, in teaching the young to be more sensitive——to be prepared to care——we ask them to think about how the other feels, not how they would feel in the same circumstances. The hope is that, gradually, they will come to understand that, when different people are involved, circumstances are never quite the same.”