Compassion in the context of Pity

Ethics is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.

Normative ethics aims to find general principles that govern how people should act. Applied ethics examines concrete ethical problems in real-life situations, such as abortion, treatment of animals, and business practices. Metaethics explores the underlying assumptions and concepts of ethics. It asks whether there are objective moral facts, how moral knowledge is possible, and how moral judgments motivate people. Influential normative theories are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. According to consequentialists, an act is right if it leads to the best consequences. Deontologists focus on acts themselves, saying that they must adhere to duties, like telling the truth and keeping promises. Virtue ethics sees the manifestation of virtues, like courage and compassion, as the fundamental principle of morality.

Wisdom, also known as sapience, is the ability to apply knowledge, experience, and good judgment to navigate life's complexities. It is often associated with insight, discernment, and ethics in decision-making. Throughout history, wisdom has been regarded as a key virtue in philosophy, religion, and psychology, representing the ability to understand and respond to reality in a balanced and thoughtful manner. Unlike intelligence, which primarily concerns problem-solving and reasoning, wisdom involves a deeper comprehension of human nature, moral principles, and the long-term consequences of actions.

Philosophically, wisdom has been explored by thinkers from Ancient Greece to modern times. Socrates famously equated wisdom with recognizing one's own ignorance, while Aristotle saw it as practical reasoning (phronesis) and deep contemplation (sophia). Eastern traditions, such as Confucianism and Buddhism, emphasize wisdom as a form of enlightened understanding that leads to ethical living and inner peace. Across cultures, wisdom is often linked to virtues like humility, patience, and compassion, suggesting that it is not just about knowing what is right but also acting upon it.

The Kosovo Maiden or Maiden of the Blackbird's Field (Serbian: Косовка девојка / Kosovka devojka) is the central figure of a poem with the same name, part of the Kosovo cycle in the Serbian epic poetry. In it, a young beauty searches the battlefield for her betrothed fiancé and helps wounded Serbian warriors with water, wine and bread after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 between Serbia and the Ottoman Empire. She finally finds the wounded and dying warrior Pavle Orlović who tells her that her fiancé Milan Toplica and his blood-brothers Miloš Obilić and Ivan Kosančić are dead. Before the battle they had given her a cloak, golden ring and veil for the wedding as a promise of safe return, but they were slain and Pavle pointed to the direction of the bodies. The poem finishes with:

The poem became very popular as a symbol of womanly compassion and charity.

The Three Treasures or Three Jewels (Chinese: 三寶; pinyin: sānbǎo; Wade–Giles: san-pao) are basic virtues in Taoism. Although the Tao Te Ching originally used sanbao to mean "compassion", "frugality", and "humility", the term was later used to translate the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha) in Chinese Buddhism, and to mean the Three Treasures (jing, qi, and shen) in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Love is an emotion involving strong attraction, affection, emotional attachment or concern for a person, animal, or thing. It is expressed in many forms, encompassing a range of strong and positive emotional and mental states, from the most sublime virtue, good habit, deepest interpersonal affection, to the simplest pleasure. An example of this range of meanings is that the love of a mother differs from the love of a spouse, which differs from the love of food.

Love is considered to be both positive and negative, with its virtue representing kindness, compassion, and affection—"the unselfish, loyal, and benevolent concern for the good of another"—and its vice representing a moral flaw akin to vanity, selfishness, amour-propre, and egotism. It may also describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, oneself, or animals. In its various forms, love acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships, and owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts. Love has been postulated to be a function that keeps human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species.

Honour (Commonwealth English) or honor (American English; see spelling differences) is a quality of a person that is of both social teaching and personal ethos, that manifests itself as a code of conduct, and has various elements such as valour, chivalry, honesty, and compassion. It is an abstract concept entailing a perceived quality of worthiness and respectability that affects both the social standing and the self-evaluation of an individual or of institutions such as a family, school, regiment, or nation. Accordingly, individuals (or institutions) are assigned worth and stature based on the harmony of their actions with a specific code of honour, and with the moral code of the society at large.

Samuel Johnson, in his A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), defined honour as having several senses, the first of which was "nobility of soul, magnanimity, and a scorn of meanness".This sort of honour derives from the perceived virtuous conduct and personal integrity of the person endowed with it. Johnson also defined honour in relationship to "reputation" and "fame"; to "privileges of rank or birth", and as "respect" of the kind which "places an individual socially and determines his right to precedence". This sort of honour is often not so much a function of moral or ethical excellence, as it is a consequence of power. Finally, with respect to sexuality, honour has traditionally been associated with (or identical to) "chastity" or "virginity", or in case of married men and women, "fidelity".

Karuṇā (Sanskrit: करुणा) is generally translated as compassion or mercy and sometimes as self-compassion or spiritual longing. It is a significant spiritual concept in the Indic religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism.

Humanity is a virtue linked with altruistic ethics derived from the human condition. It signifies human love and compassion towards each other. Humanity differs from mere justice in that there is a level of altruism towards individuals included in humanity more so than in the fairness found in justice. That is, humanity, and the acts of love, altruism, and social intelligence are typically individual strengths while fairness is generally expanded to all. Humanity is one of six virtues that are consistent across all cultures.

The concept of "humanity" goes back to the development of "humane" or "humanist" philosophy during the Renaissance (with predecessors in 13th-century scholasticism that stressed a concept of basic human dignity inspired by Aristotelianism) and the concept of humanitarianism in the early modern period, resulting in modern notions such as "human rights".

Karen Armstrong (born 14 November 1944) is a British author and commentator known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, while in the convent and graduated in English. She left the convent in 1969. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule.

Armstrong received the US$100,000 TED Prize in February 2008. She used that occasion to call for the creation of a Charter for Compassion, which was unveiled the following year.