Extend Self to Others

CORE DEFINITION

The phrase pairs extending the self with reaching others: one begins from one's own felt experience and infers what another person or creature would feel in their circumstances. It is the method behind the Confucian virtue of shu, often rendered as the negative golden rule, do not impose on others what you would not want yourself. The core claim is that direct access to another's inner state is impossible, so empathy must work by mapping one's own experience onto their situation. The qualification is projection: the mapping fails when one's own preferences are assumed to be universal, so the inference must be checked against the other person's actual report.