Abstract

In the following pages I examine Schopenhauer’s contribution to the debate about the extension of the moral community, concretely, to the basis principles of the animal ethics. In the first section, I describe the role of the compassion in the ethics, as propounds Schopenhauer. In the second, I focuse on the correlation ‘suffering - intellectual capacity’ as criterion to feel compassion, and I emphazise the limits of the empathy in Schopenhauer’s philosophy too. In the third section, I examine the value of the compasión in connection with the denial of the will and with the pessimistic point of wiew. Finally, I stress the aspects that I consider the most important oder debatable of Schopenhauer’s position