 Secondly, it may be argued that pantheism is able to give a particularly strong ground for an ethic of altruism or compassion. To Schopenhauer (with whom this argument is particularly associated) only genuinely altruistic or compassionate actions have moral worth, but only pleasure and pain are capable of motivating the will, from which he concludes that genuinely moral action is possible only if the pleasure and pain of others can stir us to action as directly and immediately as can our own pleasure and pain. It is not enough that we sympathetically imagine ourselves in their shoes, he argues; we must literally feel the pleasure and pain of others as our own, an attitude that will be rationally grounded only in a monistic metaphysics in which the distinction between ego and not ego becomes a trivial or illusory distinction between two manifestations of the same underlying unity. (Schopenhauer 1839). Schopenhauer includes nonhuman animals in this argument. To the charge that what is defended here remains but a species of egoism—metaphysically enlarged, but still morally worthless—it may be replied that self-concern is to be deprecated only insofar as it is something that exists in contrast with concern for others (a contrast which no longer finds any purchase in this scheme).