 Aristotle analyses tragic compassion as involving three propositions, so to speak: (1) the sufferer’s suffering is serious; (2) the sufferer does not deserve his suffering; 3) the sufferer’s suffering is of a kind that could well touch me [the subject of the emotion] too (Martha Nussbaum devotes Part II of her Upheavals of Thought to this emotion-type). We might say that compassion is a construal of the situation — the sufferer, his suffering, the etiology of the suffering, and the emotional subject’s own condition compared with that of the sufferer — in terms of these three formal propositions.