What's the Difference Between Compassion and Moral Worth?

For shopenhaw the project of ethics is a descriptive one. What he's really interested in is when we praise or blame others and take an attitude towards vrincen's heroic bravery. For schopenhauer, it tends to be that there is an element of unegoistic behaviour, which he calls compassion. When we act compassionately towards another person and manage to treat their suffering as if it were our own, what we're doing is we are momentarily not identifying with our own individuality, but seeing ourselves reflected or connected to the other person. And this fits into his wider metaphysical picture, that ultimately, we are actually just different manifestations of one and the same reality, which