Abstract
This chapter is devoted to reflecting on the role of empathy in interactions with people with profound intellectual disabilities. We have a duty to respect people with intellectual disabilities. Respect involves identification with a point of view. We owe them an effort at identification with their perspective. However, if intellectually disabled people’s communicative abilities are impaired, our apprehension of their point of view might be limited, reducing our ability to identify with them and respect them. To answer this challenge, I appeal to empathy. Through imaginative empathy, we can learn to identify with their perspectives. I argue that empathy is a good moral guide and can be helpful in developing respectful attitudes toward people with profound intellectual disabilities.
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Notes
- 1.
As Dillon (1992) points out, there are different ways of respecting persons, for example, respecting their moral and legal rights. I will be most concerned here with respecting in the sense of caring or having concern for others.
- 2.
I am using the notion of ‘pre-reflective consciousness’ here in a very general way that can be compatible with different theories of consciousness. It’s the idea that the early stages of consciousness do not require self-reflective processes that emerge later in development. Even some versions of higher-order theories of consciousness can be compatible with the idea of a minimal conceptual structure at birth which would give neonates the capacity for pre-reflective consciousness (Gennaro 2012).
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Passos-Ferreira, C. (2023). Empathizing with the Intellectually Disabled. In: Barbosa-Fohrmann, A.P., Caponi, S. (eds) Latin American Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Bioethics and Disabilities. The International Library of Bioethics, vol 102. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22891-9_1
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