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Abstract

A growing interest across disciplines in the nature of empathy has sparked a debate over the place of empathy in morality. Proponents are eager to capitalize on the apparent close connection between empathy and altruism, while critics point to serious problems in our exercise of empathy - we are naturally biased, empathize too much or too little, and prone to making all sorts of mistakes in empathizing. The proponents have a promising response, that it is not empathy simpliciter, but empathy in some “proper” form, that does the work they claim for it. This paper aims to propose a cautiously optimistic position for the proponent by rethinking the suggested approach. I argue that empathy plays two important roles in morality, one epistemic and the other relational, but the proponent must be careful not to exaggerate the contribution that empathy, even in its “proper” form, can make to our moral life.

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Notes

  1. For a “laundry list” of potential problems with empathy, see Jesse Prinz 2011.

  2. I base my conception of empathy largely on Amy Coplan’s definition in her paper, “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects” (2011). Coplan defines empathy as “a complex imaginative process in which an observer simulates another person’s situated psychological states while maintaining clear self-other differentiation (p.5).” I think her definition has the merit of capturing points of substantial agreement in the diverse literature on empathy. The few changes I introduce are meant to highlight features of empathy that pertain specifically to its place in morality.

    Tamar Schapiro has suggested an alternative conception of empathy that leans closer to our ordinary usage of the term. She points to the example of a con artist who is an expert in empathizing in the more restricted sense I endorse here. As she sees it, the fact that we would not describe the con artist as “empathizing with his victims” goes to show that “empathy is not a morally neutral concept; moral standards of some kind are already build into it (2011, p.93).” More specifically, empathy involves a moral attitude of respecting others as autonomous agents (p.97).

    I find Schapiro’s construal appealing, although I would think that in our ordinary understanding, empathy is tied more closely to care and concern for others than to respect. I prefer the morally neutral conception mainly because it allows me to engage with more of the contributors (from various backgrounds) to the discussion.

  3. Spontaneous, unmediated empathy is quite common. When we see photos of the Boston Marathon bombings, for example, we immediately “catch” the fear, shock, pain and other feelings of the victims, but unlike the crying baby, we experience those feelings not as our own (except vicariously) but as those of the victims. (Note here that empathy need not be the only experience we have in such cases. It is most likely part of a mix of reactions, which may also include sympathy for the victims and outrage at the bombers.)

  4. Batson claims to have established empirical support for the “empathy-altruism hypothesis” – that the feeling of empathy gives rise to the motivation to promote another’s well-being purely for that person’s sake (see, for example, Batson et al. 1997). Hoffman, taking a developmental approach to the topic, affirms empathy’s contribution to prosocial response and proposes that parents can facilitate the internalization of moral norms in their children by tapping into the latter’s growing capacity for empathy (2000).

  5. See Prinz 2011 and Darwall 2002.

  6. See 3.3.1 and 3.3.3 of his Treatise (2000).

  7. Given the limited scope of the paper, I’m setting aside issues with his problematic move from empathy to empathic concern.

  8. Slote believes it’s not wrong to be partial to our family and friends, but maintains that “[r]efusing to save a drowning child one has never seen before in order not to disappoint one’s daughter by being absent when she returns home from school” shows a lack of fully developed empathic concern (2007, p. 31). This applies at the national level too. Slote argues that legislators with fully developed empathic concern should pass laws that “reflect a substantial amount of concern for the welfare of people in other countries” although such concern is justifiably less than their concern for their own people (2010, p. 132–33).

  9. My view here is in part inspired by Adrian Piper’s paper, “Impartiality, Compassion, and Modal Imagination,” where she distinguishes between moral judgments of a person’s involvement in the object of her (modal) imagination (e.g., a possible event, a future event, another person) and judgments of it on psychological grounds (1991).

  10. Both Hoffman (2000) and Piper (1991) have stressed the importance of maintaining a self-other differentiation.

  11. This is not meant to rule out changes in one’s self as a result of interactions with the external world so long as the changes and the subsequently changed self can be claimed as one’s own.

  12. So long as she’s still capable of fulfilling her obligations in day-to-day life.

  13. I’m focusing on Carse’s account, not Slote’s, because I think he leans too closely to identifying empathy with empathic concern. The two are not the same, and the link between the two remains controversial.

  14. It may seem circular to say that we are to get a sense of one’s point of view through empathizing, for empathizing involves taking up that point of view in the first place. I agree there is a circle; it is inevitable, but not vicious. As with understanding (of any subject matter), we can improve our empathic efforts in light of new information we learn either about the parts (i.e. mental states) or about the whole (i.e. overall perspective).

  15. Although understanding involves this practical aspect, it is to be distinguished from knowledge-how. Knowledge of how to do something is a practical skill, which does not necessarily require propositional knowledge about the activity. Understanding involves the ability to apply what one knows about a subject matter, where the application can range over many different activities.

  16. In the case of the insensitive journalist, I’m assuming she does not have malicious intent.

  17. Since one can be better or worse in any of these areas, one’s understanding would be deeper or shallower accordingly.

  18. My coming to see empathy as embodied cognition is much influenced by Alvin Goldman’s work in this area (especially Goldman 2013). To say that empathy is embodied is to say that the process of coming to gain knowledge and understanding of the other’s internal experience through empathy is encoded not in propositions but in bodily changes that make up one’s vicarious experience.

  19. A rich discussion of the contexuality and indexicality of thoughts as reasons can be found in Chapter 4 of Stueber’s Rediscovering Empathy (2006).

  20. Stueber’s arguments are meant to be a priori in the sense that the nature of thinking determines that someone’s thoughts and her reasoning with thoughts can be intelligible only internal to her point of view. So Stueber would say it is in principle impossible, not just difficult, to understand one’s thought process without empathizing. I think he’s probably right, although for my purposes, I can grant that in our everyday life, we can and often do get a pretty good idea of why someone did what she did without empathizing, by drawing on our past experience with similar cases.

  21. This is a real life story described in David Eagleman’s article, “The Brain on Trial,” from the Atlantic July/August 2011.

  22. As I said earlier, the application need not be morally appropriate. I think what Carroll has in mind by “appropriate” is something like “appropriate with respect to the kind of thing the object is.”

  23. Empathy has also been characterized as a kind of (imaginative) “participation” in another’s inner life (see Deigh 1996 and Halpern 2001), a notion similar to “sharing” in that both mark the empathizer’s position as one of being alongside or with the other person.

  24. It’s possible for one to share similar emotions as another without empathizing: fans cheering for the same team or survivors of a train wreck may go through the same emotional experience in virtue of being in the same situation. But even in an identical situation, there may well be individual differences in people’s reactions.

  25. And for those who do participate in joint activities, such shared times together readily provide opportunities as well as resources for sharing and understanding each other’s inner life.

  26. See Ch. 1 (“What Is Moral Repair?) and Ch. 4 (“Resentment and Assurance”) of Walker 2006.

  27. Perhaps not coincidentally, Smith (2002) and Hume (1983) both refer to empathy as a “fellow feeling.” However, whereas the meaning of this “fellow feeling” shifts between “feeling with one’s fellow (human)” and “feeling for one’s fellow (human)” in their writings, I take it to mean only the former.

  28. The image of a person with mental illness comes to mind when we think of someone with a “distorted” picture of herself. I do not wish to restrict the class of people to those afflicted with mental illness. One may be unaware of certain facts about herself, or self-deceived about them, without being mentally ill. Limited or partially false self-understanding is common, or even an inescapable human condition.

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Song, Y. How to Be a Proponent of Empathy. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 437–451 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9525-9

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