Empathizing across sensibilities

ABSTRACT

Empathic perspective taking involves a phenomenally rich reaction to another’s mental state, in an attempt to understand the other by feeling with them. But can we take just any perspective, even if the person we aim to understand seems fundamentally different from us? In this paper, we will explore the possibility of empathically understanding others that are different from us with respect to one aspect of their mental life: their sensibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• sensibility
• imagination
• perspective-taking
• evaluative construal
• imaginative resistance

1. Empathy and sensibilities

Understanding others arguably requires that we ‘take their perspective’. But can we take just any perspective, even if the person we aim to understand seems fundamentally different from us? In this paper, we will explore the possibility of empathically understanding others that are different from us with respect to one aspect of their mental life: their sensibility, conceived as a disposition to have certain emotions in certain situations.

In the broadest sense, empathic perspective taking involves a phenomenally rich reaction to another’s mental state, in an attempt to understand the other by feeling with them, by reacting emotionally to their emotional state so as to capture its phenomenological reality. The empathizer must be aware that the imagined situation is not actual for them. Further, they must be aware that their emotion corresponds to the target subject’s reaction to their situation, and that there are no (or not the same) ties to motivation for them.

Clearly not any attempt to capture the phenomenological reality of a target subject’s emotional state will count as successful empathizing. Different authors have offered different ideas as to what the success conditions are.¹ A very demanding notion has it that empathizing involves the judgment that the emotional state of the target reflects the correct evaluative properties of the relevant situation (see, e.g. Ben-Moshe 2020; Kauppinen 2014). For instance, in empathizing with a target subject scared of an approaching dog, the empathizer must not only be able to reproduce the fear, but also the evaluation of the situation that led to it. A slightly weaker, yet still demanding notion of empathy has recently been defended by Olivia Bailey (2022, 2023). Her notion doesn’t entail that emotions necessarily reflect our judgment of the situation. The target subject might have an irrational fear of dogs; they might know about their irrationality and still fear the dog. While they wouldn’t necessarily judge that the dog is dangerous, their evaluation cannot be completely unintelligible to them: the dog at least appears dangerous, which makes the emotional reaction of fear appropriate (Bailey 2022, 7). Appropriateness thus tracks ways things appear to the subject, which may or may not correspond to how the subject judges. The intelligibility of an emotional episode is a condition on successful empathizing as well: the empathizer must make the target subject’s emotions intelligible to themselves. They must thus put themselves in a position where the world appears to them such that the emotional episode of the target subject is appropriate. It is here that the notion of sensibility becomes relevant, and we may wonder: if one is a carefree person, can one put oneself in a position to see the world from the perspective of an anxious person so to make their fear of a dog intelligible? Can an empathizer meet the relevant condition if they differ in sensibility from their target?

While this question is interesting in itself, how we answer it also has substantial practical consequences, for instance for politics. At least some of the disagreements with our political opponents certainly rest on differences in sensibilities, but the assumption that their mental life is inaccessible to us seems implausible. It is part of our assumptions about democracy and international politics that we can understand, and sometimes come to agreement with, people ideologically and psychologically different from ourselves. To come to learn that this is, in fact, impossible would have dramatic consequences for our self-conception as a social and political species.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel and former French president Nicholas Sarkozy were famously dubbed ‘Europe’s odd couple’ or simply ‘Merkozy’, due to their unexpectedly personal relationship. It seems that the need to collaborate effectively and find compromise in challenging times brought them together despite their different leadership styles and personalities. To quote from an article by Steven Erlanger in the New York Times Magazine:

‘She’s a scientist, almost like a German cliché, planning everything, going step by step, unemotional, not a show horse,’ Stefan Kornelius, a senior editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, told me. ‘But Sarkozy’s the kind of macho man that she doesn’t like at all. And she and the chancellery are irritated by his jumping from issue to issue, his lack of attention, his inability to do German systematic work. She’s a technocrat with a hidden husband, and he’s flamboyant, with a beautiful woman’ — the singer and former model Carla Bruni — ‘at his side.’²

In an effort to understand Sarkozy’s personality, Merkel is said to have watched Louis de Funès movies. ‘Merkozy’ highlights what is intuitively correct: we are able to understand and empathize with people that are much different from us. And indeed, our everyday interaction with others would be greatly impoverished if we couldn’t empathically understand partners, friends, family members, colleagues or fellow citizens who display different sensibilities from our own ones. Lacking empathic understanding of our opponents can lead to simplistic characterizations and to antagonistic attitudes, hatred and fear (Hannon 2020, 7). In extreme cases, such attitudes may be justified, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that we should shy away from empathizing altogether. In his meticulous reconstruction of the Nazi’s ideology and philosophy, Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting Like a Nazi, Johann Chapoutot’s emphasizes the idea of a ‘shared humanity’ and the fact that the Nazi’s actions and lives took place ‘within a universe of meaning and values’:

The very idea that the horrors written down, proclaimed, or committed by the Nazis were the work of human beings is difficult to comprehend—and that is a good thing. As madmen, as barbarians, or, for followers of certain strains of theology and the occult, as incarnations of some kind of radical “evil,” the authors of these crimes are inevitably placed outside the bounds of our shared humanity. In both France and Germany, the reception of films such as Downfall (2004), which portrayed Hitler’s final days in his bunker, has contributed to this phenomenon of circumscription and rejection: it has been deemed indecent, and even intolerable, to show Hitler munching cookies, chatting affably to his secretary, and playing with his dog. Giving human— all too human—traits to the absolute monster in this way can seem quite dangerous, particularly from a pedagogical standpoint. But if history can and must take this perspective into consideration—and this is another debate entirely—its study most definitely is not served by the dehumanization of those who participated in the Nazis’ crimes. Excluding these people from our shared humanity exonerates us from any serious reflection on humankind, Europe, modernity, the West—in sum, it makes it impossible to rigorously study any aspect of the world the Nazi criminals inhabited and participated in, a world that we might have in common. (…)

In addition to confronting the fact that they were twentieth-century Europeans, we must come to terms with the fact that the Nazis were, quite simply, people. They were people who came of age and lived in a specific set of circumstances, and one job for historians is to shed light on these circumstances. But beyond that, the Nazis have in common with all other humans, including ourselves, the fact that their lives took place within a universe of meaning and values. (…) (Chapoutot 2018, 7–8)

While Chapoutot emphasizes the need to understand the Nazis as fellow humans, he also sees the difficulty and the resistance we might have towards it. There is at least a prima facie fear that empathically understanding certain people could have a negative effect on us: we may be inclined to take over the view of our opponents, which in some cases would be morally wrong, as Michael Hannon notes: ‘Indeed, it might be a moral failing that one is able to successfully project oneself into some truly horrific outlooks’ (Hannon 2020, 9fn16). But, here again, knowing that empathizing with people with different psychological outlooks from us is not just difficult or unpleasant, but impossible in principle, would have substantial consequences.

In what follows, we will argue that we can indeed empathize across sensibilities. Our arguments further suggest that there is prima facie no danger of being ‘infected’ by another’s emotional orientation to the world.

2. Sensibilities and the Locked-In View

When we wish to understand someone else in a certain target situation, we can aim to do two different things:

1. We can aim to simulate how we would think and feel if we were occupying the target situation.

2. We can aim to simulate how the other person thinks and feels (or would think and feel) in the target situation.

In (a), the simulated perspective is first-personal: from our own perspective, we simulate being in the target situation. In (b), we can either aim to take a first-person perspective and simulate how the other person would think and feel, or we can aim to understand what it is like or would be like from a third-person perspective. In (a), empathic success will rest on whether the inferences we are drawing from our own perspective to someone else’s are justified. (b) Requires us to simulate someone else’s psychological life directly, either from the third or the first-person perspective. This raises the question of whether we can access the other’s psychological life along a limitless range of psychological states, or whether our empathizing abilities are in some way limited.

Peter Goldie (2011) and Richard Moran (2001) have raised conceptual concerns about (b) with regards to the first-person perspective. When we simulate a target subject’s perspective ‘from the inside’, we have to consciously accommodate their psychological features, for instance their anxious sensibility. But this is necessarily doomed to result in a ‘distorted model’ of the target subject’s thinking and feeling (Goldie 2011, 309), since these features impinge on the target’s perspective naturally or subconsciously. In recent work, Olivia Bailey (2022, 2023) has posed a related challenge which targets our ability to adopt or accommodate, in the imagination, a sensibility that is different from our own one (Bailey 2023, 223). Empathizing across different sensibilities (if possible at all) involves that we understand the situation the target subject is in, that we know what the target subject’s sensibility is, that we don’t share it, and that we have a broad idea of what kind of state the target subject is in, so that we can empathically access it.

In our discussion of Bailey’s arguments and, more generally, a view that denies the possibility of empathizing across sensibilities, we will focus on the following example (see Langkau 2021 and Bailey 2023). Suppose we aim to understand someone’s love for hockey, which we ourselves don’t share. We understand the situation, and we know that the target subject’s sensibility is such that they see hockey as exciting and admirable in virtue of its being aggressive and violent: ‘All that shoving and slamming into the boards looks wonderfully tough (…) – and that display of virile combativeness is what makes something a real sport, rather than a mere amusement’ (Bailey 2023, 226). The sport we ourselves admire, however, is rhythmic gymnastics: ‘It shows up [to us] as the most admirable sport in virtue of the grace and delicacy of its athletes. (…) elegant refinement is what makes something a real sport, rather than a childish game’ (Bailey 2023, 226). In Bailey’s view, given our sensibility, the hockey fan’s excitement will look unintelligible to us, and the reason is that we don’t share the underlying evaluative construals: the hockey fan admires hockey as a sport in virtue of the lower-level properties hockey has. So, even if we, as gymnastics fans, know that the target subject’s sensibility is such that they find hockey exciting and admirable in virtue of its being aggressive and violent, we cannot make this connection ourselves and hence the emotion will remain unintelligible (Bailey 2023, 227).

Metaphysically speaking, we can understand the relation between sensibilities and perspectives (emotional states, episodes etc.) in at least three different ways. At one extreme, sensibilities and perspectives as well as their relations would be generic. Someone endorsing this view would think that there is only what Goldie calls a ‘thin’ and ‘impersonal’ (Goldie 2011, 307) conception of agency: one thinks, feels and acts along purely generic lines, and nobody’s perspective would be inaccessible in principle. At the other extreme, we would find the idea that sensibilities and perspectives are always idiosyncratic: human beings don’t share a generic psychological basis and they thus interact idiosyncratically with their environments. There might be different ways to cash out this position, but one way is to make the notion of sensibility occupy a central role in our psychological economy. According to such a view, in order to explain and maybe simulate someone else’s psychological life, one must always first point to one’s and the other person’s sensibility, and from there somehow construe one’s and, to some extent, the other’s psychological life.

Both these extreme views seem implausible, empirically as well as conceptually. Much more plausible and compatible with our experience is a view somewhere in the middle, according to which our psychological lives are determined by both generic and idiosyncratic factors: even though human beings share a generic psychological and affective basis, which makes empathy in the sense of (b) possible in the first place (and justifies psychology as a scientific discipline), it can be modulated by more or less idiosyncratic factors that might put some people, or at least some of their psychological states, beyond our reach.³

Idiosyncratic factors will still constitute a problem for empathy if we endorse such a moderate view. One way to alleviate the related worry is to take a layered approach to the way idiosyncratic and generic factors play into our mental lives. Under the assumption that, first, a central function of our psychological life is to represent our environment and, second, we are generally successful in doing so not as a matter of idiosyncrasy but as a matter of generic connections between the environment and psychological dispositions, we can assume that, despite the possible influence of idiosyncratic factors, we can generally attribute rather generic psychological states to our target subjects. While idiosyncratic factors can, and do, play a role in determining our psychological lives, such factors are not pervasive, and we shouldn’t start from them. Accordingly, empathizing across sensibilities might not be trivial, but it is not impossible either.

For Bailey, sensibilities seem to be idiosyncratic entities: ‘human sensibilities are profoundly and pervasively diverse in nature’ (Bailey 2023, 223). With our perspectives determined by our sensibilities, we are ‘locked-into’ our perspectives, and as a result, successful empathy in the sense of (b) can only be an instance of meeting a psychological doppelganger, never an instance of bridging a gap between sensibilities. Let us call this the Locked-In View.

Here is how we reconstruct Bailey’s (2022, 2023) argument for the Locked-In View:

1. Emotional episodes are not brute but rest on evaluative construals.

2. Evaluative construals rest on a relation R between lower-level properties and higher-level properties of objects of emotional episodes.

3. R is determined by a subject’s sensibility.

4. To empathize with someone is to simulate someone’s emotional episode.

5. Simulating someone’s emotional episode entails taking R to obtain.

6. Sensibilities are not plastic, i.e. one is stuck with one’s sensibility and cannot easily exchange it for another one, not even for the purpose of simulation.

7. Hence, we cannot empathize with subjects with sensibilities different from our own ones, i.e. we are ‘locked into’ our sensibilities.

There are three key claims in this argument. The first concerns the idea that emotional episodes are not brute but involve emotional construals (1):

We apprehend things as having particular evaluative properties in virtue of their other, lower-level properties (…) My emotional construal of rhythmic gymnastics as admirable, for instance, is a construal of it as admirable because characterized by the elegant movement of delicate bodies. (Bailey 2023, 226)

According to the Locked-In View, emotional construals are a personal matter. They are reflective of ‘my own sensibility … thoroughly imbued with my own … sensibility’ (Bailey 2023, 226). That is, we don’t just become aware of the admirability of rhythmic gymnastics by paying attention to its elegant features, or of the admirability of hockey by attending to the technique and speed displayed. Instead, they are construed as admirable through a personal, idiosyncratic process. This is the second key claim (3).

The third key claim of the Locked-In View says that sensibilities are not plastic (6), e.g. ‘we cannot effectively imaginatively simulate the emotional experience of a timorous person if we are ourselves brave’, as Bailey puts it (Bailey 2023, 225).

3. Against the Locked-In View

As suggested above, the Locked-In View is not very well motivated by how we experience everyday interactions. But it should be possible to explain our experience even if we assume that emotional episodes are not brute but rather rest on evaluative construals (1). In the remainder of this paper, we will argue against the other two key claims, (3) and (6).

3.1. An alternative role for sensibility

We may agree that we apprehend some object as having higher-order properties in virtue of having lower-order properties, but simultaneously resist the specific reading of this relation as an idiosyncratic one, resting on our personal sensibility, as in (3). Clearly our affective life is not fully determined by the environmental conditions we find ourselves in, together with personal features such as our current physical and psychological condition. More long-lasting personal factors play a role as well, such as entrenched affective dispositions. To account for both generic and personal factors, we wish to distinguish between sensitivity: a generic capacity to apprehend and represent normative features through emotional episodes, and sensibility: an idiosyncratic set of emotional dispositions that can impinge on and modulate our sensitivity.

Sensitivity can be conceived in different ways. On the one hand, it can be conceived as something hard-wired, maybe on the model of the well-known so-called ‘affect program theory’, described by Craig DeLancey as ‘the view that some emotions are pancultural syndromes enabled by inherited biological capabilities’ (DeLancey 2001, 3). There are good evolutionary and psychological reasons to think that we are all endowed with such a form of generic sensitivity. Humans do share quite a few affective reactions, which are the objects of psychology as a science, and we are generally able to make sense of each other’s affective lives. That being said, there are also well-known problems for this form of hard-wired emotional genericity, related for instance to cultural variations of emotional reactions (see, e.g. Kurth 2022, Chap. 4). On the other hand, the genericity of sensitivity can be conceived as a function of a hard-wired disposition to undergo affective states coupled with anti-individualistic processes of emotional acculturation (see, e.g. Goldie 2000, Chap. 4). In other words, if not generic in the sense of hard-wired, sensitivity could still be generic because emotional reactions are, to some extent at least, culturally conditioned. How exactly the genericity of sensitivity is conceived doesn’t matter much for our present purposes. What matters for the distinction is that we are not emotionally encountering the world on our own, merely through idiosyncratic sensibilities.

At the same time, we also know that there is a level of idiosyncrasy in our affective lives and that more factors than purely generic ones are at play. For instance, one’s anxious sensibility is revealed as one is petrified with fear caused by the apprehension of the dog’s sharp teeth, as everybody else revels in its cuteness. Assigning our sensibilities this modulating role makes a version of a more moderate view. If our affective lives are determined both by our sensitivity and our sensibility, divergence in sensibilities could still be compatible with significant convergence in terms of sensitivity.

A stronger understanding is that there is no generic sensitivity, but only idiosyncratic sensibility; it is sensibility all the way down. Klara revels in the dog’s cuteness not because dogs are cute and humans are hardwired to be sensitive to cuteness, but because of her own sensibility. If the dog is apprehended as cute, it is in virtue of some of its features: its round shaped eyes, its fluffy fur and its rolling on the floor, all being construed as cute by Klara personally, through her own sensibility. This is what seems to be expressed in the following passage by Bailey:

The concept of ‘sensibility’ I will deploy, which I take to reflect the commonsense notion, is that of a world orientation that ultimately manifests in one’s patterns of emotional evaluative construal. A sensibility shapes how the world looks to one in two respects. First, a sensibility governs one’s patterns of attention: a really timorous person is always on the lookout for features of the world that could be construed as threatening … And second, a sensibility governs which evaluative construals are triggered or invited by the lower-level properties or features one notices. (Bailey 2023, 222)

It is in this sense that the relation between lower-order and higher-order features is an idiosyncratic one: one that is determined always locally, by one’s own sensibility.

In order to support her view, Bailey refers to Justin D’Arms of whom she (partially) quotes the following passage taken from a footnote:

There are good … reasons for thinking that, insofar as simulation is a way of empathizing, it depends on the observer’s sensibility. Consider an attempt to simulate the reaction of a person whom you know to have a very different sensibility from your own. He is easily offended, let’s suppose, and seldom amused, while you are thick-skinned and quick to laugh. You may be able to predict his dour reactions to something that would have amused you. But can you simulate them, and so become empathically irritated at something you are naturally inclined to find quite funny, and not at all offensive? It seems to me highly doubtful that you can. The point is not that simulationists are committed to supposing that we can’t recognize differences between our own sensibilities and those of other people. The point is that simulation is not promising as a device for generating emotional congruence between people with such differences of sensibility. (D’Arms 2000, 1492)

However, it is hard to get anything strongly in favor of an idiosyncratic take on the role of sensibility from this passage. On the one hand, D’Arms’ claim is that empathizing conceived as simulation depends on the observer’s sensibility. But he also seems to think of sensibility as a gradual affair, and to locate the problem for empathy in a case where the target possesses a ‘very different sensibility’ from ours. Accordingly, it is not the notion of sensibility itself that is problematic, but very strong differences in sensibility. In fact, we could even recast what D’Arms is saying here in terms of the distinction between sensitivity and sensibility: Imagine simulating the reaction of a person whom you know to have a sensitivity strongly modulated by sensibility. In such a case, the possibility of empathizing might depend on variations of sensibility, but whether it is a matter of idiosyncratic sensibility all the way down is a much stronger claim and, as far as we can see, this passage of D’Arms remains neutral between an idiosyncratic view and a more moderate one.⁴

Bailey further draws a comparison between what she calls ‘sensibility shifting’ and the more familiar case of ‘imagining experience that you have not yet had’ (Bailey 2023, 224) in order to support her view. Mary (Jackson 1982), famously, cannot imagine what it is like to experience redness because she never had an experience of redness, and she doesn’t possess any kind of resources that could allow her to generate an imaginative experience of the required kind. Similarly, subjects with different sensibilities cannot imagine what the affective life of somebody else is like. But rather than an argument, this offers merely an illustration of the relevant claim. Indeed, the analogy presupposes that sensibilities work all the way down, it doesn’t show that they work all the way down. And if they were to work all the way down, then maybe we could say that imaginative recreation of an affective life determined all the way down by a different sensibility remains foreclosed to us. But this is precisely what we need an argument for.

3.2. Sensibility, sensitivity and scaffolding

According to a more optimistic view, in order to both imagine (complex) experiences we haven’t yet had (Kind 2020a, 2020b) as well as experiences of others (e.g. Langkau 2021), we can employ our ability to imaginatively scaffold: we can build up our way to psychological perspectives different from our own ones by combining and recombining mental states from our own experience. If you don’t care yourself for hockey but do care about rhythmic gymnastics, you can scaffold your way to an appreciation of hockey by combining and recombining some mental states of yours, such as your enthusiasm for rhythmic gymnastics and your perception of hockey. But Bailey thinks our excitement about sports is tied to particular lower-level properties: ‘All I have are experiences of sport as admirable in virtue of its featuring the elegant movement of delicate bodies’ (Bailey 2023, 227). As the only possible way to overcome their own sensibility, Bailey considers that the empathizer imagine, e.g. the dog that seems dangerous to the target subject with features of a spider they themselves find scary. However, she concludes, this doesn’t bring the empathizer closer to the mental state of the target subject, who imagines the dog with the dog’s features as scary. The only way to empathize would be to actually see the dog as dangerous.

In response, we will offer two different arguments. First, having introduced the distinction between sensibility and sensitivity, we think that scaffolding could largely concern sensitivity. Second, we argue (in 3.3) that in any case, sensibilities different from our own ones shouldn’t be among the kinds of evaluative imaginings we resist.

In light of the distinction between sensitivity and sensibility, there is no reason to assume that it is sensibility rather than sensitivity, or sensibility alone, that makes our emotional episodes intelligible. Instead, appealing to the notion of sensitivity and to the features of hockey could be sufficient to account for the intelligibility of hockey being experienced as admirable. In fact, a great many of the features that make hockey appealing: its display of speed, control, technique and coordinated movements are likely ones that appeal to our sensitivities. Further, for our simulation to be apt, it seems that we would have to start with an understanding of the structural features of the game, that is, things like its aims, rules and intrinsic difficulties. Appreciation of the movements of players isolated from this background understanding is unlikely to be an appreciation of the game of hockey. But once these background features are in place, it is plausible that these will imbue one’s perception of the movements.⁵

But what about cases where sensitivity only takes us so far? Two important points are the following. First, if sensibility doesn’t operate all the way down, appealing to sensibility in order to simulate someone else’s perspective is not a good heuristic, since it means emphasizing the difference instead of maximizing what’s shared, which likely is a recipe to misconstrue situations that are more similar than different. As Bailey sets the gymnastics and hockey case up, the two kinds of sport appeal to people with very different sensibilities. The valuable features of hockey are not available to the meek person, because they don’t have any way to construe them from their sensibility. But this might just be the wrong way to look at the case. Of course, there likely is some noise, such as ‘all that shoving and slamming into the boards’ (Bailey 2023, 226), which might look distasteful to the meek person. But the meek person can also attempt to suspend the effect of their sensibility to focus on the more generic evaluative aspects of hockey to try to get a grip on the perspective of the hockey fan. That is, in the alternative picture of the role of sensibility we sketched, turning off sensibility might be a way to get to the evaluative features, not a way to turn away from them.

In the last subsection, we will argue that even if sensibility plays a more important role than we have suggested so far, we might be able to overcome the relevant obstacles by way of imagination.

3.3. Scaffolding properly done

Given that they don’t share the same sensibility, it is trivial that a gymnastics fan finds the hockey fan’s admiration for their sport at least prima facie unintelligible. But in (6), the Locked-In View further claims that we cannot make such a connection in the imagination either.

Here is a case in which we should be able to empathize, according to the Locked-In View. Suppose we are a gymnastics fan, a friend is at a gymnastics competition; we are not, but our friend sends us messages, talking about the performances and letting us know how excited they are. We understand the situation the target subject is in, we know what the target subject’s sensibility is and share it, and we have an idea of what kind of state the target subject is in. We can then empathically understand our friend. All we have to do is imagine the situation and let our own sensibilities ‘run’. Empathically understanding our friend’s excitement should thus be very easy, and no or barely any scaffolding is needed.

The aim of scaffolding is bringing, in our imagination, things together that aren’t together in reality, or that we haven’t experienced. Hockey’s lower-level properties and admiration for sports aren’t together as we experience the world, but this doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t imagine them together. Similarly, we could claim that we can’t imagine being at a hockey game because we are not at a hockey game, and there’s a tension between what we are experiencing and what we are imagining. So, when imagining a certain set of lower-level properties that are not exciting to us as exciting, we are doing a similar thing as we do when we imagine being at the hockey game when in fact we are not. Note that in order to scaffold our way to imagining hockey as exciting, we have to imagine the emotional, evaluative bit as well. It’s not the case that we’re imagining the world and then wait for the emotion, so to say. There should only be a tension if our aim was to experience ourselves hockey as admirable. The requirement, however, is that we imagine.

Bailey rightly notices that the gymnastics and hockey case is trickier than other scaffolding tasks, since it involves an evaluation. The gymnastics fan has to imagine evaluating a certain situation in a certain way, and in a way which is in conflict with how they would naturally do: ‘the elements that we are meant to imaginatively draw together are in tension and so resist amalgamation into a single coherent evaluative apprehension’ (Bailey 2023, 227). Hence, because there is tension between the evaluative higher-level properties, which we see as fitting to the lower-level properties, on the one hand and the higher-level properties we are supposed to imagine on the other hand, we arguably cannot imagine the ones we are supposed to imagine.

This is very much related to the well-known ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’ (Gendler 2000) in the context of fiction. Several different puzzles can be distinguished, but one version concerns our resistance or failure to imagine deviant, fiction-prescribed moral evaluations.⁶ However, the scope of the phenomenon of resistance or unwillingness to imagine has been acknowledged to be wider and to cover non-morally deviant content as well, both normative and descriptive (e.g. Walton 1994; Weatherson 2004). If we distinguish the puzzle of imaginative resistance or failure from the puzzle of fictionality (which says that we cannot imagine certain claims that are supposed to be true in a fiction), the first doesn’t necessarily only apply to fiction, but could rather also apply to simulating the perspective of others. Hence, cases of deviant sensibility might cause in us the resistance or unwillingness to imagine certain lower-level properties in relation to certain higher-level properties.

However, there seems to be a difference between imagining judging some action as morally bad and imagining judgments involving thicker evaluative concepts. Even if we are not fans, we are clearly more willing or able to imagine someone enjoying hockey than we are to imagine finding a morally despicable action morally permissible. One reason is likely that we can use the lower-level properties to help us get into the state the target subject is in when they let their sensibility ‘run’ on the respective situation. Given our sensibilities, certain lower-level properties are not salient or central to us, but they can be made salient. For instance, we can focus on and emphasize the non-violent aspects of hockey, as suggested in the previous subsection.

But empathically understanding the hockey fan should not be so hard in any case, unless we wish to say that no evaluative differences can be imagined. But this is implausible. Which sports we like is a matter of sensibilities, but more on the side of taste, i.e. closer to the kind of food we like. Imagining a certain flavor or a new combination of flavors often (or always?) comes with an evaluative part: imagining peppermint flavored ice cream comes with a minimal evaluation of that flavor. Claiming that we can’t imagine the excitement of a hockey fan seems to lead us to having to claim that we can’t imagine what it’s like for someone to like peppermint flavored ice cream, that all we can imagine is what it would be like for us. But maybe we have to work a bit to be able to imagine evaluations that don’t come naturally to us; maybe we have to practice and can become better at it with training (see Kind 2020a, 2020b for an account of imagination as a skill), and since this might be the case, it may also be crucial that we are motivated to empathically understand one another.

One way of making empathizing easier is leaving not all of it up to the imagination. The gymnastics fan could, for instance, go to a hockey game and actually experience the hockey fan’s excitement while watching the game, or simply learn more about the game. This would probably contribute at least some way towards making their state intelligible. Again, we have to want to empathically understand the hockey fan, just like seeing our friend’s excitement about a new video game we find boring, seeing our partner’s excitement about a certain meal we ourselves dislike, etc., can make certain reactions intelligible to us because we want to understand them. Hence, actually experiencing a person with different sensibilities in a certain situation might help us bring certain lower-level and higher-level properties together for us.

We have argued that first, scaffolding means imagining all parts of the experience rather than letting one’s own sensibility ‘run’ in response to the imagined situation. Second, if there is such a phenomenon as imaginative resistance, the threshold should be set higher, since we want to be able to say that we can empathically understand someone liking certain flavors we don’t like. There is clearly nothing morally wrong with liking vs. disliking certain flavors, and similarly with liking hockey rather than gymnastics. Putting the threshold too low seems to undermine the function and power of imagination.

4. Conclusion

In this paper, we have given some reasons to think that we can empathize across sensibilities. Cases like ‘Merkozy’ as well as our own mundane experience suggest that if we are willing, we can understand people much different from us. We discussed the role sensibility may play in our emotional evaluation of the world and presented the Locked-In View, according to which evaluative construals rest on a relation between lower-level properties and higher-level properties dictated by our personal sensibility. We then gave two main arguments against the Locked-In View. First, sensitivity is the most important factor in our emotional evaluations of the world, and sensibility only plays a modulating role. Second, even if sensibility explains (most of) our emotional evaluations, we should be able to empathize across sensibilities, because scaffolding includes imagining the relation between lower- and higher-level properties, not letting our own sensibility ‘run’ on the imagined situation.

Since in successful empathy, we merely imagine the evaluative properties, don’t endorse them ourselves and are aware that they are not ours, there is at least prima facie no danger that we will simply take over our opponent’s perspective as our own. Empathically taking over the perspective of people who have committed horrific crimes doesn’t imply that we get infected by their world view. Merkel and Sarkozy didn’t become friends, and interaction with opponents doesn’t (necessarily) change us. But, of course, we have to be willing to make an effort in trying to empathically understand people who are much different from us.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Tobias Schlicht for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrik Engisch

Patrik Engisch is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva. His research focuses primarily on creativity, fiction and the philosophy of food.

Julia Langkau

Julia Langkau is an assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Her research focuses on fiction, empathy, imagination and creativity.

Notes

1 We won’t be able to give a complete picture of the literature here. For recent work on empathy, see also, e.g. Zahavi (2014) and Maibom (2020).

2 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/magazine/16MerkelSarkozy-t.html.

3 In psychology, the most common way to categorize different types of personality is within the well-known model of The Big Five, according to which a personality is measured along the dimensions of extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism.

4 Moreover, D’Arms doesn’t close the door on the idea that we could still empathize with people with sensibilities different from ours, though not by simulation.

5 Thanks to Tobias Schlicht for this point.

6 Some theories explain this phenomenon by claiming that we can’t imagine (Cantism), others by claiming that we are not willing to imagine (Wontism), see Tuna (2020) for an overview.