The Contribution of Empathy to Ethics

ABSTRACT

Empathy has been taken to play a crucial role in ethics at least since the Scottish Enlightenment. More recently, a revival of moral sentimentalism and empirical research on moral behavior has prompted a renewed interest in empathy and related concepts and on their contribution to moral reasoning and to moral behavior. Furthermore, empathy has recently entered our public discourse as having the power to ameliorate our social and political interactions with others.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which such a role can be actually granted. Before focusing on a positive assessment, I will delve into a few problems our ordinary concept of empathy and our commonsensical way of conceiving its connection to ethics will need to face. Specifically, I will show how an exaggerated reliance on the ordinary concept of empathy could lead to an underestimation of its biases and potential limitations (§ 2), how a naïve conception of its connection to morality can overlook relevant counterexamples (§ 3) and lead to forms of reductionism (§ 4). Overcoming this possible shortsightedness would pave the way for arguing in favor of an important – though not sufficient and possible neither necessary – role for empathy in ethics (§ 5).

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• ethics
• sympathy
• Adam Smith
• empirical evidence
• reductionism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Clearly, there are many cases that are much more complicated than the one which considers comparable consequences on those we help. For instance, if by using the same resources I can only slightly ameliorate my relatives’ well-being while I can radically change a stranger’s life, would my preference still be justified (Singer 2009, 130–131)? Would it be permissible to spend 10 on a toy that would only make my kid slightly happier as opposed to paying for life-saving therapy for a distant stranger?

2. According to Smith, subjects with ASD cannot be characterized as having a deficit in empathy, but as having an excessive empathic engagement that, rather than being directed towards others, is interiorized in personal distress. Hence, these subjects are not apathic when facing others’ emotions. On the contrary, they have an erroneous overreaction, their feeling is imbalanced, and they are unable to identify the subject of that emotional state, because of a difficulty in distinguishing between the emotional states that originate in the self and those that originate in others.

3. This conclusion might be rejected by refusing to focus only on the consequences when considering the morality of an action. In fact, if one considers intentions as crucial to the evaluation of a behavior, then one might claim that psychopaths’ intentions are evil or uniquely conventional (as opposed to being properly moral). And that, for their intentions to be moral, empathy is in fact needed.

4. The concept of an emotional attunement rather than that of identification is to be preferred for two reasons. First, it allows for an imperfect isomorphism between the emotions felt by the two individuals involved: it is often the case that, in empathizing with someone’s emotion, I do not feel the exact same emotion, but a slightly different one (often a less intense one) with the same valence (positive or negative). The concept of identification renders this typical fact of our empathizing experience more difficult to grasp immediately. Second, attunement is more neutral than identification also as far as the self-other distinction is involved. Saying that A identifies emotionally with B seems to have a stronger implicature on the direction of the process and on the fact that is A that projects or simulates B. On the contrary, emotional attunement seems to convey weaker stereotypes. Attunement can also be an interpersonal enterprise – we attune with each other –, whereas it seems obvious that only an individual can identify with someone else.

5. The account presented in this paper differs from Prinz’s (Prinz 2011b, 213–221) because I grant empathy’s role in enabling moral development in typical individuals, and because I am interested in underlying that, while I deny that empathy is necessary for moral judgment and moral conduct, I do not mean to imply that it can never accompany and prompt them.