Varieties of Empathy: Moral Psychology and Animal Ethics

2000

The purpose of this thesis is to articulate a new theory of normative ethics, called "ethical empathism." One of the basic tasks of ethics is to determine, without prejudice, who or what has moral standing. That is, who can be said to be entitled to basic practical respect in the form of rights, utilitarian consideration, or some form of care? The traditional, humanist, solution is that only human beings have moral standing, or else they have a surpassing degree of it. A detailed investigation of traditional humanism and of animal liberation ethics-which would extend moral standing to nonhuman animals-reveals a sort of deadlock. In the interests of furthering this debate, a new and formidable version of humanism is offered. It is dubbed "Juggernaut" because of its great success in apparently defeating, and resisting objections from, contemporary animal liberationist views. Juggernaut is based in the idea that nonhumans generally lack many dimensions of value which humans possess. Juggernaut is so compelling that critics of humanism, L. W. Sumner and Evelyn B. Pluhar (from a utilitarian and a strict rights perspective, respectively) have already reckoned it to be the best version of humanism to date. It becomes difficult to find fault with it, perhaps, until it is pointed out that the view lacks deep empathy. That is, humanism does not identify with the key reality of the point of view, for any conscious entity which can be said to have one. Such an identification with a being, and that being's good, results in a strong form of respect which is not contingent on any other attributes of the given being. Additionally, reductionist strategies in interpreting mental lives risk harming beings, by overlooking those with actual psychological capacities. Therefore, such forms of reductionism (among others related to the denial of free will, and of mind in general), are rejected as oppressive. In general, harmful treatment of nonhuman animals is characterized as not only unempathetic, but oppressive, and therefore "speciesist" (although Juggernaut, as implied, seeks to cast doubt on this judgment). Comparing the oppression of nonhuman animals, then, to racism, invites a possible comparison to the Holocaust. This comparison can be borne out at a conceptual level, since the treatments involved equally accord with what is meant by the term, "discriminatory oppression." Still, while there are many similarities of detail, there are also differences. This is unsurprising since, after all, there are many differences of detail between forms of racism and sexism, as well. Normative questions are explored, and entire moral theories are found to run counter to what the author identifies as "the classist fallacy" (inferring, just from the fact that a being does not belong to a certain favoured grouping or classification, that we may harm that being). These theories include such venerable constructions as Kantianism, contractarianism, natural law theory, and ecoholism. The theory which is treated at considerable length, however, is utilitarianism, which will claim to empathize with all beings in a given context, thus finding out all that is good, and then maximizing that good for all beings. From this premise, utilitarianism can seem to be a very formidable contender for the title of "deep empathy." It may seem as though, by contrast, strict rights views, which are less willing to harm individuals for "the greatest good," are merely v Cet animal est très méchant, Quand on l'attaque il se défend.

2011

Empathy has recently been described as a dark force of immorality by Bloom and Bubandt and Willerslev. In my paper, I contrast their discussion and definition of empathy with the account of empathy found in phenomenology. After highlighting the many differences, I discuss the moral significance of the phenomenological notion of empathy

2017

There is widespread disagreement in philosophy about the role of empathy in morality. Is empathy essential to moralising? Or does it interfere negatively with the ends of morality? Or is it perhaps the concept of a 'corrected' empathy felt from a 'common point of view', which can both explain and justify our considered moral judgements? One possibility, not often considered, is that empathy is as morally important for our moral thought, development, knowledge and action as are some other emotions such as respect, anger, guilt and hope. I articulate this view by characterising empathy as an integral part of emotional effort to comply with the demands of morality. I will argue that extreme views about empathy, often grounded in a questionable conception of emotion, subvert a plausibly moderate enthusiasm about the moral import of empathy that this paper aims to encourage.

Much of the current debate opposing empathy to rationality implictly operates on a Cartesian paradigm of rationality. This paradigm takes rationality as the thought of a disembodied subject—a thinker radically abstracted from the situating accidents of race, age, gender, nationality, etc. that are the inevitable compliment of being embodied. This holds even if those engaging in the debate are postmodern. Rorty, for example, in assuming that the private sphere is concerned with “philosophies,” beliefs and convictions, limits it to the subjective apprehensions of a Cartesian ego. For an embodied ego, by contrast, the private sphere is delineated in advance by the privacy of our organic functioning. What makes it private are not subjective beliefs, but rather the nonsubstitutibility of such functioning. No one, for example, can eat for another person, sleep for him, and so forth. Our death, like the organic functioning it terminates, is essentially private. I will argue that reason does not arise through abstracting from this private sphere; it rather makes use of the empathy that presupposes our organic functioning. Such empathy overcomes our privacy by imaginatively embodying itself in another person—that is, imaginatively feeling in and through the other. Doing so, it overlays one private sphere over another. It divides the self. For example, the person who empathically feels the hunger of the other while satiating her own experiences both hunger and satiation. This double affect, I will argue, both calls us into question and raises the question of reason—the question, why this rather than that: in this case, the question why one person should eat and another not. It also, in allowing us to experience the world from another perspective, raises the question of what is objectively the case, what holds not just for one person, but rather for both. By tracing the embodied roots of our rationality, I will thus argue that the opposition between empathy and rationality is a false dichotomy. What it points to is not, as Rorty thought, the limitations of rationality per se, but rather the failure of the Cartesian paradigm to understand its origin and scope.

Filozofia, 2010

Almost daily, we read and hear of car bombings, violent riots and escalating criminal activities. Such actions are typically condemned as “cruel” and their “cruelty” is taken as the most blameworthy trait, to which institutions are obliged, it is implied, to respond by analogously “cruel but necessary" measures. Almost daily, we read and hear of tragic cases of suicide, usually involving male citizens of various age, race, and class, whose farewell notes, if any, are regularly variations on an old, well-known adagio: “Goodbye cruel world.” Additionally, many grave cruelties are neither reported nor even seen by the media: people are cheated, betrayed, belittled and affronted in many ways, which are as humiliating as they are ordinary. Yet, what is cruel? What meaning unites the plethora of phenomena that are reported “cruel”? How is it possible for cruelty to be so extreme and, at the same time, so common? This essay wishes to offer a survey of the main conceptions of cruelty in the history of Western thought, their distinctive constants of meaning being considered in view of a better understanding of cruelty’s role in shaping each person’s selfhood.

The first section of this chapter extends the arguments set down in Chapter Seven vindicating the ontological claim that primary empathy, fellow-feeling is constitutive of subjectivity. Here, Colwyn Trevarthen’s three tiered account of subjectivity/intersubjectivity provides a useful organising framework so that the various designations and processes of empathy can be mapped onto the subjective levels (Daly 2014) and it is the primordial ‘we’, of fellow-feeling, of primary empathy which is the ground for the other derivative modes. Furthermore, this primordial ‘we’ is not merely a cognitive apprehension of belonging to an intersubjective sphere, but it is crucially embodied so that the ‘I’ within the ‘we’ reveals a belonging to sex, family, race, species and arguably sentience. In the second section of this chapter, I return to Max Scheler’s seminal work The Nature of Sympathy. Because Merleau-Ponty did not address the issues of empathy extensively and because throughout his writings he references Scheler regularly and always favourably, I propose there would be sufficient concordance for a useful comparative analysis. The key test will be in whether Scheler’s treatment of empathy coheres with Merleau-Ponty’s ontological project. In the beginning of The Nature of Sympathy Scheler asserts that fellow-feeling (Mitgefühl) can never be the basis for an ethics, because it ‘can never do justice to the facts of moral life … [because it is] blind to value’ (Scheler 1954). But then contrarily, the title of Chapter X is ‘The Moral Value of fellow-feeling’. Such an inconsistency warrants closer examination. In the third section of the chapter, other objections to the empathy account of ethics are evaluated. I situate this reconfigured empathy account of ethics with regard to normative accounts; where do they converge and where do they diverge? Are they in the end compatible? Not only do I propose that primary empathy underwrites essential aspects of normative ethics – ‘the universalising principle’ of deontology and the ‘everyone considered’ of utilitarianism – but also that it offers a resolution to the problem of ethical motivation. In the final section, I explore the viability of the claim flagged in Chapter Seven, that there is no subject entirely devoid of primary empathy. If this is so, then how can we account for ethical failure? If primary empathy is constitutive of subjectivity, then what is happening when a subject appears to be devoid of empathy? Here I draw on some recent investigations in neuropsychology to support my claims (Decety 2013, Decety and Christen 2014, Eisenberg and Eggum 2009, Meltzoff and Decety 2003, Levy 2013, Fecteau and Pascual-Leone 2008, Baron-Cohen 2011, Fuchs and Schlimme 2009, Batson 2009, Trevarthen 2012, Frith and Gallotti 2013, Happe and Frith 2014, Frith and Wolpert 2003). I argue that in cases wherein the empathic deficiency cannot be regarded as constitutional, thus excluding cases of psychopathology, the will to nullify or block empathy is imposed from the tertiary level of subjectivity. The capacity to affectively disembody experience and function purely through the rational capacities, positively facilitates highly task-focussed activities such as bomb-disposal or surgery, but may equally render the subject susceptible to the seductions of destructive rationalisations such as those at work in objectification and reification. Furthermore, a key issue in the current debates that is often overlooked is that there are two empathic modes; cognitive empathy and affective empathy. These continue to be regularly conflated in the literature, thereby compounding the confusions. As previously discussed, psychopaths have highly functioning cognitive empathic capacities which facilitates their manipulation of others, whereas what is relevant in order for empathy to serve moral aims is the responsiveness of affective empathy.

Almost daily, we read and hear of car bombings, violent riots and escalating criminal activities. Such actions are typically condemned as “cruel” and their “cruelty” is ta- ken as the most blameworthy trait, to which institutions are obliged, it is implied, to respond by analogously “cruel but necessary" measures. Almost daily, we read and hear of tragic cases of suicide, usually involving male citizens of various age, race, and class, whose farewell notes, if any, are regularly variations on an old, well- known adagio: “Goodbye cruel world.” Additionally, many grave cruelties are nei- ther reported nor even seen by the media: people are cheated, betrayed, belittled and affronted in many ways, which are as humiliating as they are ordinary. Yet, what is cruel? What meaning unites the plethora of phenomena that are reported “cruel”? How is it possible for cruelty to be so extreme and, at the same time, so common? This essay wishes to offer a survey of the main conceptions of crue...

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 2016