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Empathy and morality in behaviour readers

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Abstract

It is tempting to assume that being a moral creature requires the capacity to attribute mental states to others, because a creature cannot be moral unless she is capable of comprehending how her actions can have an impact on the well-being of those around her. If this assumption were true, then mere behaviour readers could never qualify as moral, for they are incapable of conceptualising mental states and attributing them to others. In this paper, I argue against such an assumption by discussing the specific case of empathy. I present a characterisation of empathy that would not require an ability to attribute mental states to others, but would nevertheless allow the creature who possessed it to qualify as a moral being. Provided certain conditions are met, a behaviour reader could be motivated to act by this form of empathy, and this means that behaviour readers could be moral. The case for animal morality, I shall argue, is therefore independent of the case for animal mindreading.

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Notes

  1. I will use the term 'mindreading,' instead of 'theory of mind,' or 'ToM,' as Povinelli et al. usually call it, in order to avoid the theory-theory connotations of the latter term.

  2. ‘[A] subject lacking an f ToM [i.e. mindreading capabilities] would not have access to r-states [i.e. information] about his own internal cognitive states […]' (Penn and Povinelli 2007, p. 738).

  3. The importance of mindreading for the prediction of behaviour has been questioned by Andrews (2012). Povinelli et al. also acknowledge that, in humans, the attribution of mental states is used more often for explanation than for prediction (Gallagher and Povinelli 2012, p. 151).

  4. However, see Andrews (2013) for an account of autonomy that does not require mindreading.

  5. In Rowlands’ scheme, moral agency is gained through understanding and not through control. See “An empathic behaviour reader” section.

  6. Within Rowlands' scheme, morally laden emotions qualify as reasons, and are not mere causes, because they are emotions that involve content (see “The cognitive requirements of minimal moral empathy ” section).

  7. In making this assumption, I am bracketing several important critiques of Povinelli and colleagues' approach made on both theoretical and empirical grounds, for instance, Andrews (2005), Buckner (2014).

  8. Nothing in my argument turns on whether emotional contagion is indeed a form of empathy.

  9. These four conditions are sufficient for it to be an instance of empathy as a moral emotion, but they are not necessary. Other forms of empathy as a moral emotion may be conceived, some of which may be sufficient for a being to count as a moral agent, and not merely as a moral subject.

  10. But not all. See, for instance Zahavi and Overgaard (2012).

  11. The word ‘specific’ is important. At times, ‘mere’ emotional contagion gives way, not to a non-intentional form of personal distress, but one that has content. For instance, when a bird is startled and flies away, and immediately the rest of the flock follows it, the latter may be due to an emotional contagion that has yielded a state of fear directed towards the possibility of there being a predator around. Although this would be an emotion involving content, it would still be a form of personal distress, for the content involved has no relation whatsoever to the welfare of the conspecific who triggered the emotion.

  12. MME involves both factual content (“This creature is displaying distress behaviour”) and evaluative content (“This creature's distress is bad”). C does not need to be capable of explicitly entertaining the evaluative content of her emotion, but I am assuming that she is capable of entertaining the factual content, and thus, of believing something along the lines of, but not necessarily equivalent to, “This creature is displaying distress behaviour.” A case could perhaps be made for MME only requiring that the factual content be tracked, but I shall not follow this road, since Povinelli and colleagues' work strongly suggests that they would grant me this assumption (see “Behaviour reading versus mindreading” and “An empathic behaviour reader” sections).

  13. Note that the attribution of MME to Higgins not only relies on the badness of Jane's distress, but also, more importantly, on the experiential form that Higgins' emotional contagion takes. In being distressed that she is displaying distress behavior, he is experiencing Jane's distress (behaviour) as something distressful, i.e., as something bad.

  14. Moral subjecthood is not restricted to positive moral emotions. If Higgins were to possess some reliable mechanism that resulted in him rejoicing in the display of distress behaviour in others, and if this motivated him to contribute to their suffering, we would also have to conclude that he is a moral subject. In this case, the moral emotion Higgins would be a subject of might be labeled cruelty or schadenfreude. Note, however, that his lack of understanding would prevent Higgins from being held responsible for his behaviour.

  15. For counter-arguments, see, e.g. DeGrazia (1996), Regan (2004), Rowlands (2009, 2012).

  16. At least the individuals that Kennett is interested in (see Kennett 2002, p. 345).

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, under Grants BES-2012-052504 and FFI2011-23267. I would also like to thank Kristin Andrews, Álex Díaz, José A. Gascón, Javier González de Prado, Mark Rowlands, Cristian Saborido, Kim Sterelny, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Additionally, this material benefitted from discussion at the 2013 SEFA and SIFA meetings, as well as the IV PBCS workshop.

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  1. Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid, Spain

    Susana Monsó

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Monsó, S. Empathy and morality in behaviour readers. Biol Philos 30, 671–690 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-015-9495-x

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