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Empathy, Shared Intentionality, and Motivation by Moral Reasons

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Abstract

Internalists about reasons generally insist that if a putative reason, R, is to count as a genuine normative reason for a particular agent to do something, then R must make a rational connection to some desire or interest of the agent in question. If internalism is true, but moral reasons purport to apply to agents independently of the particular desires, interests, and commitments they have, then we may be forced to conclude that moral reasons are incoherent. Richard Joyce (2001) develops an argument along these lines. Against this view, I argue that we can make sense of moral reasons as reasons that apply to, and are capable of motivating, agents independently of their prior interests and desires. More specifically, I argue that moral agents, in virtue of their capacities for empathy and shared intentionality, are sensitive to reasons that do not directly link up with their pre-existing ends. In particular, they are sensitive to, and hence can be motivated by, reasons grounded in the desires, projects, commitments, concerns, and interests of others. Moral reasons are a subset of this class of reasons to which moral agents are sensitive. Thus, moral agents can be motivated by moral reasons, even where such reasons fail to link up to their own pre-existing ends.

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Notes

  1. I shall use “ends” as shorthand to refer to such desires, concerns, interests, and commitments. I intend “ends” broadly so as to include the desires and interests of sentient, non-human organisms.

  2. For sake of clarity and contextualization, I have reconstructed the argument Joyce (2001, p. 77) offers, filling in some key premises from earlier in the text and rephrasing the argument to emphasize Joyce’s claims about reasons (while omitting his related claims about ‘ought’ statements and moral obligations).

  3. Joyce distinguishes between subjective rational reasons and objective rational reasons, where the former count as reasons from the agent’s limited epistemic perspective (e.g., if the agent is hungry, and believes that the food she’s been offered will satisfy her hunger, then she has a subjective rational reason to eat the food, even if she lacks an objective rational reason to eat it, because the “food” she’s been offered is actually made of plastic.) Moral reasons are presumably reasons of the latter—i.e., objective—kind. To meet the motivational constraint, it must therefore be the case that an agent could be motivated by a moral reason R, assuming she had the relevant true background beliefs. An agent’s failure to be motivated by a moral reason due to certain false beliefs is not sufficient to disqualify the reason: if the agent, rational and fully informed, could be motivated by the reason in question, the reason meets the motivational constraint.

  4. On my view, being motivated by a reason doesn’t require conscious awareness of the reason on which one acts. On this point, I find Nomy Arpaly’s (2003, ch. 2) arguments particularly convincing.

  5. For simplicity, I allow that ‘ends’ can include subjective ends (desires and subjective interests) and—if there are any—“objective ends,” such as survival, that count as ends independently of whether the subject desires them or not. This broad account of ends can accommodate cases in which a person lacks the desire/end of preserving her health, although it is in her interest to do so. Interesting and difficult issues arise surrounding cases where subjective and objective ends come apart. The inclusive view I adopt here can help make sense of cases where an individual lacks “ends” in a robust sense or lacks the capability to form ends, but nevertheless has interests, the promotion of which might enable her to gain or regain the capacity to form and act on her own (and others’) ends. The overall point about the possibility of motivation by others’ ends can stand, however, even if one denies the existence of objective ends.

  6. This strategy is not new; many philosophers have tried to highlight the symmetry among agents to suggest that if one’s own ends are the source of reasons, then others’ ends must be too. Kant’s ethics is the seminal source for arguments of this kind; influential twentieth century works include Thomas Nagel’s The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and Alan Gewirth’s Reason and Morality (1978). In recent work, Stephen Finlay (2006) defends an “end-relational” theory of normative reasons, which grounds reasons in ends (and not necessarily in the ends of the agent to whom they are addressed) and allows for the existence of external reasons. However, Finlay maintains a broadly internalist model of moral motivation, where external reasons fail to motivate.

  7. David Wong (2006, ch. 7) makes a related claim. Wong “[affirms] externalism with respect to the individual’s motivation, but…affirms internalism with respect to human motivation” (183).

  8. A number of authors have developed naturalistic accounts of morality tied to the function of morality in human life. Allan Gibbard (1990, 26) , for example, understands morality as growing out of humans’ evolved social nature and emphasizes the role of morality in coordination and cooperation. David Wong (2007, 39–44 and ch. 2 more generally) describes the interpersonal function of morality as “facilitating social cooperation” and the intrapersonal function as “promoting a psychological order within the individual” by “specifying what is worthwhile for the individual to become and pursue.” Wong argues that these functions developed through the course of human biological and cultural evolution and that these functions constrain the content of moralities and moral reasons, yet allow for a plurality of acceptable moral systems. I have argued that the central function of morality is to harmonize the diverse ends people hold (Hourdequin 2005). Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the function of morality is to facilitate cooperation, suppress selfishness, and make social life possible (according to Haidt and Kesebir 2010, 800); this function bears significant resemblance to those articulated by Gibbard, Wong, and myself, and to the extent that this function is accepted as authoritative, it will constrain hat count as legitimate moral reasons.

  9. On this point, I agree with Joyce (2001). Joyce actually puts this in terms of a desire for the good of the community; but the general point holds. The question of whether a standing desire of this kind can ground moral reasons is discussed further below.

  10. In this regard, my view resembles that of David Wong (2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009). The key features our views share in common are these: 1) Both allow that moral reasons can motivate without connecting with a standing desire of the agent, and 2) the existence of a moral reason for an agent to do some action X is not dependent on the particular motivations of the agent in question, though 3) there is a sense in which (as Wong 2009, 345 puts it) “moral reasons are constrained by human psychology.” Insofar as internalism about reasons holds that the existence of a reason for A to Φ depends on the presence of some desire, interest, or end of A’s that would be served or furthered by Φ-ing, neither my view nor Wong’s counts as internalist.

  11. Although ‘empathy’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘sympathy,’ it is helpful to distinguish the two: empathy necessarily involves feeling what the other feels or what one might expect that he or she feels, it is a kind of “feeling with”; whereas sympathy involves “feeling for” another person—e.g., feeling badly for another’s misfortune—without necessarily sharing the feelings of that person.

  12. Following Martin Hoffman (2000), I am understanding empathy as involving both cognitive and emotional elements. Some authors (e.g., Blair 2008) distinguish “cognitive empathy” (involving the ability to discern/know what others are feeling) from “emotional empathy” (involving concern for what others are feeling), and it appears that “cognitive empathy” can function in the absence of the kind of responsiveness described here—i.e., some individuals (e.g., those with antisocial personality disorders) appear to have normal capacities for cognitive empathy paired with significant deficiencies in emotional empathy. For details, see Blair 2008.

  13. Empathy can perhaps be helpfully be understood as grounding an attitude or way of seeing others that is analogous in important ways to the attitude toward or way of seeing ourselves that gives internal reasons their motivational grip. On this view, my own desires ground reasons for me to act in virtue of a general orientation of concern for myself. One way of understanding the failure to be motivated by one’s own desires is thus through a kind of alienation that weakens self-concern: in such cases, it no longer matters to me that I have certain ends, the reason-giving power of my ends is attenuated. My own distress, even, may cease to be strongly reason-giving in certain circumstances.

  14. I thank David Wong for helping me appreciate the salience of this case. Wong (2006, ch. 7) also discusses Darwall’s example.

  15. Elsewhere, Tomasello et al. (2005, 680) describe shared intentionality as “collaborative interactions in which participants have a shared goal…and coordinated action roles for pursuing that shared goal”, but this definition is too narrow to capture the range of phenomena described in Tomasello’s work on shared intentionality. In addition, for reasons described below, I don’t believe that the attention to and motivation by others’ ends requires goal sharing per se.

  16. See, for example, the work of Raimo Tuomela, Margaret Gilbert, and Michael Bratman.

  17. I am indebted to Schmid (2005) for offering a very helpful interpretation and commentary on Sen’s views of self-goal choice, which has informed the discussion below.

  18. Bernhard Schmid, in a recent commentary on Sen’s work, emphasizes the importance of group identity in grounding action motivated by the goals of others. Schmid (2005, 57–58), for example, argues, “If identification with a group lies at the heart of the structure of commitment, and agent does not have to perform the paradoxical task of choosing someone else’s goal without making it his own in order to qualify as truly committed…[I]n committed action, the goals in question are not individual goals, but shared goals.” Although this may be the right way to analyze certain kinds of commitment, Schmid’s analysis still seems to require that an agent’s action be explained by a pre-existing goal—in this case, a shared or common goal rather than a private one. Schmid’s analysis is therefore inadequate to explain the phenomenon that concerns me here, in which others’ goals can ground reasons for action, even if the agent does not adopt those goals as her own. I thus disagree with Schmid in the sense that I try to show here how one can—unparadoxically—be motivated by another’s goal without making it one’s own.

  19. But see Vaish, Carpenter, and Tomasello (2010) for discussion of how children’s observation of an agent’s harmful intention reduces helping behavior toward that person.

  20. Or any other interest or desire that would be served by helping the homeless.

  21. Dolan and Fullam (2004), for example, found that subjects with ASPDs performed no worse than subjects in the control group on standard theory of mind tasks, and they were not significantly impaired in their detection of social faux pas in a story they were told, but subjects in the ASPD group were less successful in understanding the feelings of the speaker and listener following the faux pas. Dolan and Fullam (2004, 1100) explain this finding as a possible result of a failure to “truly [empathize] with the characters in the stories or an indifference to the impact of the faux pas on the speaker or listener.” They therefore conclude that “the key deficits [in APSDs] appear to relate more to their lack of concern about the impact on potential victims than the inability to take a victim perspective” (2004, 1093). Relatedly, James Blair (2008, 158) has argued that psychopaths “have no impairment in ‘cognitive’ empathy [or Theory of Mind] but marked, and selective, impairment in ‘emotional’ empathy.” Interestingly, Blair argues that autistic individuals have the reverse problem: intact “emotional” empathy and deficient “cognitive” empathy. Although the precise relationship between shared intentionality and empathy has not been well worked out, and the terminology can be unclear, these findings suggest that deficiencies on the motivational side of empathy and shared intentionality may be central in ASPDs.

  22. My claim here is that emotional empathy is a necessary condition for moral agency; cognitive empathy alone is insufficient.

  23. This point raises some complex issues regarding the relationship between empathy and shared intentionality. My (albeit speculative) view is that a lack of robust empathic capacities compromises moral agency in certain ways; but insofar as shared intentionality has built into it a pro-social orientation, such a deficiency does not undermine moral agency altogether.

  24. Because the motivational propensities involved in empathy and shared intentionality are very general, they may not lead to specifically moral action: not all actions which promote the ends of others can be considered moral. Moral education is needed precisely because these diffuse propensities need to be given an appropriate shape: through moral education we learn which of others’ (many) ends provide moral reasons, which do not, which moral reasons deserve the greatest weight, and ultimately (perhaps), why.

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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Rick Furtak, Leonard Kahn, Ivan Mayerhofer, Bill Rottschaefer, David Wong, the Springs Philosophy Discussion Group, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Correspondence to Marion Hourdequin.

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Hourdequin, M. Empathy, Shared Intentionality, and Motivation by Moral Reasons. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 15, 403–419 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9288-5

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