Abstract
Jesse Prinz, in a recent article called ‘Against Empathy’, discusses many cases of the ‘dark side of empathy’ that show how empathy may lead to an unfair judgment and may favour some at the expense of others.1 The problem with empathy, Prinz holds, is that empathy interferes with morality due to its ‘intrinsic partiality’ and ‘ineluctable locality’.2
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Notes
J. Prinz (2011) ‘Against Empathy’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 49, pp. 214–38.
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Batson suggests that the concepts of empathy respond to two distinct questions: ‘How can one know what another person is thinking and feeling? What leads one person to respond with sensitivity and care to suffering of another?’ The distinction between these two modes of empathy, namely knowledge and care/sensibility, does not in itself imply that there is a transition from the first to the other, but it raises the question of whether they may lead to each other. D. C. Batson (2009) ‘These Things called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena’ in J. Decety and W. Ickes (eds) The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 3–16
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C. L. Harenski, K. A. Harenski, M. S. Shane and K.A. Kiehl (2010) ‘Aberrant Neural Processing or Moral Violations in Criminal Psychopaths’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 21, pp. 1–12.
Along the lines of F. de Vignemont und P. Jacob (2012) ‘What is It Like to Feel Another’s Pain’, Philosophy of Science, 79, pp. 295–316.
B. Vermeule (2007) Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP), p. 43.
C. Batson (2009) ‘These Things called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena’ in J. Decety and W. Ickes (eds) The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 3–16.
M. Tomasello (1999) The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP).
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© 2016 Fritz Breithaupt
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Breithaupt, F. (2016). Empathy for Empathy’s Sake: Aesthetics and Everyday Empathic Sadism. In: Assmann, A., Detmers, I. (eds) Empathy and its Limits. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137552372_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137552372_9
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