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The Empathy Dilemma: Democratic Deliberation, Epistemic Injustice and the Problem of Empathetic Imagination

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Abstract

One of the challenges facing complex democratic societies marked by deep normative disagreements and differences along lines of race, gender, sexuality, culture and religion is how the perspectives of diverse individuals and social groups can be made effectively present in the deliberative process. In response to this challenge, a number of political theorists have argued that empathetic perspective-taking is critical for just democratic deliberation, and that a well-functioning democracy requires the cultivation in citizens of empathetic skills and virtues. In this paper, we begin by distinguishing several kinds of imaginative projection and corresponding kinds of empathy. On the basis of this analysis, we suggest that genuine empathetic perspective-taking, especially across gendered, racial and embodied differences, is more challenging than is often assumed in the literature. This poses a dilemma for theorists who place great store on the role of empathetic imagination to overcome the challenges of democratic deliberation. On the one hand, placing responsibilities for empathetic perspective-taking primarily on the socially privileged raises risks of inaccurate and inappropriate projection. On the other hand, mitigating the risks of projection by calling on the socially marginalised to articulate their experiences and feelings in a way that can engage the imagination of the socially privileged, risks perpetuating epistemic injustice. We suggest that while this dilemma may be difficult to overcome, its effects can nevertheless be mitigated through both the cultivation of individual deliberative virtues and pragmatic institutional responses.

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Notes

  1. Elster (1998, p. 6) argues that deliberation must be restricted to reasonable argument and must exclude all other forms of affectively charged communication. See also Habermas (1998), who argues that the only force that should operate in public deliberations is the “force of the better argument”, and that all decisions reached should be supported by good reasons, ones that all affected parties could accept. See also Hogget and Thompson (2002, p. 109).

  2. Morrell (2010, p. 35, citing Marcus 2002).

  3. Ibid., p. 1.

  4. Ibid., p. 163.

  5. Ibid., pp. 114–115.

  6. Goodin (2003) and Krause (2008).

  7. Medina (2013a, b).

  8. Mary Scudder also examines the first horn of this dilemma in Scudder (2016). We will return to this discussion in the second section of the paper.

  9. Wollheim (1984), Goldie (2000), Velleman (1996) and Coplan (2011a,b).

  10. Mackenzie (2000, 2006); Mackenzie and Scully (2007).

  11. Velleman (1996).

  12. Wollheim (1984, pp. 76–79) and Goldie (2000, pp. 198–205).

  13. Goldie (2000, p. 198).

  14. Mackenzie (2000).

  15. Gordon (1986).

  16. In Goldie (2011), he refers to these kinds of cases as ‘base cases’ (p. 307).

  17. Haslanger (2012, p. 286).

  18. Coplan (2011a,b).

  19. Coplan cites especially research by Jean Decety and a variety of co-authors. See for example Decety and Greze (2006) and Decety and Jackson (2006). Decety’s research is also cited by Morrell (2010).

  20. Goldman (2011), makes a related distinction between the ‘mirroring’ route to empathy and a neurologically distinct route to what he calls ‘reconstructive empathy’, a higher level form of empathy that involves the imagination.

  21. Coplan (2011a, p. 45).

  22. Coplan does nevertheless concede that ‘bottom-up’ processes such as emotional contagion may interact with and help to activate ‘top-down’ processes of imaginative perspective-taking Coplan (2011b, p. 14).

  23. Coplan (2011a, p. 53).

  24. Ibid., p. 54.

  25. Ibid., p. 44.

  26. Ibid., p. 58.

  27. Goodin (2003).

  28. https://inmyblooditruns.com/about/.

  29. Goodin (2003, pp. 171, 190).

  30. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/aug/15/australias-creative-industry-is-shockingly-white-but-dont-be-discouraged.

  31. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/17/only-1-of-uk-childrens-books-feature-main-characters-of-colour.

  32. Sunstein (2002).

  33. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/aug/21/the-age-of-comfort-tv-why-people-are-secretly-watching-friends-and-the-office-on-a-loop.

  34. Goodin (2003, p. 183).

  35. Ibid., p. 189.

  36. Ibid., p. 191. Goodin does acknowledge that cultural representations on their own are insufficient to broaden people’s perspectives. He also advocates for social mixing as a way of expanding perspectives and engaging imaginations: ‘It is obviously far easier to imagine what the world looks like from the perspective of a black person or an immigrant or a person from some religious minority if you actually know people like that personally…social mixing of those minimal sorts constitutes a necessary first step towards firing the imagination in the ways “democratic deliberation within” would require’.

  37. Krause (2008, 2011) and Morrell (2010).

  38. Krause (2011, p. 83).

  39. Ibid., pp. 85, 96.

  40. Krause (2008, p. 113).

  41. Krause (2011, p. 92).

  42. Krause (2008, p. 117).

  43. Henderson (1987) and Krause (2011, p. 86).

  44. Ibid., p. 87.

  45. Morrell (2010).

  46. Ibid., p. 210.

  47. Ibid., p. 57. This is what Coplan refers to as emotional contagion. While on Coplan’s account emotional contagion is quite distinct from empathy, Morrell and Davis maintain that the process of non-cognitive empathy is one of the dimensions of empathy.

  48. Classical conditioning occurs when ‘“affective reactions to others [that] result from past situations in which the individual perceived affective cues in another person while directly experiencing the same affect”’. Morrell (2010, p. 57 citing Davis 1994, p. 39). Direct association requires that we have previously experienced an emotion similar to the one we now observe in others, although it does not require that we feel it simultaneously. We associate the cues with our own previous emotional experience, and so experience the affective response from the cues of the other person. Labelling occurs when ‘“the observer uses simple cues to infer something about the target’s experience”’ (ibid., p. 57), such as recognising that someone is sad or upset by their facial expressions or demeanour.

  49. Morrell (2010, p. 58).

  50. Ibid., citing Davis, p. 40.

  51. Ibid., citing Davis, p. 17.

  52. Ibid., citing Davis (1994, p. 17).

  53. Ibid., p. 167.

  54. Scudder (2016).

  55. Ibid., p. 531.

  56. Ibid., p. 533.

  57. Susan L. Feagin makes a similar point, referring to the important role played by the specifically ‘literary features of a work—such as prose, style, imagery, alliteration and length of sentence’ or by ‘cutting and alterations in color and focus’ in film in eliciting a reader or viewer’s empathy for a character (Feagin 2011, p. 156).

  58. Smith (2011, p. 112).

  59. Plantinga (1999, pp. 524–550).

  60. Meyers (2016, p. 145).

  61. Ibid.

  62. Ibid., p. 178.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Ibid., p. 169.

  65. Ibid., p. 168.

  66. Ottenelli (2017).

  67. Ibid., p. 609. There are other practical problems with this kind of personal narration. As Federica Liveriero also notes, because members of marginalised groups struggle to have their voices heard or make any impact on political decisions, it may be pragmatically pointless for them to give an account of their personal experiences in public, and may even be harmful. It may exacerbate their feelings of epistemic injustice to have their political reflexive agency constantly publicly questioned. See Liveriero (2020, p. 808).

  68. Fricker (2007, pp. 147–175).

  69. Medina (2013a, b, p. 95).

  70. Ibid., p. 95.

  71. Rebecca Mason. 2011. Two Kinds of Unknowing. Hypatia 26(2), 295–307, p. 303.

  72. Charles Mills. 2007. White Ignorance. In Sullivan and Tuana (eds). Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, Albany: State University of New York Press.

  73. Dotson (2014).

  74. Ibid. Amandine Catala makes a similar point in drawing attention to the problem of what she calls epistemic mistrust; She writes: ‘the constant presence of the prejudice that the speaker is epistemically untrustworthy amounts to a potential testimony dismissal that is sufficient for testimonial injustice to obtain’. Catala (2015, p. 431).

  75. Dotson (2014, p. 98).

  76. Ibid.

  77. Hill (2015).

  78. Ibid., p. 6.

  79. Ibid., p. 515.

  80. For discussion, see for example, Collins (2000, pp. 123–125).

  81. Dotson (2011, p. 244).

  82. Ibid.

  83. Crenshaw (1991, pp. 125–127) and Dotson (2011, p. 245).

  84. Medina (2013a, b, p. 116).

  85. Berenstain (2016, p. 570).

  86. Ibid., p. 586.

  87. Morrell (2007, p. 381).

  88. Morrell (2007, p. 85).

  89. Krause (2011, p. 98).

  90. Ibid., p. 99.

  91. Dotson (2012, p. 34).

  92. Lugones (1987, p. 4). Compare also Medina’s notion of kaleidoscopic imagination in Medina (2013a).

  93. Scudder (2020a, b).

  94. Ibid., p. 514.

  95. Ibid., p. 516.

  96. Ibid.

  97. Chambers (2009, p. 330).

  98. Ibid.

  99. Muradova (2020).

  100. Gronlund and Setala (2017, p. 475).

  101. John Dryzek, Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 59.

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  1. Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Catriona Mackenzie

  2. School of Law, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Sarah Sorial

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Mackenzie, C., Sorial, S. The Empathy Dilemma: Democratic Deliberation, Epistemic Injustice and the Problem of Empathetic Imagination. Res Publica 28, 365–389 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-021-09534-z

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