Moral Education: An Alternative to the Anti-empathic Model

Abstract

In ‘Moral Education: An Alternative to the Anti-empathic Model’ is a topic deeply related to that of moral development that is taken into consideration: that of moral education. Empathy—so the claim of this chapter—allow us to cross our egocentric boundaries and let us see the world from the perspective of another human being. This permits a richer understanding of the others. Empathy offers us an insight into the agency of the other person, into the ways in which they act, based on certain reasons and hence is a precondition for moral judgement and conduct and an indispensable part of moral education. Moreover, this chapter also show in what sense can psychopaths and autists be seen as lacking empathy.

The account given by Prinz about moral education is, briefly, the following:¹ a child develops moral competence thanks to imitation; in particular, the child has to be able to react with negative emotions in the presence of negative states of affairs, for example, the suffering or distress of another subject or the disapproval of caregivers and, conversely, to react with positive emotions in the presence of positive states of affairs. Now, it is understandable that to be able to react with positive or negative feelings in certain contexts it cannot suffice to possess a mere disposition to feel basic emotions, like joy, sadness, disgust, or fear; the child also needs the ability to discern other’s feelings and emotions. Here is where imitation plays its part: these emotional dispositions are, in fact, established by imitation and emotional contagion. Children learn to mimic perceived emotions through vocalisations, facial expressions, and gestures, for example, and then eventually come to feel, by means of imitation and especially emotional contagion, the inner states of others. Growing up, they will learn that, in response to given emotions experienced thanks to emotional contagion, certain reactions are in order. Thus, for instance, the sadness they feel thanks to emotional contagion from someone who is suffering will elicit a consolatory response learnt via imitation. Within this scope, Prinz sees the failure of psychopaths (besides their incapacity to be moved by fear, admiration, and other emotions) in their inability to become ‘infected’ by the feelings of others and to respond accordingly.

If I am right about this reconstruction, I think it can be criticised within the framework of (moral) developmental psychology and in light of well-documented studies, which allow for another interpretation. Let us consider these in succession.

Imitation surely can provide a basic sense of social connectedness. Through imitation human beings become capable of mutually acknowledging each other and understanding the sense of existing with others that are, in various aspects, similar to them.² However, this is not sufficient for morality to develop. For this to happen, imitation and mirroring processes have to be supplemented by an open system of reciprocation and shared representations of intentions, emotions, thoughts, and other mental states. It has been observed (and it is widely documented by developmental psychologists)³ that the mechanisms of emotional contagion, mimicry, and imitation tend to decrease as the subject develops other, more complex (and more important) cognitive capabilities. To quote Passos-Ferreira on this issue:

Imitation gives way to signs of reciprocation and emotional co-regulation. As joint attention to objects develops, shared affective representations also emerge. Eventually an explicit moral sense develops, accompanying the emergence of mind-reading and imagination by age 4. Around age 5, children show explicit understanding of the mental states that drive others in their behaviors and beliefs, allowing children to understand the motivational aspects that trigger moral attitudes.⁴

Therefore, the reading given by Prinz of the (moral) evolutionary story of the child might turn out to be rather simplistic. Imitation and emotional contagion are surely the first step in the development of metacognitive, social, and moral abilities, but not the last step. Notice, also, that emotional contagion is an ability the occurrence of which happens before the development of full self-other differentiation. Thus, for example, in the case of vicarious distress (like the famous case of collective crying in a nursery) the baby is not experiencing the others’ distress, let alone acknowledging that others are probably suffering. On the contrary, the infant is feeling their own distress. Hence, to explain the phenomenon of empathic concern, as well as the simple recognition that another is in distress, Prinz would need more than imitation and emotional contagion.

Moreover, empathy is not only our most pervasive method for understanding others, but it also permits us to make faster and more reliable predictions about the others’ mental states, decidedly more so than emotional contagion. It is, furthermore, undeniable—as already stated in the first section of this book—that (high-level) empathy seems to be the only psychological mechanism we have to understand the mental states of all individuals to whom we do not have perceptual direct access, because they are absent or because their mental states are not clearly expressed in their actions. For these reasons, empathy becomes essential when there is the need to grasp secondary moral emotions, false or divergent beliefs, cognitive and affective perspectives of others, and other such states. This seems to me to be the big gap in Prinz’s attempt to defend an ethics without empathy. To think morally, one cannot refrain from sharing others’ affective states or taking others’ perspectives into consideration through imagination or simulation.

By reading Prinz’s theory, one repeatedly receives the impression that the philosopher is doing everything possible to avoid speaking of empathy, until the point in which he is forced to use the phenomenon of emotional contagion as a substitute for empathy. The problem with this is that emotional contagion is ill-suited to act as such. In fact, unlike both emotional contagion and imitation, empathy emerges in the child only at the moment in which they become aware of self-other differentiation, and from this moment, the role of emotional contagion becomes increasingly marginal. Already in early development the emergence of certain cognitive functions draws a clear line (of which babies become more and more aware with the age) between emotional contagion and empathy. Pacherie⁵ asserts that this occurs by means of three levels: the first involves the emergence of a capacity in children to connect the motor representation of a certain emotional experience with the emotion that might have caused it, without thereby going through what developmental psychologists call the ‘proprioceptive stage’, which means without using the corresponding imitation of the other’s expression. In other words, children develop a perceptual access to others’ emotional states by perceiving their mimicry, vocalisations, facial expressions, for example, without this happening through proprioception (imitation).

It has been observed, for instance, that infants, using the words of Gopnik and Meltzoff: ‘vocalise and gesture in a way that seems [affectively and temporally] “tuned” to the vocalizations and gestures of the other person’.⁶ This was proved, in particular, thanks to two experiments which have become classics in the field of developmental psychology. In 1985, Murray and Trevarthen⁷ conducted an interesting test. A two-month-old infant had to interact with its mother via a video monitor in two different ways: in the first instance, the interaction was carried out through the use of a live video monitor; the child, in other words, saw the face of the mother in the screen and her attuned answers to its facial expressions and vocalisations. In the second situation, the monitor only showed a video-registration of the mother’s previous expressions, gestures, and so on. On this last occasion, the interaction simply failed. The infant seemed to understand quite rapidly that its mother’s actions were not synchronised with its own. This eventually led to a suspension of the interaction and usually left the child upset. Similar results had already been observed in a previous experiment conducted by Tronick and others.⁸ Here, infants from three to six months of age were examined in a normal face-to-face interaction with an adult. For one or two minutes the adult had to assume a neutral facial expression, without trying to engage in any way with the infant’s gestures and vocalisations. Then, the interaction was repeated, but this time the adult was allowed to respond in an appropriate way to the actions of the baby. As in the experiment conducted by Murray and Trevarthen, the infants became upset and the interaction quickly ceased in the case of the impassive face, whilst in the second case, the face-to-face interaction flowed without difficulty.

Other studies, besides these, have shown that infants from five to seven months of age are able to detect and understand the existing correspondence between visual and auditory information that specifies the expression of emotions. In other words, they begin to see a correlation between a certain type of emotion and the visual and auditory way in which human beings usually express it.⁹

All these capacities acquired by the baby are characteristics of a kind of empathy (it is in fact a rudimentary form of low-level empathy) that allows the infant to draw fundamental distinctions between feeling a given emotion, spotting the same emotion in others, and sharing this others’ emotion. The child at this stage has acquired the ability to identify distinct types of emotion.

Growing up (starting from nine months of age), the child reaches a second level of empathy, thanks to which it can understand the object of the emotion, meaning that the child is able to see the connection linking the emotions experienced by others with a certain situation. This ability appears at this stage due to the development of mechanisms underpinning what phenomenologists would call the intentionality. These mechanisms are joint attention processes, social references, and, indeed, intentional communication and allow for the understanding of others’ behaviour and the awareness of shared meanings about objects, events, and more.¹⁰

As a result, for instance, the child starts to attribute emotional evaluations to happenings that depend, to a large extent, on the affective responses of others (often caregivers). To illustrate what it is meant by these words, think of the classic scene of a toddler falling down and then turning to its mother. There is a moment in which the child seems surprised, rather than frightened or in pain, then the reaction of its mother, which, most of the time, is constituted by a concerned face, sad and high-pitched vocalisations, and a run to help pick the child, elicits the final emotional response of the child: crying. The infant here understands the ‘correct’ affective reaction to attribute to what has happened as a result of empathy with its mother and will thereby be able to understand, when it sees the same occurring to others, that falling down is a bad thing.

This case seems to show once again the unsuitability of the explanation offered by Prinz that is grounded in emotional contagion. Sometimes, in fact, the mother might not put on a sad face or express unambiguously an emotion that the toddler can discern, but the very fact that she runs to the child and tries to comfort it is enough for the child to understand that something bad has happened.

There are also times when the mother might express a certain emotion about a third object (or subject) different from the child: for instance, laughing while playing with the family pet. In this case, thanks to the mechanism of joint attention, the child will attribute a positive meaning to the pet and treat its mother’s emotions in relation to the animal as a kind of judgement or commentary towards it. This will eventually help the child to understand the causal role of emotions and the motivations behind one’s own affective reactions. In fact, this is the third and last level of the process so described by Pacherie (2004) and Passos-Ferreira (2015), that is, understanding the correlation between the three different dimensions of an emotional reaction, which they state as the type of emotion, its intentional object, and its motivational factors. This level of comprehension occurs from two years of age and requires the use of imaginative and simulative processes. It is, therefore, no coincidence that it begins with children engaging in symbolic and play employing pretence, in which imaginative characters are created, hypothetic scenarios are conceived, and objects and gestures from the real world are used to symbolise objects in fictive, imagined situations (a banana as a phone, for instance, or the gesture of holding an invisible cup of tea and drinking from it). These patterns of behaviour, which have apparently no connection with the phenomenon of empathy, are actually essential in allowing children to acquire the capacity to simulate others’ cognitive and affective perspectives and to acquire a good imaginative flexibility overall. This, in turn, will contribute to the development of what I have called ‘high-level empathy’, which is, as we have seen many times previously, of crucial importance both for the deepening of the information acquired through low-level empathy and for the use of empathic capacities in ‘opaque’ (to use Pacherie’s words) contexts, that is, for those contexts in which we have no clear perceptible clues to rely on for the acknowledgement of others’ emotions.

The following is a quote from Passos, who uses the term ‘imaginative empathy’ to refer to the phenomenon I have named ‘high-level empathy’:

Empathy, defined as this capacity to understand via perception or imagination the type of emotion and the connection between emotion, motivational aspect, and intentional object, is essential for moral development. The capacity to express moral attitudes involves the capacity to understand and identify secondary emotional reactions like guilt, shame, contempt, regret, admiration, outrage, and concern. Imaginative empathy plays a central role in understanding those affective reactions and allows us to internalize those emotional reactions as we imagine or simulate them based on others. This is the way children come to understand and internalize moral rules and moral attitudes.¹¹

Now, here Passos is asserting something crucial. Her claim is that empathy is diachronically and possibly synchronically necessary for morality, as well as for a normal emotionality. What she calls ‘secondary emotions’—such as shame, guilt, and outrage—in fact can only be experienced thanks to typical empathic mechanisms where the subject shares the emotions felt by others as a result of perspective-taking and simulation. So, for instance, the fact that the caregivers of a child react with shame (or act as if they were profoundly ashamed) to certain actions carried out by the child leads it to feel ashamed as a reaction and to attribute the property of ‘shameful’ to those actions.

Passos is convinced that this kind of explanation constitutes a direct criticism of the theory expressed by Prinz and that can be considered partially true. The reconstruction made by Passos has the not negligible merit to constitute a valid and reliable alternative to that made by Prinz, and its being more in line with the old and recent discoveries of developmental psychology certainly places the burden of the proof on Prinz’s shoulders. This, though more modest in degree, is good news for the defenders of empathy. Imitation and emotional contagion are the first steps in a long process also (and especially) involving affective perspective-taking and empathic simulations and, until the emergence of these abilities, it is impossible to speak of morality in children. This, if it is admittedly no proof of a causal relationship, surely speaks in favour of a close correlation between empathy and moral development.

In what follows, I want to argue for two aspects of high-level empathy that I believe have a crucial importance for morality: first of all, HLE enables people to overcome their own egocentric perspective and perceive others (and oneself among them) as independent but, in many ways, connected living beings. Secondly, thanks to HLE, people can receive the quasi palpable impression to be seen and be observed by others. Indeed, this regard d’autrui, to quote Sartre, is deeply connected with the development of moral emotions (Smith would probably say ‘sentiments’) that are, in their turn, an essential component of our moral life. Within this framework, the analysis of the work of Edith Stein will provide an excellent starting point.

1 The Anti-egocentric Power of Empathy

In her work on empathy, Stein never thematises the moral function of empathy in an explicit way. This is a choice that is perfectly understandable if we keep in mind that her primary interest was to clarify the epistemological function of empathy. However, there are some parts of this work (especially in the second and third chapters, respectively: The Constitution of the Psycho-Physical Individual and Empathy as the Understanding of Spiritual Persons), in which she makes assertions that allow for some level of interpretation. Take, for instance, the following passage: ‘[A] new object realm is constituted in in feeling. This is the world of values. In joy the subject has something joyous facing him, in fright something frightening, in fear something threatening.’¹²

Now, whoever has even a passing familiarity with these issues knows that this statement is far from being undisputed, and trying to substantiate this claim of Stein’s by making use of the literature on the theme would involve grappling with decades of diverse ideas on the topic brought up by numerous and famous philosophers of emotions. It would involve discussing the perceptual theory of emotion, the cognitive theories, the sentimental and neo-sentimental theories, the attitudinal theories, and this is certainly not the forum for it. What is imperative to highlight, in order to interpret Stein’s words in the right way, is a simple matter of fact. In the case of an adult, full-fledged, and normally-gifted person, and where the emotion is not recalcitrant,¹³ simple and ‘naïve’ judgements of values are normally associated with the feeling of a certain emotion in the following way: if I fear X, then I have at least one reason to find X under some aspect fearsome; if I feel admiration for Y, then I have at least one reason to find Y admirable, and so on. Of course, I might be wrong and/or I might change my judgements over time and with more information, however, in the situation where I feel Y about X, I have a prima facie reason to think that X deserves Y or that feeling Y is fitting with regard to X being as they are.

Now, if we consider empathy as the principal ability we have to understand and even share others’ emotions, thoughts, intentions, desires, or similar (and I see no reason to doubt that), then it becomes easy to see how it is possible, thanks to empathy, to abandon our egocentric perspective and assume that of the other. It becomes, in other words, possible to understand what Stein means when she asserts, in another even more significant passage, that by means of empathy we always experience another person as a feeling, thinking, desiring, and judging subject, as the ‘center of orientation’ of their own world. Quoting Stein: ‘a sensitive, living body belonging to an “I,” an “I” that senses, thinks, feels and will. The living body of this “I” not only fits into my phenomenal world but is itself the center of orientation of such a phenomenal world. It faces this world and communicates with me.’¹⁴

What does it mean to experience another human being as the ‘center of orientation’ of their own world? It means to experience the other as a being that has their own perspective on things and that perceives the world primarily in relation to themselves; a being that has needs, an emotional life, and vulnerabilities as we do. This kind of experience is the opposite of the egocentric kind of experience; it is the opening to a horizon consisting of mutual relationships. The others are not perceived as mere shadows of myself, as individuals that I can objectify to pursue my ends, but as autonomous subjects. It is thanks solely to this kind of perception (or experience) that I can not only simply acknowledge, inter alia, the desires and interests of others, but that I can even respect them. Notice another important passage in this citation. Stein affirms that the other is also always in communication with me, which means that they cannot be conceived merely as the centre of orientation of their own world, but as a being that can observe me, relate to me, and even make requests of me from their singular world. This means that I am seen by the other, judged by the other, appealed to by the other in a way that I would never be able to experience without leaving my egocentrism behind and opening towards the others and the world through the use of empathy. Namely, what I think that can be argued on the basis of the reflections of Stein is that empathy works as a precondition to moral judgement and moral behaviour. Empathy, in fact, helps us with correct understanding of the moral scenarios we have to face. It helps us—as already mentioned in the chapter about moral perception—to interpret the situation at hand morally. If I know that I am constantly dealing with finite and vulnerable beings that have desires, emotions, interests, and needs as I have, then this awareness constitutes the first and most fundamental (being the most original) call to a moral responsibility on my part and to the instantiation of moral behaviour. In the words of Rainer Forst:

[The insight into finitude] is an insight into the various risks of human vulnerability and human suffering, bodily and psychological. Without the consciousness of this vulnerability and the corresponding sensibility […], moral insight that is an insight into human responsibility remains blind.¹⁵

This feature of empathy is a crucial one for morality. Thanks to empathy we do not simply come to understand and feel the mental states of other people, as if they were some type of object that we can manipulate to our will; by means of empathy, as has been said repeatedly, we assume the perspective on the world of another person, we see what matters for this subject. Moreover, for the time in which we empathise, we see these things as mattering for us as well, because we have abandoned our perspective to gain access, as it were, ‘by the inside’ to that of the other. I want to quote the words of John Deigh on this issue, as I find them quite appropriate:

The empathy it requires must involve not only taking this other person’s perspective and imagining the feelings of frustration or anger, say, that he would feel as a result of being interfered with but also understanding his purposes as generating reasons for action even as one realizes that these purposes and reasons are independent of one’s own. Only if this later condition is satisfied can we say that someone recognizes the other person as a separate, autonomous agent. Only then can we say that he has advanced beyond the egocentric view.¹⁶

And later he adds:

In taking another’s perspective, the agent sees the purposes that give extension and structure to the other’s life and sees those purposes as worthwhile, as purposes that matter.¹⁷

As you can see, Deigh is very clear on the matter: to empathise with another person means not only to simulate her feelings and her mental states in general, but also ‘understanding his purposes as generating reasons for action’. In other words, empathy offers us an insight into the agency of the other person, into the ways in which they act, based on certain reasons. We could add also insight into the ways in which, for example, they believe, love, fear something, based on certain reasons.

It should thus be easy to see now in what sense I have said above that empathy is a precondition for moral judgement and moral conduct and hence a necessary part of moral education. Our judgement of the behaviours of others will not be a truly moral one without insights coming from empathy, and our actions towards others will benefit from these insights, in addition. Consider, in fact, the image we normally have of the morally virtuous person. We think (and rightly so) that such a person is, for instance, someone who gets angry from time to time but—to say it as Aristotle would do—with the right people, at the right moment, for the right reasons, and to the right extent, and the same applies to any other emotion. My claim is that without empathy it will be difficult for the morally virtuous person to be truly morally virtuous: how would they know that—to use the same example—X deserves their anger (and how much, at which moment, and for what reasons) because of something they did, if they do not know what passed through X’s mind and what it is like for X to be in the situation he or she is in? Our judgements about others would be unrefined and approximate. What is more, without empathy our morality would be short-sighted; we could have, that is, moral intentions, but we would find difficulty in converting these good intentions into actual good moral deeds for the same reasons I outlined earlier: we would be lacking important information that would help us to know exactly what to do. Continuing the analogy with Aristotle, empathy covers, following my proposal, part of the field (and of the tasks) which are characteristic of the phronesis. Phronesis was for Aristotle a type of practical wisdom or intelligence, akin to, if not even analogous to, the concept of prudence, which carried out the role of the guide of the virtuous person, the inner advisor who told them how and when to act, thereby orienting all of their virtues.¹⁸ Phronesis is distinct from sophia, as this one is a pure theoretical knowledge directed towards universal truths typical of the sciences: for example, it is by having and developing our sophia that we learn the principles of mathematics and geometry. On the contrary, the phronesis is concerned with particulars, in the sense that it is concerned with how to act in particular situations. One can, of course, learn the principles of action in the same way in which one learns the principles of arithmetic, that is, in a theoretical way, but applying them to the real world, in situations one could not have foreseen, requires more than theoretical knowledge: it requires a practical wisdom. My claim is that this practical kind of wisdom or intelligence would be incomplete (and thus imperfect) without the indispensable contribution of empathy, which is, after all, a kind of ‘emotional intelligence’. Without empathy a true phronesis cannot exist, which means that the morally virtuous person must also develop their capacity for empathy. Take the case of sincerity, for instance. It is a common assumption that morally virtuous persons are by definition and ipso facto honest and sincere. However, what does it mean to be sincere? Sincerity certainly does not require saying openly everything one has in one’s heart, to any person, at any moment, and without any kind of filter. In fact, such a behaviour would easily result, inter alia, in the assertion of indelicate and inopportune comments that would hurt others’ feelings. Far from considering a person acting in this way as being morally virtuous, we would think that they are indeed inappropriate, ill-mannered, and asocial. Hence, the morally virtuous person, anything but insincere, would nevertheless be a person able to tell the truth ‘in the right way’, meaning that they would be capable of doing it without hurting others (or at least by reducing this eventuality to the minimum). In order to carry out such a task they are going to need more than wisdom: they need empathy to perceive the emotionality of others and give voice to more appropriate, honest comment. The same applies to all the other virtues: empathy comes to be an integral part of the phronesis and, driven by it, a necessary component of the ethos of the morally virtuous person.

Notice that to say that empathy is a necessary constituent of the ethos of the morally virtuous person implies that a defective empathy would mutilate the moral excellence of this person, and it would compromise their capacity to act morally. Furthermore, as we have seen in the previous discussion, a complete lack of empathy would prevent us from exiting from our egocentric perspective and developing a moral stance about others and the world; a world in which others are taken into account in our actions.

The fact that empathy can be of such a crucial importance for the ethos and for the moral development of a person should not strike anyone as surprising. We have in fact seen—especially, but not only, in the case of Huckleberry Finn—that principles are not the sole constituent of morality or, more specifically, that morality consists of the development, justification, and application of moral rules and principles. There are times in which our principles are wrong and need correction, but, above all, we need to develop a moral perception in order to know which kind of rule of conduct (and when) ought to be applied to the actual situation at hand. Does this mean that we should use our empathy instrumentally, that is, with the aim of correcting our perspective or refining our moral perception? Yes and no. Yes, because this is indeed useful and it can be definitely helpful to try to overcome our perspectives in some situations. No, because this would not happen in every situation where it is needed. To overcome one’s own perspective, one needs, in fact, the willpower to do so and the capacity to do so. These are elements that can be developed only by means of training, in other words, by the development of a good character (ethos). Take again the example of Huck Finn. Here, the young boy does not make an ‘instrumental use’ of empathy to intentionally influence his moral perception. Rather, empathy assumes in this example the role of an inner voice, a force that goes against his best judgement to return Jim to the slave-owners. If our best judgement is in some cases insufficient to inspire us to ‘do the right thing’ (to quote the famous film by Spike Lee), then it is easy to see that it is also not sufficient to use empathy instrumentally. The aim of a good moral education should hence be the enhancement of empathy tout court, so that it can always be present together with our moral principles. We should strive to make a habitus out of empathy, because it is only when empathy becomes a habitus that it can substantially (and not contingently) change our way of seeing. Iris Murdoch once said:

The selfish, self-interestedly, causal or callous man sees a different world from that which the careful, scrupulous, benevolent, just man sees; and the largely explicable ambiguity of the word ‘see’ here conveys the essence of the concept of the moral.¹⁹

Along the same line, I claim that the empathetic person sees a different world from that seen by the unempathetic person. Consider again Huck’s example: the unempathetic person, raised with the ideals of anti-abolitionists in their ears, would indeed see no moral dilemma, no difficulty in deciding what to do with Jim: he must be taken back to his owner, that’s all. On the contrary, the empathic person (the person who has made their empathy a habit based on the model of the Aristotelian virtues) is in fact the only one to actually see a (moral) problem that is invisible to the rest of the ‘contingent empathisers’ (i.e. people who have not developed the same habit and whose empathy is only contingently and irregularly elicited).

The morally virtuous person needs empathy, and if they do, then empathy seems to be a necessary element in the moral patrimony of this person. To see how cogent this thesis is, we will now consider a class consisting of people who seem to completely lack empathy.

2 Empathy and Psychopathy

Psychopaths have been one of the favourite subjects of studies in the field of psychopathology for several decades, and since the mysteries of their psyche are far from being univocally solved, it is reasonable to believe that they are going to be under the lens of psychologists and psychopathologists for many years to come. The typical traits which have always attracted the interest of both specialists and laypersons are their inclination for criminal and generally immoral behaviour and their apparent lack of fellow-feelings. In fact, high levels of callousness, grandiosity, manipulation, impulsivity, criminal versatility, and other antisocial characteristics are commonly present in all the lists describing their behaviour.²⁰ Their criminal inclinations are also well documented. For instance, it has been shown that within one year of release from prison, psychopathic criminal offenders are up to four times more likely to reoffend than non-psychopathic offenders.²¹ Moreover, it has been found that within ten years of release 77% of psychopathic offenders had committed a new violent crime, as opposed to 21% of non-psychopathic offenders.²² Since these data are taken to be incontrovertible, the problem to be solved has always been to discover the reasons behind them: why are psychopaths so prone to criminality, immorality, and insensitivity? It is on this point that international research has offered the greatest variety of attempts to understand the proximate causes of typical psychopathic behaviour. In such a situation, it was easy for philosophers and psychologists alike to take one of these explanations and, from it, create a canonical model for rationalising psychopathy. In this sense, the positions sustained by Jesse Prinz and Paul Bloom are no exceptions. Over the decades, aspirant explanations have included abnormalities in psychopathic individuals’ emotional and physiological responses,²³ in their perception of others’ distress,²⁴ in their sensitivity to punishment,²⁵ and in their attentional capacities.²⁶

As a philosopher, I do not (and cannot) consider myself an expert in the field of psychopathology and that is why I will not argue for the superiority of my theory with regard to other positions. However, I will have achieved my aim if I manage to show that my proposal is able to explain the amorality of psychopaths as a result of their deficient empathy and, at the same time, to avoid the criticisms of Prinz and Bloom.²⁷ Since I have explained previously that their theory of psychopathy as a general dulling of all emotions is absolutely compatible with the absence of empathy as being the key deficit of psychopaths, I am going to show over the following pages why it makes even more sense—in addition to being more in accordance with the discoveries of psychopathology and developmental psychology—to think of empathy as being ‘the great absent’ in the psychopathic condition.

First of all, it seems unduly simplistic to think of psychopathy as a condition displaying a general blunting of all emotions. It appears that people defending this view have the tendency to see psychopaths as reflecting the popular image of the cold and apathetic manipulator, as reflected in numerous films, television series, and novels. Consider, for example, Dr. Hannibal Lecter as portrayed in the books of Thomas Harris and masterfully represented on screen by Anthony Hopkins; or Dexter Morgan from the TV series Dexter; or, yet again, Jeffrey Dahmer, a real psychopath and serial killer who has recently acquired a certain notoriety even among laypersons due to the acclaimed Netflix series Dahmer. These kinds of psychopaths certainly exist and are undoubtedly the ones which capture our imagination (which explains their presence even in pop-culture) but are not the only types. There are, for instance, many psychopaths who can hardly be conceived (and described) as apathetic. In fact, whilst psychopaths surely are ‘hyporesponsive’ to certain emotions,²⁸ they are far from being hyporesponsive to all emotions. For instance, numerous psychopaths have actually been found to be hyperresponsive to emotions like anger, pride, jealousy, or envy, what means that they experience these emotions in a very vivid manner, and, moreover, they have a tendency to feel emotions, such as surprise, disgust, joy, and happiness in a similar way to most of us.²⁹ Aaltola,³⁰ in this regard, makes a distinction between secondary psychopaths, who are ‘hot-headed’ and aggressive, though not empathic, and primary psychopaths, who are extremely controlled and intelligent, while being emotionally detached, fearless, and unempathetic.

Nevertheless, that is not all. There are, in fact, psychologists who support an even stronger position about the emotionality of psychopaths. Arielle Baskin-Sommers, for instance, contends that psychopaths are not apathetic and cold-blooded, but simply very bad at multitasking. In other words, they are inefficient in effectively processing information. By way of example, in one study, Baskin-Sommers and her colleagues John Curtin and Joseph Newman decided to test the supposed fearlessness of psychopaths.³¹ The outcomes were particularly remarkable. The research was conducted with the (psychopathic) inmates of a maximum-security prison³² and the following fear conditioning task was used to test their purported fearlessness: on a screen appeared the letter ‘n’ (either upper or lower case) and a coloured box (either red or green). Now, a red box meant the convict may get an electric shock, whilst a green box meant that he was safe. The tasks which the inmate had to carry out were twofold: in some tests—while the box was displayed—the inmate had to tell the examiners the colour of the box (thereby focusing on the threat), whereas in others he had to tell the examiners the letter’s case (focusing in this way on the non-threat). It was observed that psychopaths experienced fear responses (indicated by a startle and amygdala activity) when they had to focus on the box (which, as already seen, stood for the ‘threat’), but they showed a remarkable deficit in fear reactions when they had to tell the examiners the letter’s case (in a situation, i.e. where the box came to assume a secondary position with regard to their primary goal). These results are intriguing, since they do not show—as it was and still is often supposed—a general incapability of psychopaths to be moved by emotions (in this case, fear), but rather that psychopaths tend to experience a minor or absent emotional response compared to non-psychopaths when they are focused on something else. In a sense, we could assert that psychopaths seem to have an extremely selective attention and only what falls within the scope of this attention deserves an emotional reaction from them. What remains outside of this, instead, is seen (probably unconsciously) as irrelevant and, for this reason, does not trigger any particular emotion.

Prima facie, it would seem that all these different descriptions of psychopathic emotionality are in conflict. Bloom and Prinz underline the blunting of feelings as a typical element of the psychopathic condition; others, like Freeman and Heym, mention that this is incorrect and simplistic, since there are emotions which seem deeply felt by psychopaths; finally, psychologists like Baskin-Sommers and colleagues argue that what truly characterises psychopaths is, to some extent, a defective attention, and not apathy. So, where is the truth? Who is right? To a certain extent, no one, and everyone. It is true that we should not conceive psychopaths as beings that are devoid of all human emotions, in fact, not even psychopathic criminals seem to fit this description. However, laypeople and scholars who generally consider psychopaths to be callous and cold-blooded are not totally wrong. In fact, psychopaths can give the impression of suffering from an overall blunting of feelings exactly because of their very selective (defective) attention and inability to multitask and process information not directly of interest to them. Why so? Because we are not used to dealing with these kinds of people. You see, say, a man ready to take an irresponsible and potentially fatal risk for what seems to you an unimportant personal issue and you might conclude that this person is incredibly cold-blooded. You see another who is not paying attention to his partner and you might believe he is callous and insensitive.

Of course, all of this could be explained by the above-mentioned blunted emotionality, and that would be the easy route. Alternatively, we could take the thesis of the ‘defective attention’ in order to illustrate the matter. According to this view, the first man who is risk-averse only acts in such a manner because he is unable to calculate the future consequences of his action. The second, who ignores his partner, is simply focused on something else, which, although perhaps completely secondary in our opinion, occupies his total attention. In other words, many of the psychopathic typical features could merely be the result of this potentially primary hyperselective, and thus deficient, attention.

Nevertheless, we might wonder if that is the full answer and, in particular, if hyperselectivity and defective multitasking are really responsible for psychopathic amorality. Granted that psychopaths are often inept at making plans for the future or at focusing their attention on aspects that do not directly matter to them, can all this be seen as the cause of their amoral behaviour? It seems not. What is (morally) wrong about the psychopathic way of making plans for the future, or selecting what is of importance and what is not, is their systematic exclusion of everything that is not directly beneficial to them. In other words, everything that matters in the world of psychopaths is what matters to them. All the rest, ‘the others’, can only serve, for psychopaths, as instruments to be used to reach their objectives, but they are of no concern per se. If Immanuel Kant warned, in his second formulation of the categorical imperative: ‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end’, indeed, psychopaths do exactly the opposite: the humanity of the other is ever only a means to achieve their own ends, and nothing more.

Hence, to again take into account the example of the psychopath not paying attention to his partner, the problem here is not (or not merely) that the psychopath is unable to keep his attention high, both on his personal matters and on his partner, but that he really sees his partner as unimportant.³³ The psychopath seems unable to respect the ‘inner world of others’³⁴ for its own sake, to consider it as having its own importance and dignity, regardless of its connections with what matters to him. On the contrary, the tendency of the psychopath is that of seeing the inner world of others as depending on his own inner world and as mattering only because it can benefit him. Namely, what is different in the psychopathic perspective is that whilst the ‘normal person’ sees his inner world as encountering that of others under different forms: conflict, participation, association, love, for example (but as, in any case, important in its own sake), the psychopath assumes an egocentric kind of perspective in which his own inner world is the only one possible (or at least the only one that is of consequence) and the others are there merely to be used or else ignored. That is why the psychopath can be perfectly able to use what many psychologists call ‘cognitive empathy’ and to not only understand what other people think and feel, but to utilise this knowledge to deceive them or even persuade them to pursue his ends; however, he will not be able to feel ‘affective empathy’ for them, he will not truly suffer alongside them, nor for the same reasons, and in many cases he will be unable to be receptive and share their emotional perspectives.

It is thus the egocentric and egoistic closure towards others that characterises psychopaths best and explains their perceived amorality. Furthermore, this retreat into egotism, or, to express it in a better way, this inability to really open oneself to others, can be explained by the lack of affective empathy, which, as we have seen, is the key to reversing this situation and becoming part of a community of shared emotions, feelings, and ends.

However, there is a potentially destructive criticism that can be made regarding this reasoning, and it concerns the particular condition of those people with autism or Asperger’s syndrome. The condition these people have, in fact, could also be described as one of hiding inside oneself. Moreover, the well-known profound difficulties that these individuals experience in interacting with others on an emotional level may also be explained by a lack of empathy. Hence, if we want to defend the view I have presented, we need to construe a convincing argument against such positions. I believe that such an argument can be found and over the following pages we are going to see the evidence for this.

3 Empathy and Autism

The view that people with autism and Asperger’s lack empathy is rather widespread. Jeanette Kennett,³⁵ for instance, is persuaded that an empathy deficit cannot be the cause of the typical moral shortcomings of the psychopath, since autistics also suffer from the same deficit. Nevertheless, autistics, as opposed to psychopaths, possess moral concern for others and even a sense of duty, which are both totally absent in psychopaths. There is thus no need to be able to put oneself in the shoes of another in order to be capable of moral agency to act morally, which suggests, for Kennett, that a rationalist ethics, such as that of Immanuel Kant, is substantiated by the (psychopathological) experience and must be preferred to the sentimentalist one of David Hume (or Adam Smith, for that matter). Autistics are able to act morally, because, like good Kantians (or at least like good rationalists), they adjust their behaviour following rules of a certain character. What is more, autistic persons:

[…] though lacking empathy, do seem capable of deep moral concerns. They are capable, as psychopaths are not, of the subjective realization that other people’s interests are reason-giving in the same way as one’s own, though they may have great difficulty in discerning what those interests are.³⁶

This fact certainly constitutes a significant challenge against the view defended in this book and, indeed, it has been expanded upon by many scholars, among whom we find Frédérique de Vigmemont and Uta Frith, who have formulated what can be described as an ‘autistic paradox’ that proceeds as follows:³⁷

• (a) ‘Humean’ view: Empathy is the only source of morality.³⁸

• (b) People who have no empathy should have no morality.

• (c) People with autism show a lack of empathy.

• (d) People with autism show a sense of morality.

As we have seen, Kennett’s strategy to resolve the paradox is to reject statement (a). Other scholars, like Victoria McGeer, also dismiss (a), but, in addition, reject (b). McGeer, in fact, agrees with Kennett that autistic individuals lack empathy, but refuses to endorse a rationalist ethical account and contends, instead, that autistics can rely on many other affective states which can ground moral agency: for instance, the well-known autistic strong desire for order that underlies their concern with rule-following. Furthermore, she believes that people with autism have concerns that are absent in psychopaths, such as compassion for others or concern with one’s place in the social order.³⁹

Before going further with the analysis and seeing how it is possible (if it really is) to escape this paradox, it will be useful to say some words about autism. To clarify, I will focus on high-functioning autism spectrum disorders, in which there is little or no impairment in linguistic ability (though there may have been language delay) or IQ. So, from what are these kinds of autistics suffering? Generally, they are characterised by a severe social impairment and a limited capacity to engage in role-playing, as well as a marked repetitiveness of behaviour and extremely limited interests. Autistics are typically very uncomfortable in social situations and quite frequently confused by other people’s reactions. Especially after Simon Baron-Cohen’s seminal article Does the Autistic Child Have a Theory of Mind?,⁴⁰ there has been a growing consensus tracing back autistics’ difficulties in social negotiation and adjustment to a defective mindreading ability, that is, as we have seen, to the ability of predicting and attributing mental states to themselves and to others. This does not mean that autistics cannot develop a valid mindreading ability. In fact, they can learn to attribute and even predict mental states of others—although they habitually do that on the basis of a simple correlation between cues and outcomes—but such learning is usually imprecise and, more importantly, difficult to acquire.

Nevertheless, persons with autism usually report feeling bad when they are told that their behaviour was in some way hurtful and always think that hurt should be avoided where possible.⁴¹ Contrary to the vast majority of psychopaths, autistics are also able to distinguish moral from conventional violations and have physiological arousal responses to perceived distress in the same way ‘normal’ individuals do.⁴² Presumably, because of all that, autistics do not share the psychopathic proclivity to criminal and generally antisocial behaviour. However, their compromised ability in mindreading make them often unable to determine both when someone is in distress and what they should do in response to it. A fascinating record of what this means in practical terms comes from the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks, who reports the words of one of his high-functioning autistic patients, Jim Sinclair:

I have to develop a separate translation code for every person I meet. […] Does it indicate an uncooperative attitude if someone doesn’t understand information conveyed in a foreign language? Even if I can tell what the cues mean, I may not know what to do about them. The first time I ever realized someone needed to be touched was during an encounter with a grief-stricken, hysterically sobbing person who was in no condition to respond to my questions about what I should do to help. I could certainly tell he was upset. I could even figure out that there was something I could do that would be better than nothing. But I didn’t know what that something was.⁴³

This quote is especially interesting, since it shows that when autistics fail to meet certain moral standards and show instead a morally inappropriate behaviour, they do it as a consequence of a failure to understand the moral valences of complex social situations, to adjust their response to the distress displayed by others, to react with the appropriate emotions, and more.⁴⁴ However—and this is crucial—this failure is not the product of an absent general concern for others. Autistics do care about others.

Hence, we have the following situation at hand: psychopaths do not care about others, and this uncaring attitude, together with their cold and callous emotional reactions to fear, violence, harm, and other emotions, is the cause of their immoral behaviour. However, psychopaths do not, contrary to autistics, have any difficulty in mindreading: just the opposite, this is exactly what makes them such good manipulators, charmers, and conmen. They perfectly understand what other people are feeling, thinking, or doing, and even what reactions they are likely to have. Autistics, for their part, care about others, but they are not so good at mindreading. In fact, they may not understand what a person is feeling, and, when they do (even if only approximately, as in the previous example of Jim Sinclair), they usually do not know what to do in order to instantiate moral behaviour. Notice that this shifts the problem of morality to internalism. In fact, sometimes, the behaviour instantiated by a psychopath can seem prima facie more morally fitting than that of an autistic and have better results in the praxis (the other person may feel themselves understood, valued, and taken care of), nonetheless, we would not be ready to call a psychopath a morally good person only because he was able to achieve this outcome. Why so? Simply, because his intentions are not good. Nonetheless, what does it mean that his intentions are not good? What is implied by that? Looking at the previous description, it is now easy to answer: because psychopaths do not act from a caring perspective; a perspective that is, at the opposite end, embraced by autistics. In other words, autistics are capable of acting under the motive of altruism, to ultimately benefit others and not themselves, whereas psychopaths are not capable of assuming the point of view of a caring and altruist person. Quoting Andrea Sangiovanni on this issue:

[…] there is no sense in which autistics are left [contrary to psychopaths, ed.] entirely ‘cold’ to the responses of others. Quite on the contrary, they often care very much what others think, and why they are thinking it; what makes them anxious and clumsy in their responses is, first, others’ perceived opacity and unpredictability and, second, the perceived indeterminacy and malleability of social rules and conventions, whose application, of course, varies quite significantly (and to autistics, often unintelligibly) according to context and circumstance. We might say that where psychopaths are morally blind, autistics are merely short-sighted.⁴⁵

Psychopaths are morally blind, because they are unable to see the others from the perspective of someone caring: they can only see others from the perspective of someone that wants an immediate profit and the satisfaction of his own machinations.⁴⁶ Autistics, on the contrary, are morally short-sighted, because they can see others from a caring perspective and can also glimpse where good and bad exist, but are often unable to see what should be done in order to realise what is good and avoid what is bad. They see social relationships and human emotional reactions as a complex puzzle that they find extremely challenging to solve, therefore they can do wrong without meaning any wrong.

Now that we have seen that autistics lack something and that this deficit is responsible for their ‘moral short-sightedness’, it is time to answer the fundamental question: what capacity, what faculty or disposition do autistics lack that diminishes their moral sight and makes them unable, at times, to see or respond appropriately to moral reasons? Are scholars like Kennett, and, in some sense, McGeer, correct when they assert that autistics have an empathy deficit (or even empathy absence)? The answer is: partially. In fact, both psychopaths and autistics lack empathy in some sense, but they lack different kinds of it. More precisely, psychopaths are capable of cognitive empathy, but unable to feel affective empathy, whereas autistics are exactly the opposite: they are able to feel affective empathy but have a very deficient cognitive empathy. Evidence of that is the fact that whereas psychopaths—as reiterated—have no difficulties in attributing and predicting other people’s mental states, they are usually left cold by these people’s emotional reactions. On the other hand, autistics find it very difficult to understand and foresee others’ mental states, but this does not mean that they remain unmoved by others’ affective feedback. Indeed, many researchers think that autistics are capable of affective empathy, even if they are severely impaired in mindreading.⁴⁷ For instance, autistics do have people whose company they enjoy more and, also, others they are not happy to see. Further, autistics can even have ‘love relationships’ and be a couple (even though these relationships are, of course, different from those you and I can have) and they are usually sad to know that someone they like is suffering. However, as we have made clear earlier in the book, although the division between cognitive and affective empathy can be very useful at the level of heuristic and epistemological analysis, it is rarely so clear in the praxis, and, what is more, profound influences on one of the two empathic dimensions have substantial repercussions on the other. Therefore, some scholars, like Hobson and Hobson,⁴⁸ draw on various studies to argue that since deficits in cognitive empathy make it difficult for autistics to understand the mental states of others and even experience them as individuals with minds in the first place, the depth, range, and the likelihood of their affective reactions to the feelings, thoughts, and situations of others will be undoubtedly limited, which they are. No one would deny that autistics have affective reactions that do not meet the range, depth, and similarity of those felt by non-autistic subjects. Cognitive and affective empathy are, consequently, deeply connected phenomena. However, this does not help us to solve the problem: what do autistics lack and how can this influence their moral perception and moral agency? To answer these questions, we have to complicate the matter slightly. This puzzle can indeed be solved only on the condition that we have all the pieces, even if this means increasing the complexity of the puzzle itself.

The fact is that not all people with autism have the same difficulty in experiencing empathy (be it cognitive or affective). For instance, Brewer and Murphy⁴⁹ report that many autistics say they experience typical or even excessive empathy at times. As a matter of fact, one of the subjects they studied was able to describe in detail his intense empathic reaction to his sister’s distress at a family funeral, and he was not an isolated case. Nevertheless, other autistic individuals agreed that feeling empathy and understanding others’ emotions is difficult for them. A way to explain this discrepancy is to admit that people with autism are not all the same and to introduce another concept, that of alexithymia. Alexithymia is, in a few words, a condition characterised by a difficulty in identifying and understanding one’s own and others’ emotions,⁵⁰ which is exactly the kind of deficit usually attributed to autists. People with alexithymia might suspect they are experiencing an emotion, but are unsure about which emotion it is, and, at the same time, might know that the other is feeling a certain emotion, but ignore that emotion. Interestingly, whilst alexithymia has been observed to be present (in different degrees) in about 10% of the population at large, this percentage climbs quite remarkably in the case of autists, who are associated with it in a range of 40% to 65%.⁵¹ This means that, approximately, one out of two autistics suffers from alexithymia.

The question arises: can alexithymia explain why some individuals with autism have difficulties with emotions and others do not? The answer to this question can only come from a cross-sectional study, which is exactly what Brewer and Murphy did, by analysing four groups of subjects: individuals with autism and alexithymia; individuals with autism but not alexithymia; individuals with alexithymia but not autism; and individuals with neither autism nor alexithymia. The results of this study are of fundamental importance for any scholar who tends to draw the all-too-familiar conclusion that autists generally have an absent, or at least critically impaired, empathy. In fact, it was observed that subjects with autism but not alexithymia showed typical levels of empathy, whereas individuals with alexithymia (regardless of whether they have autism or not) were less empathic. Thus, it seems that autism is not associated with a lack of empathy, but alexithymia is.

Is alexithymia also associated with a deficient morality? Are alexithymic people, for instance, less prone to help others or to care for them? Not really. Indeed, people with alexithymia were observed to feel even more distress in response to witnessing the pain of others than did those subjects without alexithymia.⁵² The fact is that they have difficulty in witnessing it, but when they do, they seem to express a marked presence of care about others and about their feelings. After all this, it is important to remember that the lack of cognitive empathy seems not so much a characteristic condition of autism per se, but of alexithymia. This can possibly present a significant problem, since the vast majority of the studies on autism conducted so far do not take this difference into consideration, which eventually makes it difficult to deduce the kind of deficit that is the product of autism as opposed to that of alexithymia.

Thus, for instance, Zalla et al.⁵³ tested the ability of a group of autistics to distinguish between moral and conventional rules, using a list of typical such rules, together with some examples of disgust violations stemming from Nichols’ book Sentimental Rules.⁵⁴ What they found was quite interesting: in fact, whilst normal individuals considered both moral and disgust violations as authority-independent but were able nonetheless to distinguish between the two, people with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) did not. Furthermore, other studies have shown that autistics tend to judge unintended harms to be as bad as deliberate harms, in all probability because of their insensitivity to agents’ intentions caused as a result of their deficit in empathy.⁵⁵ Nonetheless, here is exactly the problem: is the ability to put themselves in other people’s shoes (the lack of which almost certainly explains these results) typical of autistics simpliciter or of people with alexithymia? At this stage of research, it is perhaps impossible to give a clear answer to this question. However, the analysis of subjects with ASD has served to highlight the importance of empathy (both cognitive and affective) for a morality that should not be blind (as in the case of psychopaths) but also not short-sighted (even if basically functioning, as in autistics). Using the words of Zalla et al.:

We argue that while the affective component of the empathy is sufficient to distinguish affect-backed from affect-neutral norms, an intact cognitive empathy, which is specifically involved in moral appraisal, is required to distinguish moral from disgust violations.⁵⁶

Hence, though it is undeniable that autistics do not share the same amorality displayed by psychopaths and though they certainly care about others and have an understanding of moral and social norms, their deficits in cognitive empathy have a negative influence on different moral dimensions, such as moral agency, moral development, or moral perception.⁵⁷

This means that although the empirical evidence regarding psychopathy and autism is controversial (and for that matter we should suspect the works by scholars who think that ‘the case of psychopaths’ or ‘the case of autists’ unequivocally supports one precise view on empathy) it seems plausible that while members of both empathy-deficient populations may be able to distinguish between moral and conventional violations in at least some cases, they have a poor grasp of the grounds for authority-independent rules for blaming people.⁵⁸ If I am right in this conclusion, then empathy is, continuing our analogy with sight, our moral eye. It is the organ that is responsible for the ability to see or to respond to moral reasons and a deficit of it corresponds, as we have seen, to a deficit in morality. In particular, this hypothesis would predict that people with a deficit of empathy, regardless of their reasoning capacity, would be poor at making moral judgements when moral perception or insight is needed, and they would show a marked inability to act morally: in the case of psychopaths, due to a lack of moral motivation (they are not interested in acting in a moral way) and in that of autistics, when the rules they have learnt from others do not yield a clear answer or yield answers that conflict with one another.⁵⁹ To the best of my knowledge, this is an hypothesis that still remains to be proved by some form of psychological study. As we have seen, however, there are good indications that it might be true.

Until now, I hope to have shown with enough clarity that empathy is in fact necessary for moral education. Indeed, populations with a deficit in empathy, such as psychopaths and autistics, have (to different degrees and for different motives) problems with the instantiation of moral behaviour, the acquiring of moral insight or perception, and the development of moral habits. Nevertheless, there is still one issue that deserves our attention: how can moral education or development occur? We have already talked about the inductive discipline method of Martin Hoffman and seen the less conspicuous, but still central role that empathy can play (and indeed plays) even in the imitative method of Jesse Prinz; now it is time to examine how empathy can enhance a caring perspective and, consequently, moral agency.⁶⁰