Empathy and the Acquiring of a Caring Perspective

Abstract

This chapter is dedicated to the theme of caring in ethics. It is here explained how can empathy develop a caring perspective and, by means of that, a moral character. The concept of receptivity (analysed, i.e. by Michael Slote) is demonstrated to be essential for moral behaviour and receives in this chapter further attention that links it inextricably to empathy. Finally, the causal chain that connects empathy with care and care with (moral) action is illustrated in its circularity, which, far from being a weakness, reveals the strength of the ties between empathy, caring, and morality.

As I said in the previous footnote, it is not my intention to defend a straightforward care-ethicist approach to morality, however, I think that care ethicists have contributed to the emergence and the consequent examination of some facets of morality that have been disregarded for far too long in the sphere of moral philosophy. One example is the fact that traditional ethics, such as deontological and teleological ethics, have not taken the context of moral subjects into account. The way in which traditional moral philosophers have conceived ethical theories is almost solely compatible with the model of a socially privileged, independent, and able-bodied male, capable of making isolated transactions in the world. The problem is that this kind of experience is not shared by women and by other marginalised subjects, who have a different conception of what moral agency really means. So, whilst utilitarian and Kantian ethics attempt to answer the question ‘what is the right thing to do?’ irrespective of the individuals and the context, care ethics have had the distinction of highlighting the importance of responsiveness.¹ Since ethics is conceived here as relational, as dealing with subjects interacting with each other, the knowledge of what is good and bad is generated, beyond various guiding principles, by attentiveness and openness to the other. Hence, the moral concern is always addressed to the other, not to any particular action abstracted from the (relational) context.²

For these reasons, care ethics deserve credit from all moral philosophers and psychologists who value the emotional role in moral deliberation and believe that the assumption of a caring perspective is of central importance to moral agency, moral perception, moral development and education, and moral motivation. Since care is a transversal notion and an integral part of our idea of morality, I think that analysing the connection between empathy and care, and, especially, between empathy and the development of a caring perspective, will be a worthy complement to the section about empathy and moral development and education.

It may be surprising to learn that the (arguably) most famous, influential, and prolific care ethicist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Nel Noddings, was rather reluctant to use the term empathy, especially in her early works. However, I do not think that this constitutes an outright rejection on her part. In fact, the reasons for her early distrust of the term are plausibly to be found in a form of extreme prudence. Assuming that empathy involves something like the projection of the empathiser (in Noddings’ framework ‘the carer’) onto the target (‘the one cared for’), there is the risk that this model becomes overly one-sided, and in this sense, an expression of a merely masculine way to see how ‘feeling with’ works and in general the approach we use to relate to others.³ However, as we have seen, the way we have described empathy and its functioning can very much agree with Noddings’ emphasis on an ongoing responsive interaction between the caregiver and the one cared for as being crucial for the instantiation of moral acts. Indeed, the mechanism of projection or perspective-taking is just one among several other methods that can be employed to empathise with others; it is not the only possible one. Instead, our discourse regarding empathy as a result of openness to the other, of being receptive towards the other, is in line with Noddings’ arguments. Take, for instance, this passage:

In a phenomenological analysis of caring, it becomes clear that the consciousness of carers, in moments of care, is characterized by two features. First, there is a special form of attentiveness, which I have called engrossment. Second, there is a motivational shift; the motivational energy of the carer begins to flow toward the needs of the cared-for.⁴

According to this description, caring is constituted by the employment of two capacities: on the one side, the endeavour to understand and, in a certain sense, to feel the needs, interests, desires of another person (the ‘engrossment’), and on the other, the prosocial caring reaction (which, as we have seen, is often defined in the literature as ‘sympathy’ or ‘compassion’).⁵ This is interesting, in fact, if we leave aside the rather peculiar name of ‘engrossment’ given by Noddings, we could state that the caring process is ultimately a form of ‘compassionate empathy’ or something similar. It seems, in fact, to be constituted by empathy plus compassion. I think this is a correct conclusion and I believe that even Noddings could hardly deny that. Nevertheless, this would also be uninteresting: indeed, it seems obvious that if A empathises with B and even feels compassion for B, then, in a certain sense, A cares for B. What would really be interesting is to discover how empathy can (if it can) lead to caring. In fact, this is exactly what we are going to attempt.

Caring is a kind of perspective that only older children can assume (at least, at a conscious level). This presupposes that the caring subject is concerned about someone or something and wishes them well. As an Italian, I venture to say that the caring perspective can be perfectly incarnated by a very common Italian expression of affection which is: ti voglio bene. Ti voglio bene is less strong than ti amo (i.e. ‘I love you’), which is only used for romantic partners, and for this reason it is normally employed to express attachment to people such as relatives and friends. It literally means ‘I want your good’ and conveys a double message: on the one hand, the person using it is telling the other that they positively wish the other well, that they want the other to farewell, and voices in this sense a kind of wish; on the other hand, the person who says it is making a clear statement that everything they want for the other is for them to be good and to do well. In this sense, it is something stronger than a mere wish. The person who vuole bene (‘wants well’) is also stating, indirectly, that they would never do something bad to the other (at least, not intentionally) and that they would actively undertake actions that would lead the other to do well and be good. In fact, when we say that we want something—as opposed to when we hope, look forward, or ‘would like to’—we are not merely expressing a hope, rather, we are confessing that we are very interested in something and that we are going to do what is in our power to acquire it. Notice also that this perspective, the fact of volere bene, does not mean that the one who expresses it should do everything the other person wants. In fact, we could volere bene to someone we believe is in the wrong, and then our duty, if we really care about them, would be to help them reform. Hence, the caring perspective implies not only a general concern about another and about their welfare, but also the motivation to do something in order to help them; a conclusion that seem to be shared by all care ethicists.

However, there might be a problem with all of this. If it seems natural (or at least understandable) to care about our family, our friends, or perhaps our dearest colleagues, it seems not so compelling to develop a caring perspective for people we do not know, or, what is worse, for people we find disagreeable or unlikable for some reason: a political opponent, a hypercritical colleague, for example. Granted, this is an issue that should not be overlooked, but this also does not pose an impossible problem to solve either. There are at least two ways in which we can develop our empathy (and, with that, a caring perspective), so as to act as a type of antidote to our biases⁶: one will be discussed here, whereas the other will be explored in the section on empathy and moral motivation.

To understand the link between empathy and caring it is imperative to highlight how empathy and caring are both connected to the concepts of knowledge and inquiry. Indeed, it is obvious that we cannot truly care for subjects we ignore. Ignorance is such an impediment to real care that the act of ‘ignoring’ someone or something has become synonymous with ‘not caring’ about that someone or that something. Hence, caring presupposes by its very essence a form of knowledge, and in order to really get to know a certain subject, we have to investigate carefully (which, in turn, requires an engagement on our part). This appears sound, thus far. The problem with this simple scheme, however, is its one-sidedness. In fact, the conceptual chain, no doubt, can go from inquiry, to knowledge, to caring, but it can also work in reverse: we can interest ourselves and seek information about someone or something and thereby widen our knowledge because we care about them or it. For instance, I might care about environment because I work for Greenpeace and, consequently, have a deep knowledge of the way climate change is endangering the survival of numerous animal and floral species on the planet, or, on the other hand, I might also start to gather information about the impact of climate change due to an initially shallow, vague interest in nature and wildlife and then become concerned about these issues.

It is important to highlight this double-sided process because it is the same one that characterises empathy. We have seen, in fact, that it is easier to develop empathy for people we know,⁷ but we have also asserted that empathy can play a major role in terms of widening our epistemic and moral perception and in information-gathering. Empathy can make visible features of a situation that would otherwise remain invisible. As is easy to see, this can naturally lead us to care about something that we have initially ignored by making that something perceivable to the empathiser. This Janus-like process that can flow from knowledge or inquiry to empathy and caring, but also the reverse, can prima facie seem problematic. How is it possible to solve this contradiction? My answer is that we cannot and we should not, even if we could. The analysis of this process has shown that the line that connects knowledge with empathy (or care) is not a straight one, but a circular one. We can know X and because we are aware of their condition we can empathise with them and/or care about them; in turn, the empathy and/or the care we have for X can enlarge our comprehension and our knowledge of X’s condition, which can again boost our empathy, and so forth. For this reason, whilst I agree with Hamington (2017) when he says that empathy is a necessary but insufficient condition for care, I am nonetheless more inclined than him to highlight the potential of empathy in this context. In fact, even though empathy is not sufficient for care per se, it is, nevertheless, essential for its development. However, let us proceed systematically.

Hamington, following Noddings, defines care as ‘an action taken that promotes the growth and flourishing of another’⁸ and adds that: ‘Empathy can be experienced without being motivated to act.’⁹ There are several motives for which we can choose not to act, but it is especially the link between inquiry and empathy that Hamington sees as crucial for the undertaking (or not) of the caring action. Hamington sees as a problem the fact that the causal chain is complicated by a nonlinear relationship existing between inquiry, empathy, and action. Indeed, without sufficient inquiry, empathy can—so Hamington claims—lead to an inadequate or misguided caring action: ‘In such cases, my empathy does not run deep and my understanding is superficial and it would have been better had I not acted at all.’¹⁰ To get an idea of what he meant by that, we can briefly analyse his example:

[…] if I see a colleague crying and I offer them a tissue and tell them they should go home and take care of themselves, the gesture is superficial and minimal and possibly aimed at assuaging my discomfort with the display of emotion. […] Had I engaged in greater inquiry, […] I might have learned something that would have led to an action experienced as deeper caring by the person crying.¹¹

Indeed, we make these decisions on many different occasions. Sometimes we feel we are just too stressed, busy, or tired to offer the help others need, and this inevitably impacts negatively on our caring capacities. However, I disagree with Hamington in considering this example as emblematic in indicating the limits of empathy for the improvement of caring. In fact, exactly like the act carried out, the empathy felt in this case is also ‘superficial and minimal’. The very fact that Hamington deems the action as ‘aimed at assuaging my discomfort’ is an indication that what we feel when we behave like this is closer to personal distress than to genuine empathy. Hence, the only point that this example manages to make evident is that when we empathise in a superficial, mediocre way, there is a high chance of not developing a genuine care for others and possibly feeling vicarious or personal distress instead of empathy. However, this is certainly not the kind of empathy that should be encouraged, nor the one that I maintain can play a crucial role for the acquiring of a caring perspective. The type of empathy I defend requires exactly those elements which are excluded here: time, effort, and risk. If we want empathy to become a habit, then we cannot conceive of it as a phenomenon that might happen or not, that is, as something contingent, but as a perspective, a point of view that is possible to acquire and over which we can exert a certain control.¹²

1 Empathy and Receptivity

I have expressed more than once my scepticism about the idea of grounding an ethics in empathy and have distanced myself from philosophers who support this position, such as Michael Slote. However, I have to acknowledge that Slote is the philosopher who perhaps best describes what I mean with ‘assuming an empathic perspective’, and he does it by linking empathy with what he calls the ‘virtue of receptivity’. Unfortunately, although receptivity is the key concept of an entire book written by him—I am speaking here of his From Enlightenment to Receptivity¹³—and appears countless times in this work, I was not able to find any clear definition of this term. It is said that receptivity is a virtue, that it is a concept that was almost totally neglected in the history of Western philosophy, and that should be rediscovered, nevertheless—and rather stunningly—I struggled to find a clear-cut definition of this notion. Furthermore, it seems to me that Slote shifts numerous times in the book from the concept of receptivity, to those of openness, empathy, and sympathy. Sometimes he seems to use them interchangeably, whilst other times he appears to want to treat them as different, separate concepts. For example, on pages 34 and 35 of the book, a clear distinction is to be found between the phenomena of empathy and that of sympathy, for the reason—so Slote asserts—that empathy involves receptivity, whereas sympathy does not. Then, to the contrary, on page 44 Slote says that openness and objectivity ‘require one to have or to be able to acquire a certain degree or amount of sympathy’. Later, at least from page 172 onwards, he uses—so it seems—the notions of receptivity and openness rather interchangeably.

However, having read the book in detail, I think it is possible to make several assertions that well summarise—so I hope—Slote’s position.

First, receptivity is a necessary precondition for care, possibly of sympathy, and certainly of empathy, and almost totally identifies with the last one. Second, receptivity can be portrayed as a perspective of openness, open-mindedness and almost, I would say, of approachability towards the other. The receptive person is not hostile, not reticent nor closed-minded, but open to what the other thinks, feels, says, and so on. In this sense, a person who is receptive is in the best position to care about others and, consequently, help them, because this kind of persons are, by definition, free of prejudices. The only prejudice this person has—we might say, using a play on words—is that of not having prejudices. This, of course, does not mean that the receptive subject is ‘by nature’ and, to the same extent, open to any kind of idea presented by others, but that they always try to see another’s point of view as well as their ideas and arguments ‘in the favourable light in which he or she views them’,¹⁴ even when they do not agree with them. In practical terms, this entails that the receptive or empathic subject feels, however mildly, a slight emotion of enjoying approval, since we can only regard favourably something that we approve of, that is, something towards which we are favourably inclined.¹⁵ In Slote’s words: ‘being intellectually/epistemically rational and objective really does require having certain emotions (and likewise certain feelings)’.¹⁶ Notice that receptive empathy does not necessarily require you to radically change your opinion about something, but only to make—so to speak—a temporary deviation from your way of seeing things. It requires more than a simple epoché, because you need not only to temporarily abandon your position, but also to change your mind for a moment.¹⁷ Further, and more importantly, (receptive) empathy does not require that you end up agreeing with the other. After having worn the other’s shoes for a while, you can always return to yours, but with the awareness of having taken the necessary step towards being truly objective and unbiased towards the other.

On the other hand, imagine you have to empathise with a person whose beliefs are radically different from yours. Moreover, envisage, for instance, a need to empathise with those whose opinions repel you, such as individuals who are profoundly racist, or misogynist, or similar. Would you really be able to see their opinions in the same favourable light in which they see them? To feel—although temporarily—an emotion of approbation? In my opinion, this would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. For this reason, I think that Slote requires too much from empathy and receptivity, namely, a positive feeling of approbation. This feeling seems to have more to do with sympathy than with empathy. We have seen several times in this book how sympathy is often described as being very similar to (when not overlapping with) compassion.¹⁸ This is also the position of Slote, who, on page 34 of his book, asserts:

Thus empathy in its most paradigmatic examples involves having the feelings of another involuntarily aroused in ourselves, as when we see another person in pain. It is as if the person’s pain invades us […] However, we can also feel sorry for, bad for the person who is in pain and positively wish them well. This amounts, as we say, to sympathy for them, and it can happen even if we aren’t “feeling their pain.”¹⁹

Nevertheless, there exists another meaning of ‘sympathy’, which is very much widespread, even among laypersons, and that characterises sympathy but not compassion. For this reason, I would not take compassion and sympathy for synonyms and would prefer to assign a rather sharp difference between them. Doing so I do not want to directly criticise the authors who use them interchangeably, but I am of the opinion that, by equating them, we run the risk of losing important distinct features and to deprive the semantic field of the two concepts. In general, compassion seems to imply a stronger feeling of care, concern, and suffering (for the targeted person) than sympathy.²⁰ Also, compassion is specific for negative situations. We cannot feel compassion for someone who fares well, such as someone who has just won the lottery. However, we can sympathise with them if we know, for example, that this person was poor and that this pay-out would help them provide for their children’s studies. We can, in other words, sympathise with people in positive situations and we can have a general sympathetic attitude with people or groups of people whom we love, like, or support (our partner, our friends, our favourite football team, for example). Finally, according to the concept of sympathy I am advocating, we cannot sympathise with people we do not like, with people we despise, or those we find morally blameworthy. We may empathise with a criminal who is facing a fair trial, we might even have compassion for them, but if we learn that they indeed deserved the punishment awarded for this crime, we would not sympathise with them. Therefore, I would define sympathy as an emotional attitude of affinity and support we feel for subjects we are concerned with, in light of their being individuals towards whom we are positive inclined. Also, very much like compassion, sympathy normally involves a motivational push, meaning that if able to help, the sympathetic person will probably help, depending on how much they are ready to sacrifice.

Having made this point, I think it is rather easy to notice that when Slote asserts that empathy and receptivity are essential for objectivity, he is actually talking about what I call sympathy. In fact, it is under circumstances when we sympathise with someone that we can see their opinions in the same favourable light and approve of them. Think of what you really mean when you utter the sentence, for instance: ‘I sympathise with this view’. It is in those cases that we are effectively expressing a positive feeling of approbation, but they are not to be conflated with cases in which we empathise with others. Empathy for other points of view can occur in the absence—so I claim—of any ‘positive feeling of approbation’. Further, it can coexist even with disapprobation. Again, examine your own intuitions and think of when you utter sentences, such as: ‘I understand why you have this opinion and I can empathise with your feelings at the moment. Nonetheless, I think you’re wrong.’

The problem with Slote’s argument is that he appears to be equating ‘openness’ with ‘welcoming’, which means that he seems to ignore that there is a perhaps slight, but surely extremely important difference between being open towards the point of view of another, and welcoming this point of view (i.e. approving of it). Empathy only requires the first attitude, not the second. It requires to be open and receptive and, what is more, it requires one to investigate the other, in order to attain the most accurate representation of the other’s thoughts and feelings. Only then is true empathy (not necessarily sympathy) possible.

2 The ‘Circularity’ of Empathy

To really understand what the concept of empathy I am defending implies and requires from us, perhaps nothing would be better than reading the following words by Leslie Jamison. Jamison is not a philosopher, nor a psychologist, and probably this is the reason why she was so able to perfectly describe what empathy entails without resorting to standard definitions, psychological evaluations and questionnaires, and other similar sources. She is a young novelist who had the opportunity of working as a ‘medical actor’. In summary, she had to act as if she had some kind of disease, in order to test the skills and the empathy of young doctors (who visited her as a normal patient). In the first chapter of her book, The Empathy Exams, she describes the phenomenon of empathy thus:

[…] empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion. […] Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see […] Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response. […] Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia—em (into) and pathos (feeling)—a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?²¹

This quote is so dense in meaning that it deserves some unpacking. Interestingly, it is also rather circular; in fact, it offers, at the end, the instruments that permit one to understand what was meant in the first sentence. It is said at the beginning that empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion. Why so? Empathy—my interpretation of Jamison’s words—is fundamentally a gift, for many different reasons (some of which are mentioned in the citation itself). It is a gift for us, because it allows us to understand others by encouraging us to ‘ask the right questions’ and necessitates that we use our inquiry and imagination, thereby improving our cognitive and sensitive abilities. Additionally, of course, it is a gift for others, for the very good reason that the person who feels the empathy of others feels themselves understood and on the same wavelength as the other. This is always a pleasant experience. However, empathy can also be an invasion, because often the ‘questions whose answers need to be listened to’ are precisely the awkward, uncomfortable ones, and because there is always the danger that the empathiser enters too far into the intimacy and the privacy of another, thereby passing from being an ‘explorer’ to being an ‘invader’, from ‘observer’ to ‘stalker’. Notice, however, that Leslie Jamison does not share the same doubts, the same hesitations about empathy that some care ethicists, such as Nel Noddings, share. The ‘penetration’ intrinsic in the etymology of empathy can become an invasion, but it is essentially intended as a ‘travel’. It is not a violent conquest, but a discreet and respectful journey led by, so to say, a ‘healthy curiosity’—if not sheer care—for others.

There is then another issue mentioned by Jamison that deserves our attention and this is the relation between empathy and knowledge or inquiry, which we have discussed earlier on previous pages. Empathy is inherently Socratic: it requires knowing that we know nothing, and since we know nothing, it requires imagination sustained by inquiry. In this sense, empathy is a way of gathering information that needs to be supported by as much information as possible, showing once again that the circle is the form which marks it. Also, exactly like in the Socratic maieutics, the information about others we are seeking by means of empathy is already present: it merely needs to be noticed. Consequently, how can one detect it? The answer to this question is also twofold. On the one hand, it needs—as previously stated—unbiased inquiry: ‘Empathy—according to Jamison—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all.’ On the other hand, since ‘Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see’—which infers that something like ‘perfect’ or ‘total’ empathy simply cannot exist, that the entire contextual horizon can never be embraced by our gaze—and since no emotion²² has discrete edges, empathy requires porousness. Notice that ‘porousness’ is nothing but the same concept of receptivity/vulnerability I have highlighted several times in previous sections, only this time with a more physical and embodied taste in order to maintain the idea of corporeity evoked by the fitting metaphors about wounds, seizures, and bleedings. It has, moreover, the not negligible virtue of attesting adequately to the ‘passive side’ of empathy. It indicates that empathy is not always a question of projection into the other, that is, of ‘perspective-taking’, but of ‘perspective-receiving’. The word ‘porousness’ suggests in fact that we should behave as a type of sponge and become imbibed or even soaked by the inner world of other.²³ The world of others is indeed already there, ready to be perceived by means of empathy; it is not pure interiority, but present in the common Mitwelt.

Hence, empathy has a more ‘passive’ and a more ‘active’ side, the former describing an attitude of openness, receptivity, porousness, and similar towards others, and the latter portraying, instead, an attitude of inquiry, information-gathering, and perspective-taking. However, the two are rarely used separately: most of the time they are used in conjunction, and, furthermore, both have the same relationship between knowledge or inquiry, on the one hand, and caring, on the other. Consider, for example, a person who consciously assumes an empathic attitude towards others. We can affirm with a clear probability that such a person will act this way out of a more general caring attitude or, at least, with the intention of being caring and altruistic towards others.²⁴ This is, in fact, one of the most common reasons for choosing to develop and assume such a perspective. Take, then, the case of a person who is naturally extremely empathic, but does not consciously assume this perspective. A person, that is, for whom empathy simply occurs. Both these people, because of empathy for others, will feel, in certain situations, a measure of duty to help, but in a different sense from the Kantian-like duty (which, as philosophers know well, is accomplished out of respect for the categorical imperative). Here, ‘duty’ expresses almost a compulsion, that is, the fact that the empathic person will feel compelled to act. Noddings once wrote that: ‘[…] the caring person, one who is in this way prepared to care, dreads the proximate stranger, for she cannot easily reject the claim he has on her’.²⁵ Now it is possible to specify that it is not care that is the necessary condition to feel this claim, as well as the subsequent ‘compulsion’ or pressure to help, but empathy. We understand now why I have previously mentioned ‘vulnerability’ in connection with empathy: the receptivity and porousness required by an empathic perspective makes us less independent and more connected with the other. Notice, indeed, that ‘feeling with’ requires a bond that is not necessary for ‘feeling for’. Feeling for is a kind of sentiment that can be experienced even by independent, self-sufficient, and autonomous individuals; on the contrary, feeling with is by definition typical of dependent and relational individuals. One can, for instance, feel sorry for another, while left ‘untouched’ and undisturbed in their contentment (as in the case of ‘rational compassion’). Empathy, instead, makes the intrinsic fragility of humans and their interdependence perceivable both in one’s own person and in that of the other. Furthermore, empathy usually leads us to gather more information about others, and more information usually motivates us to care. Hamington goes so far as to speak of an actual causal chain:

[…] there are times when we are otherwise engaged that we do not wish to endeavor to know more because we realize that such inquiry will pull us in to care. In such cases knowledge can be said to activate empathy, which in turn can lead to caring action. One can avoid the causal chain by retreating from knowledge.²⁶

I would not speak, as Hamington does, of a genuine causal relationship, but I think that it is undeniable that there is, at least, an extremely strong correlation between inquiry or knowledge and empathy and that this correlation (that goes both ways) is, in turn, deeply correlated to care. The only reproach I have against Hamington is that he does not identify the fact that if empathy is indeed fed by knowledge, knowledge can be fed by empathy, too. He recognises that the ‘causal chain’—as he refers to it—between knowledge, empathy, and care is nonlinear, but he seems to ignore the fact that it is actually circular.²⁷

Now, having seen how complex the relationship between the triad of knowledge–empathy–care is, how is it possible to help people to develop care and, with it, moral behaviour? The answer is simple in theory, but not as simple in praxis: in short, we have to improve inquiry and empathy skills, which speaks in favour of a holistic and inclusive moral education. Of course, there are numerous ways to achieve this. One is certainly the previously cited method of inductive discipline conceived by Hoffman (2000), where the child who has caused harm to other children should put him or herself in their place and feel concern for the effect his or her action has caused and might cause in the future. This method that works so well at a personal level can also be productive at the societal one, thanks to a process of generalisation. However, we will discuss this issue more at length in the section on moral acting or motivation.

3 Developing a Moral Character by Means of Empathy

Reviewing the literature, there are numerous different models of moral education grounded on empathy or which at least regard empathy as a central element of moral education. As I do not want to make a rather inadequate list of some of the most valuable proposals for moral (empathic) education, I will only analyse and comment two of them, highlighting what I find valuable in these approaches. This will be useful to demonstrate how wide, multifaceted, and important the role of empathy is for moral education and development. The first model comes from Nel Noddings²⁸ and has four processual components: the process of modelling, that of dialogue, that of practice, and, lastly, that of confirmation. As I have said, it is not my intention to summarise this method, but it is important to highlight the fact that although Noddings, even here, does not allude explicitly to empathy (a concept which she finds problematic for different motives), I think that the concept of empathy I support should be presupposed for the proposed approach to work properly. Keep in mind that Noddings is proposing an educational pattern that can and should be taught in family and schools. Empathy is presupposed in the first stage, which is that of modelling, where the carer (suppose a teacher) makes explicit, thanks to the instantiation of certain paradigmatic actions, what it means to care about others. In order to do this, they make use of empathy. The cared-for (suppose schoolchildren or students), in turn, observe the teacher’s behaviour and try to follow their example. Afterwards comes the part of dialogue. Here, schoolchildren have the opportunity, by means of an open-ended discussion (which implies both talking and listening) amongst themselves and with the teacher, to improve their caring abilities, and, although Noddings does not in fact refer to it as such, empathy—as we are going to see—comes to play a central role in this context. Noddings, in her book Educating Moral People, actually distinguishes between three forms of conversation: the formal conversation, the ordinary conversation, and the immortal conversation. I will briefly describe only the immortal conversation, as it is both the most interesting and most ‘empathic’ of the three.

The so-called immortal conversations are discussions in which crucial aspects of the human being (especially of human ontology and morality) are thematised: death, life, love, hatred, destiny, friendship, and virtues, among others. In order to thematise such complex issues, schoolchildren are invited to put themselves in the position of other people—usually literary figures—and assume their perspectives. It is evident how important empathic skills become in this context: what might these characters have thought and felt? Which intentions and goals did they have? Such questions can only be focussed on and answered—I think—thanks to empathy. The schoolchildren and students have here the opportunity to practice what we have named ‘narrative empathy’ and empathise with fictional characters as if they were real. Notice, also, that empathising with literary figures does not only permit learning how a morally virtuous person should act in certain situations and what actions should instead be avoided (remaining at a level of moral practice) but it even allows for the thematisation of metaethical questions: what does it mean to behave morally? What is (morally) good? What is (morally) bad? Empathising with an individual (even a fictional one) permits the uncovering of the inner world of this other, making explicit their system of values, the reactive emotions they experience for what they have chosen to do or thought of doing, the intentions they had or might have had, and more. Renouncing empathy signifies relinquishing all of this valuable knowledge that is vital for the development of a moral sense, as well as moral behaviour.

Of course, all this knowledge would be empty if it were not followed by practice. The ideal moral person is not that individual who, without exception, simply knows what is good and what is bad, but one who also always does what is good and avoids what is bad. Thus, to integrate theory with praxis, Noddings’ approach includes a third stage, in which students can ‘learn by doing’ and instantiate caring behaviour. Here, the possibilities are countless. An interesting one is that offered by the so-called Compassion-Project, which has as its goal that of improving compassion for people who commonly are on the margins of society.²⁹ To reach this goal, young students are invited to spend two weeks in a social institution, such as in a home for the disabled, a hospital, or a centre for refugees. Consequently, they have the occasion to interact with particularly vulnerable populations and use their empathic skills and their imagination to understand the others’ stories and the impact these have had on their lives, as well as how they feel as a result of living the way they do. Students will learn that living as a differently abled person, or as a refugee, or as a person with, say, a serious illness, entails having a different phenomenology and, with that, a different sensitivity. Such people perceive the world differently and need to be treated with a special kind of care. Empathy, inter alia, helps to understand how to modulate our behaviour towards them.

The final stage is that of ‘confirmation’. Basically, confirmation involves two similar, but nonetheless different aspects. In one sense, it is a somewhat positive version of induction, where the students’ motives are credited even though their actions may not be morally praiseworthy. For instance, the teacher reacts to the (moral) mistake of a student not only with some form of punishment, but also by trying to be comprehensive and to understand the reason behind the misjudgement, thereby showing empathy with the student.³⁰ In the other sense, ‘confirmation’ requires that the teacher respond to the wrongdoing committed by the student with good will, by presupposing that he or she must have had a good reason to do it. Using the words of Noddings:

To confirm others is to bring out the best in them. When someone commits an uncaring or unethical act (judged of course from our own perspective), we respond—if we are engaging in confirmation—by attributing the best possible motive consonant with reality. By starting this way, we draw the cared-for’ attention to his or her better self. […] We confirm the other by showing that we believe the act in question is not a full reflection of the one who committed it.³¹

I think that Noddings’ approach is not only possible to be applied in classroom, but that it could also be very effective in educating children and young people in general towards moral behaviour, thanks to the assumption of an empathic perspective. As a former amateur actor, however, I find that besides the important role that literature can play in developing empathy and, with that, a caring perspective—which was masterfully shown even by Martha Nussbaum in her famous and influential book, Upheavals of Thought—acting should also deserves more attention. The overlooking of the role that acting can play in the development of empathy and our imaginative skills, in general, seems to be a widespread bias in philosophy.

This is quite surprising, especially because in the year 2000 there was a good attempt by philosopher Susan Verducci to fill this gap.³² As a former student of Noddings, Verducci was interested in finding a way to incentivise and improve the kind of empathy needed for caring and she thought that method acting was the answer. I am very sympathetic to this view, since Verducci is one of the few philosophers explicitly maintaining that empathy must become a habit and that it is possible to assume an empathic perspective. I have been adamant on this matter in the course of the book: empathy should not remain a ‘punctual’ phenomenon—in the sense of occurring only at given times and for a short period of time—but become a habitual perspective. Verducci is persuaded that her method will bring about this outcome:

With practice and guidance, one hopes that students will cultivate not only their capacity to empathise, but the habit of doing so. Ideally, students would develop a way of being in the world that centres on the connections between their own lived lives and those of others.³³

Even if Verducci does not emphasise this notion in her 2000 article as much as I do, we find here in nuce a position that I have been further developing and defending throughout my book, that of empathy as a habit, as—in the words of phenomenologists—a way of being in the world. Empathy should be a fostered skill that stays alert in the background, ready to emerge when the conditions for its emergence are met. It is not an on/off ability. Instead, it is an ability which, being a habit, is always ‘on’, in a sense, but arises with particular strength when it is triggered by particular conditions or explicitly activated by the individual. In my opinion, we have to conceive of empathy as a ‘muscle’. As with individuals with certain muscular diseases, there are people who are born with a deficit of empathy, but the vast majority of people have this muscle and are able to train it and, with training, to make it stronger and more reliable or, conversely, to waste it.³⁴

However, how can acting contribute to the training and the enhancement of empathy? Perhaps because of the influence of her mentor, Verducci also theorises a four-stage model. First, comes the careful study of the script, in which actors conduct a textual and contextual examination.³⁵ By contextual I mean that actors attempt to acquire a profound and accurate understanding of the characters, based on dialogues, actions, and description contained in the script, and by asking themselves questions to help them understand the psychology of the characters and, thus, empathise with them: ‘What could a woman like X want?’, ‘What might Y have been thinking in that moment?’, for example. The contextual examination itself refers to the fact that contextual elements, such as the writer or the time period in which the script was written, have to be taken into account. Second, acting can indirectly contribute to the refining of our empathic skills because of the requirement by actors to accurately simulate feelings and emotions by means of facial expressions, vocalisations, gestures, and similar, sometimes even managing to feel them ‘on their own skin’, so to say. Indeed, actors are used to immersing themselves in different contexts and their experience with the simulation of emotions and feelings through body language constitutes worthwhile training when it comes to ‘real-life’ empathy. A third contribution stemming from acting is also the improvement of our imaginative skills, which of course are of fundamental importance for empathy. In reality, what is perhaps the most crucial feature of an accomplished, talented actor, meaning the realism with which he or she is able to impersonate a certain character, depends on these skills, for a very good reason. The fact is that no script, no screenplay can say everything one needs to know about a certain character and about his or her background history. The actor can only receive some clues about the figure he or she has to embody, and starting from that basis, ‘a real person’, as it were, and not a stereotypical character, must come to life. In order to do that, one has to be capable of ‘filling the gaps’ of the script with his or her imagination and to discover ways of conveying a certain personality through perceivable signs, such as those previously cited: facial expressions, tones of voice and gestures, for example.

Another central characteristic of empathy that is found in method acting as well, and that can be developed as a result of this approach, is the ‘dual experience’ that one needs in order to empathise correctly. This phenomenon was identified and described with different degrees of emphasis by the vast majority of the scholars working on empathy.³⁶ It is nothing else than the experience we have when, on the one hand, we put ourselves in the shoes of another person and imagine really being them, and, on the other, we do not lose track of who we actually are, thereby inhabiting, at the same time, our body and our persona (to use a term dear to Husserl), along with those of the others. Actors usually live this kind of experience on a daily basis and are therefore skilled at accomplishing it smoothly and flawlessly, which of course is advantageous when empathy must be applied in real-life scenarios.

4 Conclusions

In this section we have dealt with the theme of the role empathy can play for moral development and moral education. We have seen that the allegations made by critics of empathy are dubious and questionable for many different reasons. The attempt made by Jesse Prinz to substitute a moral education based on empathy with one grounded on the processes of imitation and emotional contagion is unsatisfactory on several fronts: not only does imitation need to be (and is, in fact) grounded on a more complex and accurate mechanism, which empathy is and emotional contagion is not and cannot be, but mere imitation is also not sufficient for a moral kind of education. We have further examined the cases of psychopaths and autistics and argued that their deficits and impairments (to varying degrees) in their empathic faculties are at the basis of their complex links with morality, which, in the case of psychopaths, can lead to sheer amorality, and in that of autists to an ‘imperfect morality’. Finally, we have closely observed the relationship between empathy and care and have analysed some methods of moral education which seem to enhance an empathic and caring perspective, thereby promising better results than the very basic methods of moral education proposed by Prinz and Bloom.

Taking all that into account, and although, as I said at the beginning of the section, it is perhaps impossible to conclude with absolute certainty that empathy is strictly necessary for moral development and education, it emerges from our analysis that there are more persuading and numerous clues indicating that it is necessary, than evidence disproving this thesis. For this reason, I think that the burden of proof falls on the shoulders of the anti-empathists, who, at present, do not seem capable of providing any convincing argument against the centrality of empathy for moral education and development.

There is, however, another theme that has been referred to many times throughout, and which deserves further attention: the connection between empathy and moral motivation or agency. In other words, it is now time to investigate whether (and to what extent) empathy is necessary (or at least important) in order to act morally.