Empathy and the Importance of Affectivity

Abstract

This chapter argues that empathy is the basic emotional mechanism we use to understand others and that is always in place. The idea that we are guided by an objective attitude in interpersonal relationships is confuted and, on the opposite, it is illustrated how empathy makes visible the notion of import in the moral field and calls for a participatory attitude. The case of death penalty is examined to provide an explanation for the transformative power of empathy regarding our understanding of moral values.

This last citation from Kant offers us enough food for thought to go further than him and, indeed, to go past him. We have already said that what has moral significance goes far beyond what can be made an object of duty. Now we even have Kant’s confirmation of this. However, there is more that deserves to be highlighted. The fact is that the attitudes we possess, the values we adhere to, and even the feelings we experience constitute an irreducible part of our moral self and reflect on us morally as much as the actions we perform. We have made it clear earlier on that empathy is to be considered a virtue and mention has been made of the many different forms necessary or at least useful for morality. We also stated that resorting to HLE is a choice (it does not occur automatically) and in that sense we are responsible for its development and use. Until now it has been easy to understand what is meant by saying empathy is a part of our moral self and reflects on us morally. However, what about LLE? Does the faculty to automatically perceive the thoughts and feelings of others also reflect morally on us? Is it also a part of our moral self? My claim is that it is exactly like our emotions. It would be a mistake to consider what we experience, as opposed to what we choose or initiate, as stranger to the moral landscape. It is true that with relation to the emotions (and to LLE) we are in a certain sense ‘passive’, because we feel we ‘undergo’ a certain emotion and we do not decide to have it. Nevertheless, emotions also depend largely on our beliefs and on the attitudes we come to assume, and these are elements under our control. This in turn explains why we can, for example, overcome our fear of something once we acknowledge it as being entirely unfounded, unjustifiable, and misplaced, or why we can influence our LLE by choosing to be more or less open and receptive. Since we have some sort of control over our emotional reactions, we are also partly responsible for them. To quote Lawrence Blum on the issue: ‘The moral self cannot be seen on a model of pure activity; […] it cannot be identified solely with that of which we are the initiators or authors.’¹

However, I do not want to reduce this concept to a matter of responsibility. What I mean by saying that our basic faculty of empathy, as well as our emotions, are part of our moral self is that we inevitably see ourselves as constituted essentially (even though not exclusively) by our emotional reactions. Consider, in fact, what happens when we change our ideas about something or our set values. In those cases, we cannot tolerate experiencing certain emotional reactions in ourselves any longer. Vetlesen gives the example of a racist who ceases to be one. ‘To effect such a change’, he argues, ‘he would have to come to see his former attitudes and emotional reactions toward, say, a black person as entirely baseless and inappropriate. That is, he would increasingly view his past reactions as incompatible with his emerging understanding of himself, of the kind of person he aspires to be.’² In the same way, the absence of empathic reactions, regarded both in its high-level and low-level form, would reflect negatively on the moral self of the individual. Not showing empathy, especially when it is required by the circumstances, would inevitably display either a defective moral development on the part of the non-empathiser, a lack of interest for the target, or even the determination to go against what morality would require in that situation. The first and the third conditions are certainly morally reprehensible; the second one is morally reproachable only in those cases in which the lack of concern constitutes a moral violation. However, lack of interest is potentially dangerous for morality when this lack of interest takes the form of a general apathy and is propaedeutic to lack of concern. Of course, the moral person is not obliged to take interest in anything (especially when it is something morally neutral), but they should be a ‘concerned’ person, in the sense of being concerned about what matters at a moral level. Now, let us take a step back for a moment and return to our discussion on moral judgement and moral perception. It seems, in fact, that we must judge or at least perceive that some state of affairs requires the instantiation of some moral act on our part (say, an act of altruism) before we can make the decision to instantiate that act. Not without reason, Blum, who defines ‘altruism’ as ‘a regard for the good of another person for his own sake’,³ writes that: ‘It is true that altruistic emotions involve judgment in some way—e.g., the judgment that someone is in pain, in need, suffering.’⁴ Now, the problem here is that judgement seems prima facie to be grounded in cognition and reason: it indeed appears that we judge on the base of rational considerations. For this reason, classic cognitivists, like Solomon,⁵ conclude by equating emotions to special kinds of judgements or by affirming that emotions are grounded in judgements. However, we cannot overlook the fact that often it is the other way around: our judgements are actually grounded in emotions. I follow Vetlesen when he says:

In explicating what is here meant by “grounded”, I defend the thesis that as far as moral judgment is concerned, the exercise of judgment presupposes and is made possible by our “having” (or, better, having the ability to have) certain emotions.⁶

If this is true, then it is obvious that moral judgement cannot be constituted by a merely cognitive or a purely emotional component. Indeed, if judgement is a cognitive act, but is grounded on emotional reactions, then this can only mean, quoting Vetlesen once again on this matter, that: ‘[…] neither cognition alone nor emotion alone can move us to genuine moral judgment. Both components are needed, and to hold that one is “primary” to the other is to violate the principal equality of importance of the two faculties in question.’⁷ Now my claim, which I share with Vetlesen, is that empathy is the faculty which, by being at the base of moral perception, provides the emotional insight to moral judgement, and, ipso facto, that is, qua fundamental component of moral judgement, provides a good motivational foundation to moral agency, especially to altruistic actions. Nevertheless, how does it do that? Let us start with how empathic apprehension works. Blum argued in Friendship, Altruism, and Morality that:

Altruistic emotions are intentional and take as their objects other persons in the light of their ‘weal’ and, especially, their ‘woe’. […] And so the altruistic emotions have a cognitive dimension: the subject of the emotion must regard the object as being in a certain state.⁸

What Blum wants to express here is that altruistic emotions, such as empathy,⁹ compassion, or concern, have the others as intentional objects, and since they see the others in light of their weal and woe—they are, in other words, sensitive to this dimension—they cannot but picture a certain subject as being in a certain state. It would be impossible, in fact, to feel compassion for someone thriving. So, when compassion, for instance, arises, it does it in virtue of the fact that the subject implicitly or explicitly sees another individual (or group) as in some way and to some degree suffering. In this sense, altruistic emotions always have a cognitive component, in addition. Now this ‘seeing’ the other person as ‘in some way and to some degree suffering’ is not just a mere perceptual seeing, but a moral kind of seeing. Without this, as Vetlesen rightly emphasises: ‘no object for (moral) judgment would be given in the first place’.¹⁰ In other words, the reality of suffering, which calls for moral action, is disclosed by an empathic seeing. The question now is whether this seeing is simply a cognitive form of seeing or rather a joint cognitive and emotional one. Vetlesen holds the latter to be true and I agree with him. Nonetheless, why is that the case? Vetlesen’s argumentation, although brilliant, does not satisfy me entirely, therefore, in what follows, I will develop a personal line of reasoning which, I think, fits very well with the one offered by Vetlesen.

Consider, once again, the example of a person suffering. One might want to object that when we perceive an individual as suffering, we do not need to resort to any emotional faculty in order to do so, nor to perceive that individual as an addressee for moral judgement or moral action. We might simply notice some very telling perceivable cues (e.g. their tears, their sobbing, or even their cries of pain) or we may even consider what had happened that had brought them to this state in order to see them as suffering and as thereby also an object of moral judgement and/or agency. In this case, altruism would result from a purely cognitive ascertainment of the facts. However, this is not how human beings work.¹¹ Indeed, it is very hard to perceive suffering from a detached point of view. Remember, for instance, the famous example by Adam Smith: ‘When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer.’¹² This is also why I have often emphasised the fact that it is extremely difficult, especially in some situations, to sharply differentiate cognitive from emotional empathy. For Smith, empathy is an inescapable part of our human nature and, if this is true, it would be nonsensical to require us to abandon the empathic perspective, in order to assume a moral one. This would mean that in order to be moral, we would need to cease being human, to renounce, as it were, our human nature.¹³ Further, we have one more reason to reject this position: we have already analysed Blum’s view, in which attitudes, values, and emotions are all fully a part of the moral self, as well as empathy. Thus, once again, it seems absurd to conceive of the necessity to suppress a part of ourselves in order to see a situation as requiring from us some form of moral judgement or action. Nevertheless, the objector might have another arrow in their quiver. It might indeed be argued that no one is demanding that we renounce empathy, nor even the concept that it is an actual part of our moral self or even of our human nature (as Smith, Hume, and others contend), but only that it is not necessary for moral perception.

1 Empathy and Emotional Perceiving

I hope that we have argued sufficiently in support of the fact that empathy is necessary for moral perception in the section dedicated to this issue. Now I would like to take a step further and see how empathy connects with moral agency, especially with altruistic actions, and it is here that the argumentation by Vetlesen, who starts precisely with the issue of moral perception, happens to be useful and even more insightful than ever. The critics of what could be called the holistic version of moral perception¹⁴ may in fact still contend that (maintaining the same example) suffering qua object of moral perception can be conceived in terms of pure cognition, whereas the emotional concomitants of that suffering, such as empathy, concern, compassion, or care, are namely only that: mere concomitants. This view presupposes a kind of shift in the process: at the beginning, the subject is depicted as disinterestedly perceiving the phenomenon (be it suffering or others), then, at a second stage, as acting or reflecting on that perception in an emotionally charged manner.

The problems with this picture are at least two-fold. On the one hand, this requisite shift from detached and ‘cold’ perception to emotionally coloured action or reflection is merely assumed, but not explained. Indeed, why this shift would occur and in what way are questions left unanswered. On the other hand, this model contradicts what we intuitively know about how moral perception—but, I would add, perception in general—really works and that we find in the texts of the phenomenological tradition. We should, in fact, always remember that we are almost never in a purely contemplative position, in which we disinterestedly perceive a certain phenomenon from the condition of an ascetic-like apathy. Perception—especially in the social, relational, interpersonal sphere, and especially when dealing with the emotions of others—is always emotionally laden. We can think here of the assertion by Heidegger in Being and Time: ‘Verstehen ist immer gestimmtes’, which can be translated as ‘understanding always has its mood’, and ‘Verstehen ist immer befindliches’, which underlines the fact that understanding is always accompanied by some state of mind and is never free-floating.¹⁵ Thus, we always feel something, if only implicitly or unconsciously, and, what is more, emotional cues from others cannot leave us indifferent. The existence of a shift is a mere utopia.¹⁶ Of course, we can take on what Peter Strawson would call an ‘objective attitude’ and preclude ‘the range of reactive feelings and attitudes which belong to involvement or participation with others in inter-personal human relationships’, but ‘being human, we cannot, in the normal case, do this for long, or altogether’.¹⁷ To quote the illuminating words of Vetlesen on this issue:

[…] suffering is not a “neutral” phenomenon in the first place, and there is not “disinterested” access to the human reality of suffering. The access is pervaded by interest, by taking an interest in a piece of lived human reality. […] to say of a person that he or she is suffering is already to see that person in a certain way, and to want to exempt our emotional faculty from this seeing is to undermine it, extinguish it, indeed to prevent its very emergence. Stronger still, I argue that to “see” suffering as suffering is already to have established an emotional bond between myself and the person I “see” suffering.¹⁸

The idea is an interesting one. The point is that perceiving the suffering of another person is an act mediated by emotions: there is no neutral access to this kind of perception. Suffering appeals to us, calls on us in a way very similar to the concept of the ‘face’ in the philosophy of Lévinas, in a way that we cannot resist, nor avoid. If we do that, then it is because we are unable to really conceive of that suffering as such, in other words, as something that matters. Vetlesen imagines, for instance, the case of a man, Davis, who accidentally stumbles upon a person being beaten by another. After having watched the scene, Davis proceeds with his walk, as if nothing had occurred, content to have given the incident a fleeting look. As it is understood, Davis feels nothing in particular: he simply does not care about the situation. Does this constitute a confutation of the claim that suffering inexorably triggers empathy or at least some emotional reaction in us? It does not. Cases, like that of Davis, merely show that there are subjects with impaired emotional capacities and that this impairment prevents them from carrying out the correct processes of moral perception, or, to put it basically: to morally perceive tout court. To use Vetlesen’s terms, it is a matter of ‘a subject failing to do justice to his object’ and also ‘The described incident would refer us back to him, questioning his ability to see suffering as suffering, that is, to see the human reality it entails.’¹⁹ Davis and those like him are—so the very adequate adjective Vetlesen acquires from Robert Lifton—numb,²⁰ meaning that their emotional capacities are either suppressed or in some way inhibited or damaged. The recognition of a phenomenon which calls on us morally (like the suffering of a person, which normally requires a moral act of altruism) and our emotional reaction to it driven by empathy are so deeply connected that we cannot conceive that a person may affirm, without an implicit contradiction, that they acknowledge a phenomenon demands a moral response, but do not feel any emotional reaction; that they can perceive, for instance, that the suffering of an individual requires them to do something, but that cannot feel empathy towards that individual. That is why Strawson rightly asserts that: ‘[…] a thoroughgoing objectivity of attitude, excluding as it does the moral reactive attitudes, excludes at the same time essential elements in the concepts of moral condemnation and moral responsibility’.²¹ It excludes moral responsibility, because a subject’s moral Zurechnungsfähigkeit (to use a term by Habermas translatable with ‘accountability’) depends on the ability of people to perceive moral phenomena thanks to the adoption of a participant reactive attitude, and it excludes moral condemnation for the same reason: if one is not capable of ‘seeing’ something as morally good or bad, how can one morally judge it? All this, in its turn, is closely related to the issue of moral agency: a person who cannot perceive a situation as requiring some moral act will either renounce action or act without taking a moral stance, without the intention of doing what is morally right. To better explain this claim of mine, take once again the case of Davis. As we have seen, Davis, incapable of perceiving the suffering of another as implicitly requiring from him a moral act, simply passes by, foregoing his opportunity to instantiate moral behaviour. Nevertheless, even in the hypothetical situation that he made the right decision by helping the suffering person in some way that we deem morally right, if he had done this in the absence of moral perception and without adopting a subjective reactive attitude (which is at the base of moral perception), we would not be ready to call his action as moral. On the contrary, we would affirm that he had performed a moral act only accidentally, namely, without knowing it, nor wanting it.

In this process, empathy plays a fundamental role. I agree, in fact, with Vetlesen in defining moral perception with the following words:

Moral perception […] is recognition of the way in which a situation affects the weal and woe of the human beings involved in it. […] moral perception has its source in human receptivity, in the primordial capacity of human beings to be attentive to, to be alert to. It is thanks to this underlying active receptivity, this sensuous-cognitive-emotional openness to the world, that moral perception is provided with a direction, is “tuned in” to deal with specific features of specific situations.²²

This quote should already suggest why empathy is so central for moral perception. The point is that a person’s failure to show a morally adequate reaction derives in fact from their prior failure to be open, receptive, to empathise, and consequently to perceive the phenomenon at hand as a morally significant one, and therefore, also as one which calls for response and action. As Vetlesen insists: ‘the failure at the manifest level of action-response originates in a failure at the primordial level of receptivity’.²³ The lack of receptivity towards others, when it is not caused by other strong emotions gaining priority in the mind of the subject (e.g. when someone is so worried about something that might happen to them that they lose sight of what is happening to others around them) is to be attributed to a lack (or at least to an impairment) of empathy. Empathy is, in fact, exactly that: receptivity, openness to others. Empathy can be described, using the word of Vetlesen, as ‘an open-ended, dynamic mode of relating to the world, in particular to the human and thus eminently moral world’.²⁴ Once again, I cannot refrain from paraphrasing Heidegger. The German philosopher makes clear in his work that without attunement, to the world, there would be no experience, no perception of the world and of the individuals populating it. We would, in fact, never be affected by anything. Affection can occur only when the ‘situated being-in-the-world’ ascribes ‘import’ (to borrow a term by Taylor)²⁵ to entities in the world, when these start to matter to them in the ways that their emotions have outlined in advance. Indeed, an emotionless apprehension of things is excluded. Of course, Heidegger’s considerations were meant to be applied to the totality of the world’s affection. My claim is that there is a particular class of affections which regard the affections we feel as a result of imagined or actual relations with others. These affections are all guided by a special type of receptivity, which is a receptivity towards the ‘inner world’ of others (their thoughts, intentions, values, beliefs, feelings, and emotions) and is called empathy. Thanks to empathy, people and their inner reality start to matter for us.

However, an argument could be advanced towards the following view: it seems that we can have emotional reactions, which attribute a certain meaning to occurrences in the world that do not require the presence of empathy. For instance, I can get angry at the sight of a policeman senselessly hitting a person and judge that it is immoral, even in the absence of empathy, for the person being hit. This is a mechanism well described by Prinz: if we divide token actions (such as hitting a harmless person) into types of behaviour (in this case, ‘police brutality’) and we attribute to these types of behaviour an appropriate emotion (e.g. indignation), then we can abstain from using empathy, which becomes superfluous. In fact, every time we see an action instantiating a certain type of conduct, we will react with the correspondent emotion. However, the point here is how do we establish that a token behaviour is an example of, say, police brutality or not. It is certainly agreeable to affirm that indignation can result from the observation of police brutality, but how do we reach the conclusion that what we are observing is indeed a case of police brutality? It is in this context that empathy turns out to be extremely useful. In fact, it is undoubtedly true that there are some guiding principles which help, in the praxis, to determinate whether a given action belongs to the class of prohibited or, in any case, condemnable actions, or not, but principles alone are not sufficient. There is and there always will be a vast grey area in which empathy can and must let its voice be heard. Situations are often not so clear: in these cases, entering into the open-ended, dynamic process of empathy with both the victim and the perpetrator, assuming their perspectives and trying to feel what they feel, is the best way we have to shed some light on the event and arrive at a moral judgement (which should lead to the instantiation of a moral action).

2 The Case of Death Penalty: How Empathy Can Change Our Mentality

Notice that if it is true that principles and ideas can shape the sensitivity of people, the contrary is also true: that sensitivity and empathy can modify rules, principles, and ideas. If we think of what was considered an instantiation of justice two centuries ago, of what was considered right and fair, and we compare it to the norms of justice we have nowadays among Western civilisations, we will soon understand how fluid our categories of right and wrong and the principles categorising certain actions in types of behaviour are. What was considered right or morally permissible 200 years ago is now seen as morally reproachable, and to maintain that this is due to a change triggered by ideas is only looking at one side of the coin. Ideas can only influence us when they touch our emotionality, and our emotionality is extremely responsive to empathy and to empathic arguments, whether anti-empathists like it or not. Let us consider, for instance, what two European intellectuals have written about the death penalty. I begin with Tolstoy, who wrote in his Confessions the impressions he had when he assisted in the death of a robber-murderer named Francis Richeux in Paris in 1857, before a crowd of 15,000 people:

When I saw the head separate from the body, and how they both thumped into the box at the same moment, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress can justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world, on whatever theory, had held it to be necessary, I know it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, and is not progress, but is my heart and I.²⁶

This theme and the potent images he saw on that day continued to torment the writer throughout his life, so much so that years later he had to come back to it in What Is to Be Done?:

Thirty years ago in Paris I once saw how […] they cut a man’s head off with a guillotine. I knew that the man was a dreadful criminal; I knew all the arguments that have been written in defence of that kind of action […] but at the moment the head and body separated and fell into the box I gasped, and realized not with my mind nor with my heart but with my whole being, that all the arguments in defence of capital punishment are wicked nonsense […] and I by my presence and non-intervention had approved and shared in it. In the same way now, at the sight of the hunger, cold, and degradation of thousands of people, I understood not with my mind or my heart but with my whole being; that the existence of tens of thousands of such people in Moscow—while I and thousands of others over-eat ourselves with beef-steaks and sturgeon and cover our horses and floors with cloth or carpets […] is a crime, not committed once but constantly; and that I with my luxury not merely tolerate it but share in it.²⁷

Both quotes start with a vivid gory image: the head of the sentenced man, which, cut off from the rest of the body, thumps into the box at the base of the guillotine. Tolstoy was prepared for this: he knew that the law provided for this kind of punishment, but at that moment the impression he had was so strong, that it changed everything. He understood—so Tolstoy says—not with his mind but with his whole being, that this deed was in some way unjustifiable, that no theory or principle could account for such an act, and that his heart was the supreme judge. This is extremely important since it shows—as I have made clear many times throughout the course of the book—that access to moral values can often be reached not by means of rational principles, but by means of empathy and affectivity. The second quote shows how the moral insights acquired in one context can be transferred to other settings and other situations by analogy and generalisation, following a pattern which I have outlined earlier. The human capacity for analogy, driven by imagination, generalisations, and so forth, is also at the base of empathy’s ductility and of its application to much wider frameworks than the interpersonal relationships between single individuals. Nevertheless, anti-empathists might still want to argue that this case does not necessarily prove the importance of empathy. Tolstoy might very well have experienced another kind of emotion: horror, for instance, and this horror led him to revise his assumptions and arrive at a new kind of moral judgement. To this criticism, two answers can be given. On the one hand, I am strongly of the opinion that Tolstoy did feel empathy on that occasion. In a letter sent to the Russian litterateur Vasily Botkin, in fact, in which he recounts the same episode, expresses himself thus:

I have seen many horrors in war and in the Caucasus, but if a man were torn to pieces in my presence it would not have been so repulsive as this ingenious and elegant machine by means of which they killed a strong, hale, healthy man in an instant. There [in war] it is not a question of the rational [will], but the human feeling of passion, while here it is a question of calm and convenient murder finely worked out, and there’s nothing grand about it.²⁸

I think that what the great novelist wanted to assert here is that whereas in war he could empathise with the man who killed (however brutally) another man, he could not do the same in the case of the death penalty. I think that here we are in the typical situation as described by Hume. When Tolstoy empathises with the soldiers he does not experience a sentiment of disapprobation towards them: their actions are understandable, since soldiers find themselves under the influence of strong emotions and act to defend their lives and those of their comrades. On the other hand, when empathising with people executing another person, he cannot avoid feeling strong disapproval. He is unable to specify why exactly this sentiment arises, but he knows, as he says, ‘with his whole being’, that something is profoundly wrong.

However, this is not the only mechanism based on empathy that Tolstoy utilises. Even his communication is entirely grounded in empathy. It is clear that the aim of the Russian writer is to convince others of the moral truth he feels he has discovered, that he wants to persuade more people that a morally virtuous person should not support the death penalty. This being the case, how does he accomplish his goal? He does so by means of empathy. He does it by communicating what he saw and felt, by explaining what his emotional reactions looked like, so that the reader can perceive the scene as he perceived it and feel what he also felt. His considerations about the death penalty are steeped in empathy: there was empathy in his original experience and there is empathy at the base of his communicative method. This also means that empathy is fundamental for acquiring moral insight and expressing a moral judgement and, given that Tolstoy began to fight against unfair laws (and also against poverty) as a consequence of this epiphany, and that he managed to convince others of the inherent immorality of capital punishment, empathy also plays an essential role in moral motivation and conduct.

I mentioned above that I would consider two intellectuals arguing against capital punishment. Until now we have analysed the writings of Tolstoy. It is now time to shift our attention to another famous Russian novelist: Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky’s case is perhaps even more interesting than Tolstoy’s, in fact, as at one point he himself was given the death penalty and so lived the experience of a ‘dead man walking’. Accused of subversive activities for having taken part to a radical intellectual discussion group called the Petrashevsky Circle, Dostoevsky was arrested and sentenced to death. Thus, on December 22, 1849, Dostoevsky was led before a firing squad, certain he was going to die, but received a last-minute reprieve and was sent to a Siberian labour camp instead, where he worked for four long years. The (literally) near-death experience changed him forever and in one of his most famous novels, The Idiot, he makes the protagonist of the book express a heartfelt critique of capital punishment. The prince Myshkin is talking about the terrible impression he had observing the guillotine in action in France, when his interlocutor raises the following point: ‘Well, at all events it is a good thing that there’s no pain when the poor fellow’s head flies off.’²⁹ The answer of prince Myshkin is too long to be cited in full, so I will quote only the most important passages:

Do you know, though,’ cried the prince warmly, ‘you made that remark now, and everyone says the same thing, and the machine is designed with the purpose of avoiding pain, this guillotine I mean; but a thought came into my head then: what if it be a bad plan after all? You may laugh at my idea, perhaps—but I could not help its occurring to me all the same. Now with the rack and tortures and so on—you suffer terrible pain of course; but then your torture is bodily pain only (although no doubt you have plenty of that) until you die. But HERE I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour,—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very INSTANT—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, CERTAIN! That’s the point—the certainty of it. Just that instant when you place your head on the block and hear the iron grate over your head—then—that quarter of a second is the most awful of all.³⁰

The prince makes his opinion even clearer in what follows: ‘I feel it so deeply that I’ll tell you what I think. I believe that to execute a man for murder is to punish him immeasurably more dreadfully than is equivalent to his crime. A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a criminal.’³¹ The reasons for that are explained in the following lines, that I will not quote, but only briefly paraphrase, as follows. If you take the case of a person attacked by robbers at night in a dark wood you can imagine that this person will, even though terrified by the circumstances, hope until the last moment that they might somehow escape death. That is why a person who is going to be killed in such situations will try to do everything, beg for their life, bargain, and more, in the hope that they will be spared. Not so with the person sentenced to death. They know that nothing will save them, that begging is useless, that hope is forever lost. In effect, this, asserts the prince, ‘must be the most dreadful anguish in the world. You may place a soldier before a cannon’s mouth in battle, and fire upon him—and he will still hope. But read to that same soldier his death-sentence, and he will either go mad or burst into tears.’³² Then comes the most pathetic and autobiographical section:

No, no! it is an abuse, a shame, it is unnecessary—why should such a thing exist? Doubtless there may be men who have been sentenced, who have suffered this mental anguish for a while and then have been reprieved; perhaps such men may have been able to relate their feelings afterwards. Our Lord Christ spoke of this anguish and dread. No! no! no! No man should be treated so, no man, no man!³³

Let us now try to analyse these citations. Prima facie, if one is ready to accept that there are crimes worthy of death, it seems that the guillotine would be one of the most effective and ‘compassionate’—or, at least, less painful—methods. It would be much quicker and less agonising than hanging, less messy and more efficient than shooting, for example.³⁴ It seems that the guillotine is even a more merciful method than the much later developed electric chair, symbol of the American mode of capital execution, where death is not exactly instantaneous, horribly painful and, as we know as a result of many different cases of executions ‘gone wrong’, not equally efficacious. Nevertheless, what is really problematic with death sentences are not only the techniques used to take the lives of the condemned, but the psychological state of pure desperation in which they plunge those awaiting their fate. The awareness that everything is over, that no one and nothing will save you, that the writing is on the wall, and death will come soon and inevitably, this is the worst suffering of all. In all other situations in which death appears as near and as extremely probable, but not certain, people never lose hope and this is what helps them to keep fighting. This is true for soldiers in war as it is for people attacked by robbers or, we might add, for patients diagnosed with a serious and potentially deadly disease. If there is still even the smallest possibility of survival, a human being will cling to it and not give up. In contrast, the death penalty destroys any hope and a human being is not capable of coping with desperation, simply because desperation, by definition, erases the possibility of coping. This is why Dostoevsky asserts that ‘to execute a man for murder is to punish him immeasurably more dreadfully than is equivalent to his crime’.

Later, to further reinforce his point, Dostoevsky mentions what is, with all probability, the most famous capital execution of the history—at least in the West—namely, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. What the Russian writer wants to say with this example is that the ‘passion’ of Christ, that is his agony, began long before his actual atrocious execution by crucifixion. It had already started the night before it, when he knew he was going to die and what he was going to suffer, and he passed the night in prayer in such a dreadful state of anguish that, so the Bible says, he began to sweat blood.³⁵ I understand Dostoevsky here as highlighting to a prevalently Christian audience the fact that if even the Son of God, in all his majesty, his moral perfection, and his courage, experienced such a profound agony, all the more excruciating this experience would be for ‘normal people’. In fact, the prince’s speech finishes with an autobiographical note. There is indeed a man who has been sentenced and, after having suffered the same mental anguish for a period of time, has been pardoned, and this man is Dostoevsky himself. It is as if he wanted to say: ‘if you don’t believe what is written in the Bible about Jesus, believe at least in what I tell you. Believe me when I say that capital punishment is an abuse, a shame, and it is completely unnecessary!’

I consider this line of thought by Dostoevsky to be remarkable and stimulating in itself, but what is even more interesting for our purposes is that everything he says is centred on the role played by empathy at various levels for morality. The entire reasoning, in fact, stems from a very empathic consideration and, what is more, from affective empathy. Consider the following: the prince’s interlocutor makes an observation which, in its obviousness and self-evidence, is very difficult to disagree or even to argue with, namely, that death by guillotine is at any rate painless, or at least almost painless. This assertion, besides confirming the plain factuality of this kind of death, demonstrates that the subject making such statement has not carried out a real process of affective empathy. His understanding of the imagined situation is superficial, it does not reach the very core of the other’s experience, because it does not take the empathiser to linger in the other’s perspective, in the other’s inner world. In effect, lingering is exactly what the truly empathic person does and what the morally virtuous person should do. It is also—and this is not surprising—exactly what Myshkin does.³⁶ The prince is not satisfied with the mere scratching of the surface of things, and for this reason, he allows his empathy to dwell in the inner world of the other and to feel (to a given extent, of course) the anguish that the sentenced person might be feeling at that moment. He knows indeed that true objectivity (moral or not) requires us to dive deeper into the experience of the other. Indeed, here we have a conclusive confutation of the criticisms expressed by Bloom, Prinz, and others, for whom empathy is necessarily intrinsically biased and thereby a hindrance to true objectivity. With this example, we see instead that there are cases where empathy is the only means of reaching an objective evaluation of the facts and, consequently, the disclosure of the inherent immorality of certain practices. The guillotine only appears to be painless and ‘merciful’. In truth it is, like any other method of capital punishment, intrinsically disrespectful of the dignity of the condemned, because it deprives the person of everything they need not simply to survive, but to feel themselves to be a person, and not a mere object that can be destroyed on command. The death penalty not only strips the person of their freedom (that would be mere incarceration) and their life, but also of hope. Inevitably, no human being can live without hope. People can live without freedom, without trust, without courage, but they cannot live without any hope of the future, for the very good reason that this is the common horizon of all our actions, and without it, everything is meaningless. This is why capital punishment is more dreadful than the crimes it seeks to punish: because no crime can erase hope the way it is erased by this penalty. Hence, the conclusion cannot be but to judge the death penalty as ‘an abuse, a shame’, as something ‘unnecessary’. Notice that the words used to describe this method are not chosen lightly. It is an abuse because it lets us dispose of another person in a way no one should have the right to do. It is a shame because it strips a person of their dignity as a human being and puts the ‘punisher’ at the same level (if not at a lower one) than the felon that is punished, and it is unnecessary for many different reasons. To cite just a few: because incarceration for life would prevent the offender from committing other crimes, because it does not work as an effective deterrent, and because it does not allow for rehabilitation, that is, for the possibility that the wrongdoer might regret what he or she has done and change his or her behaviour. Notice that the access to all this information is granted only by empathy. It takes empathy to perceive how the death penalty eradicates hope and leads to desperation, thereby becoming worse than the crime it seeks to punish. It takes empathy to see in which sense capital punishment is unnecessary, besides being an abuse and a shame. In fact, in order to be perceived,³⁷ this information requires that we use affective empathy and, in particular, that we take the time to linger in the inner world of the other and let our imagination (and our feelings with it) flow freely. Eliminating empathy from the moral sphere would mean relinquishing all these insights and renouncing the moral motivation resulting from them. Indeed, whoever is capable of gaining these insights by way of emotional empathy will be motivated to fight for more ethical methods of punishment and to regard criminals not as pariahs and the dregs of society, but as actual human beings. Empathy is the key to moral insights which are extremely difficult to ignore.

I use these examples from influential and prominent intellectuals to further accentuate the fundamental nature of the role of empathy within the strong link that exists between moral perception, moral judgement, and, from there, moral motivation and finally moral agency. In fact, such examples also contradict the conclusion supported by Jesse Prinz towards the end of his 2011 article, according to which emotions can be directed towards types of conduct, whereas empathy is focused merely on individuals. In this article we find the following words:

Indignation can be directed towards types of conduct, whereas empathy is focused on individual persons. […] I suspect that limitations on moral indignation may be most likely to arise as a result of empathetic interference. In cases where indignation is effected by proximity, for example, that may result from the fact that we don’t empathize with victims; if we focused on the crime rather than the victims, such effects might diminish. The point might be summarized by saying that the limitations of empathy are intrinsic to it: empathy is biased […]. Therefore empathy is less well suited to serve as the central motivational component of morality.³⁸

In this sense, the analysis we made of the two examples demonstrates exactly the opposite: empathy can direct our emotional reactions (and indignation is one of those) to types of conducts, and not only to the victims. Tolstoy did not empathise merely with Francis Richeux, and Dostoevsky (through the figure of Prince Myshkin) did not empathise with anyone in particular. The process leading to the described moral insights certainly began as empathy for the victim(s), but from there, their attention soon shifted to moral reflections on the institution of capital punishment. What is crucial is that these kinds of reflections would have been impossible without empathy. The dichotomy between empathy as focussed only on the victims and moral emotions as concentrated exclusively on the type of conduct is a false one. Empathy is not fixed, but fluid, dialogical; it starts as an enquiry and then enters into communication with many of our psychological faculties and emotions and forces us to confront what we perceive by means of them, such as the moral insights empathy discloses with our previous moral intuitions. It is like a stone falling in still water. The waves it produces reverberates on anything we thought and felt before, that is, on our personal ‘still water’. Empathy is able to make the jump from the particular to the general, from the individual to the masses. If I can feel with another person, then I understand that we are not so different. With this insight in mind, I can use my capacity for analogy and induction to understand that what is condemnable in this case is condemnable in every other similar case. It is surprising to remark how anti-empathists seem to ignore this mechanism. Consider, for instance, the following statement by Prinz: ‘[…] the basic idea is that we make a concerted effort to focus moral reflection on what has happened not on whom it has happened to, because the whom question invite bias.’³⁹ Prinz, in other words, considers empathy as referring merely to the individual and not to the situation the individual is facing. Nonetheless, we have seen that empathy does not work that way: there are times in which situations cannot reveal themselves in all their clarity, in all their gravity, in all their meaning (both moral and epistemic) without empathy. To cite once again the example of the death penalty: here empathy for the condemned is what sheds light on the very institution of capital punishment and fuels indignation against it, pace Prinz, who thinks that empathy ‘lacks motivational strength’.⁴⁰

3 Empathy and Import

This power that empathy has and the role it is capable of playing at a time of adoption of certain political policies (a role that Bloom had totally disavowed in his work) is becoming increasingly clear to me, especially in these latter stages. While writing these lines, in fact, numerous countries all over the world are undergoing the effects of extraordinary health measures deployed by different governments in order to minimise the pernicious consequences of the COVID-19 virus. I, myself, am living in an enforced lockdown in the company of one of the most empathic persons I have ever met: my partner, who, with her short commentaries and observations while watching the news, is unwittingly providing me with more than a few important insights about what empathy is capable of and why we should listen to its voice more often than we usually do. There are two comments in particular that I wish to highlight, since they are paradigmatic of the ethical force empathy can exercise as a character trait to be consciously embraced and developed by political leaders (thus, as political virtue) and as one to be adopted by people in general (namely, as virtue stricto sensu). I shall begin with the second of these.

On an evening during the first half of March 2020, my partner and I were watching the news while having dinner, when the anchor-woman on TV reported the number of people dying everyday in Italy because of the Coronavirus pandemic. As journalists on television often do, she was reporting these numbers in a serious, but rather impassive manner. I looked across at my girlfriend and saw her concerned face. After a moment, she said something like the following: ‘Can you imagine that all these numbers were people? Actual people like us? Grandpas and grandmas who had probably survived the war, people who had worked hard, struggled, loved, who made a family… And now they are dead. They are gone, without the opportunity to see their loved ones again, without someone to hold their hand, without even a funeral, so that people could at least mourn them in the proper way. Think of their families, too. How terrible is that?’ During this commentary, her eyes welled up and after a while she could not help but shed tears. This comment and her physical reaction made me think. Anti-empathists used to say that empathy is ineffective when we deal with large masses of people and with raw data, because it is impossible to empathise with so many individuals all at once and because it is hard to experience empathy for people we do not know, who live in foreign lands, for example. However, before my very eyes I had seen exactly the opposite. My partner was perfectly able, as a young Swiss woman, to empathise with the death of thousands of people in Italy that she did not know in the slightest, to imagine what it might have been like for their relatives, to feel, in some way, something similar to what they might have felt. Not only was she able to do this, but she proved to be capable of seeing data, rates, and percentages not as mere numbers, but as equating the life and death of real people. With a few words, she showed the transformative power of empathy, a power which turns unemotional information in emotionally charged material and that makes evident the ethical significance of that information.

The second remark I would like to mention was often to be heard while commenting on the first reactions of leaders who showed an initial, let us say, ‘mild’ attitude towards the potential dangers of the pandemic of Coronavirus, leaders such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, or Jair Bolsonaro. In these and other cases, my partner observed that they seemed more concerned about the damages the pandemic could cause to the economy than about the health of people in their countries, and more interested in protecting the economic future of their states than the lives of the people inhabiting them. In particular, I remember, while listening to the words of a famous multimillionaire (whose name I will not reveal) who said, talking about the economic consequences of the general lockdown, that ‘billions were lost for minus a few hundred deaths’, my partner was shocked and uttered the exact following words: ‘this man talks about human beings as if they were potatoes’. This so trenchant a sentence was not intended by my partner as a mere provocation, but as indicative of the fact that some political and economic leaders seemed more concerned about the financial and economic fallout than about the ‘humanitarian’ costs, and that this standpoint was the result of what Strawson would call ‘the objective attitude’ they chose to adopt. Paying attention to the raw data and avoiding empathising with those dying and the families they left behind, it is rather tempting to come to the conclusion that, all things considered, it is better to save the economy at the cost of sacrificing ‘a few thousands’ of lives. This is especially true if one adopts an ultra-utilitarian view and reflects on the fact that the Coronavirus chiefly affects elderly people, who represent a part of the population which is not only, in the main, unproductive, but is even in need of extra assistance (hence, a significant expense to the state). Of course, no one has dared to support such an ultra-Darwinist and quasi eugenic position openly, but statements have been made by politicians and top managers over these months of pandemic that seem very much to go in that direction.

My view on the matter is that, whichever strategy one chooses to implement ‘for the good of the country’, empathy should never be absent from the general picture. There are reasons for protecting the economy and reasons for protecting the lives of people, but the point is that some of the reasons in favour of the latter cannot be seen in the correct light if empathy is lacking from the picture. In other words, without empathy one can easily become unable to attribute the appropriate import to the reasons in favour of protecting lives. Strawson said that being human, it is normally impossible to sustain an objective attitude for long (or altogether). Since empathy is one of the ways (possibly the principal way, as we have seen) to exit from this attitude and abandon this perspective,⁴¹ then we can say that being human, we cannot normally (or, at least, we should not) do without empathy for long.

Notice that there is a special sense in which the dimension of the human appeals to the dimension of the moral. When I conclude that the person sentenced to death would feel what I also would feel in such a situation, I gain—through empathy—an access to the human reality of suffering, and this reality is a matter of ‘non-indifference’ to me, because it cannot but signify something for my desires, feelings, or purposes as a human being. Quoting Vetlesen: ‘The perceived human reality addresses me, calls on me, lays a moral obligation on me, since I am, and see myself as, a human being. This is the link I established between the human and the moral.’⁴² That said, it is understandable why Vetlesen concludes some lines later that: ‘Missing the human dimension of the situation, I also, and for that very reason, miss its moral dimension.’⁴³ But what does Vetlesen mean when he speaks of human reality? Unfortunately, he is not so precise in that matter and does not offer a clear definition, but from his writings it can be argued that, for him, being human means primarily to perceive oneself as being addressed by occurrences impacting the weal and woe of others, and hence to be affected by them. Then, for that very reason, to attribute import to others, to be called upon qua moral subject, to adopt, thanks to empathy, what Strawson would call a participatory attitude contra the objective one, which, missing the human dimension of a situation, would also miss the moral one. This interpretation seems to fit well with many of the claims he makes:

Thus, following Strawson, when I claim that I cannot—or in any case cannot for long—maintain an objective attitude, I mean that we cannot maintain for long the suspension of the emotional bond between me and my cosubjects. In other words, I cannot go on perceiving and treating cosubjects as if they were none, as if they were instead objects, as if they were not such beings that the situation in which they find themselves could call on and address me qua moral subject. Indeed, if consequently held onto, my all-around adoption of an objective attitude would disavow my very humanity.⁴⁴

These considerations can lead us to another important conclusion, namely, that empathy makes us capable of perceiving the common humanity we share with all people, and since the perception of this common humanity is at the base of moral perception, then we should regard with extreme suspicion, if not with sheer adversity, the processes of dehumanisation. We have seen how anti-empathists caution against empathy, but my claim is that there exists something much more dangerous than a biased empathy and that is the absence of it. In the next chapter I am going to explain what I mean by this.