Lack of Empathy and Dehumanisation

Abstract

The final chapter addresses the topic of the lack of empathy. The idea is to see what would happen if empathy were kept outside the ethical realm. The supported claim is that this would constitute a serious deficit for morality ultimately leading to indifference and, in the worst scenario, dehumanisation and brutality. The argument is backed by an extensive analysis of the extermination camps and by an investigation on shame and on being in the presence of others conducted with suggestions stemming, i.a., from Sartre, Levinas, and Scheler.

Ask a person (at least, a person of Western origin, who are the people with whom, as a European, I am most acquainted) to tell you what was the darkest period of human history and they will usually answer either the ‘Middle Ages’ or the period of the great twentieth-century totalitarianisms, especially the time of the Naziregime in Europe and Communism under Stalin in Russia. Alternatively, and more precisely, ask an individual what was the period when humanity really hit bottom and showed its cruellest face, and they will in all probability think of National-Socialism in Germany and the tragedy of the Holocaust. It is, therefore, not surprising that Arne Johan Vetlesen takes this example as emblematic to discuss the processes of dehumanisation, and since this is a theme that has also emerged in this book, it is seemingly appropriate if we take it as the fil rouge linking lack of empathy with dehumanisation and amorality.

Recall our discussion about Eichmann: there we said that Eichmann was guilty of dehumanising his victims, whom he did not regard as human beings, but as mere ‘numbers’. However, there is a dehumanising process that Eichmann carried out earlier than that applied to his victims and it is the one he practiced on himself, letting himself be treated as an instrument by his superiors, as means, and not as end in himself. Vetlesen calls this process one of double dehumanisation.¹ I will argue in what follows that this practice of double dehumanisation can only be realised thanks to the suppression of empathy for others.

The central idea is the following: to commit a genocide of the scale we know the Holocaust to have been, but even to ‘simply’ kill another person, one has to overcome various forces that push in the opposite direction. Some of them are, of course, the result of personal taboos, of our ideas about right and wrong, of the education we have received and the examples we have chosen (more or less voluntarily) to follow. However, a great number of these repulsive ‘forces’ are due to sheer empathy for the other, both in its synchronic version (at the moment, that is, of our considering killing or being about to kill a person) and in its diachronic one, namely, the empathy which was a part of our moral development and education and in the formation of our moral concepts and principles. Therefore, if this empathy becomes suppressed or diminished, the above-mentioned forces pushing us away from the idea of making other suffer will give way.

Consider the typical Nazi concept of the ‘heavy task’. Much of Nazi justification for the atrocities implied in their deviant ideology was grounded in this simple concept, which we know to have been based on a controversial (to say the least) interpretation of the Kantian categorical imperative, as Eichmann’s case, among others, shows. For a task to be heavy means that its fulfilment requires a great personal sacrifice on the part of the subject carrying it out, hence, an ethos centred in this concept cannot but demand that the individual becomes psychologically strong, ‘hard’, and in some way insensitive to suffering. To use a play on words, any limit becomes a limitation, a hindrance to accomplish one’s own duty, hence it must be overcome. Himmler is known to have resorted very often to this concept in his propaganda. When asked how he could bring himself and others to do actions that would shock any normal human being he was able to put operations, like mass killings, in terms of a difficult but necessary form of self-sacrifice, of immolation for the wellness not only of Germany as a country, but of the entire world.² As it is easy to imagine, the only way to cope with this kind of ethos was to weaken, to lessen one’s own tendency to feel for and especially to feel with, a process which Lifton names psychic numbing. As a result of this process, the numbed individual experienced the Jews and the other prisoners in the concentration camps as beings who could no longer affect them, and this is how the paradox of the killing without killing was enabled. When the Nazis proceeded in the effective suppression of the prisoners, the latter were already dead in their hearts.³ Indeed, they were already dead because the moral being of the Nazis was already dead, killed in a heroic (so they thought) act of auto-immolation to the even higher ethics of duty. Ubi maior, minor cessat. The process of double dehumanisation is, therefore, nothing but a process of double-killing or, at least, of numbing (oneself) and then killing (the other). Moreover, this process is based on mechanisms aimed at eradicating (partially or totally) empathy.

One of these mechanisms and its tremendous effects has already been discussed in the section on moral judgement. There, we saw that a twisted and perverted ideology could lead to categorising the world, and the subjects living in it, in such a way as to allow for a revolution regarding our more intimate and primordial moral intuitions. Recall, for instance, the powerful and meaningful quote by Primo Levi: ‘people like this deserve their fate, just look how they behave. These are not Menschen, human beings, but animals, it’s as clear as day.’ The primary method employed by the Nazi propaganda to suppress empathy and allow for the Endlösung, the Final Solution, was to make Untermenschen out of Jews: to make them less than human. In this sense, an efficacious manipulation of the semantics (conducted by Goebbels and his team) which described the Jewish race as maggots, as a cancer spreading in the healthy body of the German country proved to be hyper-effective. If Jews were a menace to the German nation and to the world, rooting them out meant saving the world. If Jews were the sickness, suppression was the cure. It is crucial to understand this perverse mechanism in order to understand the tragic truth behind the Holocaust, namely, that this was intended by the Nazis as a moral task. The outcome of this twisted ideology was the foundation of an equally twisted morality for which, as Vetlesen rightly notes: ‘the individual’s theft of a cigarette is wrong, but the murder of millions right’.⁴ Notice that it was morally condemnable to keep something that belonged to a Jew for oneself, not because one ought to have respect or moral obligations towards a Jew, but because one would be in possession of property of the German state, to which Jewish personal possessions rightfully and solely belonged. The reason for that is that Jews were not considered to be moral addressees, nor full-fledged moral subjects: they were devoid of a moral status and, thus, could not be the target of moral obligations of any kind. If we wanted to schematically summarise the mechanism at the base of this method, we could do it by saying that the dehumanisation of the Jews led to their exclusion from the field of moral addressees and to a decrease in empathy towards them (to the ‘numbing’ of it).

1 The Distancing Method

Another method employed to actively suppress (or at least reduce) empathy towards Jews was that of distancing. Vetlesen, with all probability influenced by Lifton, speaks of ‘bureaucracy’ in this way. However, I think that the concept of ‘distancing’ permits a richer understanding of this phenomenon and stresses the real objective of Nazi bureaucratisation, as well as of the progressive technologisation of the killing methods employed in the Lager, which is indeed distancing (both physically and psychologically) the perpetrators from the victims. The distancing method was employed at every level. At the administrative level, it took on the aspect of bureaucratisation: bureaucrats acted in a type of protective bubble. Their senses were made numb, unable to perceive or witness directly the reality of mass murder because of physical distance and because human beings were presented to them merely as cases, as data, as numbers, as Sachen (‘things’). Quoting Vetlesen: ‘The Jew simply never appears; from the very start of the genocidal sequence, the individual Jew is subjected to a derealization making him or her invisible and nonexistant long before the actual killing itself.’⁵ Yet of course, such a method can be very effective with administrators working from their offices, but what about the Einsatzgruppen? What about the SS, the Gestapo, and all the military units employed in the actual sweeping and killing of Jews? The task in this case was accomplished through the use of ideology and technology.

The first method, as we have said, made of the Jew something (and not someone) less than human, and for this reason devoid of moral status and human rights. Furthermore, ideology converted the Jew into an idea, a concept. It was the idea of the Jew that had to be eradicated. In the death camps, one never faced the concrete Jew, with a name, an identity, a personal history, but an empty shell with a tattooed number on the forearm. This is what they were: numbers. It is almost impossible to kill a person from whom you can feel fear, the longing for life, with whom you can empathise: but it is a lot easier to kill a concept. This also explains why Nazis could show empathy towards, say, their children, but they were able to inhibit it towards Jews in the camps: Jews simply belonged to another category, to which another status and other rules of conduct corresponded.⁶

Technology, accordingly, helped to implement the method of distancing. We know, for instance, that Himmler himself remained particularly upset after having witnessed an open-air shooting of Jews: in such a situation in fact, the bond pertaining to face-to-face interaction could not be suspended, and hence a certain degree of low-level empathy arising from the mere observation of the faces and the looks of the prisoners, as well as from their cries, could not be taken completely out of the picture. The episode was told by Hilberg in his book The Destruction of the European Jews in which this dialogue between Himmler and the Obergruppenführer Bach-Zelewski is reported:

Verse

Verse BACH-ZELEWSKI: Reichsführer, those were only a hundred. HIMMLER: What do you mean by that? BACH-ZELEWSKI: Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando, how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished (fertig) for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!Footnote

Hilberg (1985, p. 332).

How serious Bach-Zelewski accusations were can be discerned by his post-traumatic shock: he was hospitalised with acute stomach and intestinal pains and experienced, according to Lifton,⁸ ‘psychic exhaustion’ and ‘hallucinations concerned with the shootings of Jews’. In general, as is also evident from the autobiography of Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz camp commander, the psychological consequences of such modi operandi were devastating: many members of Einsatzkommandos committed suicide, others went mad, and almost all of them had to rely on alcohol in order to perform their duty.⁹ Therefore, it soon became clear that more distance between perpetrators and victims had to be devised, and it is in this respect that technology came to their aid, turning death camps into ‘killing factories’, into well-oiled machines. Zyklon-B gas replaced mass-shootings, allowing for a distance never experienced before: the prisoners were collected with the excuse of sending them to take a shower, thereby reducing to a minimum any protest or wailing, they were locked up behind thick walls and then it was only a question of waiting a few minutes for the gas to do its work. With such an execution, the guards were even spared the sight of blood. There was almost no seeing, no hearing, no touching. Never before has an execution occurred in such a detached, distanced context. Hence, numbing was granted, and with it, the emergence of empathy was inhibited. This obviously allowed for more killing, giving rise to a self-reinforcing dialectic: the number one gets, the less empathy one feels, the less empathy one feels, the more one can kill, and the more one kills, the number one gets and the less empathy one feels.

Observe that the elimination of empathy also allows for the eradication of guilt. Guilt, in fact, can arise if, and only if, one of the following two conditions are met: (1) we believe we have done something morally blameworthy; (2) we feel we have hurt another person. The typical circumstances of the first kind of guilt do not need any further explication: when you are aware that your conduct has violated some moral principle you believe in (say, you have told a lie) feelings of guilt usually arise, as a result. Situations constituting the second type of guilt can, on the contrary, be somewhat subtler: there are, in fact, times when you do not think you have done anything wrong, but the effect of your action on someone is so hurtful and so contrary to what your intention was, that you may feel guilty as a consequence and discover, in fact, that what you have done was not entirely worthy. An example might be when you tell someone a truth they do not want to hear with the intention of ‘waking them up’, but you end up simply hurting them. Notice that in order to feel a sense of guilt in the first kind of situation, empathy is not necessary, but it is necessary in the second kind. This reflection allows us to understand why numbing and inhibition of empathy were so successful in eradicating any sense of guilt among Nazis. Guilt, in fact, was eliminated thanks to a two-fold method: on the one hand, by the thought that what they were doing was a moral act, a self-immolation for the good of their country and of the whole world, and, on the other hand, by their lack of empathy for the prisoners they tortured and killed. Quoting Vetlesen:

Feelings of guilt, […] are bound up with being affected, and to be affected by the other, the other must appear to us as a “real experience” that we have. In other words, the other must be perceived as a subject in the full sense of the term, as an autonomous person able to feel pain and to be hurt.¹⁰

As we have seen, my definition of guilt allows also for a wider interpretation, for which guilt must not necessarily be bound with the hurting of another person. However, it is true that guilt has to do with being affected by the other; it implies an opening towards the other, towards whom I am responsible. Now, I disagree with Vetlesen in thinking that guilt is always linked with empathy (which, for him, makes visible the suffering I caused in the other, thereby giving rise to guilt), but there are, in fact, emotions which need the contribution of empathy in order to arise. One of the shortcomings of Prinz’s critique on empathy—which, as we have seen, is grounded in the idea that emotions are both necessary and sufficient to ground morality, without the further need for empathy—is indeed overlooking the fact that some emotions which are fundamental for morality cannot occur without empathic mechanisms in place. Consider, for instance, the case of indignation. Indignation is, almost by definition, a form of empathic anger, an anger usually felt by subject A towards subject B, for what B has done to a third subject C. Strawson himself makes a similar description of indignation in his article Freedom and Resentment. There, he derives indignation from resentment, the latter being, for him, an angry reaction to injury or indifference. Indignation is nothing but a vicarious version of resentment. However, let us consider it in his own words:

The reactive attitudes I have now to discuss might be described as the sympathetic or vicarious or impersonal or disinterested or generalized analogues of the reactive attitudes I have already discussed. They are reactions to the qualities of others’ wills, not towards ourselves, but towards others. Because of this impersonal or vicarious character, we give them different names. Thus one who experiences the vicarious analogue of resentment is said to be indignant or disapproving, or morally indignant or disapproving. What we have here is, as it were, resentment on behalf of another, where one’s own interest and dignity are not involved; and it is this impersonal or vicarious character of the attitude, added to its others, which entitle it to the qualification ‘moral’.¹¹

As you can see, Strawson defines indignation as ‘the vicarious analogue of resentment’, and it is easy to see why. When I believe that a person has acted unfairly towards me, I will probably feel anger as a result, but when I believe that someone has acted unjustly towards another person, even a person I am not acquainted with, indignation will take the place of ‘simple’ anger. For instance, indignation can arise from a sexist or racist comment expressed (or from a behaviour enacted) by a salesman towards a person who precedes me in a queue, whereas when I am the target of such a comment (or behaviour) anger is the most plausible emotional reaction. That is not to say that indignation can never arise on one’s own account (a possibility which is granted by Strawson, too), but that most of the time indignation is vicarious and that this characteristic is what makes it—so Strawson believes—moral. Unfortunately, the British philosopher does not explain why. Nevertheless, by relying on his other texts, it seems safe to affirm that the vicarious dimension is crucial in order to reach the level of universality typical of morals: a personal reactive feeling is, in fact, unsuitable to be called, ipso facto, a moral one, but an emotion that can arise on behalf of others has, ipso facto, the potential to be universalised, for the very good reason that it goes beyond one’s own egoism and egocentrism and can become, to use Strawson’s words, ‘impersonal’ in character. Put in yet another way, the person who feels indignation feels resentment not for themselves, but on behalf of another, hence, their concern and interest are not about themselves, but about another, thereby revealing a universalistic and intrinsically moral afflatus. For our purposes, Strawson’s reflections are especially interesting, since to define indignation as vicarious resentment or vicarious anger is to admit, implicitly, that indignation is nothing but empathic anger, that is, anger/resentment aroused by my putting oneself in the position of the other. Notice that the other whose position I put myself into may not necessarily be the victim: it can also be the person whose behaviour triggered my indignation. In fact, indignation designates, by its very etymology, what is not dignus, which is the Latin word for worthy, deserving, or respectable. Hence, by empathising with the politician instantiating a certain behaviour I may feel disapprobation for it and react with indignation, because such a behaviour is indignus (unworthy, dishonourable) for a politician: ‘if I were him, I would feel shame’.

2 Shame and Empathy

This consideration leads us to another issue anti-empathists seem to have disregarded, namely, the fact that empathy appears to be at the base of many social and moral emotions. Take, for instance, the case of shame. Unfortunately, this book is not the place to support my claim with a long study of shame, since this emotion is extremely complex, has a long history, and in recent times has had a massive revival due to an impressive number of publications dedicated to the theme. However, I would like to stress a few concepts.

In their influential book In Defense of Shame, Julien Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno, and Fabrice Teroni have ruled out a possible link between empathy and shame by pointing out that empathy and shame are inversely proportional: when shame is elicited, empathy tends to diminish, and vice versa. In fact, when you experience a profound sense of shame—so their claim—your ability to empathise with others is severely limited, since you are too embroiled in your own emotion to even try to take another’s perspective.¹² Furthermore, as numerous studies have shown, shame-prone individuals are generally less empathic than other individuals who are inclined to feel different emotions (like guilt) when they do wrong. Proneness to guilt is strongly associated with taking the perspective of others and with having concern for them, whereas shame-proneness is connected with a decreased capacity to empathise and an inclination towards self-oriented distress. This outcome is due to the different focus that the emotions of guilt, on the one hand, and shame, on the other, have. Guilt, in fact, focuses on a ‘bad behaviour’, whereas shame focuses on a ‘bad self’.¹³ This distinction is of central importance, since, in concentrating on bad behaviour, one focuses on the consequences of that behaviour on other people, enabling and increasing empathy for others. With shame, by contrast, the (distressing) focus of the emotion is on oneself, considered as shameful, as deserving contempt or blame, thereby making an empathic process with others impossible. Empathy is grounded in openness towards others, whereas shame signifies self-closure, in particular, so it is no wonder that the phenomenology of shame seems to go against that of empathy. However, the analysis of Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni on the connections between empathy and shame might be slightly too rushed. Indeed, if it is true that shame, when felt for oneself, is a hindrance to empathy, it is also true that shame can have empathic mechanisms at its base.

If we take a look at the phenomenology of shame, we will soon discover that what is typical of shame is a strong, stressful sensation which leads us to avoid the scrutiny of others: when we are ashamed, we want to hide, disappear from sight. This powerful impulse we feel in shameful situations is also confirmed by the vocabulary and the idiomatic expressions connected with shame. When ashamed, it is usual to say (and to feel the desire) to ‘sink through the floor’, for example. This is why I agree with Sartre when he affirms in Being and Nothingness that although the I may very well express judgements on themselves when ashamed and link the shameful episode with an incapacity on their side to exemplify a certain self-relevant value (and Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni are very skilled at evidencing this aspect), the triggering factor remains essentially the presence of the other. This involves a presence which is actual or made present in the imagination and which objectifies the subject, that is, the subject feels themselves objectified by the critical look of the other, by their ‘accusing finger’ and for this reason can objectify themselves in judgement, thereby acknowledging themselves in the same way the others do. The alter is therefore essential for shame.¹⁴ My claim is that this alter, who is actually present or made aware in the imagination, and who is responsible for the elicitation of shame, can only cause this triggering when the ashamed subject empathises with them. In other words, the judgement of the other (which is expressed in words or behaviour or simply imagined) can be made transparent by means of empathy. Consider the following sentences by Sartre:

Yet this object which has appeared to the Other [me as seen by the Other, ed.] is not an empty image in the mind of another. Such an image in fact, would be imputable wholly to the Other and so could not “touch” me. I could feel irritation, or anger before it as before a bad portrait of myself which gives to my expression an ugliness or baseness which I do not have, but I could not be touched to the quick. Shame is by nature recognition. I recognize that I am as the Other sees me.¹⁵

This quote is very telling. Sartre is adamant that ‘I’ in the mind of the Other am not just an empty image that can be more or less true to what I really am. On the contrary: I am the person the Other sees as they see: ‘I recognize that I am as the Other sees me.’ In order to do that, to see myself as the other sees me and to objectify myself as the Other does, I need to empathise with the Other, namely, I have to take their perspective. Observe that this occurs both when the other is actually present and when I enact imaginatively the perspective of someone watching and judging me: be it God, my father, or a type of Smithian impartial spectator. I feel ashamed because I empathise with the judgement of the Other and feel towards myself what they feel for me, thereby approving of this judgement. Hence, contrary to what Deonna et al. thought, shame would not exist without empathy, without the fundamental access to the inner world of the Other that empathy grants me.

3 To See and to Be Seen

In addition to that, Sartre’s reflections also emphasise the centrality of another element, which empathy makes visible and must be eliminated in order to suppress empathy and favour numbing, namely, the regard d’autrui, the look of the Other. We have seen previously how the perpetrator hesitates when they can touch, hear, or see the victim and how this perceivable dimension has to be removed by distance to avoid empathic hesitation. In particular, we have spoken of the empathic potential of face-to-face interactions: it is hard to kill another while watching their face and see the look in their eyes, and this is why executions by means of shooting are done by covering the head of the sentenced person with a sack, or by making them hang their head and look down. Sartre’s theory and the analysis we have undertaken of shame offer an interesting explanation for that: a face-to-face interaction not only tends to elicit low-level empathy, but sheds light on a breakthrough experience on the part of the perpetrator, who understands that in seeing the victim, they are also seen by that person, that the victim is at the same time their witness. ‘You kill me, but I see you killing me. I am the witness of what you are going to do to me.’

There cannot be any hope of anonymity in a face-to-face interaction: I cannot hide from the Other’s look, and I can hardly pretend that the Other is not a human being, that we do not share the same humanity, as the episode between Himmler and Bach-Zelewski also shows. This is why it is not indifference, but relation, to be the basic form of intersubjectivity:

[…] not caring for the other is what is conspicuous, what calls for explanation, what catches our attention—in short, what strikes us as a breakdown to be accounted for. Under conditions of physical proximity, where the full exposure of exchanging looks is allowed for, to matter to one another, to be engaged in the What next? Is the primordial form of relating to each other. [I]t is not well-nigh impossible to adopt an indifferent stance even here. But to […] do so presupposes an effort, it presupposes the subject’s wresting himself or herself away from the condition of being engaged with the other.¹⁶

Once again, we return to Strawson’s standpoint: it is possible to adopt an objective attitude, but this must not be considered as the position we usually favour. Being human, we normally live in medias res, in a Mitwelt of interpersonal relations, of mutual concern, and we cannot (or can only with extreme difficulty) prevent ourselves from feeling certain emotions and having certain thoughts in given situations. The with-world in which we live is a result of the interrelations we have with ourselves and with others, it is the outcome of an understanding we continuously reach, based on the positions, the perspectives we choose (more or less willingly) to adopt. I have already quoted phenomenologists like Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, and even Heidegger on this matter. Here, I wish to use a citation by Husserl to conclusively clarify this issue:

Waking life is always a directedness toward this or that, being directed toward it as means, as relevant or irrelevant, toward the interesting or the indifferent, toward the private or the public, toward what is really required or intrusively new. All this lies within the world-horizon; but special motives are required when one who is gripped in this world-life reorients himself and somehow comes to make the world itself thematic […].¹⁷

Husserl shows once again how it takes an effort to reorient oneself and one’s perspective on the world, how it is difficult to assume an artificial perspective and go against our empathic intuitions which designate the world in which we live and move.¹⁸ However, once we do this, once we choose to destroy and reconstruct our perspective on the world we share with others, we can change not only our interpretation, but even our perception (both moral and not) of it. In other words, what the Nazi soldiers could not change was the fact that they were killing, even exterminating people. This immediately made perpetrators of them and victims of the Jews and the other prisoners. Nevertheless, they could assume a perspective by which they were killing some in order to save many others, for the sake of a greater good. They could numb their senses by means of distancing and ideology and silence their inner, natural empathic reactions.¹⁹ In effect, it was exactly this kind of hard-won, ‘objective attitude’, this distancing themselves from a Mitwelt that one can approach only with the help of empathy, which permitted all those atrocities to be committed.

In this sense, even the doctrine of Levinas can be seen in the positive light it deserves. I am not sure whether Levinas would agree with me on the interpretation I propose for his theory, but I am confident enough that this is the only way I can make some ambiguous aspects of his arguments not only understandable to me, but productive at a moral and ethical level, at least in my opinion. The French philosopher famously remarked that the other comes to me and to my attention as a face, and not merely as a look (as in Sartre’s theory). This already constitutes a substantial difference, in fact a look, by definition, can only see, and this is what the other does for Sartre. I am seen by the other, and in this sense, the other exercises a negative influence exclusively on me: to be exposed to the other’s direct regard is to be exposed absolutely; this strips me of my freedom and transcends my transcendence. The other is perceived as a looming and threatening presence towards which I can nothing: the look does not allow for exchange. However, things are different when I am confronted with a face. Here, the other affects me in a two-fold sense: as a master commanding me (and this is the junction point with Sartre) and at the same time as a being that is outright nude, defenceless, vulnerable; a being which can also be seen, which can be commanded, hurt, and killed. The other does not deprive me of my freedom; on the contrary, their intrinsic and constitutional vulnerability assigns a precise task to my freedom, for which, therefore, I am fully responsible, which is to choose not to kill the other. Indeed, why is that? It is because I perceive the other’s frailty, neediness, and utter vulnerability by means of empathy: I feel that the other is vulnerable as I also am, and once I have recognised that, this acknowledgment cannot but call for responsibility on my part. Empathy is what makes the other present to us, namely, what presents the other as a face in the sense of Levinas, that is, as a human being who shares this world with me together with a common sensitivity, and towards whom I am responsible. Recalling the words of Knud Løgstrup:

By our very attitude to one another we help to shape one another’s world. By our attitude to the other person we help to determine the scope and hue of his or her world; we make it large or small, bright or drab, rich or dull, threatening or secure. We help to shape his or her world not by theories and views but by our very attitude toward him or her. Here lies the unarticulated and one might say anonymous demand that we take care of the life which trust has placed in our hands.²⁰

This quote is telling. The Danish philosopher wants to express the idea here for which being with someone means something more than merely existing alongside someone. The attitude we have and the perspective we assume towards the world and towards the other have an impact on the other’s attitude and on the other’s own perspective about the world. The Mitwelt results from the encounter between these different perspectives and attitudes. Since we are the author not only of our world, but, to a large degree, of that of others, too, we cannot escape responsibility for the way in which we shape this shared world. In other words, every move we make has an impact not only on our own life and on our individual world, but on those of others as well. Living in this world, which is intrinsically shared and which is essentially a co-world, requires the faculty to attune to others, to be sensitive towards them, to understand them, and, in this sense, empathy proves to be a fundamental, vital component of social and moral life, a condicio sine qua non.

Yet, there is more. It seems to me, in fact, that empathy is the key to a comprehension of the other which is sensitive to their proper ontological status and to the special way in which we are with the other. Consider, for example, the words of Heidegger in Being and Time, which remain central in the work of many phenomenological philosophers: ‘The kind of being which belongs to the Dasein of Others, as we encounter it within the world, differs from readiness-to-hand [of “things” or “equipment”] or presence-at-hand [of “Nature”]. […] [“Others”] are neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand. […] [T]hey are there too, and there with it [the Dasein].’²¹ What Heidegger is doing here is describing the ontological status of human beings: the others are not instruments to be used for our aims or ends (like things or objects, which have a readiness-to-hand), nor are they merely existing alongside us as natural creatures, like plants or animals (presence-at-hand). On the contrary, they are as we are, in the same way, they are Daseins who are with us, beings ‘among whom one is too’.²² However, although Heidegger was able to shed some light in the ontology proper to the other, he did not show the same ability in highlighting the kinds of relations that we have in mind when we think of ‘being with others’ in the proper sense. Using the words of Martin Buber: ‘[T]his resolution […] knows nothing of any essential relation with others or any real I-Thou with them which could breach the barriers of the self.’²³

In what follows, I shall argue that the type of relation which Buber had in mind, that I-Thou relation with others that can breach the barriers of the self, can be met only by a mutual relation which involves openness towards the other on both parts and the acknowledging of the Other as in some sense different, but also not too much dissimilar, from Me: a kind of relation which involves, in other words, the essential deployment of empathy.

4 Being-with Others

We are with others—this, for instance, is the position of Stephen Darwall,²⁴ and I agree with him—when we are in another’s presence. The concept of ‘presence’ has more than one similarity with that of the face, but it is more abstract, less embodied, and perhaps, because of that, more easily suitable in describing the kinds of relations shaped by empathy. To be in the presence of someone means essentially ‘to be brought somehow into awareness of and to relate to him as a person’,²⁵ but, even more importantly, it means to relate with the other from a second-personal standpoint as described by Darwall in his most famous book:

[S]ince it [the person] can be understood only within a network of concepts that involve the idea of second-personal address: the authority or standing to address claims and demands to others, legitimate claims and demands and the distinctive kind of reasons for acting they create (second-personal reasons), and answerability for complying with valid claims and second-personal reasons.²⁶

This quote has not the usual clarity to which Darwall has accustomed us, however, it is Darwall himself who gives us a good reading key by mentioning Strawson slightly later in the article. What Darwall calls ‘the second-personal standpoint’ and Strawson the ‘interpersonal attitude’, as opposed to the ‘objective’ one, are one and the same thing. Both philosophers point out the need to holding ourselves answerable to each other through, what Strawson calls, the ‘reactive attitudes’, such as the previously mentioned concepts of resentment and indignation. Nonetheless, holding ourselves answerable to another essentially signifies the acknowledgement of the other’s authority over us, to bestow on them the same authority that we also have under the condition of mutuality. This is the reason why Buber criticised Heidegger on this issue: regarding someone as a person is not a third-personal conviction, but a second-personal attitude, meaning, that it is an attitude towards that person, and not a belief about them. A belief would be a static concept, a mere ontological (or, better, ‘ontic’) acknowledging: the second-personal attitude involved here is instead an active one, which commits the agent(s) to mutual answerability. Interestingly, this concept is not at all arbitrarily stipulated, nor a merely philosophical one. Reflect, for instance, on your saying that you ‘feel a presence’. You would never use this term to describe that you feel an animal is present nearby. With ‘presence’ we indicate beings showing not only an evidence of mentality, but who can refer to us in a way which implies and even presupposes our answerability, beings, that is, who can communicate with us under the idea of mutuality. As a matter of fact, this is the definition Darwall gives of ‘being with one another’:

[T]wo people are with one another when they are mutually aware of their mutual openness to mutual relating. […] [B]eing present to them, acknowledges their second-personal presence and standing and, thereby, involves implicit respect for them as having this authority.²⁷

Then he adds an interesting example:

That is why it is especially chilling when someone with whom one has had a close personal relation acts as though you are not there when it is common knowledge between you that you are, as though he is not in your presence or as though you are not in his.²⁸

Let us try to reconstruct Darwall’s argument: to be mutually aware of mutual openness to mutual relating is to be in the presence of someone. To be in the presence of someone is to have a second-personal attitude and to assume a second-personal stance in relation to that someone, who, in turn, does the same to me. This ‘modus of being’ entails implicit respect for the other, for the good reason that I implicitly recognise the other as having the authority to treat me second-personally. In other words, the other can expect me to be open towards them, to respond to their questions, requests, orders, implorations, and, in general, to all the second-personal practices involved in this kind of perspective. The implicit ‘shared’ authority and respect inherent in this kind of mechanism is especially transparent in those cases in which this mechanism occurs because of at least one of the two persons involved in the relationship. Thus, for instance, a person who acts as if I am not there refuses to ascribe me the authority and respect a second-personal relationship would require. It is as if they said: ‘I may still be in your presence, but you are not in my presence anymore. I am not open towards you, nor do I want you to be open towards me.’ Suddenly, I am treated from a third-personal stance: as a ‘them’, as someone who can be useful or not, detrimental or not, threatening or not, but I am no longer treated as deserving the same authority or respect. I am not an ‘other’ with whom this person can relate second-personally: I have become ‘The Other’, a complete stranger, a person who cannot participate in a relationship of mutual openness.

Of course, not all the interactions we have are second-personal, nor is a third-personal relation necessarily and intrinsically a negative one. Indeed, there are even second-personal relationships which do not entail the ‘being-in presence of’, as when a robber wielding a knife demands you to give him your wallet. They talk to and threaten you from a second-personal stance, but they are not in your presence in the depicted sense and you certainly do not share a mutual openness with them. However, it is important to highlight that every time where we are in the presence of someone in the described sense (by sharing a mutual openness and accountability), we are so within the framework of a second-personal relationship.

5 Empathy and Being in the Presence of the Other

Nonetheless, what does all of this have to do with empathy? A great deal, actually. Let us return one more time to Strawson. By reading his article Freedom and Resentment through the lenses offered by Darwall’s The Second-Person Standpoint, we can say that our way of holding people responsible for what they do and think is by means of ‘reactive attitudes’, which are in their essence profoundly second personal: resentment, indignation, guilt, and blame, for example. It is here that empathy comes into play: in fact, to make themselves mutually accountable, people who are present with each other need to be open, receptive, even vulnerable to each other’s reactive attitudes. Furthermore, in order to be affected by the reactive attitudes of others in the entire spectrum of ways mutual accountability requires, empathy is needed. It is needed, because receptivity and vulnerability are involved: empathy is indeed required to be affected by others when their emotions towards us are not transparent enough. However, there is an even more crucial role played by empathy within this context:

[T]he projective empathy implicit in respecting the other takes them into the other’s perspective so that they can see themselves in the resenting way the other sees them. If they can bring this reaction “home” and generate Smithian “fellow-feeling,” they can then feel the feeling’s propriety in a way that enables them to feel its reciprocal analogue, guilt, or regret for having caused the kind of hurt or harm that warrants apology.²⁹

Thus, empathy turns out to be essential to modulate the Strawsonian reactive attitudes, which means that the second-personal answerability typical of the being-with, of being in the presence of, relies on empathy. We can respond, anticipate, and react to the reactions of others, when interacting in contexts of mutual accountability, essentially within an empathic framework. This, of course, is assuming that we take into account second-personal relationships which involve being-with. In the case of third-personal relationships, in which others are not with us stricto sensu, a Strawsonian objective attitude will result and, with it, empathy will become unnecessary.

I think that this line of thought by Darwall can become particularly enlightening if applied (as he certainly did not do so in his article) in the context of lack of empathy typical of the concentration camps. If, in fact, you take the relationship there was between prisoners and guards in the lagers in light of what we have explained so far with regard to Darwall’s theory, it is possible to observe that it was not one in which victims and perpetrators were in each other’s presence, or, which is equivalent, were ‘being with’. On the contrary, the relationship existing between these two groups was a third-personal one for the majority of the time. Jews were not seen as subjects that shared the perpetrators’ authority and towards whom respect was due: in fact, they were so irreducibly alien, so ‘other’ in their ‘otherness’, that it was impossible to interact with them under the condition of a shared mutuality. Only third-personal pronouns were apt to define them: ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’. Pronouns that underline even more distinctly the distance there was between the German Volk and… them. The ‘being with’ the Jews was not only ontologically impossible because of their not being Menschen, of their not sharing the same humanness, but even the mere idea of mixing with them, of being in their presence stricto sensu needed to be eradicated as a perversion by means of their concrete, physical, and total elimination. In this framework, it is worth noticing that the feelings, emotions, and attitudes elicited by Jews are exquisitely third-personal and exclude them from mutual answerability, rather than call them to it. These feelings and attitudes include, inter alia, disgust and contempt. When you feel disgust, in fact, this emotion is addressed to someone or something which appears as intolerably hideous, for which distancing is in order, since the mere perception of it becomes extremely unpleasant. In the same way, when you feel contempt, you feel it for someone whom you consider poles apart from you and for whom you cannot feel any respect: ‘I am not like him!’ Such emotions, although they can sometimes be justified, are on the whole far more deleterious than reactive (second-personal) attitudes, which, even when they are negative, always necessarily involve implicit reciprocal mutual relating often grounded in empathy. To say it in Darwall’s words:

By making ourselves personally accountable to those we are with, we put ourselves in their hands, give them a special standing to hold us answerable, and make ourselves vulnerable, through projective empathy, to their feelings and attitudes, not just as the latter’s targets, but as feelings we can bring home to ourselves and share. This, according to Buber, “breach[es] the barriers of the self.”³⁰

Therefore, empathy breaches the barriers of the self, it makes the self porous, vulnerable, ready to be affected by others, and respond to them, allowing for interplay, for acknowledging the humanity of the other, for seeing the other as at the same time different and equal. Equal, because the other shares my same humanity and deserves the same authority and respect I have qua human being; different, because empathy (as opposed to identification or contagion) makes explicit that the other is fundamentally an ‘Other’.

However—acknowledging the influence that the philosophy of Levinas had in relation to this point within the theoretical path of this book—it would be wrong to consider the fact that I access the minds of others in a way that is different from that which I use to access my own mind as being an imperfection, a shortcoming, or a deficiency. On the contrary, it is precisely this difference in the two approaches that reveals the other is de facto exactly that: an Other. Using the words of Levinas, the absence of the other is nothing else but their presence as ‘other’.³¹ This difference is constitutional and it is the reason why we can say that the minds we experience through empathy are actually minds belonging to others. Husserl proves he shares the same line of thought when he writes that if we had the same access to the consciousness of the other as we have to our own, then the other would stop being an ‘other’ and would instead become a part of us, of our persona.³²

Now, having highlighted this crucial point, we can arrive at a likewise critical conclusion: the cruelty of Nazis relied on the fact that ideology, distancing, and all the methods we discussed earlier took the soldiers and the guards in the concentration camps to assume third-personal attitudes and emotions towards the prisoners. To use again the case in point of disgust and contempt, Jews were viewed with contempt for being weak, inferior, and unworthy as a race, and they were regarded with disgust for their being Untermenschen, less than humans, as well as for the ‘infection’ they could spread by contaminating German, Arian blood. Of course, there were times in which Nazis addressed prisoners second-personally, for instance, when they gave them orders. However, they were never with them stricto sensu, they were not in each other’s presence, because empathy was precluded from arising. Empathy would have been able to break the spell and make the Nazis capable of seeing the Jews as humans, as beings who could, for example, suffer or love as they also did, who shared one and the same humanity. However, everything was scrutinised so as to impede a rising of empathy. An important testimony comes indeed from the autobiographical book by Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz, who writes:

Time and again I was asked how I, how my men, over and over again, could cope with witnessing this process, how we could endure it. I always replied that all human inclinations and feelings had to keep silent in the face of the ice-cold consequence with which we had to carry out the order of the Führer. Thus, I had to appear cold and heartless in front of proceedings that would cause the heart of any still humanly feeling person to turn around in his body.³³

This quote is extremely revealing, since it confirms everything we have argued for until now. Höss does not talk, in fact, about moral inclinations and feelings, but says instead that ‘all human inclinations and feelings had to keep silent’ and speaks of ‘ice-cold consequence’. Further, he says that the proceedings carried out in the Lagers would have caused ‘the heart of any still humanly feeling person to turn around in his body’. These admissions are very significant, as they show that it was, in fact, the all too human capacity of ‘feeling with’ that was blocked in those contexts, of being entirely human. The fact that Höss admits that any human person (any ‘humanly feeling person’ to be precise) would have felt their heart tear apart in dealing with such practices is more than a hint towards the actuality that it was empathy to be fundamentally lacking in this context. Before compassion (and contrary to what Nussbaum thought), before sympathy, the great absent was empathy, human empathy. Recall the process of double-killing of which we spoke earlier: Nazis had to kill the humanity in themselves before killing other humans. They had to show the same coldness of heart (sometimes the same sadism) we have seen being the chief characteristic of psychopaths. It is therefore no coincidence that many of them were, in fact, sociopaths.

6 Lack of Empathy and the Case of Cruelty and Brutality

If we wanted to use the valuable terms of Max Scheler, we could say that the suppression of empathy did not make all Nazis cruel (as we tend to think). Cruel was the Nazi ideology, and cruel were the Nazis who took pleasure in torturing and exterminating the prisoners of the camps. However, for the most part, Nazis were indeed brutal, rather than cruel.³⁴ Scheler introduces this difference at the beginning of his book Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, when talking about similar but distinct phenomena in the sphere of sympathy. The cruel person is, for Scheler, not simply that person who is insensitive to other people’s suffering, but rather that kind of individual whose primary pleasure and enjoyment lies in torturing and in the agony of his or her victim. In this sense, their chief defect is not a lack of empathy, or of fellow-feeling, but involves something different. Scheler explains it by introducing a crucial distinction between what he calls Mitfühlen and Nachfühlen, listed in the English translation as ‘fellow-feeling’ and ‘vicarious feeling’. In short, the German philosopher argues that whereas ‘vicarious feeling’ involves the mere visualising of the feelings of the other, ‘fellow-feeling’ entails the (re)active participation in the state and value of the other’s feelings (as these are visualised in vicarious feeling). The phenomenon of cruelty cannot therefore be conceived as a lack of vicarious feeling; on the contrary, cruelty exists exactly because we have vicarious feeling for another person who is suffering, but no ‘fellow-feeling’ as a result. In other words, cruelty is what occurs when we enjoy the suffering of the other which is presented (or made present) to us through vicarious feeling.

As we already know, there are some authors, such as Darwall or Breithaupt, who see this occurrence as demonstration that empathy (at least in its cognitive declination) can be at the base of cruelty and sadism. We have already confuted this view, but I would like to add something more here. Cruelty, in my opinion, does not arise from affective empathy as described in this book. In fact, although I do not think that empathy necessarily involves isomorphism, it is undeniable that if the term ‘empathy’ is to have any sense at all, it should be attributed to feelings which are more congruent with those of the other and which share at least their same valence. Thus, plainly, just as we would not be ready to say that Julia empathises with Jane when Jane is crying her heart out and Julia is laughing as a response, I find it absurd to think empathy would be occurring when a person is in agony and another one takes pleasure at the sight of this person’s pain. It would be more reasonable to think that cruelty results from a profoundly perverted sensitivity, for which the suffering of another (human) being is never really empathised with, never thought of as meaningful. Further, the other, in such a framework, is never considered as sharing the same status as the cruel person (thus, they are never with the other in the proper sense), but as being a mere instrument to his or her own personal satisfaction. This means that the flaw inherent in cruelty already occurs at the level of (moral) perception. It is as if the cruel person cannot see things in the same way they appear to any ‘normal’ person, as if they were not merely ‘blind’ to certain values (in the sense of being incapable of seeing them), but—to continue the analogy of sight—as if they have a strange case of daltonism, in which values (instead of colours) are misattributed. Therefore, for instance, the suffering of the other is not a matter of concern, but a reason for joy and pleasure.

The matter of brutality is entirely another issue. As Scheler states: ‘In contrast to cruelty, “brutality” is merely a disregard of other peoples’ experience, despite the apprehension of it in feeling.’³⁵ Hence, whereas the cruel person feels pleasure in making another individual suffer and intentionally pursues this end, the brutal person is simply not touched by this suffering. Nota bene: brutality is not reducible to insensitivity. The latter, according to Scheler, is mainly found in pathological cases (e.g. consider depression as a case of chronic insensitivity and vicarious distress as a temporary one) where the individual is so absorbed in their own (negative) feelings so as to be undermined with respect to being moved by others and/or feeling any kind of fellow-feeling for them. Under these circumstances, the brutal and the insensitive person are both ‘not touched’ by others and disinterested in their weal and woe. However, brutality differentiates itself from insensitivity by virtue of its conscious disregard of other peoples’ feelings. The insensitive person does not choose to be insensitive and is often unaware of their own insensitivity. The insensitive person might have the desire to feel with others, to empathise with them and even to sympathise with them, but they struggle to do so as it involves an enormous effort. Instead, the brutal person has the capacity to empathise with the victims of their brutality, but chooses not to employ this. They do not feel pleasure, nor displeasure in instantiating their brutality with violence, killing, and so on, they simply decide not to care, and to this absence of care is inherent an absence of a clear-cut feeling in relation to what is perpetrated.

This reconstruction fits perfectly with our previous reflections. We have said, in fact, that Nazi ideology required people (especially those soldiers employed in the enactment of the Final Solution) to renounce what was more characteristically human in them. In this sense, it is only logical that the trait characteristic of Nazi soldiers was not so much cruelty, but rather brutality. The cruel person, in fact, cannot be said to lack humanity stricto sensu. Their capacity to think and feel is still there, but it is perverted in ways that can sometimes be irreversible. Put in another way, the cruel person can be inhuman in their evil desire to always think of better ways to make other people suffer and in their feeling pleasure in the pain of others. On the contrary, the brutal person consciously chooses to inhibit their capacity to think and feel as a normal human being, and in their doing violence without feeling anything in particular, in their blind obedience to orders, and in their renunciation of empathy (but also compassion) for others, they prove to be not inhuman, but subhuman.

If I am right in this argument so far, I think that the conclusions that can be drawn are even more striking and can be used in response to many of the criticisms which are often proffered against empathy. I have already discussed the fact that the biases which are taken by anti-empathists to be essentially inherent in empathy are actually flaws of reason and that the extent of our empathy usually reflects the extent of our open-mindedness. I have also tackled the view that the sadistic torturer is empathic. Now it can be shown that even if one were not ready to accept my arguments about these issues, one could hardly reject the conclusion that the absence of empathy in the moral domain is in fact much more deleterious than its supposedly biased nature.

Consider our ‘latest discoveries’. We have seen that Nazi soldiers had to be ‘cold blooded’ in order to comply with their orders. This ‘cold-bloodedness’ was achieved thanks to a process of numbing based on ideology, distancing, and other methods. This numbing, aimed at the elimination of empathy for the victims, inevitably led to a condition which we may call, based on Schelerian terminology, ‘brutality’ on the part of the perpetrators. However, although powerful, this numbing was not all-encompassing; instead, it was highly selective. Nazi soldiers were able to inhibit their empathy in the concentration camps, but a part of them was still capable of feeling empathy in other contexts. Nonetheless, what if this deactivation of empathy were generalised and became all-encompassing? After all, we know from Vetlesen, Lifton, and from the analysis we conducted on the phenomenon of the Holocaust that the number the individual becomes, the more they kill, and the more they kill, the number they become.³⁶ It is therefore a process that, even though selective, can easily spread and infect the mentality as well as both the conscious and unconscious behaviour of the individual. Furthermore, anti-empathists insist that we should abstain from using empathy within the moral sphere, ‘turning it off’ as some kind of switch, thereby also upholding a full-fledged intentional numbing of empathy. However, I am convinced that such a position would be detrimental to morality. To ‘hush up’ our empathy would mean to relinquish being affected by the condition of others, to renounce taking active human interest in their ‘weal and woe’, to surrender to indifference. Indeed, I can almost hear anti-empathists objecting that empathy is not the only means by which we can take an interest in others and in their circumstances, and that these methods are preferable to empathy. Nevertheless, as we have seen in the course of this book and with numerous examples, there are many cases in which empathy is the main access to moral perception, moral motivation, and moral conduct (let alone moral education and development), and to renounce empathy in these contexts would be to renounce seeing and doing what is moral.

7 The Dangers of (Moral) Indifference

From a moral perspective, the indifference, and in some cases, the brutality stemming from the absence of empathy are even more dangerous than cruelty. In fact, whereas some people can do cruel things from time to time, not so many individuals are capable of being consistently and continuously cruel. The latter are usually pathological individuals. Nevertheless, people can much more easily succumb to indifference and become—sometimes unconsciously—‘brutal’ in the way previously described. However, there is more to take into consideration. Even if we grant, as Bloom does, that empathy can sometimes fuel hatred,³⁷ my claim is that the potential dangers that this could create would be minor (and thereby preferable) to those that indifference caused by lack of empathy could provoke. In fact, as Scheler rightly observed in the second part of his book Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, both love and hate, although of course in opposite ways, stem from and clearly show a deep-rooted emotional engagement. To love is, for Scheler, to take an active, positive, ‘feeling’ interest (in the sense of a deep-felt emotional interest) in some particular person and to seek the enhancement of the qualities and the values perceived in the other, so that one is happy for the good that occurs to them. On the other hand, to hate means to feel an active, negative interest in another individual and to be happy about the misery and suffering of the other and bitter at their joy. Notably, the hating person will typically seek the divestment of the perceived qualities and values of the hated one.

From a moral standpoint, one can love the wrong person and for the wrong reasons, and one can hate a person who does not deserve it, perhaps for fabricated or simply wrong reasons. Both possibilities are morally criticisable. However, the fact that someone can show a deep-seated emotional engagement, that they can feel and pursue an interest, should be seen as positive at this point, because it would mean that their emotional capacities, among which we find empathy, and which are constitutive of a considerable number of more complex processes, such as information gathering and moral perception, are still there. Now imagine a person completely devoid of empathy. This person, understandably, would be totally unaffected by others. They would take no active interest (negative or positive) in the ‘weal and woe’ of another and show no emotional engagement, nothing but coldness and insensitivity. This condition is far more dangerous than that of a person whose emotionality was ‘wrongly’ elicited, in fact, it is hard to return to a state of emotion and interest when everything seems ‘grey’ and leaves you untouched. Why care for others if at the end of the day it’s all the same and nothing matters? To this view, a few objections might be raised: to begin with, anti-empathists do not want to say that empathy is necessarily detrimental, but that it is detrimental within the moral sphere. Hence, a person should not renounce empathy tout court, but only empathy applied in the moral field. Furthermore, they may maintain that a person lacking empathy might still feel emotional affection based, for instance, on token behaviours, without further need to empathise with the individual instantiating that behaviour. Nonetheless, these objections miss the point. In primis, we have already noticed more than once that renouncing empathy in relation to morality is a great loss in many different aspects. Moreover, it is hard to completely abstain from empathy: it seems more reasonable to let empathy flow and then act on the base of what reason recommends, together with the suggestions stemming from empathy. The alternative would be to suppress empathy, thereby losing a significant part of our emotional sensitivity. To use the illuminating words of Vetlesen on this point:

[T]o undermine the access to the weal and woe of the other through empathy is to undermine an indispensable presupposition for the exercise of moral judgment, so that—to invoke the example of Nazi Germany—having barred the emergence of empathy through processes of dehumanization, there was no risk that the “brake” represented by judgment would come to interfere with the increasingly technologized killing. This suggests that the further one moves away from the love-hate end of the continuum and approaches the logic of indifference, the greater the danger that the subject will contribute to immoral acts, because the less likely it is that he or she will be able to “see” and subsequently pass judgment on moral phenomena.³⁸

Vetlesen defines empathy at various times in his book as the ‘basic emotional faculty of humanity’ and I agree with that. Empathy, in fact, constitutes the ability to relate to others through emotion, it is our interpersonal compass, the key to being attuned to others. This is why I am against moral theories which tend to favour one particular feeling over empathy, as it happens with Bloom and his idea of (rational) compassion and, to a lesser extent, with Prinz (who, in his 2011a article, speaks in favour of anger, and in the 2011b, of concern as in many aspects superior to empathy). Consider, for instance, the case of compassion. It is easy to notice that compassion is too narrow to serve as a motivational basis for our moral acts and, likewise, too narrow to be the explanation of moral conduct in general. It would, in fact, be absurd to believe that someone necessarily has to suffer (which is compassion’s eliciting condition) in order to feel a moral obligation to help them as an addressee of moral action. Morality cannot but transcend any particular feeling, emotion, or sentiment we may develop towards others. Nevertheless, morality cannot be prescinded from empathy in the way we have defined it, nor can fellow-feelings, such as compassion, sympathy, or pity, which all stem from empathy.³⁹ In order to act morally, we have to ‘get things straight’, to understand a situation as well as the thoughts and feelings of those implied in it. All of these elements are given and revealed to us through acts of physical and emotional perception. This level precedes that of judgement as well as that of action and it is the stage in which emotions play their part. The emotions we feel pin us down to the particular moral circumstance we have in front of us, to that singularity, to the hic et nunc that cannot but address us directly and immediately. The situation and the subjects present in it ‘talk to us’, granted that we are receptive, empathic enough to hear their voices.