I wrote this book with the intention of making it understandable and interesting both for laypeople and for researchers from other disciplines, in the belief that the questions raised and the answers given might have significance for a larger audience than solely a philosophical one. After all, an illustration of the nature of empathy, its phenomenology and functioning, as well as its role within the ethical sphere should be an endeavour welcomed by a variety of individuals and constitute a knowledge which can be useful and fruitful in many different domains, such as the social, the psychological, but also the political and the economic. In fact, the choice of whether to encourage and develop, or, conversely, to disincentivise a culture of empathy, are questions that concern first and foremost our political and economic representatives.

In this respect, I think that this work of mine has the merit to renounce the partisan and senseless polemic between a priori supporters and critics of empathy and constitutes an attempt to offer an alternative and, as much as possible, an impartial theory that I hope will be a small step in the right direction; the same position which, in my modest opinion, international research on empathy should adopt in the years to come.

The claims defended in this book are many. We started with an epistemological analysis of the empathic phenomenon and marked its limits from other similar phenomena, such as sympathy or compassion. We also discussed several approaches to empathy and ways in which we can empathise with others, concluding that it was sensible to divide empathy into a more basic and conceptually poor form (low-level empathy) and a more complex and mentalistic one (high-level empathy).

After that, we shifted to the central theme of this thesis: the study of the possible moral roles empathy can play. We conducted an exhaustive reconstruction of the main criticisms made by anti-empathists against empathy and confuted the majority with various arguments. However, ours was not a mere defence, aimed at the confutation of anti-empathic positions: in fact, we attempted to show how empathy can be useful and often even necessary for the principal dimensions of morality, namely, moral perception and judgement, moral education and development, and moral motivation and conduct. In particular, we highlighted that empathy can enrich and refine moral judgement by means of its function as information-gatherer and, what is more, that it plays an essential role in moral perception (which, in turn, is central in moral judgement).

Furthermore, we saw that, at the present state of research, it is rational to conclude that empathy is necessary for moral education as well and that its benefits for moral development appear to be beyond all doubt. Specifically, we asserted that empathy should become a habit, a kind of ‘second nature’, and we showed both at the theoretical and at the practical level what benefits this approach brings. We then observed how empathy differs from sympathy in that it does not require approval of what the other thinks or feels, but only openness and receptivity. Sympathy implies a positive assent towards the other, but not empathy.

We then spoke of empathy as a powerful motivator and defended the view in which empathy can be considered a virtue, and, in this guise, as an essential character trait of the virtuous person and fundamental for their (typical) moral agency or conduct. Finally, in the last chapter, we examined contexts in which empathy is either suppressed or heavily limited and concluded that even granted the few biases that can affect this phenomenon, building an ethics without empathy would be a mistake not less unforgivable and imprudent than, as the expression goes, ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’.

Empathy is not always and necessarily right. It does not always and necessarily bring out the best in us; it is not always and necessarily a guarantee for the instantiation of moral behaviour. On the other hand, nothing does. Empathy is fallible, as all our capacities are; it is manipulable and prone to biases, but so is reason, too. However, given its potential for morality, the solution to this matter can hardly be the eradication of empathy from the moral sphere. The claim that this work of mine supports is that we simply need to learn not only to think straight, but to ‘empathise straight’. We have to educate our faculty of empathy so that it can become increasingly more reliable within the ethical field.

Of course, all of the above would not make any sense if we were not be able to introduce, perhaps even to encourage, a form of mentality that is not yet deeply rooted in mankind: a mentality that would surely need time to grow, to develop, to spread, but that is already there, albeit latently; a concept that we are all connected, all linked to varying degrees. We said earlier that morality should govern our mutual relations. Now empathy, by making these interrelations visible, and, especially, possible in a full-fledged form, Footnote 1 by making us assume the perspective of others, becomes essential for ethics, which, inter alia, aims at governing these interrelations under the idea of the Good and the Right. Empathy is the means by which to flesh out this still often unexpressed potentiality of mankind. This is certainly no easy task but the fact that the path is hard to travel does not mean that it should be discarded. Also, the fact that the objective can even seem at times as beyond our reach does not mean that we should abandon the fight. Because if we lose our capacity to fight for what is good, then we lose, more than any other capacity we have available to us, what makes us truly moral.