In the last chapter I reviewed all the most important and striking criticisms proffered against empathy. What should be clear by now is that no matter what many politicians, psychologists, neuroscientists, ethologists, economists, or even our own common sense may say, empathy has limits and shortcomings, as well as biases. Empathy is fallible, manipulatable, and inaccurate. For some scholars, this makes it not only unsuitable for morality, but deleterious for it: empathy is not necessary and not sufficient for morality at best and dangerously noxious at worst.

What will now follow is in some sense a defence of empathy. It is not a defence tout court, an unconditional support for the case of empathy and an attack on all contrary theses. I will not proceed with the confutation of all criticisms cited against empathy. Empathy undoubtedly has its limits and it is not always a secure guide for acting morally, but it has, nonetheless, a central role to play for morality.

The structure of the following sections will, for the most part, mirror the one employed in the previous one, when discussing the critiques of Jesse Prinz. In other words, the main framework will be constituted by the analysis of the role of empathy in, respectively, moral judgement, moral development/education, and moral motivation/conduct. The boundaries will, nevertheless, not always be so rigid, as the issues at hand are fairly interrelated, hence, cross-references will be in order.

Now, as previously mentioned, the question to ask is: what is the role played by empathy in moral judgement?

I have already rejected some of the objections advanced by Prinz regarding the supposed unnecessity of empathy for moral judgement in the first part of this book. However, some questions have remained unanswered and now is the time to revert to those questions. It seems prima facie undeniable that we express at least some moral judgements without resorting to empathy. We are, for example, perfectly capable of judging that we have been wronged by someone else, though few people would dare to say that this judgement stems from empathy with ourselves. On the contrary, this kind of judgement seems to rely on the way we see the action. Thus, typically, for a sentimentalist (I take the case of sentimentalists in light of the fact that Prinz defines himself as such) if I react to a certain action with anger and I have a sense of having been treated wrongly, I have prima facie reasons to express a negative moral judgement against this action. Another way to reach the same conclusion is to examine the features of a given action (e.g. jumping the queue) and contrast them to certain rules of conduct that ought to be followed. Hence, if we have a social rule requiring queues not to be jumped, the instantiation of an action entailing this feature has to be condemned.

If you see no use for empathy in any of the above, it is because no degree of empathy is involved here. In other words, no matter where we decide to put our source of normativity (if in rules and principles, as deontological and consequential ethics would require, or in the feeling of certain ‘emotions’, as in the case of sentimentalist theories), at least in the case in which I am the victim of immoral treatment, empathy is not a player in the game. However, Prinz wants to go further than this, by claiming that there are also actions in which the victims are subjects different from me (see the list supra) and that, nonetheless, are judged as being immoral without any contribution coming from empathy.

Now, I believe Prinz is right: there are various moral judgements that we make daily without employing empathy; this is an undeniable truth. Nevertheless, I also believe that his position can be tackled on two fronts: the first is by highlighting how empathy and its influences on moral judgement can sometimes be hidden, but, despite that, are very much active. The second is by showing a noteworthy role that empathy can play in moral judgement which, far from making empathy the foundation of moral judgement, makes it nonetheless a crucial faculty when it comes to judging the behaviour of a moral agent, thanks to its connection with a notion that is normally related to morality and moral behaviour: that of intention. Let us start with the first objection.

Prinz, as seen in the previous pages, chooses the following actions as examples of immoral acts, the immorality of which does not rely on a judgement based on empathy: evading taxes, necrophilia, consensual sibling incest, destruction of unpopulated places in the environment, and desecration of a grave of someone who has no surviving relative. At closer look, however, three of those acts could (in principle) involve some kind of empathy. I am speaking of, respectively, tax evasion, environmental destruction, and grave desecration. In fact, though we are not confronted (when judging whether these actions are morally good or bad) with actual people with whom to empathise, we can use our imagination to think about how the consequences of these actions could affect other people. For example, we may simulate in our mind the negative feelings of people forced to pay more taxes because of the high number of tax evaders: their anger and, in the case of a low-income family, even their desperation. The same mechanism applies to the other two occurrences: we might empathise with the sadness of people who would no longer be able to enjoy the forest we burned down or we might imaginatively put ourselves in the place of the dead and think that we would like our grave to be treated with respect. Naturally, the fact that all these actions can be judged as morally wrong on the base of empathy does not mean that empathy is always at the root of all our moral judgements. Other principles may take on this role. However, the fact is that it can do so, and as such, it cannot be easily dismissed.

The cases of necrophilia and consensual incest are more complex. One could sustain that even in the case of necrophilia it is possible to put ourselves in the place of the dead person to see that what the necrophile is doing is deeply wrong. However, it is true, intuitively, that empathy is not the first emotional (or emotional-related) reaction we have when contemplating these cases. On the contrary, our first natural answer is disgust. The truth is that we normally feel these kinds of acts, even before considering the violation they represent for social or ethical norms, as intrinsically disgusting. Our negative judgement is from the very beginning driven by this strong emotion of revulsion and Prinz is surely right to affirm that empathy does not even come into play, here. Disgust is ipso facto sufficient for a condemnation of this action.

Since I agree with Prinz on this matter, I will not investigate this point further, and I will instead focus on the second kind of consideration about the role of empathy for moral judgement.Footnote 1

1 The Epistemic Role of Empathy

At first glance, morality seems to be a matter of actions and of consequences stemming from these actions. We look at a certain action and see its outcome and we then judge if the action was good or bad. We say, for instance, that killing an innocent person is bad or that giving to a charity is good. Sometimes, we jump from the moral judgement of an action (or of more than one) to the moral judgement about the person themselves, for example, we say that a man who frequently kills innocent people, like a serial killer or a terrorist, is a bad person. Conversely, we normally deem the doctors who risk their lives to help people in need in warzones to be good people.

However, it seems that, when judging the morality of a certain action, the intention of the agent also plays a huge role. Interestingly, the intention of the agent is a dimension of morality that concerns all the main ethical theories. Both consequential and deontological ethics, for example, have at their core principles that agents have to take as their aims before acting, which means to say that the agents’ intentions must be in accordance with these principles. Thus, for instance, a utilitarian ought to have the intention of maximising the happiness and well-being of the majority of people, whereas a Kantian should intend to follow the requirements of the categorical imperative. But the role of intentions is central in other ethical systems, too. Take the case of virtue ethics and of the ethics of care. In the first, the intention of the agent who wants to act morally must be addressed to the instantiation of virtue (depending on the case, they have to perform, such as, a courageous or a generous act, or something similar). In the second one, the intention of the agent must be that of a person who has other people at heart, a person who cares for them. Even in everyday morality we tend to credit the intention of the agent as having a crucial importance. When, for instance, someone does something wrong to us, that person can apologise and hope for our forgiveness by saying: ‘It was not my intention.’ We recognise the centrality of intention also in the legal field. In the court of law, a felony is judged as more or less serious depending on whether it is deemed as having been intentional or not.

Hence, although the views about the axiology of moral judgement, that is, about what should be judged ‘moral’, is anything but unitary, it seems rather safe to affirm that whatever our position is in ethics, the intention of the agent must in any case be taken into account together with the action which is carried out by him or her. Granted that we agree on this issue, empathy comes to assume a special significance in this regard. In fact, empathy—so I claim—can make not only the emotions, but also the beliefs and the intentions of others transparent to me. Put in another way, empathy makes visible the reasons why an agent acts in a certain manner. This feature of empathy, which is part of what we may call its epistemic role,Footnote 2 is what makes it such an irreplaceable instrument for morality. In fact, if the intention and the reasons behind an action of a subject indeed matter—from a moral perspective—not less than the action itself, then empathy’s role becomes key. Let us see, with the help of a practical example, how this can work. This example comes from personal experience. I find it quite interesting, as it shows reasonably well how empathy can work both in refining our moral judgements and in furnishing reasons to judge the behaviour of someone else in moral terms.Footnote 3

2 The Effects of (Empathic) Lingering

During my months spent in Germany as a PhD candidate at the FU Berlin with my second supervisor, I had to have an operation. Luckily, it was a minor one, but of course such happenings are generally never pleasant, and they are especially unpleasant when undergone in a foreign land, with a foreign health system, where doctors speak in a foreign language (it does not matter how familiar you think you are with it, technical language can always surprise you), and when you are alone, far from family and friends. After the operation at the hospital, the doctor told me to come back the next day, so that she could change the bandage and see if the wound was clean and was healing correctly. I remember that she told me explicitly to come at 14:00 on the next day. I said that I would have come at that time and I thanked her.

The next day, punctual as a Swiss watch, I was in the hall, waiting to be examined. Even if I was merely there for a quick check of my wound, I had to pay the maximum fee, because, as a resident of Switzerland, I was not covered by my Italian, and hence European, health insurance. I sat for an hour, then two. After two and a half hours, I tried to speak with the nurses and doctors who passed by, telling them that I was told to come at 14:00 for a very short visit and no one had examined me, yet. They seemed cross and told me that it was perfectly normal to wait that long in a hospital when there are people in more severe conditions. I knew they were right. I am aware of how things work in a hospital: after all, my mother was a nurse and my father is a surgeon and they have been working in a hospital for their entire lives. But still, I found it very strange that I was given an appointment at an exact time, and no one at least had the courtesy to come and tell me how long I might be expected to wait. I told myself that maybe they were struggling with unforeseen emergencies and I sat down once again. Over the hours that followed I kept on sitting there while I watched all the other people who had arrived well after me receiving medical attention, and I was there, waiting for my personal Godot. I remember having thought: ‘You should go, Manuel. Nobody will come for you. Just leave!’ But I could not. I had paid an expensive fee to be treated and I had waited for so long. I just could not bear the thought of leaving without accomplishing anything and with the risk that five minutes after my departure the doctor might arrive. So I stayed. For five long hours. From two to seven o’ clock. At the end I was angered and exhausted. I was literally overwhelmed with feelings of frustration and unable to understand why this had happened. I was the only one left in the hall and I had been among the first to arrive. I wondered what could possibly justify such treatment? While I was still asking myself these questions and looking for possible answers, I saw ‘my’ doctor arrive. It was the otolaryngologist who had operated on me the day before. I raised my head and looked at her, she glanced at me for a moment and I thought that she was going to say something. But she did not. She turned her head and did so as if to walk away. I could not let her run away, so, I stood up and reached her. I remember having told her that I had been waiting for five hours, that I had arrived punctually at two o’ clock, as she had asked from me. Then I wanted to ask her if it was possible for her to examine me, but I could not, because her quick and rather abrupt reply interrupted my flow of speech: ‘Yeah, well, it’s not my fault! What can I do? It’s not my fault if I haven’t had the time. I’ve also been here the whole afternoon, you know?’ She was really on the defensive and attempted to excuse herself by refusing any kind of accountability. She never said ‘I’m sorry.’ Not once. Not even a ‘I’m sorry, but…’.

I told her that I understood her and that I got the point, but that she could have been honest with me and let me know as soon as she noticed that the day was going to be a very busy one. After that, I wanted to ask the question I could not ask the first time, that is, if she could check me over now. But, once again, I was interrupted: ‘This is a hospital, what do you expect? It is possible that you might be waiting for hours. If you don’t like that, you can go to a private clinic!’ I didn’t know what to say. This was not the point at all. Of course I could have gone to a clinic in the first place, but she was the one asking me to come at 14:00 that day, hence I was bound to her by her promise to examine me and by the fee I had paid. How could I just leave? I explained all of this to her, but she just shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, and told me yet again: ‘What can I do? It’s not my fault.’

I gave up. I could feel my frustration and my irritation boiling up in me and I certainly did not want to verbally assault the doctor who had operated on me the day before and who very likely had had a stressful day. So I stopped talking, hoping that she would understand my situation and, since it would have taken no more than five or ten minutes, maybe offer to examine me right then and there. But she did not. As soon as I shut my mouth, she turned around and walked away. A few minutes later I saw her out of uniform, dressed in street clothes, ready to leave the hospital. It was simply too much to bear: I got up, took my things, and left the hospital, too.

Now, let us analyse what happened at the psychological level and what role empathy played. Five hours spent like this, waiting for such a short visit, while watching other people who had arrived after you being dealt with before you, would test the patience of anyone in the world to the limit. It is normal to feel frustrated and annoyed, and it is easy and understandable to blame others (in this case the staff of the hospital) for causing you all this distress. Nevertheless, I refrained from doing that and empathy was the reason I was able to do it. I perfectly remember how I was trying to change my judgement about the doctors by empathising with them. I thought that it must be difficult to handle all those patients, they are forced to make choices and they have to give preference to people who have worse injuries and pathologies than me. I constructed entire narratives and imagined that the doctors were probably dealing with several emergencies, and, although maybe more stressed than me, they were trying to do their best to help everyone there.

What I carried out was in fact a high-level empathic process, which I shall label lingering. To empathically linger with others means dwelling, as it were, in the others’ inner world. It means trying to see the world with the eyes of others, by taking their perspective and by simulating their feelings, beliefs, and intentions. Of course, we will never be able to perfectly feel or think like others do, but we can get close to that, and the more information we have on others and on the situation they face and the more our empathic skills improve, the more consonant our thoughts and emotions will be with regard to them.

This is exactly what I did: I tried to imagine being a doctor in the emergency department of a hospital during a busy day and asked myself what it would be like. I used the stress that I felt while waiting to simulate the stress they might have been having during that day and I was able not only to understand, but, somehow, to feel that, despite all the good intentions they might have and in spite of all their efforts, they were simply unable to offer the best of the services.

Hence, my empathic process had three positive effects: it helped me to identify the situation correctly Footnote 4; it managed to refine my judgement about the hospital’s staff (they were not unprofessional, unkind, or disorganised, they were just extremely busy and stressed); and it slightly lightened my mood by appeasing my frustration.Footnote 5

Then, time passed by, and a profound sense of vexation arose in me. I had the impression of having totally wasted my day and when I addressed my doctor I was exhausted, drained of all my physical and psychic energies. I remember that I fundamentally expected two things from her: the first was to hear that she was sorry. Obviously, I did not want her to beg me for forgiveness or something similar, but I would have liked her to have empathised with my frustration and tell me she was sorry for not having checked on me, as she had arranged only the day before. Footnote 6 The second thing I wished she had done was to suggest examining me at that time, when she had finally finished her shift. Of course, I knew all too well that she was presumably tired, possibly even more so than me, but given the fact that she knew how long I had been waiting for that examination, that I had paid, and how short and easy my check-up would have been, I had hoped that she could empathise with me and dedicate ten minutes of her time, before going home. But, as I have already mentioned, nothing of that kind happened and, thus my claim, that lack of empathy was the cause for it. A brief analysis of the event will hopefully substantiate this thesis.

The reaction of the doctor clearly indicated a closure on her side: she was not willing to listen to me and the fact that she interrupted me more than once is an additional proof. The words she used are also symptomatic in this regard: far from telling me that she was sorry, she invested her energies in informing me that she was not responsible for the situation, nor for her inability to examine me. She made no attempt to empathise with me, to feel what I felt, nor understand that all that was needed was for her to simply tell me if my wound was clean and healing satisfactorily.

I find this particular example remarkably interesting, in fact, in addition to illustrating another side of the connection between empathy and moral judgement, it outlines two other crucial features that we are going to investigate more in depth further in the book, that is, the link between empathy and moral motivation and that between empathy and moral perception. The interplay of these different elements is extremely complex and it requires a deconstruction of the example.

The way the doctor replied to me and her decision to leave were, for me, a cause of profound distress, frustration, and resentment, and thus, after having used empathy to counter these feelings and hold a positive (moral) judgement about the hospital staff, I was now unable to do so. My judgement had radically changed: the behaviour displayed by the doctor was the definitive evidence of the lack of care and empathy for me and my situation. This deficit could not but lead me to reconsider the narrative I had been constructing: that of caring doctors willing to help but unable to do so because of the many urgent cases they had to face. Now the doctors (or, at least, that doctor) deserved my resentment and my moral blame, because she had shown with her actions, as well as her words, an unwillingness to undertake her responsibilities and do what she ought to do. To be clear, I do not want to claim that her behaviour was plainly immoral (that would be an undue exaggeration), my argument is rather that she had an occasion to do what would have been moral (helping me out by examining me at a very low cost in terms of her time) and she chose not to do so.Footnote 7 By doing that, the doctor failed an occasion to do ‘the moral thing’ and, from the point of view of a virtue ethicist, she showed a certain deficiency of virtue.

Now, some may object that the problem with the doctor’s behaviour was not her lack of empathy for me, but the fact that she did not perform the action that she ought to perform (i.e. to examine me). In other words, my resentment towards her and my negative moral judgement about her behaviour do not stem from her absence of empathy, but from her failure to fulfil her commitment towards me. Put yet in another way, it is wrong to read the situations through sentimentalist glasses, since the issue can be more easily examined in deontological terms: in my mind, the doctor had a duty towards me; the unfulfillment of this duty is hence the real cause of my moral disapprobation, whilst the role of empathy is marginal or non-existent at all. Had the doctor seen me, my judgement about her would have been positive, no matter whether empathy was or was not effectively in play.

3 The ‘Moralising Power’ of Empathy

This is a very strong objection and it deserves my attention. I have no problem in conceding that the situation can be considered in deontological terms and that, in any case, the performance of a certain action is what is central in my moral judgement about the doctor. Nevertheless, it seems that empathy can, in certain cases—and this is one of them—have an indirect influence not only on moral motivation, but on the way we normally judge other people. What struck me as ‘immoral’ (or, at least, as ‘not so moral’, as ‘less than morally virtuous’) in the doctor’s behaviour was not the lack of fulfilment of a certain duty, but her lack of empathy. I would have accepted hearing something like: ‘I am so sorry for what happened. I know how frustrating it might have been for you, but today was a rough day for everybody here. I know I should have seen you, but there simply was no time!’ What I could not accept was a total rejection of responsibilities, the coldness in her manner, in the expression of her face, and in the words she pronounced, which clearly revealed her unwillingness to empathise with me. I received the impression that there was an insurmountable wall between us, which impeded any kind of fruitful communication. If she had shown empathy towards me, she would have managed to see my reasons as reasons for her to come to my aid and to see that it was morally reprehensible for her to refrain from examining me.

Judging from her answer, I am sure that the doctor had considered the situation at hand through the lens of moral indifference. She believed, in other words, to only have a duty to help patients (starting from the people in the most serious condition) during her working time, but not past it. Now, my claim is that if she had had empathy, she would have seen the situation as intrinsically moral and as requiring a precise action on her part. Here we come to another crucial effect brought about by empathy: its moralising power. I claim that empathy has the power to moralise what can appear prima facie as being morally indifferent. This is so for the very good reason that when you take into account the feelings of another and you acknowledge the fact that you have a certain power over those feelings—or, which is the same, that you have an impact on the way another subject can be affected by you and your actions—then you are also fully aware of the responsibility that derives from your influence on the other. Of course, you may find an excuse to avoid these responsibilities and consequently refrain from acting. Or, alternatively, there may even be cases in which acting morally requires that you hurt the feelings of the other for the sake of a greater good (as when the father of a diabetic child denies them an ice cream, thereby making them sad but safeguarding their health), nevertheless, even in these cases, the judgements we make seem to be better off with empathy playing its part. In order to show that, I am going to analyse in the next chapter the connections between empathy and moral perception, that is, between empathy and our ability to see certain situations as inherently moral and as requiring a moral action on our part.