Overcoming Empathy’s Judgemental Biases

Abstract

In ‘Overcoming Empathy’s Judgemental Biases’ is the topic of the supposed biases empathy inherently has which is scrutinised in depth. In particular, it is shown that many of the biases attributed to empathy are in fact prejudices already present in the subject and which are not caused by empathy. Quite on the opposite, they can affect it. Examples from the literature, together with psychological and philosophical studies, are here discussed in order to demonstrate how empathy can help to overcome our prejudices, make us more receptive, disclose a world of values, and develop important ethical capabilities such as representative thinking.

In effect, all this arguing undoubtedly leads to an important role that empathy can play for moral judgement, thanks to what Oxley calls salience effect, Bloom labels spotlight effect, and what we have named the instrumental role of empathy. In other words, the morally virtuous person will instrumentally utilise empathy to find the best way to put their moral principles into practice. In fact, principles and norms are, by definition, general, whilst the subjects and the situations affected by our actions (and our judging) are always particular, hence, the practical application of moral rules requires a somewhat ‘inverse abstraction’ from the general to the particular. Given, for instance, the moral principle of helping people in need, the moral person might resort to empathy to better identify what this particular individual needs and how best can be helped. This is a significant function that empathy can fulfil and it surely offers an alternative vision of how even what Bloom sees as a bias, a limitation inherent to empathy (its spotlight/salience effect) can become an irreplaceable tool. However, I wish to argue for another effect that empathy can have.¹ Previously we spoke of the influence empathy has on moral perception. Now, it is time to speak briefly of the effect it can have on moral judgement itself.

We have seen, especially with the analysis of Bloom’s argumentations, how biased empathy can be. Studies from the field of psychology that appear to confirm the validity of many of Bloom’s criticisms are numerous. For instance, it was observed that we actually have a tendency to help single, individual, clearly identified persons more than anonymous, merely statistical ones, a phenomenon that is known in the psychological literature by the name of identifiable victim effect.² For example, you might very well empathise with the beggar you see near the exit at the train station and maybe give him some money, but you will probably remain unmoved by the millions of poor people living worldwide: empathising with all of them seems impossible, let alone helping them. The task seems beyond a person’s ability.

Another potentially worrying limitation of empathy regards its typical intergroup bias. In short, there is overwhelming evidence of the fact that there is a natural inclination across species to experience empathy towards members of one’s own group, which is also directly connected to an incentivising of helping behaviour towards these same members.³ Conversely, a lesser degree of empathy is felt for outgroup members.⁴ In humans, in particular, this phenomenon is often observed among people who belong to different ethnical, political, or social groups.⁵

1 Intergroup Bias

At this point I think I have to provide a brief explanation. Whilst the question of the identifiable victim effect will be analysed in the section about empathy and moral conduct/motivation, I have chosen to take issue with the intergroup bias here, in the section dedicated to moral judgement (and not in that dedicated to moral conduct and motivation). This is because I believe that these shortcomings affect moral judgement prior to moral conduct and motivation and that they have an impact on the way we act (or not) due to their deep influence on the way we judge. In fact, our judgements (i.e. what and who we deem morally good and bad, and why) are at the base of the kind of moral education we want to teach and what kind of actions we are ready to carry out. Indeed, if we pay attention to the reasons behind the existence of the intergroup bias, it is possible to see—and this is my claim—that they are not the product of a deficiency inherent in empathy, but they are caused by our own (cognitive, not necessarily emotional) beliefs and judgements. Also, present in this fact is contained a strong answer to the criticism made by Bloom (and, in part, by Prinz) about the parochialism of empathy. Bloom, in fact, by asserting that empathy is intrinsically parochial, ascribes a shortcoming to empathy which is not inherent to empathy itself, but to our own cognitive judgement. We feel less empathy for people of another ethnicity, of another land, of another language, culture, or religion, because we think that these are substantial differences, and not the other way around. Put in another way: since we think that certain classes or categories of people are profoundly different from us, we also tend to feel less empathy when we consider their conditions. I think that the more Bloom attempts to argue for the parochialism of empathy (and he is not alone in this effort, given the list of authors he cites), the more he makes visible the logical fallacy at the base of his attack. Take for instance the example he makes in the chapter The Anatomy of Empathy, p. 74 of his book Against Empathy:

Jonathan Glover tells of a woman who lived near the death camps in Nazi Germany and who could easily see atrocities from her house, such as prisoners being shot and left to die. She wrote an angry letter: “One is often an unwilling witness to such outrages. I am anyway sickly and such a sight makes such a demand on my nerves that in the long run I cannot bear this. I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds be discontinued, or else be done where one does not see it”.⁶

Bloom considers this example as showing not only that empathy does not always properly motivate to act morally (which, by the way, seems to me to be a rather weak statement: what kind of emotion can always do it?⁷) but also to imply that empathy is parochial. He repeats that several times in his book: Nazis, for instance, were capable of feeling a great amount of empathy for, say, German children or for animals, like dogs,⁸ but this empathic capacity was then just ‘turned off’ as a kind of switch, when dealing with other classes of people, such as Jews and other prisoners of the death camps. I argue that implying from this fact that empathy is parochial is a logical fallacy, in fact, on closer examination, it was the Nazi’s strong conviction—that Jews did not deserve empathy because they were not comparable to other Arian people—that guided them towards a morally unjust discrimination that then influenced their empathic ability as well. In other words, only the empathy of parochial people is parochial, because the prejudices that one has are then passed, almost via osmosis, to one’s own capacity for empathy and end up modifying it. This also amounts to saying that what makes these people really immoral is not their biased empathy, but their seriously reprehensible moral judgements and principles.

Nevertheless, to make the criticism of Bloom more complex by way of response, let us imagine a possible reply he might have to my argument. He may assert that what I have claimed proves one more time just how unreliable empathy is: it is such a biased process that it can be manipulated easily by the inculcation of immoral principles and offer no kind of defence against external or internal bias. If empathy reveals itself as unable to oppose a positive force to our darkest tendencies, then it is, at best, useless for morality and, at worst, deleterious, since it can strengthen our prejudices instead of helping us to change them.

To this criticism, two answers can be offered: on the one hand, although it is undeniable that empathy can in some cases bolster our biases, it can nevertheless also help us to overcome them; on the other hand, there is evidence that empathy is, in nuce, a positive force, but which also has the disadvantage that it can be corrupted. It seems in fact that babies have the ability to empathise with almost anybody, regardless of differences in terms of language, ethnicity, and other categories. However, an analysis of this will be offered in the chapter on moral development. Here, I will focus on the first question, that is: does empathy always reinforce our bias? If the answer is ‘not necessarily’, then we have to conclude that the criticism of Bloom is not definitive. As we will see, my claim is that empathy can, on some occasions, bolster our bias, whereas on others it can have the opposite effect. This amounts to saying that the two propositions: ‘empathy is biased’ and ‘empathy helps us to defeat our bias’ are both true and, hence, that the most effective way of dealing with empathy is not to deny it a moral role, but to invest our efforts in maximising its positive effects and minimising its negative ones.

There are countless examples that could be mentioned and discussed to show how empathy can motivate moral behaviour and change the prejudices driving our moral judgements and our moral perception. Indeed, a rather long and well thought-out list of them can be found, inter alia, in the 2011 article of Martin Hoffman Empathy, Justice, and the Law.⁹ However, there is one example that I feel I should cite, for many different reasons: its fame, in particular, in the Anglo-American context, the sheer quantity of philosophical investigations it has had, and, last but not least, the personal meaning it had for me when, as a teenager, I had the chance to read the following book. This example comes from the famous novel by Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

2 A Literary Case

The context is the following: Huckleberry “Huck” Finn is a teenager living in a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River, in the State of Missouri, when he decides to escape from the violent and constantly drunk father by taking a raft down the big river that he knows so well. The story is set around the 1840s, at a time when the Mississippi River is a long, wide body of water, mostly plied by many of the first steamboats, stretching for almost 4000 kilometres across ten different states: in short, the closest thing to a modern highway existing at that time. During his trip, Huck meets a black man named Jim, a slave escaping from his mistress Miss Watson, who wants to sell him in the infamous slave-market in New Orleans. Eventually, Huck will decide to help Jim escape and they will sail away together. Nevertheless, this is not an easy decision for Huck, and the analysis that follows focuses on the hesitations, the doubts, the reasons, and especially the emotions that lead him to make this difficult choice. As I have said before, this passage proceeded to become a topos and the subject of several studies,¹⁰ but whilst most of them were interested in the investigation of the rationality of our choices and on the phenomenon of the weakness of will (or akrasia), my focus is rather on the link connecting empathy with moral perception and moral judgement.

Now, before starting with this analysis, a possible argument could be made about the fact of whether to consider what Huck felt for Jim as empathy or as something else (notably compassion/sympathy). Critics of empathy might in fact want to make the claim that Huck was driven by compassion and not by empathy. Sabine Döring herself speaks in her insightful essay of Mitgefühl, a German word usually translated into ‘sympathy’ or ‘compassion’, which seems to imply that it was not empathy that she had in mind when reflecting on the emotion that influenced Huck’s moral perception of the situation. This said, I firmly believe that, if we take into consideration the description that Mark Twain gives of the situation Huck is facing and we speculate somewhat on the possible thoughts crossing this teenager’s mind, we will notice that empathy is a more suitable candidate than compassion for what Huck might have felt towards Jim. In fact, although having sympathy or compassion towards Jim would surely have made sense to Huck, we do not find explicit signs of this kind of emotion in the episode at hand. On the contrary, it seems that Huck makes his decision to run away with Jim rather unconsciously at the beginning, based on a certain empathy for him (after all, Jim is escaping from a bad situation like he is) and only thereafter does he come to think about all the implications of that choice.¹¹ Huck proves to have a strong emotional intelligence, and interestingly, he tries to motivate himself to return Jim to what he believes is his rightful owner (i.e. Miss Watson) by vividly imagining all the good things she has done for him and then imagining that what he is doing by helping Jim is not only wrong per se, but even a bad thing to do to her and that she does not deserve it. See the following lines:

Conscience says to me, “What had poor Miss Watson done to you that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how. That’s what she done.”

I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead.¹²

Notice how Huck tries to push himself to feel compassion for that woman and how he actually manages to feel it: he thinks of her as a ‘poor old woman’ and he uses features which are distinctive of empathy in order to simulate her loving and caring attitude towards him: ‘she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how’. Nevertheless, no matter how miserable he feels, Huck is not able to motivate himself to do what he thinks is right. Sabine Döring asserts that he could not, on account of the compassion/sympathy he felt for Jim, but I think she uses the word Mitgefühl for lack of a better term. After all, her focus in the mentioned article is not so much on the subtle difference between empathy and sympathy, but on how emotions can influence our moral perception, and it is clear that, in the end, Huck acted out of emotion and against his moral principles. It is only unclear what emotion he did actually follow. Furthermore, in German the two terms normally describing empathy, that is, Einfühlung and Empathie, are not remotely as commonly used as the word ‘empathy’ is in the English language, which suggests that also the mere familiarity with the term might have played a role in her word choice. My claim, as it should be clear by now, is that what Huck felt for Jim was not compassion (he seems to feel that more for Jim’s mistress than for Jim himself) but empathy. Huck was able to be ‘on the same wavelength’ with the former slave, to understand and feel the commonality of their ways to see the world, and to be, both conceptually and practically, ‘in the same boat’ as him.

Although Huckleberry had received a typical southern education and was raised to see nothing wrong in the practice of slavery, thereby showing that he had an intrinsically biased education, he ended up feeling for Jim that which no person with his same prejudices would normally feel for a black slave: empathy. Huck, in other words, did not see Jim as substantially different from himself: he treated him as an equal and allowed himself to be vulnerable toward him, which amounts to saying that he accepted the fact that he could rely on him, trust him, live together and share adventures with him, and, after and through all that, care for him and become friends with him. This was possible only because Huck made (we do not know exactly how consciously) an epoché, that is, he decided to suspend his (biased) judgement about Jim and about what he ought to do and he permitted himself to be touched by Jim’s humanity, the same humanity he also shared. He decided not to build a wall of prejudices, and this prepared him to feel empathy. As a consequence, by the time he let the prejudices learnt through his education come into play, the empathy he felt for Jim was already strong enough to successfully oppose his biased arguments and leave him torn by the profound disagreement between what he felt he should do (namely, help Jim) and what he knew it was his responsibility to do (i.e. take Jim to his ‘rightful owner’).

Towards the end of the novel, we find Huck writing a letter to Miss Watson telling her the place where Jim is hiding. Huck holds the letter in his hands, uncertain about what to do¹³:

And [I] got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and the night-time, sometimes moon-light, sometimes stormes, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could do for me, and how good he always was; and at least I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now […] I was a-trembling, because I’d go to decide, forever, betwixt two things and I knowed it.¹⁴

If we look at these lines and search for a trace of sympathy/compassion, we will not find it. However, what we will find is the presence of elements suggesting empathy and friendship stemming from it. Jim and Huck had the opportunity to share many experiences and the resulting emotions together: ‘we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing’. This co-sharing and co-living, what Heidegger would have called Miteinandersein,¹⁵ permitted the opening of the self to the other and the reaching of a proximity, a togetherness free from all barriers caused by prejudices, a positive kind of Fürsorge.¹⁶ True friendship between the southern youngster and the black slave was made possible by the powerful, although discreet, action of empathy: that of the low-level one (e.g. when Huck simply shared emotions, feelings, and thoughts with Jim in an unmediated and conceptually poor way) and that of the high-level one (e.g. when he contemplated the possibility of betraying Jim and imagined his probable reactions).

3 Empathy, Receptivity, and the Disclosure of Values

Of course, Heidegger famously regarded empathy with suspicion. He thought that this concept was invented to find a solution to the Cartesian solipsism: ‘Empathy’, wrote Heidegger, ‘is then supposed, as it were, to provide the first ontological bridge from one’s own subject, which is given proximally as alone, to the other subject, which is proximally quite closed off’.¹⁷ However, for Heidegger this is only a fake problem, in fact, empathy is not an original phenomenon and cannot be taken as the basis for the Mitsein (let alone the Miteinandersein), for the ‘Being-with’ itself is actually what renders empathy possible at all. Put in another manner, the Dasein originally lives in a Mitwelt and is never really closed in their own solipsism, because even the condition of being alone is nothing but a way of being with others. In the words of Heidegger: ‘“Empathy” does not first constitute Being-with; only on the basis of Being-with does “empathy” become possible: it gets its motivation from the unsociability of the dominant modes of Being-with.’¹⁸ Notice that the criticisms of Heidegger will surely hit the mark if empathy were intended as a way to overcome a sort of Cartesian solipsism. Nevertheless, as it should show clearly from the first theoretical part of the book, the concept of empathy defended here is totally in agreement with the phenomenological view (derived by the interpretation made by modern phenomenologists, such as Zahavi and Overgaard, of classic texts like those of Scheler or Merleau-Ponty) following which the Ego (or, in the Heideggerian vocabulary, the Dasein) is already originally in communication with the Other and the empathy of the Ego is nothing but the basic mechanism which mediates the encounter with the Other. As a consequence, following my own proposed concept of empathy, this should be intended as a particular form of Being-with-one-another, that is, to be in an empathic way with the other. It is exactly this special form of Miteinandersein that allows Huckleberry to have a different (moral) perception of Jim and of his moral duties towards him, dissimilar from those of the rest of the society in which he has been raised. Huck made what is required by true empathy: he suspended his judgement and made himself vulnerable, receptive towards Jim.

It is crucial to stress this point: whilst high-level empathy requires an active effort on the part of the empathiser, who has to imaginatively enact and simulate the other’s mental states, starting from their own past experience, their knowledge, and other behavioural and contextual cues to infer what is going on in the other, low-level empathy demands a sort of passivity on the part of the empathiser. It is, in some sense, the opposite movement: the empathiser does not have to project themselves onto the other (or, in any case, to form mental states which are consonant with those of the other), instead, they just have to let the other ‘flow’, as it were, into themselves. Under some aspects, this phenomenon is very similar to that of emotional contagion, but it is distinct from it because, as already mentioned, empathy is essentially an intentional mechanism, which means that it has a specific target and that we are aware of the fact that the mental states we have stem from empathy with the other.

Huck’s empathy for Jim, as we pointed out, goes in both directions: his low-level empathy enabled him to share emotions and experiences with Jim, thereby contributing to form a strong emotional bond between them, whilst his high-level empathy made its voice heard every time he imagined what would happen if he betrayed Jim: what it would mean for him, how he would react, thereby helping to shape a deeper sense of (pre-)culpability.¹⁹

However, there is more. We have said previously that being empathic comes to define a way of Being-in-the-world, a way of Being-with, and particularly of Being-with-one-another. We now add that this particular kind of modality of being is accompanied by a peculiar manner of seeing the world, of perceiving it, and, of course, of living in it. Notably, the empathic person is characteristically receptive towards others, their attitude is an attitude of openness. This granted, it is possible now to see how empathy has worked with Huck. Döring, accordingly to her position in considering Huck as showing compassion rather than empathy, says that there are aspects of Jim’s situation which come to the fore thanks to compassion and make Jim appear as a friend and thus as an equal with a justified need for freedom.²⁰ The idea is therefore that the compassionate person would focus on the pain and sorrow experienced by Jim and would take care of them, leaving all other aspects of the situation (the fact, e.g. that he is an escaped slave) in the background. However, we have argued before that it makes more sense to think of Huck as ‘more empathic than compassionate’, and now we see a confirmation of this. On closer inspection, Huck never ceases to see Jim as an escaped slave and, in some sense, a criminal, but this awareness goes hand in hand with the feeling that he deserves better, that he deserves what he, Huckleberry, deserves, that they are not as different as he might have thought once. In other words, it is not about ‘foregrounding certain aspects of Jim and his situation’ and compassionately putting others in the background. Rather, empathy puts everything in the foreground, it makes all aspects appear visible, but (and this is crucial) with different evaluative levels. Since the empathic person will be more aware of the similarities in terms of situations or conditions, and more receptive towards the emotional charge of the feelings experienced by others, these aspects of the situation will consequently receive more gravity as opposed to others. The more our empathy is refined, the more precise the evaluation of the importance of every single element will be. Huck’s empathy helped him to find an answer to the implicit question: ‘Should I consider Jim as a criminal, or as a fellow human being striving for freedom? How is he to be judged?’ Here is where empathy influences moral perception. As we have seen, empathy cannot but directly influence our way of seeing things. In its high-level form, in particular, empathy implies a perspective-taking, the looking at the world through the eyes of the other. The empathic experience can be very pervasive, as it surely was for Huck. Through the sharing of negative and positive emotions, Huck discovers that Jim is not so different from him: they both suffer and rejoice for much the same things. Through high-level empathy he becomes aware that they are both guided by similar values and principles, such as friendship and loyalty, and seek to achieve the same dreams, like freedom and happiness.

Notice that the moral perception facilitated by empathy is twofold: on the one hand, it ensures the identification of the abovementioned value, and, on the other hand, it assists with the choice of the moral action. In fact, we, as readers, see Huck’s decision to help Jim and his refusal to betray him as morally right, and, more importantly, as objectively right, not as right for Huck, for Jim, or for our modern forma mentis and the present values of our western society.²¹ We deem that the rightness of his choice and the values he has recognised are right in general, in that time as in ours and in the ages that will follow in the future. Notice that this is a typical characteristic of moral values. We see them as moral truths to be discovered and acknowledged, not as objects to be created or invented. This means that moral values have, in some sense, ‘always been there’, waiting to be detected by people advanced enough in their moral reasoning and moral perception to have the ability to see and acknowledge them.

Huckleberry’s example thus shows that empathy offers us the opportunity to enlarge our moral horizon by refining our moral perception and rendering us sensitive to values. We could, of course, decide not to open ourselves up to empathy by choosing to follow our prejudices; indeed, it would have been possible for Huck to have simply reported Jim from the very beginning. Another option, certainly, would be to empathise with people who would enhance our bias rather than helping us overcome it. Empathy per se is thus not always and not necessarily a guarantee of moral behaviour. Insights stemming from empathy need to always be questioned and scrutinised in light of our moral principles. We need, that is, to test the content of our empathic processes.

However, if we keep in mind Huck’s paradigmatic case, we cannot fail to notice that empathy can go further than our moral norms in detecting the right thing to do and in motivating us to carry it out. This introduces a difficulty: if there are cases in which trusting our empathic intuitions is better than following our moral principles, and others in which the opposite is true, on the basis of what exactly should we judge (and act) on each occasion? Unsurprisingly, such a difficult question has no easy answer. Arguably, we are perhaps best suited to provide a solution to this difficulty if we examine it from the point of view of a virtue-moralist. We can answer, in fact, that a morally virtuous person would know when to trust empathy and when to heed their rational principles. This subject would follow a bottom-up process in which, starting from the analysis of a certain situation and of the data gathered by empathy, a response would be devised and carried out. But this is not the only possible method. People who adhere to a definite ethical system with a fixed set of moral norms (e.g. the previously cited consequentialists or deontologists) would probably use empathy merely instrumentally, following its insights only in cases where these match the principles at the base of their ethical system. In other words, they would proceed in a top-down manner: judging from the moral rules and norms uppermost, they would then investigate whether empathy in the concrete situation at hand was able to enhance these principles with a useful amount of emotional charge or not. Much could be said about the utility and effectiveness of these two methods, but what seems to be beyond dispute is that empathy is an element of crucial importance, especially when the adopted moral system (often thanks to empathy itself) reveals itself as being biased or, anyway, fallacious. Hence, my claim is that it should be guaranteed that empathy always plays a role in moral decision-making and all of its intuitions are welcome. Then, the moral subject will judge in light of all possible considerations that can be drawn upon and act according to what was once called ‘conscience’, ‘inner voice’, or similar, and what is usually known nowadays as moral sense.

Before turning our attention to the connections between empathy and moral development, I want to address one final issue with the intent of offering a definitive answer to the charge of the supposed parochial and prejudicial nature of empathy. My aim is to show that there is something more worrisome for morality than a person driven by a biased and misplaced empathy, and it is a person unable to feel empathy at all. In fact, prejudices can be fought and overcome, often thanks to a redirection of empathy or a widening of it (as Huckleberry’s example has shown), but when empathy is totally absent, the results can be devastating and the hope for improvement remains a sheer utopia. The argument I am going to make starts with a quote from a philosopher that I am incapable of forgetting, even when I am not supporting his theses—Immanuel Kant—and this will take us to the Arendtian reflections on Eichmann. Finally, also with the aid of a philosopher too often and culpably forgotten in the international discourse on empathy—Arne Johan Vetlesen—I will try to make the point that moral judgement should never be prescinded from empathic considerations.

4 The Beneficial Effect of Empathy on Moral Judgement

We have spoken above of the concept of an imaginary tribunal, highlighting the role that HLE can play to put our personal judgement in communication with that of others (by anticipating it, simulating it, and comparing it). We have also stated that the Smithian idea of an impartial spectator emerges from an abstraction from our personal point of view by means of the consideration of the perspectives held by others. By empathising with others, I can gradually form the perspective of an impartial spectator, which will then help me to curb my own emotions and shape my judgements of approval and disapproval. Now, my claim is that this idea, so distinctively sentimentalist in its description, finds a most unexpected mirroring in the argumentation of a strict rationalist like Kant (though ‘purified’, as it were, from any reference to sentiments and affects). Take, for example, a telling passage of the Critique of Judgment, to be found in § 40:

[W]e must [here] take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared [by all of us], i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone else’s way of presenting [something], in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general and thus escape the illusion that arises from the ease of mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones, an illusion that would have a prejudicial influence on the judgment. Now we do this as follows: we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and [thus] put ourselves in the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that [may] happen to attach to our own judging.²²

According to Kant, the ‘maxim of enlarged thought’, the concept of the sensus communis embodies the following: ‘to put ourselves in the place of everyone else’, thanks to a faculty that is central to HLE also: the Einbildungskraft, that is, the ‘imagination’. Now, notice that even though emotions—as already mentioned—do not play a role here, the mechanism of imaginative enactment typical of empathy is in place. This is a kind of representative thinking,²³ that is of a thinking through imagination that renders the others—who are actually absent—present. This kind of thinking mirrors the enlarged representative mentality of empathy. It requires from the subject to be open to all sides, receptive to external demands. This mechanism seems to resonate (so finds Vetlesen, analysing the work of Hannah Arendt, and I agree with him) in many Arendtian considerations:

I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. […] The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would think and feel if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion.²⁴

What are the implications of these reflections? It is possible to notice that the Kantian insight that Arendt wishes to employ in the ethical and political sphere is that in order to judge particulars—and, needless to say, judging is always of particulars—we have to represent in our thinking the standpoints of all concerned. The way she found to immediately make this argument productive in the ethical domain was to put it in relation to the case of Adolf Eichmann. The refusal to judge constitutes, for Hannah Arendt, the greatest of evils in the political realm, and Eichmann came to embody exactly this lack of representational thinking, of sensus communis. Eichmann failed to judge because of his incapacity to represent others in his mind. The ethical discourse should focus, on her part, not around Eichmann’s supposed wickedness, but around his patent (so she believes) thoughtlessness. This is the worst among his sins. Hence, in summary, Arendt’s position is that Eichmann’s incapacity to act morally is caused by his incapacity to exercise judgement, which, in turn, is nothing but the consequence of his original incapacity to think; to think, that is, as a normal human being should do.²⁵ If we wanted to reduce it to a scheme, as Vetlesen does in his book,²⁶ we would have two intellectual (or conceptual) activities that then bring about a third, practical one: thinking → judgement → action.

This interpretation is undoubtedly interesting and insightful, but it suffers from at least two not-to-be overlooked weaknesses. The first is to be discovered in the rationalist tradition that influences Arendt and has her commit the classic idealistic fallacy of supposing (or subsuming) that action is necessarily preceded by thinking, when we know that this is not always the case. The second weakness is, if possible, even more remarkable. In Arendt’s reconstruction of judgement, there is a total absence of any kind of emotionality. However, it is common knowledge that emotions and feelings constitute a great and important part of who we are and that they can influence, if not even drive, our judgements. Leaving these elements out of the picture seems to be an act of undue over-intellectualisation. Furthermore, choosing not to talk about emotionality at all definitely ignores the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’, namely, the fact that Eichmann, to the surprise of many spectators of his (in)famous trial, remained perfectly cold, apathetic, showing no sign of emotion. Notably, Eichmann remained completely unmoved even at the moments of great psychological distress, when witnesses, for instance, broke down in tears. He appeared to be simply unaffected and disinterested, and the massive television coverage, together with the sheer amount of empirical evidence coming from the proceedings, clearly displayed this unaffectedness and this disinterestedness. However, curiously, almost no word by Arendt was dedicated to these features, which seems to substantiate the thesis that she indeed suffered—so to say—from intellectualist biases.

5 Empathy and Representative Thinking

Eichmann—so the claim I defend—did not seem to epitomise a man incapable of thinking in a correct, normal way; on the contrary, what he unambiguously showed was an incapacity to feel, to be affected like normal people would. Quoting Vetlesen:

The capacity he failed to exercise is emotional rather than intellectual or cognitive; it is the capacity to develop empathy with other human beings, to take an emotional interest in the human “import” of the situation in which the persons affected by his actions found themselves. To be more accurate, the empathy Eichmann failed to develop is not just one “emotional capacity” among others; rather, what I intend by “empathy” is people’s basic emotional faculty. Corresponding to this is my conception of “representative thinking,” that is, the mental process of making present to the mind the standpoints of those who are absent, as the basic cognitive faculty required for the exercise of moral judgment.²⁷

Let us try now to analyse this rather dense quotation. Vetlesen is convinced (as I also am) that the inability displayed by Eichmann is emotional, rather than cognitive. To argue for an intellectual or cognitive deficiency on the part of Eichmann, we would have to agree with the arguments presented by Arendt, based on the principles of a rationalist tradition that not every person would be ready to follow, whereas any individual who was present at the trial or was able to see it on television or read about it in the newspapers would notice the emotional failure exemplified by Eichmann. It was entirely plain to see. Now, Vetlesen claims that Eichmann lacks empathy, which should be considered as the most basic (and important) emotional capacity. This capacity, which involves, among other things, the capacity ‘to take an emotional interest in the human “import” of the situation in which the persons affected by his actions found themselves’, also corresponds to the concept of representative thinking, which is considered, in Vetlesen’s theory, as a cognitive process that is part of the bigger mechanism of moral judgement, and that other authors have alternatively called ‘cognitive empathy’, ‘mentalising’, ‘theory of mind’, or similarly. This process, which implies ‘making present to the mind the standpoints of those who are absent’, has, for Vetlesen, to work together with empathy as he intends it, as, respectively, the basic cognitive faculty and the basic emotional faculty required for the exercise of moral judgement.

This is exactly what I have argued for throughout the entire section. We have seen with Blum’s analysis that moral judgement needs moral perception and that moral perception needs empathy. Remember the example of Julio and Theresa: in one sense, Theresa was able to understand Julio’s situation as she had the cognitive faculty to imagine it. Nevertheless, there is a sense (and a crucial one) in which she was in fact unable to do this, for the good reason that she was not capable of feeling what is like to be in Julio’s situation. Therefore, we argued that empathy ought to be an integral part of any moral judgement, because to correctly judge a certain situation, or a given individual, it is necessary to take all the moral features into account, to have sensitivity for them, to perceive them. Now, Vetlesen helps us to better substantiate this concept. Moral judgement, he claims, is both a cognitive and an emotional process. These two dimensions have to work together because they are both integral parts of moral judgement. The rationalist (and specifically Arendtian) scheme for which from thinking follows judgement and then action has to be reconsidered. The real schema is the following: Perception → Judgement → Action.²⁸ Notice that perception is both a cognitive and an emotional process,²⁹ and so is judgement. Vetlesen thought that empathy and representative thinking were two different things. He saw in representative thinking the heir, so to speak, of the Kantian sensus communis and of certain Arendtian arguments and believed that it had to work in tandem with empathy. In the same spirit, I propose to combine the two in what I have called High-level empathy, which involves the capacity to be receptive to the emotions of others and, at the same time, and because of that, to keep in mind the others’ perspectives, to linger in their inner worlds. Empathy, in this sense, is exactly the mechanism for which Vetlesen was arguing, an essential component of moral judgement and moral perception, and, for this reason, a reply to both rationalist theories overemphasising the role of rationality as opposed to emotionality and to sentimentalist and neo-sentimentalist theories that minimise (or plainly criticise) the role of empathy, like that of Prinz.

6 Is Empathy Intrinsically Biased?

The proposed explanatory scheme is apt to offer a convincing elucidation of Eichmann’s and others’ similar failures to judge and act morally. Eichmann did not act morally because he was unable to judge morally, and he was unable to do this because of his incapacity to perceive morally. More precisely, Eichmann failed to perceive the Jews as fellow human beings, and this occurred because he failed to develop empathy towards them, to linger in their position, and, through this, to acquire an emotional interest in their situation. In other words, he remained unconcerned because he was unaffected. As a consequence, it is of crucial importance to stress the following point: the correct answer to a biased empathy is not the banishment of empathy from the moral kingdom, but a rectification of those biases. Also, notice that these biases are never a by-product of empathy itself, instead, they are the rotten fruit of a perverted reason. Critics of empathy, such as Paul Bloom, wonder how was it possible that Nazis were able to feel empathy for some categories of living beings and not for others, and they believe to have found an answer to that question by pointing the finger at empathy itself. However, I claim that it is mistaken to think of empathy as naturally biased: empathy’s only weakness resides in the fact that it is responsive to our convictions and can be manipulated and even perverted by them.³⁰ This assertion might sound odd at first, so let me clarify it. I am not claiming that empathy does not suffer, per se, from any in-group biases. In fact, it does. Research shows that, from a very early stage, children clearly display these biases.³¹ For example, Fehr and colleagues found that already from three and four years of age, children showed in-group favouritism in a game in which they had to share some stickers.³² Similarly, Dunham and colleagues found that five-year-olds privileged same-gender recipients in a resource distribution task, but, nota bene, in-group favouritism became negligible when group membership was determined by arbitrarily assigning children to different colour groups.³³ However, is empathy truly responsible for these in-group biases? It seems to me that empathy can at best be only indirectly responsible for the displayed favouritisms. In fact, the explanation should be sought in the identification within a given group. If children identify themselves as members of a group (as friends as opposed to strangers, or as boys as opposed to girls, or as pupils of section A as opposed to those of section B, and so on), then in-group biases may result. However, identification is not caused by empathy; on the contrary, it is the other way around: because one particular child identifies with a certain group, he or she will also tend to have more empathy for people of that group than for outsiders. This should bring us to another consideration: if this is the case, then it is not empathy per se that needs correction (or that deserves our moral condemnation), but the opinions which lead us to identify with a certain group and to develop suspicion—if not open hostility—towards the subjects we consider as part of an out-group.

This kind of explanation has the merit of providing an answer to the strange ‘Nazi-empathy’. As it should be clear by now, Nazis were capable of feeling spontaneous empathy for, say, other Germans or for animals, but they were also able to ‘turn it off’ when dealing with Jews and, in general, with members of persecuted groups. This could happen for the very good reason that Nazi propaganda was extremely effective, among other things, in depicting Jews³⁴ as less than human and even lower than animals. They constituted a class of hideous living beings with whom no form of identification or fellow-feeling was possible because they were not fellow humans in any sense of the word: they were enemies, and, what is more, they were inferior and repugnant. One of the authors that better described this matter was Martha Nussbaum, who in Upheaval of Thought wrote:

Thus for Hitler (and not only for him), the Jew is a maggot in a festering abscess, hidden away in the apparently clean and healthy body of the nation. […] Repeatedly, Nazis made Jews do things that would further associate them with the disgusting […] thus, in the spectator’s mind, linking the thought of Jewish worship to the thought of filth.³⁵

However, it is Primo Levi (quoted by Nussbaum), himself a prisoner in a concentration camp and who survived the holocaust, who offers the best description and unambiguously highlights the existing link between turning a category of human beings into a disgusting and hateful one, and thereby leading to a consequent incapacity to feel empathy, proximity, or identification with it: ‘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.’³⁶

The argument here is that when people feel more empathy for individuals they think are part of their in-group, it is wrong to consider this attitude as a shortcoming of empathy. This incapacity is the direct outcome of a tendency to divide the world in: ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. The error, the shortcoming, the bias (call it what you wish) is in thinking that we are not all equal members of one and the same humanity, that differences in gender, ethnicity, religion, culture, and such are substantial differences and can justify an almost ontological (if not ontic) separation. It is this attitude, and not empathy, that should be revised. It is not a new concept what I am arguing for. In fact, it is also to be found in religions, such as Christianism or Buddhism. We can, for instance, think of the proverbial parable of the good Samaritan (narrated in Luke 10, 25–37).

The facility is all here: not to dig ditches or build walls, but to consider oneself as part of a common, shared humanity. Of course, often it is empathy that achieves this: we have seen with Huckleberry’s case that it was the empathy spontaneously felt by the young boy that changed his convictions about black people. Therefore, often it is empathy itself that helps us to build a world free of prejudices. Nevertheless, there are contexts that favour more or less the rise of empathy, which means that it makes a considerable difference whether we raise our children to see unbridgeable differences between, say, blacks and whites or whether we teach them especially to see the many characteristics we share. In the first case, if empathy arises, it will be the exception; in the second, it will be the rule.

However, here we are entering the territory that will be the subject of the analysis of the next chapter, so, for the moment, I will not continue with these considerations. To sum up, we have seen once again, with the examination of Eichmann and the Nazi, that empathy should always be a part of the larger mechanism of moral judgement, because our cognitive faculties are not sufficient to convey the complexity of the emotional experience, nor do they guarantee alone a necessary instantiation of moral behaviour. What is more, if we turn off our empathic faculty, or if we manipulate it so as to feel it merely for some classes of people and not for others, we become unable to judge properly. On the contrary, if we introduce empathy to our moral judgements at any time, we will broaden our context of experience and reach more impartial verdicts. Empathy is, therefore, a necessary component of moral judgement.