Abstract
In recent years, empathy has received significant popular attention from scholars and pundits who believe it is the basis of the moral life, and who suggest that developing empathy will be the solution to our moral failings. When Phoebe Prince, a 15-year old from South Hadley, Massachusetts, committed suicide after being bullied by her schoolmates, TIME magazine ran a story stating that research in empathy suggests that it is a “key, if not the key, to all human social interaction and morality.”1 Psychologists and moral educators interviewed for the article argued that to prevent severe bullying in schools, students needed to be taught how to “put themselves in another person’s shoes,” so that they can consider others’ feelings and stop abusing their peers. In a similar vein, political advisor and activist Jeremy Rifkin states in The Empathie Civilization that empathy is the “social glue” that keeps society functioning as a cohesive whole. “Without empathy it would be impossible to even imagine a social life and the organization of society … Society requires being social and being social requires empathic extension.”2
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Maia Slalavitz (2010) “School Bullying Prevention: Teach Empathy at a Young Age,” TIME, April 17.
Jeremy Rifkin (2009) The Empathie Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, New York: Penguin Group, p. 42.
Martin Hoffman (2000) Empathy and Moral Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chapter 3.
Lipps’ original interest was the psychology of aesthetics, but Titchener shifted the emphasis to psychology and tried to explain the content of empathy in greater detail than Lipps originally did. According to Lipps, empathy involves inner imitation, and a projection of the self into the objects of perception. See Wispe’s discussion, “History of the Concept of Empathy,” in Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (1987) Empathy and Its Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–21.
This aspect of empathy has been emphasized by Karsten Stueber as relevant to gaining knowledge of other minds, especially in the social sciences, and serves as the foundation for my view that empathy has four epistemic functions, which I describe in Chapter 3. See Karsten Stueber (2006) Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology and the Human Sciences, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Michael Slote (2007) The Ethics of Care and Empathy, New York: Routledge, pp. 13, 16.
Holton and Langton argue that empathy cannot be the basis for morality because it will be completely sentimental and subjective, and not objective or systematic. Richard Holton and Rae Langton (1998) “Empathy and Animal Ethics,” in Dale Jamieson, ed. Singer and his Critics, Oxford: Blackwell Press, pp. 228–229. I agree that it is not the basis of morality, but believe it should have a prominent role in moral deliberation.
Diana Meyers (1994) Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy, New York: Routledge, Chapter 6.
C. Daniel Batson (2009) “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 4–8.
See Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Gallese, V. and Fogassi, L. (2004) “Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions,” Cognitive Brain Research, 3 (1996) 131–141; Gallese, V., Keysers, C. and Rizzolatti, G. “A Unifying View of the Basis of Social Cognition,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 396–403.
Iacoboni, M. (2009) “Imitation, Empathy, and Mirror Neurons,” Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 1–19.
See Hastings, Paul D., Zahn-Waxler, Carolyn and McShane, Kelly, “We Are, by Nature, Moral Creatures: Biological Bases of Concern for Others,” in Handbook of Moral Development, edited by Melanie Killen and Judith Smetana, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006.
See especially Ian Ravenscroft (1998) “What is it Like to be Someone Else? Simulation and Empathy,” in Ratio, XI, 170–185;
Robert M. Gordon (1995) “Simulation Without Introspection or Inference from Me to You,” in Mental Simulation, ed. Martin Davies and Tony Stone, Oxford: Blackwell
Paul Harris (1992) “From Simulation to Folk Psychology: The Case for Development,” in Mind and Language, 120: 120–144.
See Alvin Goldman (1995) “Simulation and Interpersonal Utility,” in Ethics, 105: 709–726. See also Robert M. Gordon (1995) “Sympathy, Simulation, and the Impartial Spectator,” in Ethics, 105: 727–742.
Alvin Goldman (1993) “Ethics and Cognitive Science,” in Ethics, 103: 337–360
Alvin Goldman (1995) “Empathy, Mind, and Morals,” in Mental Simulation, ed. Martin Davies and Tony Stone, Oxford: Blackwell.
Carl Rogers (1959) “The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change,” Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2): 95–103, p. 99.
Described in Martin Hoffman (2000) Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
See Daniel Batson, C., Lishner, D., Carpenter, A., Dulin, L., Harjusola-Webb, S., Stocks, E., Gale, S., Hassan, O. and Sampat, B. (2003) “As You Would Have Them Do Unto You: Does Imagining Yourself in the Other’s Place Stimulate Moral Action?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(9): 1190–1201.
There is a significant amount of literature on psychopathy and autism, which I do not examine here. The most important discussions include Jeffrie Murphy’s (1972) “Moral Death: A Kantian Essay on Psychopathy,” Ethics, 82: 284–298;
John Deigh (1995) “Empathy and Universalizability,” Ethics, 105: 743–763;
R.J.R. Blair (1996) “Theory of Mind in the Psychopath,” Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, 7: 15–25;
Jeanette Kennett (2000) “Autism, Empathy and Moral Agency,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 52(208): 340–357;
Shaun Nichols (2004) Sentimental Rules, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Chapter 3;
David Shoemaker (2007) “Moral Address, Moral Responsibility, and the Boundaries of Moral Community,” Ethics, 118: 70–108.
Alison Denham (2008) “Psychopathy, Empathy, and Moral Motivation,” in Essays on Iris Murdoch, ed. J. Broakes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
There is extended discussion of this topic in the volume of collected essays by Walter Sinnot-Armstrong (2008) Moral Psychology: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development, Volume 3, Cambridge: MIT Press. This includes the following essays in this book: Victoria McGeer’s “Varieties of Moral Agency: Lessons from Autism (and Psychopathy),” Jeanette Kennett’s “Reasons, Reverence, and Value,” Heidi Maibom’s “The Will to Conform,” and Frederique de Vignemont and Uta Frith’s “Autism, Morality, and Empathy.”
Martin Hoffman was the first to recommend adopting a definition of empathy that embraced the various modes of empathetic responses. Martin Hoffman (1982) “Development of Prosocial Motivation: Empathy and Guilt,” in N. Eisenberg, ed. The Development of Prosocial Behavior, New York: Academic Press.
Martin Hoffman (1982) “The Measurement of Empathy,” in Emotion in Infants, ed. C.E. Izard, New York: Cambridge University Press.
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© 2011 Julinna C. Oxley
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Oxley, J.C. (2011). The Empathy-Morality Connection. In: The Moral Dimensions of Empathy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230347809_1
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