The Authority of Empathy (Or, How to Ground Sentimentalism) (original) (raw)
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2015
Ricevuto: 9 marzo 2015; accettato il 13 aprile 2015 █ Abstract Moral sentimentalism has seen a tremendous rise in popularity in recent years within contemporary meta-ethical theory, since it promises to delineate the normative domain in a naturalistically unob-jectionable manner. After showing that both Michael Slote and Jesse Prinz's sentimentalist positions fall short of fulfilling this promise, this essay argues that contemporary sentimentalists are advised to take their clues from Adam Smith rather than David Hume. While Hume was absolutely right in emphasizing the importance of empathy in the moral context, his official description of the mechanisms of empathy as articulated in the Treatise falls fundamentally short for this purpose. Adam Smith's conception of empa-thy, a conception that in fact is closer to some of Hume' remarks in the Enquiry rather than the Treatise, as essentially involving perspective taking and his appeal to the impartial spectator perspective...
Varieties of Empathy and Moral Agency
Topoi 33:1, 2014
Contemporary literature includes a wide variety of definitions of empathy. At the same time, the revival of sentimentalism has proposed that empathy serves as a necessary criterion of moral agency. The paper explores four common definitions in order to map out which of them best serves such agency. Historical figures are used as the backdrop against which contemporary literature is analysed. David Hume’s philosophy is linked to contemporary notions of affective and cognitive empathy, Adam Smith’s philosophy to projective empathy, and Max Scheler’s account to embodied empathy. Whereas cognitive and projective empathy suffer from detachment and atomism, thereby providing poor support for the type of other-directedness and openness entailed by moral agency, embodied and affective empathy intrinsically facilitate these factors, and hence are viewed as fruitful candidates. However, the theory of affective empathy struggles to explain why the experience of empathy includes more than pure affective mimicry, whilst embodied empathy fails to take into account forms of empathy that do not include contextual, narrative information. In order to navigate through these difficulties, Edith Stein’s take on non-primordial experience is used as a base upon which a definition of affective empathy, inclusive of an embodied dimension, and founded on a movement between resonation and response, is sketched. It is argued that, of the four candidates, this new definition best facilitates moral agency.
Moral Approval and the Dimensions of Empathy: Comments on Michael Slote's Moral Sentimentalism
Analytic Philosophy, 2011
Michael Slote's book Moral Sentimentalism constitutes a powerful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking defense of a sentimentalist position in normative ethics and in metaethics. While Slote is inspired by Hume, in developing his position, he takes his cues from contemporary research in developmental and social psychology, which emphasizes a close relation between our empathic capacities and our prosocial and altruistic motivation. In discussing Slote's book, I will therefore pay particular attention to exploring the various aspects of ...
In his recent work, Michael Slote argues that empathy is what Hutcheson called 'the moral sense'. The most innovative argument he offers for this claim is that our empathic reactions play a crucial role in fixing the reference of moral terms. I argue that Slote's bold proposal faces the main problems of analytical naturalism, as well as some of its own. I suggest that empathy may nevertheless play a more modest and indirect role in acquiring moral knowledge.
Indulgent Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator
Propriety and Prosperity, 2014
Cognitive neuroscience is in the midst of what has been called an ‘affective revolution,’ which places empathy at the center of a core set of moral competencies. While empathy has not been without its critics (Bloom, 2013; Prinz, 2011), both the radicals and the reactionaries routinely cite Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) as among the revolution’s vanguard. For Smith, justified moral judgment depends on the ability to sympathize – Smith’s term for the empathetic ability to imaginatively project into, or otherwise simulate the emotions of others. The impartial spectator is good at moral evaluation and the accurate assessment of the ‘fitness or propriety’ of another’s sentiments ‘can be found nowhere but in the sympathetic feelings of the impartial and well-informed spectator’ (TMS VII.II.i.49). This chapter aims to drive a wedge between the ideal of a merely sympathetic spectator and that of the impartial spectator.
Sympathy and Antipathy in the Extra-Moral Sense
This paper addresses the challenges that Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments implies for a democratic politics of compassion. Recent evolutionary research suggests that we are hard-wired to be in tune with the goals and feelings of others. The scientific confirmation that we have a highly evolved capacity for emotional mimicry has been hailed as showing that human morality is strongly anchored in the social emotions. Smith famously prefigures this research in his account of our capacity to automatically mirror others' emotions. Yet he also shows that our emotional attunement does not necessarily prime us to take others' goals and feelings into account or to do so impartially. He argues that vanity can motivate us to have sympathy for those who exercise or enjoy 'sovereignty' and antipathy for those who lack self-command. On his analysis, 'extramoral' vanity constrains compassion, motivating us to sympathize only with the sentiments of those whose sovereignty derives from their self-command or their elevated social status.
2001
Emotions can be the subject of moral judgments; they can also constitute the basis for moral judgments. The apparent circularity which arises if we accept both of these claims is the central topic of this paper: how can emotions be both judge and party in the moral court? The answer I offer regards all emotions as potentially relevant to ethics, rather than singling out a privileged set of moral emotions. It relies on taking a moderate position both on the question of the naturalness of emotions and on that of their objectivity as revealers of value: emotions are neither simply natural nor socially constructed, and they apprehend objective values, but those values are multi-dimensional and relative to human realities. The "axiological" position I defend jettisons the usual foundations for ethical judgments, and grounds these judgments instead on a rationally informed reflective equilibrium of comprehensive emotional attitudes, tempered with a dose of irony.