The Authority of Empathy (Or, How to Ground Sentimentalism) (original) (raw)

At the outset of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith famously observed that we routinely make judgments about the propriety of emotions on the basis of empathy, or what he and his contemporaries called ‘sympathy’. In this paper, I take for granted that Smith was correct. My question is, are these judgments legitimate? That is, do we understand what we mean when we make them? And can we justify them? I stake out answers to both questions as follows. (1) After clarifying what empathic judgments are, and the sense of ‘approval’ in question, I argue that empathic judgments involve a “gray” area of approbation between proscription and prohibition, or what I call the space of permission. (2) Although the content of empathic judgments and the permissive force they carry turns out to be very weak, I argue that the form of this judgment reveals itself to be grounded on the fundamental status or “dignity” we ascribe to ourselves as moral agents – albeit, not in the usual sense of agency. Empathic judgment isn’t premised on the dignity we assume for ourselves as rational agents (i.e. our “autonomy”). Instead, it is the dignity we assume for ourselves as affective agents. It is thus not rational dignity that grounds empathic judgments, but affective dignity. Defending this claim, and thereby delivering the normative grounds for (at least some) sentimentalist judgments, is the ultimate goal of this paper.