## 1. Historical Introduction



Before the psychologist Edward Titchener (1867-1927) introduced
the term "empathy" in 1909 into the English language as
the translation of the German term "Einfuhlung" (or
"feeling into"), "sympathy"was the term
commonly used to refer to empathy-related phenomena. If one were to
point to a conceptual core for understanding these phenomena, it is
probably best to point to David Hume's dictum that "the
minds of men are mirrors to one another,"(Hume 1739-40
[1978], 365) since in encountering other persons, humans can resonate
with and recreate that person's thoughts and emotions on
different dimensions of cognitive complexity. While, as we will see,
not everybody shares such resonance conception of empathy(some
philosophers in the phenomenological tradition emphatically reject
it), it certainly constitutes the center of Theodor Lipps's
understanding, who Titchener had in mind in his translation of
"Einfuhlung" as "empathy." 



Theodor Lipps (1851-1914)was also very familiar with the work of
David Hume (see the introduction to Coplan and Goldie 2011 in this
respect). More importantly, it was Theodor Lipps, whose work
transformed empathy/Einfuhlung from a concept of nineteenth
century German aesthetics into a central category of the philosophy of
the social and human sciences. To understand this transformation we
first need to appreciate the reasons why philosophers of the
nineteenth century thought it necessary to appeal to empathy in order
to account for our ability to appreciate natural objects and artefacts
in an aesthetic manner. According to the dominant (even though not
universally accepted) positivistic and empiricist conception, sense
data constitute the fundamental basis for our investigation of the
world. Yet from a phenomenological perspective, our perceptual
encounter with aesthetic objects and our appreciation of them as being
beautiful--our admiration of a beautiful sunset, for
example--seems to be as direct as our perception of an object as
being red or square. By appealing to the psychological mechanisms of
empathy, philosophers intended to provide an explanatory account of
the phenomenological immediacy of our aesthetic appreciation of
objects. More specifically, for Lipps, our empathic encounter with
external objects trigger inner "processes" that give rise
to experiences similar to ones that I have when I engage in various
activities involving the movement of my body. Since my attention is
perceptually focused on the external object, I experience
them--or I automatically project my experiences--as being in
the object. If those experiences are in some way apprehended in a
positive manner and as being in some sense life-affirming, I perceive
the object as beautiful, otherwise as ugly. In the first case, Lipps
speaks of positive; in the later of negative empathy. Lipps also
characterizes our experience of beauty as "objectified
self-enjoyment," since we are impressed by the
"vitality" and "life potentiality" that lies
in the perceived object (Lipps 1906, 1903 a,b. For the contemporary
discussion of empathy's role in aesthetics see particularly
Breithaupt 2009; Coplan and Goldie 2011 (Part II); Curtis & Koch
2009; and Keen 2007. For a recent history of the empathy concept see
also Lanzoni 2018).



In his *Aesthetik,* Lipps closely links our aesthetic
perception and our perception of another embodied person as a minded
creature. The nature of aesthetic empathy is always the
"experience of another human" (1905, 49)**.**
We appreciate another object as beautiful because empathy allows us to
see it in analogy to another human body. Similarly, we recognize
another organism as a minded creature because of empathy. Empathy in
this context is more specifically understood as a phenomenon of
"inner imitation," where my mind mirrors the mental
activities or experiences of another person based on the observation
of his bodily activities or facial expressions. Empathy is ultimately
based on an innate disposition for motor mimicry, a fact that is well
established in the psychological literature and was already noticed by
Adam Smith (1853). Even though such a disposition is not always
externally manifested, Lipps suggests that it is always present as an
inner tendency giving rise to similar kinaesthetic sensations in the
observer as felt by the observed target. In seeing the angry face of
another person we instinctually have a tendency of imitating it and of
"imitating" her anger in this manner. Since we are not
aware of such tendencies, we see the anger in her face (Lipps 1907).
Despite the fact that Lipps's primary examples of empathy focus
on the recognition of emotions expressed in bodily gestures or facial
expressions, his conception of empathy should not be understood as
being limited to such cases. As his remarks about intellectual empathy
suggest (1903b/05), he regards our recognition of all mental
activities--insofar as they are activities requiring human
effort--as being based on empathy or on inner imitation (See also
the introductory chapter in Stueber 2006).


## 2. Empathy and the Philosophical Problem of Other Minds



It was indeed Lipps's claim that empathy should be understood as
the *primary* epistemic means for gaining knowledge of other
minds that was the focus of a lively debate among philosophers at the
beginning of the 20th century (Prandtl 1910, Stein 1917,
Scheler 1973). Even philosophers, who did not agree with Lipps's
specific explication, found the concept of empathy appealing because
his argument for his position was closely tied to a thorough critique
of what was widely seen at that time as the only alternative for
conceiving of knowledge of other minds, that is, Mill's
inference from analogy. Traditionally, the inference from analogy
presupposes a Cartesian conception of the mind according to which
access to our own mind is direct and infallible, whereas knowledge of
other minds is inferential, fallible, and based on evidence about
other persons' observed physical behavior. More formally one can
characterize the inference from analogy as consisting of the following
premises or steps.



> 
> 
> 
> |  |
> | --- |
> | i.) Another person *X* manifests behavior of type
> *B*. |
> | ii.) In my own case behavior of type *B* is caused by
> mental state of type *M*. |
> | iii.) Since my and *X*'s outward behavior of type
> *B* is similar, it has to have similar inner mental causes. (It
> is thus assumed that I and the other persons are psychologically
> similar in the relevant sense.) |
> | Therefore: The other person's behavior (*X*'s
> behavior) is caused by a mental state of type *M*. |
> 
> 
> 



Like Wittgenstein, but predating him considerably, Lipps argues in his
1907 article "Das Wissen von fremden Ichen" that the
inference from analogy falls fundamentally short of solving the
philosophical problem of other minds. Lipps does not argue against the
inference from analogy because of its evidentially slim basis, but
because it does not allow us to understand its basic presupposition
that another person has a mind that is psychologically similar to our
own mind. The inference from analogy thus cannot be understood as
providing us with evidence for the claim that the other person has
mental states like we do because, within its Cartesian framework, we
are unable to conceive of other minds in the first place. For Lipps,
analogical reasoning requires the contradictory undertaking of
inferring another person's anger and sadness on the basis of my
sadness and anger, yet to think of that sadness and anger
simultaneously as something "absolutely different" from my
anger and sadness. More generally, analogical inference is a
contradictory undertaking because it entails "entertaining a
completely new thought about an I, that however is not me, but
something absolutely different" (Lipps 1907, 708, my
translation).



Yet while Lipps diagnoses the problem of the inference of analogy
within the context of a Cartesian conception of the mind quite
succinctly, he fails to explain how empathy is able to provide us with
an epistemically sanctioned understanding of other minds or why our
"feeling into" the other person's mind is more than
a mere projection. More importantly, Lipps does not sufficiently
explain why empathy does not encounter similar problems to the ones
diagnosed for the inference from analogy and how empathy allows us to
conceive of other persons as having a mind similar to our own if we
are directly acquainted only with our own mental states(See Stueber
2006). Wittgenstein's critique of the inference from analogy is
in the end more penetrating because he recognizes that its problem
depends on a Cartesian account of mental concepts. If my grasp of a
mental concept is exclusively constituted by me experiencing something
in a certain way, then it is impossible for me to conceive of how that
very same concept can be applied to somebody else, given that I cannot
experience somebody else's mental states. I therefore cannot
conceive of how another person can be in the same mental state as I am
because that would require that I can conceive of my mental state as
something, which I do not experience. But according to the Cartesian
conception this seems to be a conceptually impossible task. Moreover,
if one holds on to a Cartesian conception of the mind, it is not clear
how appealing to empathy, as conceived of by Lipps, should help us in
conceiving of mental states as belonging to another mind.



Within the phenomenological tradition, the above shortcomings of
Lipps's position of empathy were quite apparent (see for example
Stein 1917, 24 and Scheler 1973, 236). Yet despite the fact that they
did not accept Lipps's explication of empathy as being based on
mechanisms of inner resonance and projection, authors within the
phenomenological tradition of philosophy were persuaded by
Lipps's critique of the inference from analogy. For that very
reason, Husserl and Stein, for example, continued using the concept of
empathy and regarded empathy as an irreducible "type of
experiential act sui generis" (Stein 1917, 10), which allows us
to view another person as being analogous to ourselves without this
"analogizing apprehension" constituting an inference of
analogy (Husserl 1931 [1963], 141). Scheler went probably the furthest in
rejecting the Cartesian framework in thinking about the apprehension
of other minds, while keeping committed to something like the concept
of
 empathy.[1]
 (In order to contrast his position from Lipps, Scheler however
preferred to use the term "nachfuhlen" rather than
"einfuhlen.") For Scheler, the fundamental mistake of
the debate about the apprehension of other minds consists in the fact
that it does not take seriously certain phenomenological facts. Prima
facie, we do not encounter merely the bodily movements of another
person. Rather, we are directly recognizing specific mental states
because they are characteristically expressed in states of the human
body; in facial expressions, in gestures, in the tone of voice, and so
on. Empathy within the phenomenological tradition then is not
conceived of as a resonance phenomenon requiring the observer to
recreate the mental states of the other person in his or her own mind
but as a special perceptual act (See Scheler 1973, particularly
232-258; For a succinct explication of the debate about empathy
in the phenomenological tradition consult Zahavi 2010)


### 2.1 Mirror Neurons, Simulation, and the Discussion of Empathy in the Contemporary Theory of Mind Debate



The idea that empathy understood as inner imitation is the primary
epistemic means for understanding other minds has however been revived
in the 1980's by simulation theorists in the context of the
interdisciplinary debate about folk psychology; an empirically
informed debate about how best to describe the underlying causal
mechanisms of our folk psychological abilities to interpret, explain,
and predict other agents. (See Davies and Stone 1995). In contrast to
theory theory, simulation theorists conceive of our ordinary
mindreading abilities as an ego-centric method and as a
"knowledge-poor" strategy, where I do not utilize a
folk psychological theory but use myself as a model for the other
person's mental life. It is not the place here to discuss the
contemporary debate extensively, but it has to be emphasized that
contemporary simulation theorists vigorously discuss how to account
for our grasp of mental concepts and whether simulation theory is
committed to Cartesianism. Whereas Goldman (2002, 2006) links his
version of simulation theory to a neo-Cartesian account of mental
concepts, other simulation theorists develop versions of simulation
theory that are not committed to a Cartesian conception of the mind.
(Gordon 1995a, b, and 2000; Heal 2003; and Stueber 2006, 2012).



Moreover, neuroscientific findings according to which so called mirror
neurons play an important role in recognizing another person's
emotional states and in understanding the goal-directedness of his
behavior have been understood as providing empirical evidence for
Lipps' idea of empathy as inner imitation. With the help of the
term "mirror neuron," scientists refer to the fact that
there is significant overlap between neural areas of excitation that
underlie our observation of another person's action and areas
that are stimulated when we execute the very same action. A similar
overlap between neural areas of excitation has also been established
for our recognition of another person's emotion based on his
facial expression and our experiencing the emotion. (For a survey on
mirror neurons see Gallese 2003a and b, Goldman 2006, chap. 6; Keysers
2011; Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004; and particularly Rizzolatti and
Sinigaglia 2008).

Since the face to face encounter between persons is
the primary situation within which human beings recognize themselves
as minded creatures and attribute mental states to others, the system
of mirror neurons has been interpreted as playing a causally central
role in establishing intersubjective relations between minded
creatures. For that very reason, the neuroscientist Gallese thinks of
mirror neurons as constituting what he calls the "shared
manifold of intersubjectivity" (Gallese 2001, 44). Stueber
(2006, chap. 4)--inspired by Lipps's conception of empathy
as inner imitation--refers to mirror neurons as mechanisms of
basic
 empathy;[2]
 as mechanisms that allow us to apprehend directly another
person's emotions in light of his facial expressions and that
enable us to understand his bodily movements as goal-directed actions,
that is, as being directed towards an external object like a person
reaching for the cup. 

The evidence from mirror neurons--and the
fact that in perceiving other people we use very different
neurobiological mechanisms than in the perception of physical
objects--does suggest that in our primary perceptual encounter
with the world we do not merely encounter physical objects. Rather,
even on this basic level, we distinguish already between mere physical
objects and objects that are more like us (See also Meltzoff and
Brooks 2001). The mechanisms of basic empathy have to be seen as
Nature's way of dissolving one of the principal assumptions of
the traditional philosophical discussion about other minds shared by
opposing positions such as Cartesianism and Behaviorism; that is, that
we perceive other people primarily as physical objects and do not
distinguish already on the perceptual level between physical objects
like trees and minded creatures like ourselves. Mechanisms of basic
empathy might therefore be interpreted as providing us with a
perceptual and non-conceptual basis for developing an
intersubjectively accessible folk psychological framework that is
applicable to the subject and observed other (Stueber 2006,
142-45). 


It needs to be acknowledged however that this
interpretation of mirror neurons crucially depends on the assumption
that the primary function of mirror neurons consists in providing us
with a cognitive grasp of another person's actions and emotions.
This interpretation has however been criticized by researchers and
philosophers who think that neural resonance presupposes rather than
provides us with an understanding of what is going on in the minds of
others (Csibra 2007, Hickok 2008 and 2014). They have also pointed out
that in observing another person's emotion or behavior, we never
fully "mirror" another person's neural stimulation.
The neuroscientist Jean Decety has argued that in observing another
person's pain our vicariously stimulated pain matrix is not
sensitive to the phenomenal quality of pain. Rather it is sensitive to
pain as an indicator of "aversion and withdrawal when exposed to
danger and threats"(Decety and Cowell 2015, 6 and Decety 2010).
At least as far as empathy for pain is concerned, our neural resonance
is also modulated by a variety of contextual factors, such as how
close we feel to the observed subject, whether we regard the pain to
be morally justified (as in the case of punishment, for example) or
whether we regard it as unavoidable and necessary, such as in a
medical procedure (Singer and Lamm 2009; but see also Allen 2010, Borg
2007, Debes 2010, Gallese 2016, Goldman 2009, Iacoboni 2011, Jacob
2008, Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2016, and Stueber 2012a). 



Yet it should be noted that everyday mindreading is not restricted to
the realm of basic empathy. Ordinarily we not only recognize that
other persons are afraid or that they are reaching for a particular
object. We understand their behavior in more complex social contexts
in terms of their reasons for acting using the full range of
psychological concepts including the concepts of belief and desire.
Evidence from neuroscience shows that these mentalizing tasks involve
very different neuronal areas such as the medial prefrontal cortex,
temporoparietal cortex, and the cingulate cortex. (For a survey see
Kain and Perner 2003; Frith and Frith 2003; Zaki and Ochsner 2012).
Low level mindreading in the realm of basic empathy has therefore to
be distinguished from higher levels of mindreading (Goldman 2006). It
is clear that low level forms of understanding other persons have to
be conceived of as being relatively knowledge- poor as they do
not involve a psychological theory or complex psychological concepts.
How exactly one should conceive of high level mindreading abilities,
whether they involve primarily knowledge-poor simulation
strategies or knowledge-rich inferences is controversially
debated within the contemporary debate about our folk psychological
mindreading abilities(See Davies and Stone 1995, Gopnik and Meltzoff
1997, Gordon 1995, Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, Heal 2003, Nichols and
Stich 2003, Goldman 2006, and Stueber 2006). Simulation theorists,
however, insist that even more complex forms of understanding other
agents involve resonance phenomena that engage our cognitively
intricate capacities of imaginatively adopting the perspective of
another person and reenacting or recreating their thought processes
(For various forms of perspective-taking see Coplan 2011 and Goldie
2000). Accordingly, simulation theorists distinguish between different
types of empathy such as between basic and reenactive empathy (Stueber
2006) or between mirroring and reconstructive empathy (Goldman 2011).
Interestingly, the debate about how to conceive of these more complex
forms of mindreading resonates with the traditional debate about
whether empathy is the unique method of the human sciences and whether
or not one has to strictly distinguish between the methods of the
human and the natural sciences. Equally noteworthy is the fact that in
the contemporary theory of mind debate voices have grown louder that
assert that the contemporary theory of mind debate fundamentally
misconceives of the nature of social cognition. In light of insights
from the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions in philosophy,
they claim that on the most basic level empathy should not be
conceived of as a resonance phenomenon but as a type of direct
perception. (See particularly Zahavi 2010; Zahavi and Overgaard 2012,
but Jacob 2011 for a response). More complex forms of social cognition
are also not to be understood as being based on either theory or
empathy/simulation, rather they are better best conceived of as the
ability to directly fit observed units of actions into larger
narrative or cultural frameworks (For this debate see Gallagher 2012,
Gallagher and Hutto 2008, Hutto 2008, and Seemann 2011, Stueber 2011
and 2012a, and various articles in Matravers and Waldow 2018). For
skepticism about empathic perspective-taking understood as a complete
identification with the perspective of the other person see also
Goldie 2011). Regardless of how one views this specific debate it
should be clear that ideas about mindreading developed originally by
proponents of empathy at the beginning of the 20th century
can no longer be easily dismissed and have to be taken seriously.


## 3. Empathy as the Unique Method of the Human Sciences



At the beginning of the 20th century, empathy understood as
a non-inferential and non-theoretical method of grasping the content
of other minds became closely associated with the concept of
understanding (Verstehen); a concept that was championed by the
hermeneutic tradition of philosophy concerned with explicating the
methods used in grasping the meaning and significance of texts, works
of arts, and actions. (For a survey of this tradition see Grondin
1994). Hermeneutic thinkers insisted that the method used in
understanding the significance of a text or a historical event has to
be fundamentally distinguished from the method used in explaining an
event within the context of the natural sciences. This methodological
dualism is famously expressed by Droysen in saying that
"historical research does not want to explain; that is, derive
in a form of an inferential argument, rather it wants to
understand" (Droysen 1977, 403), and similarly in
Dilthey's dictum that "we explain nature, but understand
the life of the soul" (Dilthey 1961, vol. 5, 144). Yet Droysen
and authors before him never conceived of understanding solely as an
act of mental imitation or solely as an act of imaginatively
"transporting" oneself into the point of view of another
person. Such "psychological interpretation" as
Schleiermacher (1998) used to call it, was conceived of as
constituting only one aspect of the interpretive method used by
historians. Other tasks mentioned in this context involved critically
evaluating the reliability of historical sources, getting to know the
linguistic conventions of a language, and integrating the various
elements derived from historical sources into a consistent narrative
of a particular epoch. The differences between these various aspects
of the interpretive procedure were however downplayed in the early
Dilthey. For him, grasping the significance of any cultural fact had
to be understood as a mental act of "transposition." (See
for example Dilthey 1961, vol. 5, 263-265). .



Ironically, the close association of the concepts of empathy and
understanding and the associated claim that empathy is the sole and
unique method of the human sciences also facilitated the decline of
the empathy concept and its almost utter disregard by philosophers of
the human and social sciences later on, in both the analytic and
continental/hermeneutic traditions of philosophy. Within both
traditions, proponents of empathy were--for very different
reasons--generally seen as advocating an epistemically naive
and insufficiently broad conception of the methodological proceedings
in the human sciences. As a result, most philosophers of the human and
social sciences maintained their distance from the idea that empathy
is central for our understanding of other minds and mental phenomena.
Notable exceptions in this respect are R.G. Collingwood and his
followers, who suggested that reenacting another person's
thoughts is necessary for understanding them as rational agents
(Collingwood 1946, Dray 1957 and 1995). Notice however that in
contrast to the contemporary debate about folk psychology, the debate
about empathy in the philosophy of social science is not concerned
with investigating underlying causal mechanisms. Rather, it addresses
normative questions of how to justify a particular explanation or
interpretation.


### 3.1 The Critique of Empathy in the Context of a Hermeneutic Conception of the Human Sciences



Philosophers arguing for a hermeneutic conception of the human and
social sciences insist on a strict methodological division between the
human and the natural
 sciences.[3]
 Yet they nowadays favor the concept of understanding (Verstehen) and
reject the earlier identification of understanding and empathy for two
specific reasons. First, empathy is no longer seen as the unique
method of the human sciences because facts of significance, which a
historian or an interpreter of literary and non-literary texts are
interested in, do not solely depend on facts within the individual
mind. A historian, for example, is not bound by the agent's
perspective in telling the story of a particular historical time
period(Danto 1965). Similarly, philosophers such as Hans Georg
Gadamer, have argued that the significance of a text is not tied to
the author's intentions in writing the text. In reading a text
by Shakespeare or Plato we are not primarily interested in finding out
what Plato or Shakespeare said but what these texts themselves
say.(Gadamer 1989; for a critical discussion see Skinner (in Tully
1988); "Introduction" in Kogler and Stueber 2000; and
Stueber 2002).



The above considerations, however, do not justify the claim that
empathy has no role to play within the context of the human sciences.
It justifies merely the claim that empathy cannot be their only
method, at least as long as one admits that recognizing the thoughts
of individual agents has to play some role in the interpretive project
of the human sciences. Accordingly, a second reason against empathy is
also emphasized. Conceiving of understanding other agents as being
based on empathy is seen as an epistemically extremely naive
conception of the interpretation of individual agents, since it seems
to conceive of understanding as a mysterious meeting of two individual
minds outside of any cultural context. Individual agents are always
socially and culturally embedded creatures. Understanding other agents
thus presupposes an understanding of the cultural context within which
an agent functions. Moreover, in the interpretive situation of the
human sciences, the cultural background of the interpreter and the
person, who has to be interpreted, can be very different. In that
case, I can not very easily put myself in the shoes of the other
person and imitate his thoughts in my mind. If understanding medieval
knights, to use an example of Winch (1958), requires me to think
exactly as the medieval knight did, then it is not clear how such a
task can be accomplished from an interpretive perspective constituted
by very different cultural presuppositions. Making sense of other
minds has, therefore, to be seen as an activity that is a culturally
mediated one; a fact that empathy theorists according to this line of
critique do not sufficiently take into account when they conceive of
understanding other agents as a direct meeting of minds that is
independent of and unaided by information about how these agents are
embedded in a broader social environment. (See Stueber 2006, chap.6,
Zahavi 2001, 2005; for the later Dilthey see Makreel 2000. For a
critical discussion of whether the concept of understanding without
recourse to empathy is useful for marking an epistemic distinction
between the human and natural sciences consult also Stueber 2012b.
Within the context of anthropology, Hollan and Throop argue that
empathy is best understood as a dynamic, culturally situated,
temporally extended, and dialogical process actively involving not
only the interpreter but also his or her interpretee. See Hollan
20012; Hollan and Throop 2008, 2001; Throop 2010).).


### 3.2 The Critique of Empathy within the Context of a Naturalist Conception of the Human Sciences



Philosophers, who reject the methodological dualism between the human
and the natural sciences as argued for in the hermeneutic context, are
commonly referred to as naturalists in the philosophy of social
science. They deny that the distinction between understanding and
explanation points to an important methodological difference. Even in
the human or social sciences, the main point of the scientific
endeavor is to provide epistemically justified explanations (and
predictions) of observed or recorded events (see also Henderson 1993).
At most, empathy is granted a heuristic role in the context of
discovery. It however can not play any role within the context of
justification. As particularly Hempel (1965) has argued, to explain an
event involves--at least implicitly--an appeal to law-like
regularities providing us with reasons for expecting that an event of
a certain kind will occur under specific circumstances. Empathy might
allow me to recognize that I would have acted in the same manner as
somebody else. Yet it does not epistemically sanction the claim that
anybody of a particular type or anybody who is in that type of
situation will act in this manner.



Hempel's argument against empathy has certainly not gone
unchallenged. Within the philosophy of history, Dray (1957), following
Collingwood, has argued that empathy plays an epistemically
irreducible role, since we explain actions in terms of an
agent's reasons. For him, such reason explanations do not appeal
to empirical generalizations but to normative principles of actions
outlining how a person should act in a particular situation. Similar
arguments have been articulated by Jaegwon Kim (1984, 1998). Yet as
Stueber (2006, chap. 5) argues such a response to Hempel would require
us to implausibly conceive of reason explanations as being very
different from ordinary causal explanations. It would imply that our
notions of explanation and causation are ambiguous concepts. Reasons
that cause agents to act in the physical world would be conceived of
as causes in a very different sense than ordinary physical causes.
Moreover, as Hempel himself suggests, appealing to normative
principles explains at most why a person should have acted in a
certain manner. It does not explain why he ultimately acted in that
way. Consequently, Hempel's objection against empathy retain
their force as long as one maintains that reason explanations are a
form of ordinary causal explanations and as long as one conceives of
the epistemic justification of such explanations as implicitly
appealing to some empirical generalizations (For Kim's recent
attempt to account for the explanatory character of action
explanations by acknowledging the centrality of the first person
perspective see also Kim 2010). 



Despite these concessions to Hempel, Stueber suggests that empathy
(specifically reenactive empathy) has to be acknowledged as playing a
central role even in the context of justification. For him, folk
psychological explanations have to be understood as being tied to the
domain of rational agency. In contrast to explanations in terms of
mere inner causes, folk psychological explanations retain their
explanatory force only as long as agents' beliefs and desires
can also be understood as reasons for their actions. The epistemic
justification of such folk psychological explanations implicitly
relies on generalizations involving folk psychological notions such as
belief and desire. Yet the existence of such generalizations alone
does not establish specific beliefs and desires as reasons for a
person's actions. Elaborating on considerations by Heal (2003)
and Collingwood (1946), Stueber suggests that recognizing beliefs and
desires as reasons requires the interpreter to be sensitive to an
agent's other relevant beliefs and desires. Individual thoughts
function as reasons for rational agency only relative to a specific
framework of an agent's thoughts that are relevant for
consideration in a specific situation. Most plausibly--given our
persistent inability to solve the frame problem--recognizing
which of another agent's thoughts are relevant in specific
contexts requires the practical ability of reenacting another
person's thoughts in one's own mind. Empathy's
central epistemic role has to be admitted, since beliefs and desires
can be understood only in this manner as an agent's reasons (See
Stueber 2006, 2008, 2013. For a related discussion about the role of
understanding in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science
see Grimm 2016 and Grimm, Baumberger, and Ammon 2017). 


## 4. Empathy as a Topic of Scientific Exploration in Psychology



The discussion of empathy within psychology has been largely
unaffected by the critical philosophical discussion of empathy as an
epistemic means to know other minds or as the unique method of the
human sciences. Rather, psychologists' interest in
empathy-related phenomena harks back to eighteenth century moral
philosophy, particularly David Hume and Adam Smith (See also Wispe
1991). Here empathy, or what was then called sympathy, was regarded to
play a central role in constituting human beings as social and moral
creatures allowing us to emotionally connect to our human companions
and care for their well-being. Throughout the early 20th
century, but particularly since the late 1940's, empathy has,
therefore, been an intensively studied topic of psychological
research.



More broadly one can distinguish two psychological research traditions
studying empathy-related phenomena; that is, the study of what
is currently called empathic accuracy and the study of empathy as an
emotional phenomenon in the encounter of others. The first area of
study defines empathy primarily as a cognitive phenomenon and
conceives of empathy in general terms as "the intellectual or
imaginative apprehension of another's condition or state of
mind," to use Hogan's (1969) terminology. Within this area
of research, one is primarily interested in determining the
reliability and accuracy of our ability to perceive and recognize
other persons' enduring personality traits, attitudes and
values, and occurrent mental states. One also investigates the various
factors that influence empathic accuracy. One has, for example, been
interested in determining whether empathic ability depends on gender,
age, family background, intelligence, emotional stability, the nature
of interpersonal relations, or whether it depends on specific
motivations of the observer. (For a survey see Ickes 1993 and 2003;
and Taft 1955). A more detailed account of the research on empathic
accuracy and some of its earlier methodological difficulties can be
found in the



> 
> Supplementary document on the Study of Cognitive Empathy and Empathic Accuracy.
>  



Philosophically more influential has been the study of empathy defined
primarily as an emotional or affective phenomenon, which psychologists
in the middle of the 1950's started to focus on. In this
context, psychologists have also addressed issues of moral motivation
that have been traditionally topics of intense discussions among moral
philosophers. They were particularly interested in investigating (i)
the development of various means for measuring empathy as a
dispositional trait of adults and of children and as a situational
response in specific situations, (ii) the factors on which empathic
responses and dispositions depend, and (iii) the relation between
empathy and pro-social behavior and moral development. Before
discussing the psychological research on emotional empathy and its
relevance for moral philosophy and moral psychology in the next
section, it is vital to introduce important conceptual distinctions
that one should keep in mind in evaluating the various empirical
studies.



Anyone reading the emotional empathy literature has to be struck by
the fact that empathy tended to be incredibly broadly defined in the
beginning of this specific research tradition. Stotland, one of the
earliest researcher who understood empathy exclusively as an emotional
phenomenon, defined it as "an observer's reacting
emotionally because he perceives that another is experiencing or is
about to experience an emotion" (1969, 272). According to
Stotland's definition very diverse emotional responses such as
feeling envy, feeling annoyed, feeling distressed, being relieved
about, feeling pity, or feeling what Germans call
*Schadenfreude* (feeling joyful about the misfortune of
another) have all to be counted as empathic reactions. Since the
1980's however, psychologists have fine tuned their
understanding of empathy conceptually and distinguished between
different aspects of the emotional reaction to another person; thereby
implicitly acknowledging the conceptual distinctions articulated by
Max Scheler (1973) almost a century earlier. In this context, it is
particularly useful to distinguish between the following reactive
emotions that are differentiated in respect to whether or not such
reactions are self or other oriented and whether they presuppose
awareness of the distinction between self and others. (See also the
survey in the *Introduction* to Eisenberg/Strayer 1987 and
Batson 2009) 


1. **Emotional contagion:** Emotional contagion occurs when
people start feeling similar emotions caused merely by the association
with other people. You start feeling joyful, because other people
around you are joyful or you start feeling panicky because you are in
a crowd of people feeling panic. Emotional contagion however does not
require that one is aware of the fact that one experiences the
emotions because other people experience them, rather one experiences
them primarily as one's own emotion (Scheler 1973, 22). A
newborn infant's reactive cry to the distress cry of another,
which Hoffman takes as a "rudimentary precursor of empathic
distress" (Hoffman 2000, 65), can probably be understood as a
phenomenon of emotional contagion, since the infant is not able to
properly distinguish between self and other.
2. **Affective and proper Empathy:** More narrowly and
properly understood, empathy in the affective sense is the vicarious
sharing of an affect. Authors however differ in how strictly they
interpret the phrase of vicariously sharing an affect. For some, it
requires that the empathizers and the persons they empathize with need
to be in very similar affective states (Coplan 2011; de Vignemont and
Singer 2006; Jacob 2011). For Hoffman, on the other hand, it is an
emotional response requiring only "the involvement of
psychological processes that make a person have feelings that are more
congruent with another's situation than with his own
situation" (Hoffman 2000, 30). According to this definition,
empathy does not necessarily require that the subject and target feel
similar emotions (even though this is most often the case). Rather the
definition also includes cases of feeling sad when seeing a child who
plays joyfully but who does not know that it has been diagnosed with a
serious illness (assuming that this is how the other person himself or
herself would feel if he or she would fully understand his or her
situation). In contrast to mere emotional contagion, genuine empathy
presupposes the ability to differentiate between oneself and the
other. It requires that one is minimally aware of the fact that one is
having an emotional experience due to the perception of the
other's emotion, or more generally due to attending to his
situation. In seeing a sad face of another and feeling sad oneself,
such feeling of sadness should count as genuinely empathic only if one
recognizes that in feeling sad one's attention is still focused
on the other and that it is not an appropriate reaction to aspects of
one's own life. Moreover, empathy outside the realm of a direct
perceptual encounter involves some appreciation of the other
person's emotion as an appropriate response to his or her
situation. To be happy or unhappy because one's child is happy
or sad should not count necessarily as an empathic emotion. It cannot
count as a vicarious emotional response if it is due to the perception
of the outside world from the perspective of the observer and her
desire that her children should be happy. My happiness about my child
being happy would therefore not be an emotional state that is more
congruent to his situation. Rather, it is an emotional response
appropriate to my own perspective on the world. In order for my
happiness or unhappiness to be genuinely empathic it has to be
happiness or unhappiness about what makes the other person happy.
Accordingly, if I share another person's emotion vicariously I
do not merely have to be in an affective state with a similar
phenomenal quality. Rather my affective state has to be directed
toward the same intentional object. (See Sober and Wilson 1998,
231-237 and Maibom 2007. For a critical discussion of how and
whether such vicarious sharing is possible see also Deonna 2007 and
Matravers 2018). It should be noted, however, that some authors
conceive of proper empathy more broadly as not merely being concerned
with the vicarious reenactment of affective states but more
comprehensively as including non-affective states such as beliefs and
desires. This is especially true if they are influenced by the
discussion of of empathy as an epistemic means such as Goldman (2011)
and Stueber (2006). However, already Adam Smith (1853) constitutes a
good example for such broad understanding of proper empathy. Finally,
others suggest that it is best to distinguish between affective
sharing and perspective taking (Decety and Cowell 2015).
3. **Sympathy:** In contrast to affective empathy,
sympathy--or what some authors also refer to as empathic
concern--is not an emotion that is congruent with the
other's emotion or situation such as feeling the sadness of the
other person's grieving for the death of his father. Rather,
sympathy is seen as an emotion *sui generis* that has the
other's negative emotion or situation as its object from the
perspective of somebody who cares for the other person's well
being (Darwall 1998). In this sense, sympathy consists of
"feeling sorrow or concern for the distressed or needy
other," a feeling for the other out of a "heightened
awareness of the suffering of another person as something that needs
to be alleviated." (Eisenberg 2000a, 678; Wispe 1986, 318; and
Wispe 1991).



Whereas it is quite plausible to assume that empathy--that is,
empathy with negative emotions of another or what Hoffman (2000) calls
"veridical empathic distress"--under certain
conditions (and when certain developmental markers are achieved) can
give rise to sympathy, it should be stressed that the relation between
affective empathy and sympathy is a contingent one; the understanding
of which requires further empirical research. First, sympathy does not
necessarily require feeling any kind of congruent emotions on part of
the observer, a detached recognition or representation that the other
is in need or suffers might be sufficient. (See Scheler 1973 and
Nichols 2004). Second, empathy or empathic distress might not at all
lead to sympathy. People in the helping professions, who are so
accustomed to the misery of others, suffer at times from compassion
fatigue. It is also possible to experience empathic overarousal
because one is emotionally so overwhelmed by one's empathic
feelings that one is unable to be concerned with the suffering of the
other (Hoffman 2000, chap. 8). In the later case, one's empathic
feeling are transformed or give rise to mere personal distress, a
reactive emotional phenomenon that needs to be distinguished from
emotional contagion, empathy, and sympathy.
4. **Personal Distress:** Personal distress in the context
of empathy research is understood as a reactive emotion in response to
the perception/recognition of another's negative emotion or
situation. Yet, while personal distress is *other-caused* like
sympathy, it is, in contrast to sympathy, primarily
*self-oriented*. In this case, another person's distress
does not make me *feel bad for him or her,* it just makes
*me* feel bad, or "alarmed, grieved, upset, worried,
disturbed, perturbed, distressed,and troubled;" to use the list
of adjectives that according to Batson's research indicates
personal distress (Batson et al. 1987 and Batson 1991). And, in
contrast to empathic emotions as defined above, my personal distress
is not any more congruent with the emotion or situation of another.
Rather it wholly defines my own outlook onto the world.



While it is conceptually necessary to differentiate between these
various emotional responses, it has to be admitted that it is
empirically not very easy to discriminate between them, since they
tend to occur together. Think or imagine yourself attending the
funeral of the child of a friend or good acquaintance. This is
probably one reason why early researchers tended not to distinguish
between the above aspects in their study of empathy related phenomena.
Yet since the above distinctions refer to very different psychological
mechanisms, it is absolutely central to distinguish between them when
empirically assessing the impact and contribution of empathy to an
agent's pro-social motivation and behavior. Given the ambiguity
of the empathy concept within psychology--particularly in the
earlier literature--in evaluating and comparing different
empirical empathy studies, it is always crucial to keep in mind how
empathy has been defined and measured within the context of these
studies. For a more extensive discussion of the methods used by
psychologists to measure empathy see the



> 
> Supplementary document on Measuring Empathy.
>  


## 5. Empathy, Moral Philosophy, and Moral Psychology



Moral philosophers have always been concerned with moral psychology
and with articulating an agent's motivational structure in order
to explicate the importance of morality for a human life. After all,
moral judgments supposedly make demands on an agent's will and
are supposed to provide us with reasons and motivations for acting in
a certain manner. Yet moral judgments, at least in the manner in which
we conceive of them in modern times, are also regarded to be based on
normative standards that, in contrast to mere conventional norms, have
universal scope and are valid independent of the features of specific
social practices that agents are embedded in. One only needs to think
of statements such as "cruelty to innocent children or slavery
is morally wrong," which we view as applying also to social
practices where the attitude of its population seem to condone such
actions. Moral judgements thus seem to address us from the perspective
of the moral stance where we leave behind the perspective of self-love
and do not conceive of each other either as friends or foes (see Hume
1987, 75) or as belonging to the in-group or out-group,
but where we view each other all to be equal part of a moral
community. Finally, and relatedly, in order to view morality as
something that is possible for human beings we also seem to require
that our motivations based on or associated with moral reasons have a
self-less character. Given to charity for merely selfish reasons, for
example, seems to clearly diminish its moral worth and implicitly deny
the universal character of a moral demand. Philosophically explicating
the importance of morality for human life then has to do the
following: It has to explain how it is that we humans as a matter of
fact do care about morality thusly conceived, it has to address the
philosophically even more pertinent question of why it is that we
should care about morality or why it is that we should regard
judgments issued from the perspective of the moral stance to have
normative authority over us; and it has to allow us to understand how
it is that we can act self-lessly in a manner that correspond to the
demands made on us from the moral stance. Answering all of these
questions however necessitates at one point to explain how our moral
interests are related to our psychological constitution as human
beings and how moral demands can be understood as being appropriately
addressed to agents who are psychologically structured in that manner.




Prima facie, the difficulty of this enterprise consists in squaring a
realistic account of human psychology with the universal scope and
intersubjective validity of moral judgments, since human motivation
and psychological mechanisms seem to be always situational, local, and
of rather limited scope. Moreover, as evolutionary psychologists tell
us in-group bias seems to be a universal trait of human
psychology. One of the most promising attempts to solve this problem
is certainly due to the tradition of eighteenth century moral
philosophy associated with the names of David Hume and Adam Smith who
tried to address all of the above philosophical desiderata by pointing
to the central role that our empathic and sympathetic capacities have
for constituting us as social and moral agents and for providing us
with the psychological capacities to make and to respond to moral
judgments. While philosophers in the Kantian tradition, who favor
reason over sentiments, have generally been skeptical about this
proposal, more recently the claim that empathy is central for morality
and a flourishing human life has again been the topic of an intense
and controversial debate. On the one hand, empathy has been hailed by
researchers from a wide range of disciplines and also by some public
figures, President Obama most prominently among them. Slote (2010)
champions empathy as the sole foundation of moral judgment, de Waal
(2006) conceives of it as the unique evolutionary building block of
morality, Rifkin (2009) regards it even as a force whose cultivation
has unique revolutionary powers to transform a world in crisis, and
Baron-Cohen (2011, 194) views it as a "universal solvent"
in that "any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble."
On the other hand, such empathy enthusiasm has encountered penetrating
criticism by Prinz (2011 a,b) and Bloom (2016), who emphasize its dark
side, that is, its tendency to fall prey to so-called
"here and now" biases. The following subsections will
address these issues by surveying the relevant empirical research on
the question whether empathy motivates us in a self-less manner, the
question of whether empathy is inherently biased and partial to the
in-group, and it will discuss how we might think of the normative
character of moral judgments in light of our empathic capacities.(For
a survey of other relevant issues from social psychology, specifically
social neuroscience, consult also Decety and Lamm 2006; Decety and
Ickes 2009, and Decety 20012. For a discussion of the importance
empathy for medical practice see Halpern 2001)


### 5.1 Empathy and Altruistic Motivation



In a series of ingeniously designed experiments, Batson has
accumulated evidence for what he calls the empathy-altruism thesis. In
arguing for this thesis, Batson conceives of empathy as empathic
concern or what others would call sympathy. More specifically, he
characterized it in terms of feelings of being sympathetic, moved by,
being compassionate, tender, warm and soft-hearted towards the
other's plight (Batson et al. 1987, 26) The task of his
experiments consists in showing that empathy/sympathy does indeed lead
to genuinely altruistic motivation, where the welfare of the other is
the ultimate goal of my helping behavior, rather than to helping
behavior because of predominantly egoistic motivations. According to
the egoistic interpretation of empathy-related phenomena,
empathizing with another person in need is associated with a negative
feeling or can lead to a heightened awareness of the negative
consequences of not helping; such as feelings of guilt, shame, or
social sanctions. Alternatively, it can lead to an enhanced
recognition of the positive consequences of helping behavior such as
social rewards or good feelings. Empathy according to this
interpretation induces us to help through mediation of purely egoistic
motivations. We help others only because we recognize helping behavior
as a means to egoistic ends. It allows us to reduce our negative
feelings (aversive arousal reduction hypothesis), to avoid
"punishment," or to gain specific internal or external
"rewards" (empathy-specific punishment and
empathy-specific reward hypotheses).



Notice however that in arguing for the empathy-altruism thesis, Batson
is not claiming that empathy always induces helping behavior. Rather,
he argues against the predominance of an egoistic interpretation of an
agent's motivational structure. He argues for the existence of
genuinely altruistic motivations and more specifically for the claim
that empathy causes such genuinely altruistic motivation. These
genuinely altruistic motives (together with other egoistic motives)
are taken into account by the individual agent in deliberating about
whether or not to help. Even for Batson, the question of whether the
agent will act on his or her altruistic motivations depends ultimately
on how strong they are and what costs the agent would incur in helping
another person.



The basic set up of Batson's experiments consists in the
manipulation of the situation of the experimental subjects (dependent
on the egoistic alternative to be argued against) and the manipulation
of empathy/sympathy felt for an observed target in need. The decisive
evidence for the empathy/sympathy-altruism thesis is always the
recorded behavior of the subject, who is in a high empathy condition
and in a situation where his helping behavior can not plausibly be
seen as a means for the satisfaction of a personal goal. Since here is
not the place to extensively describe the details of Batson's
experiments, a brief description of the experimental set
up--focusing on Batson's argument against the aversive
arousal interpretation of empathy--and a brief evaluation of the
success of his general argumentative strategy has to suffice (for more
details see Batson 1991 and 2011). In all of his experiments, Batson
assumes--based on Stotland (1969) and others--that
empathy/sympathy can be manipulated either by manipulating the
perceived similarity between subjects and targets or by manipulating
the perspective taking attitude of the subjects. Empathy according to
these assumptions can be increased by enhancing the perceived
similarity between subject and target or by asking the subject to
imagine how the observed person would feel in his or her situation
rather than asking the subject to attend carefully to the information
provided. [Note also that instructing the subject to imagine how they
themselves would feel in the other's situation, rather than
instructing them to imagine how the other feels, is associated with an
increase in personal distress and not only sympathetic feelings.
(Batson et al. 1997b and Lamm, Batson, and Decety 2007).]



In trying to argue against the aversive arousal reduction
interpretation, Batson also manipulates the ease with which a subject
can avoid helping another person (in this case taking his place when
they see him getting electric shocks). He reasons that if empathy
leads to genuinely altruistic motivations, subjects in the high
empathy/easy escape condition should still be willing to help. If they
were only helping in order to reduce their own negative feelings, they
would be expected to leave in this situation, since leaving is the
less costly means for reaching an egoistic goal. As Batson was happy
to report, the results confirmed his empathy/sympathy-altruism
hypothesis, not only in the above experiments but also in experiments
testing other alternative interpretations of empathy such as the
empathy- specific punishment and the empathy-specific award
hypotheses.



Researchers generally agree in finding Batson's experimental
research program and the accumulated evidence for the empathy-altruism
thesis to be impressive. Yet they disagree about how persuasive one
should ultimately regard his position. In particular it has been
pointed out that his experiments have limited value, since they target
only very specific egoistic accounts of why empathy might lead to
helping behavior. Batson is not able to dismiss conclusively every
alternative egoistic interpretation. In addition, it has been claimed
that egoism has the resources to account for the result of his
experiments. For example, one might challenge the validity of
Batson's interpretation by speculating whether empathy/sympathy
leads to a heightened awareness of the fact that one will be troubled
by bad memories of seeing another person in need, if one does nothing
to help him or her. In this case even an egoistically motivated person
would help in the high empathy/easy escape condition. (For this reply
and various other egoistic interpretations of Batson's
experiments see Sober and Wilson 1998, 264-271).



Cialdini and his collaborators have suggested an even more elaborate
non-altruistic interpretation of helping behavior in high empathy/easy
escape conditions. According to their suggestions, conditions of high
empathy are also conditions of increased "interpersonal unity,
wherein the conception of self and other are not distinct but are
merged to some degree" (Cialdini et al. 1997, 490). It is this
increased feeling of oneness rather than empathy that is causally
responsible for motivating helping behavior (See however Batson et al.
1997a, Neuberg et al. 1997, and Batson 1997 and 2011 for a plausible
reply and May 2018, 144-153 for a probing discussion of the
relation between empathic concern and oneness). One therefore has to
be cautious in claiming that Batson has conclusively proven that the
empathy/sympathy-altruism hypothesis is true, if that means one has
logically excluded every egoistic alternative in accounting for
helping behavior. But it has to be acknowledged that Batson has
radically changed the argumentative dialectic of the egoism-altruism
debate by forcing the egoistic account of human agency to come up with
ever more elaborate alternative interpretations in order to account
for helping behavior within its framework. Egoism was supposed to
provide a rather unified and relatively simple account of the
motivational structure of human agency. In challenging the
predominance and simplicity of this framework in an empirically acute
fashion, Batson has at least established altruism--claiming that
besides egoistic motivations we are also motivated by genuinely
altruistic reasons--as an empirically plausible hypothesis. He
has shown it to be a hypothesis one is almost persuaded to believe
that it is true, as he himself recently has characterized his own
epistemic attitude (Batson 1997, 522.) More positively expressed,
Batson's research has at least demonstrated that
empathy/sympathy is a causal factor in bringing about helping
behavior. Regardless of the question of the exact nature of the
underlying motivation for helping or prosocial behavior, psychologists
generally assume that in adults and children a positive, even if weak,
correlation between empathy--measured in a variety of
ways--and prosocial behavior has been established; and this
despite the fact that the above aspects of emotional responding to
another person have not always been sufficiently distinguished.(For a
survey see Eisenberg and Miller 1987; Eisenberg/Fabes 1998, Spinrad
and Eisenberg 2014. For a general survey of the various factors
contributing to prosocial behavior see Bierhoff 2002).



Regardless of how exactly one views the strength of Batson's
position, his research alone does not validate the thesis, articulated
by various traditional moral philosophers, that sympathy or empathy is
the basis of morality or that it constitutes the only source for moral
motivation. First, nothing in his research has shown that
empathy/sympathy is empirically necessary for moral agency. Second,
some of Batson's own research casts doubt on the claim that
sympathy/empathy is the foundation of morality as empathy induced
altruism can lead to behavior that conflicts with our principles of
justice and fairness. One, for example, tends to assign a better job
or a higher priority for receiving medical treatment to persons with
whom one has actually sympathized, in violation of the above moral
principles (See Batson et al. 1995). For that very reason, Batson
himself distinguishes between altruistic motivation concerned with the
well-being of another person and moral motivation guided by principles
of justice and fairness (Batson 2011). Unfortunately we do not always
realize this fact when we abstractly contrast moral motivation broadly
with egoistic motivation. For that very reason, we also do not realize
that we need to be more conscious in "orchestrating" the
relationship between altruistic and moral motivations in order to
fully utilize the motivational power of altruism for moral purposes
(Batson 2014). Finally, the research discussed so far is not relevant
for deciding the question of whether sophisticated mindreading
abilities are required for full blown moral agency, since Batson
understands empathy primarily as an emotional phenomenon. (See Nichols
2001 and Batson et al. 2003 in this respect.)


### 5.2 Empathy, Its Partiality, Susceptibility to Bias, and Moral Agency



Within the psychological literature, one of the most comprehensive
accounts of empathy and its relation to the moral development of a
person is provided by the work of Martin Hoffman (for a summary see
his 2000). Hoffman views empathy as a biologically based disposition
for altruistic behavior (Hoffman 1981). He conceives of empathy as
being due to various modes of arousal allowing us to respond
empathically in light of a variety of distress cues from another
person. Hoffman mentions mimicry, classical conditioning, and direct
association--where one empathizes because the other's
situation reminds one of one's own painful experience--as
"fast acting and automatic" mechanisms producing an
empathic response. As more cognitively demanding modes, Hoffman lists
mediated association--where the cues for an empathic response are
provided in a linguistic medium--and role taking.



Hoffman distinguishes between six (or more) developmental stages of
empathic responses ranging from the reactive newborn cry, egocentric
empathic distress, quasi-ego-centric empathic distress, to veridical
empathy, empathy for another beyond the immediate situation, and
empathy for whole groups of people. Accordingly, empathic responses
constitute a developmental continuum that ranges from emotional
contagion (as in the case of a reactive newborn cry) to various forms
of proper empathy reached at the fourth stage. At the developmentally
later stages, the child is able to emotionally respond to the distress
of another in a more sophisticated manner due to an increase of
cognitive capacities, particularly due to the increased cognitive
ability to distinguish between self and other and by becoming aware of
the fact that others have mental states that are independent from its
own. Only at the fourth stage of empathic development (after the
middle of the second year) do children acquire such abilities. They do
no longer try to comfort themselves, when emotionally responding to
another child's distress--like seeking comfort from their
own mother--, or use helping strategies that are more appropriate
to comfort themselves than the other person--like using their own
teddy-bear in trying to comfort the other child. Only at the fourth
stage does empathy become also transformed or associated with sympathy
leading to appropriate prosocial behavior. Hoffman's
developmental view is further supported by Preston and DeWaal's
account of empathy as a phenomenon to be observed across species at
various levels of complexities related to different degrees of
cognitive development. (Preston and DeWaal 2002a,b. For a discussion
of the philosophical relevance of DeWaal's view see also DeWaal
2006).



Significantly, Hoffman combines his developmental explication of
empathy with a sophisticated analysis of its importance for moral
agency. He is thereby acutely aware of the limitations in our natural
capacity to empathize or sympathize with others, particularly what he
refers to as "here and now" biases, that is, the fact that
we tend to empathize more with persons that are in some sense
perceived to be closer to us. (For a neuro-scientific investigation of
how racial bias modulates empathic responses see Xuo, Zuo, Wang and
Han 2009). Like Batson, Hoffman does not regard the moral realm as
being exclusively circumscribed by our ability to empathize with other
people. Besides empathic abilities, moral agency requires also
knowledge of abstract moral principles, such as the principles of
caring and justice. Hoffman seems to conceive of those principles as
being derived from cognitive sources that are independent from our
empathic abilities. Yet Hoffmann is rather optimistic about the
natural compatibility of empathic motivation and our commitment to
moral principles. He regards stable and effective moral agency as
requiring empathy so that moral principles can have a motivational
basis in an agent's psychology. Within this context, he has
lately emphasized a final stage of empathy development or what he
calls "witnessing", an empathic response to the suffering
of others that is so intense that we "become fully committed to
help"(Hoffman 2014, 82). As he explains--in light of
examples from the history of abolitionism, the civil rights movement,
serfdom reform in Russia, and various cases before the Supreme
Court-- it is particularly such witnessing that has contributed
towards bending the arc of the moral universe towards justice.
Accordingly, and despite our natural limitations in empathizing with
others, Hoffman still regards empathy as the "bedrock of
morality" and "the glue of society"(Hoffman 2014,
96. Besides Hoffman 2011 and 2014, see also Deigh 2011 for a measured
evaluation of empathy in the legal context ). 



More recently, such ultimately positive evaluation of empathy's
contributing role in constituting us as moral agents, as agents who
address each other from the moral stance, has encountered penetrating
criticism, particularly by Prinz (2011a,b) and Bloom (2016). Both
emphasize the dark side of empathy, that is, the aforementioned
"here and now" biases. More specifically Prinz mentions
explicitly the cuteness, salience, and proximity effects--the
fact that we tend to empathize more easily with attractive persons,
with persons that are in close proximity and only if their suffering
is particularly noteworthy-- similarity biases and the fact that
we tend to be rather selective in choosing whom to empathize with.
Empathy is also very easily modulated by a variety of top-down factors
that influence our perception of the social world and that let us
register social divisions that seem to be prima facie incompatible
with the more impartial stance demanded by the moral perspective.
Research has documented these biases in a more fine-grained manner and
shown that subjects generally "reported experiencing more
empathy for the in-group then the out-group targets and
more counter-empathy for the out-group than in-group
targets"(Cikara et. al. 2014, 120), counter-empathy here
being understood as the feeling of pleasure at the misfortune of
another (Schadenfreude) or the feeling displeasure at something
fortunate happening to another (Gluckschmerz). This is
particularly true if the other group is viewed to be in competition
with one's own group. Empathy can also be further reduced
through various dehumanizing and objectifying strategies, strategies
that have certainly employed in the context of the genocides of the
twentieth century and the system of racial slavery in the United
States (See Fuchs 2019, Kteily and Bruneau 2017). Heightened empathy
for perceived wrongs done to members of the in-group can also
lead to violent and immoral behavior (Bloom 2016, chap. 5). In
addition, empathy tends to focus on the one (particularly if he or she
is identifiable) rather than the many, what Bloom refers to as its
spotlight feature. Empathy can mislead us particularly in contexts
where we need to take into account statistically relevant information
when addressing a moral or social problem, such as when thinking about
the benefits of vaccination where it is more appropriate to think
about the large numbers of children saved rather than empathizing with
the bad effects such vaccination might have on one specific child. For
all of these reasons, Prinz favors the moral emotions such as anger,
guilt and shame as the foundation for morality, while Bloom prefers
sympathy guided by reason as a more viable means than empathy to steer
us in moral matters.



Here is not the place for a final evaluation of empathy's
contribution in regard to pro-social and moral motivation or moral and
pro-social behavior, since this question is still very much the topic
of an ongoing empirical investigation. Yet the following observations
are certainly justified in light of the empirical evidence so far and
might help to further clarify the debate. First, it seems to be pretty
well established that however one defines our natural capacity for
empathy, it is on its own not sufficient to keep us reliably on the
path of morality (See also Decety and Cowell 2015). Whether that
ultimately means that we should think of our capacity for empathy as a
limited resource or whether it would be better to think of empathy as
a motivated phenomenon and its limitations as being due to our
reluctance to activate that capacity (Zaki 2014), is certainly another
intriguing question for further empirical inquiry. One might also
wonder why we should expect that the emotions such as sympathy and
anger, which Bloom and Prinz point to, are less prone to bias and less
affected by a universal human tendency to favor the in-group.
Certainly sympathy within the context of Buddhism, to which Bloom
appeals to is a highly regulated emotion, controlled through
mindfulness practices or meditation and guided by an intellectual
grasp about the detriments of various forms of attachment to this
world. Persson and Savulescu (2018) therefore suggest that rather than
giving up on empathy completely one should reform empathy by
regulating it through one's reflective capacities in light of
our knowledge of its natural shortcomings or focus one's empathy
(cognitive and affective) particularly on another person's
concerns for his or her well-being as such empathy includes sympathy
for the other (Simmons 2014). Such suggestions are also very much in
line with proposals by David Hume and Adam Smith, who suggested
already in the eighteenth century that we need to regulate empathy
with the help of certain corrective mechanisms such as "some
steady and general points of view" or the perspective of
the"impartial spectator" in order to compensate for
empathy's limited scope. (For a good analysis of the
philosophical discussion about empathy/sympathy in the eighteenth
century see Frazer 2010). 



Most importantly, in order to evaluate the empirical discussion about
empathy's role for morality, one needs to be very sensitive to
how researchers define and measure empathy in arguing for and against
empathy's relation to moral motivation or moral judgment. Prinz
and Bloom are quite explicit in defining empathy merely as an
affective phenomenon, as our ability to feel what the other person
feels. Evidence suggests indeed that merely sharing another
person's emotion empathically does not increase our concern or
motivation for moral or pro-social action. Interestingly, however,
perspective-taking and empathic concern/sympathy, which have
always been seen as an integral part of empathy-related phenomena, are
a slightly different matter. They do seem to be positively related to
cooperation and charitable giving (Jordon et. al. 2016), to reducing
prejudices against particular groups (Galinski and Morowitz 2011), and
to an increase in one's sensitivity to injustices done to others
(Decety and Yoder 2015). Yet even here further research is needed as
the effects of such perspective-taking could be modulated by the
power differential between groups. It has, for example, been shown
that in active intergroup conflicts, positive intergroup interaction
can increase empathy for the other group. Yet within such contexts,
taking the perspective of a person from the other group while
interacting with them might also hinder the development of intergroup
empathy if the dominant group is reminded through such
perspective-taking of how they might be viewed by the
non-dominant group. Even perspective taking by the non-dominant
group might increase rather than decrease established negative
stereotypes in thinking about the other group (Cikara et. al. 2014).
It seems more effective if the non-dominant group is asked to
articulate the difficulties of their lives (perspective-giving)
and the dominant group is asked to translate that description into
their own words (perspective-taking), even if the positive
effects of such interaction is relatively short-lived (Bruneau and
Saxe 2012). 


### 5.3 Empathy, Moral Judgment, and the Authority of Moral Norms



So far, this entry has discussed mainly research exploring the
relation between empathy and prosocial/moral behavior or motivation.
Other important areas for considering empathy's role in moral
matters have to do with addressing the questions of how and whether
empathy contributes to our ability to distinguish between moral and
conventional norms, to the making of moral judgments, and how empathy
can be appealed to in explicating the normative authority of such
judgments. In considering the first question, psychologists and
philosophers have generally followed Turiel in understanding moral
norms as expressing concerns for "rights, justice, and the
welfare of other people" (Turiel 1983, 3) and as having a very
specific "signature response patterns" (Kelly et. al.
2007) associated with it. Moral norms are generally regarded to be
more important than conventional norms in that their normative
validity is conceived as being independent of social authority or
specific social practices and agreements. Their scope is also judged
to be much broader--they are thought of to be valid in other
countries, for example--, and violation of moral norms is
generally understood to be a more serious offense than the violation
of other norms. Notice however that in distinguishing between moral
and conventional norms subjects do not necessarily associate a strict
universality in the Kantian sense with moral norms and view them as
applicable to all rational beings. Indeed there is some evidence that
6-9 year old children, for example, view the moral/conventional
distinction as being fully applicable only to behavior of individuals
in the in-group and view prescription against harming members of the
out-group to be more like conventional norms (Rhodes and Chalik 2013).
Accordingly, the fact that empathy shows considerable in-group bias,
as discussed above, does not automatically count as evidence against
it playing a role in allowing humans to distinguish between moral and
conventional norms within a social context.



Of central importance for assessing the role of empathy for grasping
the moral/conventional distinction has been the research on the nature
of psychopathy and autism. Both pathologies are seen as involving
deficits in different dimensions of empathy but only psychopaths have
great difficulties in living up to moral standards of their societies
and only they were originally thought of as having difficulties in
appropriately distinguishing between moral and conventional norms
(Blair 1995 and 1996). More specifically, psychopaths show a selective
deficit in affective or emotional empathy particularly in
"processing fearful, sad, and possibly disgusted facial
expressions"(Blair 2010, 710). In contrast to persons with
autism they however do not show similar deficits in perspective taking
or theory of mind capacities. In his 1995 article, Blair therefore
blames the absence of what he calls the Violence Inhibition
Mechanism(VIM) that allows us to respond appropriately to the observed
distress cues in others for the psychopaths' moral deficits and
their inability to draw the moral/conventional distinction. In his
later work, he speaks more broadly of a dysfunction of our Integrated
Emotion System (IES), caused by a deficit in the amygdala to properly
represent negative emotions. (Blair, Mitchel, and Blair 2005, for a
recent survey regarding the very specific deficit of psychopaths in
feeling and recognizing fear see also Marsh 2014). Yet one has to
tread very carefully in drawing definite conclusions about the role of
empathy for morality from the empirical research about psychopathy.
The results of the empirical investigations are far from unified and
do not point in the same direction (For a concise survey see Maibom
2017). Newer studies, for example, seem to suggest that psychopaths,
as measured by the overall score of the revised psychopathy checklist
(PCL-R), are able to understand the distinction between moral
and conventional norms if tested under a forced choice paradigm
(Aharoni et. al 2012.)Nevertheless even that study seems to allow for
the possibility that emotional deficits are responsible for the
psychopath's shortcomings in accurately drawing the distinction
since they are somewhat linked to the affective and antisocial facets
of the PCL-R. Given the inconsistent results of the various
studies, other researchers prefer to view a psychopath's
immorality not as a specific deficit in empathy, but understand it to
be caused by their general inability to feel strong emotions, by their
general coldheartedness, or even by shortcomings in their rational and
prudential capacities. From that perspective, a psychopath might
understand in an abstract manner that certain things are morally wrong
to do, but he just does not care for morality, the welfare of another
person, or even for himself. (For further discussion see Maibom 2005
and 2009, Nichols 2004, and Prinz 2011a,b). Similar considerations
apply also to research regarding subjects with autism. Kennett
(2002)has argued that evidence from autistic individuals, whose
imaginative role-play and thus empathic capacities are diminished,
does not support the claim that empathy is necessary for moral agency.
Yet in her arguments she only considers the fact that persons with
autism have difficulties with putting themselves in another
person's shoes but does not consider that they seem to have some
ability to pick up on the emotional states of other people as revealed
by their facial expressions. Moreover, while autistic subjects in
general can distinguish between moral and conventional norms they do
seem to lack a certain flexibility in evaluating the seriousness of
the violation of a moral norm when they reflect on moral dilemmas or
when they encounter an accidental or unintentional violation of such
norms. (See McGeer 2008, Zalla et. al 2011, but see also Kennett 2011
and Leslie et. al. 2006 in response). 



Philosophers have however not been merely be interested in appealing
to empathy for explicating the psychological basis for our thinking
that certain norms have moral status. Within the general framework of
moral sentimentalism, which sees morality generally linked to our
emotional responsiveness to the actions of others and ourselves, they
have also appealed to empathy in explicating more generally the nature
of moral judgments (see also Kauppinen 2014 and 2017a). David Hume,
for example, has suggested that moral judgments are based on peculiar
sentiments of moral approbations and disapprobation, which are
causally mediated by our ability to empathize-- or what he called
sympathy-- with the pain and pleasures of others (See also
Sayre-Mcord 1994 and 2014). More specifically, sentiments of moral
approbations arise in response to our ability to think about and
enliven the pleasure and pain that others feel with the help of our
empathic/sympathetic capacities when we consider the benefits (the
pleasure and pain) which a person's character traits and actions
provide to himself and others. Yet Hume was already quite aware of
some of the above mentioned limitations and biases of our natural
willingness and capacity to empathize with others. Accordingly, he
insisted that sentiments of approbations can only be conceived of as
moral approbation if empathy/sympathy is regulated or corrected by
what he refers to as "steady and general points of view"
(Hume 1739-40 [1978], 581/2) so that our capacity for sympathy enables us to
"touch a string, to which all mankind have an accord and
symphony" (Hume 1748 [1983], 75). There are certainly a number of
issues that can be raised in response to Hume's proposal.
Suffice it here to point out that it is difficult to fully understand
how Hume is ultimately able distinguish between judgments about
something being bad and something being morally wrong. Certainly
natural disasters also cause us to sympathize/empathize with the pain
it causes others, yet such sympathy is not mediating any judgments
about the moral impermissibility of natural disasters. Hume himself
might have thought to have solved this problem by thinking that
sentiments of moral approbation have a peculiar or distinct character
(see in this respect particularly Debes 2012). Yet pointing to the
peculiarity of such sentiments seems to be rather unsatisfying for
answering this challenge. 



Michael Slote, one of the main contemporary proponents of the claim
that empathy plays a constitutive role for moral judgments, does not
follow Hume in thinking that empathy plays a moral role in allowing us
to pick up on a subject's pleasure and pain. Rather Slote, who
also has been influenced by a feminist ethics of care (Slote 2007,
2010), suggests that empathy is central for moral approval in that we
as spectators empathically pick up on whether or not an agent acted
out of empathic concern for another subject. Moral approval of an
action consists then in the subsequent reflective feeling of warmth
when empathizing with an agent's empathic concern, while moral
disapproval is equivalent with a reflective feeling of chill due to
our recognition that the agent acted without any empathic concern.
Actions are then judged to be morally right or wrong in terms of
whether they can be conceived of the actions of an agent we would
morally approve of in that they are actions done out of empathic
concern. Notice also that while Slote does regard empathy in the above
sense to be constitutive of moral approval only if it is fully or
well-developed, he does not follow Hume in thinking that empathy
needs to be regulated in order to correct for some of its natural
partiality. Indeed Slote thinks that this is a virtue of his account
since he regards such partiality reflected in our moral intuitions.
For example, he thinks that we have a greater moral obligation to help
the child in front of us or members of our family rather than people
who are more removed from us. Slote certainly deserves credit for
reviving the debate about the role of empathy for morality in
contemporary metaethics. Yet his conception of the relation between
empathy and morality has also encountered some skepticism. First of
all, it is questionable that only motivations of empathic concern,
rather than the thought that one is doing the right thing, constitute
proper moral motivations. Second, in light of the above research on
empathy's bias and natural shortcomings, it is rather
questionable to maintain that all aspects of empathy's
partiality are sanctioned by our our moral intuitions. It is therefore
hard to see how empathy's moral role can be justified without
appeal to some form of corrective mechanism. Third, phenomenologically
speaking, moral disapproval is not necessarily based on a
"chilly" feeling. At times we are rather upset and angry
in encountering violations of moral norms. Finally, Slote's
proposed empathic mechanism underlying moral approval seems to lack a
certain psychological plausibility. For Slote, we approve of an action
because we recreate the empathic concern that the agent feels towards
his or her subjects and that causes us to feel warmly towards the
agent. Yet if a positive moral judgment of an actions is tied to
providing us with the motivation or with a reason for doing a specific
action, it is hard to see how moral approval, consisting in us feeling
warmly towards the agent, should help us accomplish this. If Slote is
right, it would rather provide us with a reason for merely praising or
being nice towards the agent (See D'Arms 2011, Kauppinen 2014
and 2017a, Prinz 2001a,b, and Stueber 2011c).



There is one additional element to consider when debating
empathy's contribution to morality. Philosophers are not merely
interested in answering factual and causal questions of why we care
about morality, what causal role empathy plays in this respect, or how
empathy causally contributes in allowing us to distinguish between
moral and conventional norms and judging what is morally right or
wrong. Rather they are also interested in genuinely normative
questions in attempting to answer the question of why we should care
about morality and why we should regard moral judgments as making
normative demands on us. In morally blaming other persons we do assume
that we evaluate their behavior according to standards that they as
persons are in some sense already committed to. We assume that these
standards are their own standards rather than standards that we impose
from an external perspective on them. Unfortunately, even if one would
agree with either David Hume or Michael's Slote's account
of the causal role of empathy outlined above, it is doubtful that
their account would help us to answer the genuinely normative question
appropriately. Why exactly should I take a particular emotional
reaction of another person towards me and my action, even if it is a
feeling of warmth caused by empathy, as something that is normatively
relevant for me. Certainly we all like to be liked and try to fit in
with our peer group, but then moral judgments would be nothing more
than a glorified form of peer pressure. Hume might respond that we
should take them seriously because they are responses from the general
point of view, but that in itself seems to be begging the question of
why such perspective is articulating the appropriate normative
standard for judging our behavior and character. This is also exactly
the reason, why philosophers with Kantian inclinations have been in
general skeptical about moral sentimentalism and positions that think
of empathy as a foundation of morality (for a nice explication of
Kant's critical view of sympathy see Deimling 2017).
Contemporary "Kantians" do at times, however, admit that
empathy and perspective taking is epistemically relevant for moral
deliberations, even if it is not solely constitutive for moral agency
(Deigh 1996 and 2018; Darwall 2006, Shermann 1998, For a review see
also Oxley 2011). Interestingly, philosophers sympathetic to moral
sentimentalism have particularly turned to Adam Smith for inspiration
in developing empathy based accounts of morality and in responding to
the above normativity problem. In contrast to Hume, Smith conceives of
empathy/sympathy not merely as the enlivening of a perceived emotion
or feeeling but as imaginative perspective-taking. In taking up
another person's perspective we put ourselves in his situation
and imagine how he would respond to the situation, how he would think
and feel about it. If in bringing another person's point of view
"home to ourselves" in this manner, we recognize that we
ourselves might have felt or acted like the other person, then we
approve of the other person's sentiment or action, otherwise we
disapprove. Moreover, such approval constitutes moral approval if we
have empathized with the other from the perspective of the impartial
spectator, a perspective that Smith, like Hume, appeals to in order to
correct for empathy's natural shortcomings. More importantly,
some authors think that within the Smithian framework we also find
some answers to the normativity problem. They think that the impartial
spectator perspective can be recast as an implicit commitment of our
ordinary practice of making sense of each other as rational and
emotional creatures with the help of empathic perspective taking
(Stueber 2017) or argue that Smithian perspective-taking
involves quasi-Kantian commitments to the dignity of a person,
including his or her affective dimension. (Debes 2017, but see also
Fricke 2005, Kauppinen 2017b, and Roughley 2018).