Empathy, Sympathy, and Morality: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Empathy has been used for at least three purposes in the literature (e.g., Coplan, Goldie 2011):for understanding our acquaintance to works of art, the content of others’ minds, and for its allegedcontribution to moral behavior and moral judgment. I will discuss specifically empathy’scontribution in the understanding of others’ emotional states and in ethics.The aim of this work, thus, is showing that we can understand empathy as a basic mechanism for sharing. It enables us to understand others and facilitates our moral judgment and behavior. This higher ability is made possible by empathy. However, in order to reach it various steps arenecessary. It is not the case that having empathy as a basic mechanism directly leads to this higher ability, nor that the latter is the only way in which human beings can have a moral understanding of the world. I will deal with this topic in Chapters 3, 4, and 5.Before moving to these issues, that constitute the core of my interests, it will be necessary to sketch a theory of emotions and related phenomena. Chapter 1 will focus on the possible objects of sharing by means of a characterization of the phenomena that fall within the affective domain. In Chapter 2, I will show the growth of the debate about empathy and sympathy in the literature by aquantitative analysis of bibliometrics. Then, I will argue against a possible interpretation of empathy as an umbrella concept. Conceptual clarification, thus, will turn out to be necessary. In Chapter 3 I will try to define empathy as a basic mechanism contrasting it with other phenomena that are related to it, but cannot be identified with it. In Chapter 4, I will distinguish empathy from sympathy, interpreting the first as an amoral mechanism, and the latter as a criterion to judge others’ behaviors, direct one’s own, and understand others. This aim will be achieved primarily by an interpretation of Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments (Smith 1759).At a first approximation, empathy is what enables us to share others’ emotions and sympathy is a more reflective ability to understand others’ behaviors and affective phenomena, to judge them, andto direct our own behavior. Adopting the sympathetic and impartial spectator’s perspective willconstitute the basis for virtue. I will also understand sadism or Schadenfreude as the opposite ofsympathetic engagement.Chapter 5 will focus on the relation between empathy as a psychological mechanism and sympathy as a moral criterion. The core idea is that empathy can enable the development of a sympathetic concern for others, but the latter constitutes just a possible development of the former. Iwill also sketch the possible relation between descriptive and prescriptive accounts endorsing a nonreductionistversion of naturalism.