Research
Works in Progress
Empathy as Morally Impermissible: When Empathizing Violates Another’s Right to Privacy, Brittney Currie and Jonathan Livengood Description: Empathy is often romanticized as the catalyst for social and moral change. Why is empathy so central to our idea of achieving a better world? Empathy is a special kind of understanding. Understanding other’s perspectives is bedrock for engaging in effective and peaceful communication. With peaceful and effective communication, we can resolve conflict, exchange important information, help others suffer less, and so, we suffer less ourselves. When agents who can empathize do this with each other regularly, empathize in ways that result in understanding, they are able to anticipate each other’s long-term and short-term needs, creating better societies that reflect individual needs and community goals. By actively considering other’s unique needs, desires, values, and goals, and intentionally listening, we can learn how to effectively show up for each other as a community; nevertheless, we have cause for pause– empathizing, as cited by at least some critics, can have negative consequences (Bloom 2016). Bloom notoriously argues in ‘Against Empathy’ (2016), that empathy fails to be a mechanism for achieving peace, understanding, or resolving conflict, precisely because it is emotional at its core. If, as the literature argues, empathy truly is an emotionally laden approach for connecting individuals through shared emotional experience, then empathy fails to play its functional role in bringing about prosocial behavior. Firstly, Bloom offers that (2016) it is possible that we can become emotionally burnt-out and emotionally over-extended in a world where connecting with other’s truly necessitates taking up their emotional pain. More than that, Bloom cites that emotional attitudes that map onto nationalistic pride, and unified anger over a cause can bring about unnecessary evils. We, too, think that the goodness or desirability of empathy has limits, but, for different reasons. In this paper, we argue that it is sometimes morally wrong to empathize with another person. How could that be? We observe that in order to empathize with another person, one has to understand that person. More specifically, one has to understand (at least) what the other person values in the way that they value it. But that kind of understanding requires a non-trivial quantity and quality of information about the person. In some cases, gathering or making use of information adequate to successfully empathizing would constitute a violation of the other person’s privacy. And in at least some cases, violating the other person’s privacy would be morally worse than failing to empathize with them. In such cases, it is morally wrong to empathize with them. Here is how we proceed. In Section 1, we observe that empathy requires (or perhaps just is) a certain sort of understanding. In Section 2, we argue that in some cases, understanding another person requires violating their privacy. In Section 3, we argue that at least in some cases, the harm done by violating another person’s privacy in securing the kind of understanding needed for empathy is worse than any good achieved by successfully empathizing with that person, and therefore, in such cases, empathizing is morally wrong to do. Early Stages
Reconsidering Emotional Normativity Constraints on Empathy and Trauma, Currie Description: Standard philosophical and psychological accounts of empathy aim at emotional matching between target and empathizer (Bailey 2018; 2022) or require an empathizer have emotionally “appropriate” responses (Baron-Cohen 2012). On my cognitive-central account, I argue we can empathize sans emotion. Empathy’s success condition on empathizing with traumatic experiences cannot be emotional similarity, since this demands empathizers mimic traumatic emotional responses. Further, for empathizers who have experienced trauma an epistemic demand for “normative” emotional responses is harmful and impractical. Our usual standards for successful empathizing exclude considerations of trauma. An adequate account of empathy and trauma drops the emotional similarity and normative response standards. Cognitive perspective-taking affords epistemic distance to consider how someone’s beliefs, desires, feelings, and goals constitute their lived reality (Paul 2021). My cognitive account maintains we can cognitively empathize, or update our beliefs, without updating our emotional attitudes. I grapple with potential consequences of an account of empathy and trauma that decenters affective empathy (Betzler and Keller 2021). Early Stages
Against Arguments Strongly Rooted In Capacity: Why Classical Psychological & Philosophical Accounts Of Affective-Empathy Cannot Explain How We Empathize Description: Empathy has generally been conceptualized in both the theoretical and empirical literature as an affect-central psychological phenomenon. Moreover, it is an emotional psychological phenomenon that is firmly rooted in theory and research paradigms centering on its importance as a psychological capacity, where an agent’s success in empathizing is often measured either as a function of the absence or presence of some empathic traits, or the expression of those traits. In this sense, capacity-first and functionalist accounts of empathy are central to the way we approach and understand empathy. In this paper, I argue two distinctly contrasting things from the emotion-centric capacity-based accounts. First, I argue that empathy is a norm-guided process, whose success depends on the norms adopted by the empathizer and aims of the empathizer. Secondly, I argue that empathy is a predominantly epistemic process, recentering our understanding of the success conditions of empathy in the cognitive. What I take to be novel about my account is that I demonstrate, through a series of cases, that emotion is neither necessary nor-sufficient for empathy; in doing so, I call into question the affect- centralized capacity-based accounts of empathy, as well its theoretically informed emotional- centric aims. My argument also rehearses and synthesizes the primary research paradigms I take to be contenders of the classicalist accounts. My new analysis of empathy has consequences for how we measure empathy, understand empathy, and perhaps, how we practically approach empathizing as individuals.