Empathy and Moral Perception

Abstract

This chapter defends the view that empathy is tightly linked to the concept (and the phenomenon) of moral perception, which is in turn closely related to moral judgement. The contributions of scholars such as Lawrence Blum are taken into account and carefully analysed in order to demonstrate how moral judgement needs moral perception and how in turn moral perception cannot function properly without empathy.

At the end of the previous chapter I drew attention to a special characteristic of empathy, that is, its moralising power. By this I do not wish to commit myself to the implication that empathy is intrinsically moral and that it always plays a moral role, but rather that it can, and that, in several different circumstances, empathy makes us alert to the moral features of a specific situation. In other words, empathy, functioning as an information-gatherer,¹ enriches our understanding of a certain situation: of the motivations driving the agents, of the impact that our behaviour can have on them, of the possible reactions that might arise. But there is more. Very rarely are the situations that we face, and in which we can act, comparable to the kind of elementary feedback we find in basic physics, where from a precise action inevitably follows a fixed reaction. Human psychology is a complex matter, and empathy is the best GPS we have to drive us across the others’ inner world. In what follows, I am going to show how empathy can play a central role for what is normally known in the literature as moral perception and how this can assist our moral judgement. In order to reach this goal, I am going to analyse three emblematic examples and, in conclusion, I will try to substantiate the results by engaging in dialogue with suggestions stemming from Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt. However, before moving any further, we have to ask a crucial question: what is moral perception and how does it differ from moral judgement?

Rivers of ink could be written about what precisely is intended by moral judgement, but, to not uselessly complicate matters, we could describe moral judgement as that process by means of which we can judge the morality of an action or a subject. Put in another way, moral judgement is the process that should bridge the gap between moral rules, principles, and/or values, on the one hand, and particular circumstances, on the other, between the general and the particular, the axiological and the factual, the theory and the praxis.² We can judge, for example, that telling the truth is a good or a moral thing to do because we follow the categorical imperative as a principle or because we value positively sincerity and honesty (we think that such qualities have a high moral value). We can also morally judge a person and say, for instance, that Gandhi was on the whole a good man, for the reason that we consider his actions and his ideas to be morally worthy.

In this sense, moral perception can be deemed to be similar to moral judgement, since it also deals with moral values and qualities. Indeed, moral perception could be described as the faculty to intuitively discern (to perceive, as it were) the morally salient qualities in particular situations. However, whereas moral judgement analyses the morality of, let us say, a certain action, moral perception is what makes this action appears intuitively moral. Moral perception comes at the stage before moral judgement³ and can sometimes even bypass moral judgement entirely by leading to moral action without bringing the particular circumstance in front of the courthouse of the moral judgement. Notice that, for the sake of simplicity, I have defined moral perception as a faculty. Nevertheless, as we will see, moral perception should not be conceived as a unitary capacity, but rather as a cluster of multifarious moral and psychological processes of which empathy is an integral part.

The most typical (and most powerful) potentiality of empathy is its capacity to make us step into the shoes of another, to make us understand another not from the outside, in a cold and detached manner, like a scientist describing the behaviour of a particular animal, but, as it were, from the inside, in a hot and very attached way. Thanks to empathy, we inhabit the body of the other—maybe only for a few moments, and in any case without losing the fundamental awareness of who we are—and take on a double perspective: my own one and that of the target of my empathy.⁴ This is what I called the lingering in the world of others, which is a fundamental component of empathy (at least in its ‘high-level’ form): trying to recreate the perspective of the other, dwelling in the other’s persona, almost in an ecstatic manner, and then come back with an enriched awareness.

This feature of empathy is, taken per se, morally neutral, but it can serve the aims of morality in a variety of ways. We have seen previously that Paul Bloom has argued extensively in his book about the supposed intrinsically biased nature of empathy. Empathy is for Bloom the mother of all prejudices in morality, and if we want to act morally, then we have to cast it aside. However, we are now going to see that empathy can in fact correct our biases and help us to act morally; in particular, empathy can adjust our biases regarding other people and those regarding the (moral) appreciation of certain situations.

Take a paradigmatic case that we find in the work of Luigi Pirandello, a brilliant Italian playwright, novelist, and poet.⁵ This is an example that goes under the Italian name of La vecchia imbellettata, which means, approximately, ‘the froufrou old woman’.⁶ Pirandello relates that he was idly strolling down the streets of his hometown when his attention was suddenly drawn by a singular vision: a mature lady was walking on the other side of the road wearing a frilly colourful dress, high heels, and a heavy makeup.⁷ Now, the first emotional reaction Pirandello had (and, he hypothesised, the majority of people would have) contemplating this sight was that of something comic: there is something wrong and bizarre in an elderly woman dressed like this. The contrast between what we think an old lady should wear and what this particular woman actually was wearing gives us the impression of something deeply ridiculous. If we based our judgement about the lady on this first impression, it could be nothing but negative: we would think that what the lady is doing is inappropriate (people of that day and age would probably go so far as to judge it outrageous), that she must be shameless and, as such, constitutes a bad example for other women and a scandal for her relatives.⁸ However, a second, more profound degree of analysis is achievable, though locked behind the door of our prejudices, and the key that can open that door is empathy.⁹

Pirandello says that we could be satisfied by this first impression, chuckle and think that the lady is really embarrassing herself, and then proceed on our walk. Or else, we could do what he chose to do. We could try to step into the shoes of that mature woman and resort to what I previously called narrative empathy. We can, that is, construe a narrative about the woman in order to understand why she decided to dress like this and, in order to get in tune with her, to have consonant feelings and thoughts.¹⁰ We could start with a very generic kind of imaginative simulation: what does it mean to be a woman of that age? What are the expectations society has of us? And why, being aware of all these expectations that a mature woman should dress with sobriety and always act conventionally, would we choose to look the way she does? We then go on to add particulars to our narrative simulation, we build a story: we see a wedding ring on her finger. Maybe she is married to a man much younger than her, maybe she lives in fear that her husband might one day see her as too old for him and fall in love with a younger woman. Maybe she notices the judgemental looks on the others’ faces when she passes by dressed like that and she feels shame and embarrassment, but the desire to be seen as still attractive by her husband and the fear of losing him are stronger than anything else.

When we have reached this level of analysis, our judgement about her can no longer be the same as it was. Empathy has enriched our comprehension: we have felt her embarrassment, we have felt her fear of losing her love. Granted, we may not have recreated the identical mental state (this would be utopic: we might in fact have failed to feel all the emotions that she might have felt, we might have underestimated or overestimated the power of some of those, for example) but on the whole we have managed to enter into a mental state that is much more consonant to hers than to our previous one: we have empathised with her. Empathy has widened the horizon of our perception: now we are able to see aspects (of her, of the situation) that we were unable to see before, and these aspects have a weight in our judgement regarding the morality of the woman. Where we once saw a ridiculous, if not shameless and scandalous elderly woman, we see now a concerned wife trying to do her best to keep her family together. And if we still think we can laugh—so asserts Pirandello—then ours will not be laughter, but a bitter smile, because we understand now that we are not in the presence of something comic and ridiculous, but of something tragic or tragicomic at best.¹¹

Admittedly, one could object that we cannot be certain whether our empathy has hit the target, whether the lady really dresses like this because she is driven by the thoughts and emotions we have imaginatively enacted. Maybe we were correct the first time, perhaps she really is just a vain and deluded woman pretending she is still 25 years old. This is an obvious objection, but as already evidenced, empathy is not a completely reliable mechanism. Undoubtedly, we can be mistaken. Nonetheless, whilst this should invite prudence and caution when seeking confirmation for our empathy, it should not lead us to distrust empathy in its entirety. After all, the words of friends and colleagues are not wholly reliable, nor is our memory or reason, and even our senses are not always trustworthy, but we do not cease to rely on them. The good news is that there can be opportunities to put our empathy to the test and see if we have made the right deduction, and when we cannot, at least empathy contributes in making us aware of the potential complexity behind even the most trivial situation.

However, I want to stress this point even further. Even in the case where we found ourselves wrong about the lady, the sheer fact that we embarked in this empathic process and that we conceded the possibility of another explanation for what we saw, that spared the woman from a too-rushed sentence of immorality, reveals a scruple of conscience that already has a moral weight. It is a moral weight that is not only expressed in the following act of moral judgement, but reflected in the ethos, too, in the ethical value of the empathiser themselves. We say, in fact, that it is good, for example, not to judge by appearances, that it is good not to jump to hasty conclusions, that it is good to concede the benefit of the doubt. When we utter these sentences, we do not intend to say that these actions are good because of their consequences, because they are in some sense instrumentally useful (to reach some kind of goal, for instance). On the contrary, we value these types of conduct as inherently good. Further, we consider these token-behaviours as exemplifications, as instantiations of the moral virtues possessed by the agent. Indeed, a virtuous person is that kind of person that avoids jum** to hasty conclusions or judging from appearances. And if this is so, then empathy has to be a necessary feature of the virtuous person. Put as a syllogism: (A) the virtuous person must have the correct moral perception, that is, they must be able to identify and correctly evaluate all the moral elements of a given situation; (B) Nonetheless, empathy is, on many occasions, necessary to perceive (and judge) the moral meaning of certain situations or types of behaviour; and (C) Ergo, empathy is, on many occasions, necessary for the moral person.

To deny C, one ought to deny A or B. Since I believe that few people would dare to deny A, objectors might want to reject B, so that C could no longer follow. Indeed, there are not that many studies that focus on the link between moral perception and empathy in modern literature, and, what is more, none of these studies can be taken to provide a final answer to the question of whether empathy is necessary or not in this case. If history of philosophy has taught us anything, it is that any thesis can be confuted. Therefore, my aim in what follows cannot be that of finding the final and indisputable proof of the necessary role played by empathy in moral perception (and subsequently in moral judgement). Nevertheless, I will attempt to make this hypothesis quite compelling and hardly objectionable.

1 Moral Perception in Lawrence Blum

In his 1994 book, Lawrence Blum has developed a very illuminating way of showing how the characteristics of moral perception are distinct from those of moral judgement and how the task of moral perception does not overlap with that of moral judgement. He conceived an example with the intent of demonstrating this precisely and another one to illustrate (so it seems and so I interpret it) the role played by empathy in moral perception. Interestingly, I find that even his first example, however, does not but confirm how empathy and moral perception are strictly tied. Blum imagines the following:

John and Joan are riding on a subway train, seated. There are no empty seats and some people are standing; yet the subway car is not packed so tightly as to be uncomfortable for everyone. One of the passengers standing is a woman in her thirties holding two relatively full shop** bags. John is not paying particular attention to the woman, but he is cognizant of her. Joan, by contrast, is distinctly aware that the woman is uncomfortable.¹²

Now, the first feature that should stand out with a certain degree of clarity from this example is—in Blum’s opinion—that John and Joan clearly perceive the situation differently. In other words, different aspects of the situation are salient for John and Joan.¹³ Using Blum’s words: ‘what is fully and explicitly present to John’s consciousness about the woman is that she is standing holding some bags; what is in that same sense salient for Joan is the woman’s discomfort’.¹⁴ Now Blum is convinced that this difference is due to a difference in salience, which means that John and Joan perceive the same situation differently, because they have different perceptions of what is salient in the situation. The question to ask is therefore: why is that? Why is Joan aware of some elements that John seems to ignore? Blum stands still on the issue of perception: the point for him is that Joan perceives the discomfort of the woman in a way that John does not.

Now, whilst I agree with Blum about the difference in salience between Joan’s and John’s perception, I think that the only way we have to break the circularity of the argument for which we perceive a situation differently because we have different saliences, and we have different saliences because we perceive the situation differently, is to ground this diversity of salience in one of our most fundamental psychological mechanisms: empathy. Empathy is, in fact, intrinsically connected to what was rightly defined as the salience effect.¹⁵ This means, using the words of Oxley, that: ‘empathy makes salient another’s particular emotions, concerns, reasons, interests, and considerations in such a way that they are relevant and important to the empathizer, so that she is motivated to respond to these concerns’.¹⁶ This special characteristic of empathy allows us to explain how empathy can influence our moral perception: different empathic levels in different people produce different saliences, which, in turn, provoke dissimilar (moral) perceptions of the same situations. To be more concrete, let us return to Blum’s example.

Blum correctly observed that where Joan sees a woman in discomfort, John only sees a standing woman holding two shop** bags. There is, thus, a sense in which both of them see the same situation, constituted by the same elements (the standing woman in the subway train with her bags), and another in which they see two radically different things. The factor that shifts Joan’s perception, as it were, to another level, is empathy. Joan feels the discomfort of the woman, she is aware of it in a way in which John is not. Having this awareness, although it is admittedly possible for Joan to refuse to give up her seat, it is nonetheless harder, surely than for the unaware John. However, it would be a mistake to stress the link that empathy can have with action uniquely, as if the only element to have moral value were a practical act. On the contrary, there is already (moral) merit in the perception of the morally significant aspects of a situation, and, in the same way, we have to distinguish the moral shortcoming of a failure to see from the moral shortcoming of a failure to act. I have stressed more than once that morality is, inter alia, a matter of degrees. Now, Blum’s example allows us to observe it very clearly. Contrast, in fact, the behaviour of Joan with that of John and that of another man: Ted.

Joan empathises with the woman and perceives her discomfort. She is not merely aware of her discomfort (i.e. in a cognisant but not emoting way), she is instead moved by the representation of her discomfort and consequently chooses to give up her seat. Ted, in turn, has no problem in unambiguously and correctly perceiving the woman’s discomfort, but, contrary to Joan, he is not moved by it. He is, that is, cognitively aware of her discomfort, but he does not feel affective empathy for her. Probably, his own comfort has a stronger salience for him. John, in this sense, does not display the same egoism and insensitivity showed by Ted. He is simply unable to see the woman as in a discomforting position. However, if this discomfort would be brought to his attention, he would promptly empathise with the woman, feel her distress, and act similarly to Joan. Hence, as it should now be clear, John finds himself in the middle between a truly morally virtuous person like Joan, who is able both to see all the moral aspects of a situation and to act accordingly, and a morally bereft person like Ted, who, though he notices the same moral aspects, refuses nonetheless to act. To make the scenario even more interesting, we could think of a character even worse than Ted, for example, someone who is unable to perceive the moral elements of a situation and that even if these were brought to his attention, he would nevertheless refrain from hel**: Bob.¹⁷ In this state of affairs, we might choose to describe the differences between the four characters as differences in moral perception (this is, e.g. what Blum seems to do), but I want to go one step further and see if differences in moral perception are related to differences in empathy and I think that it can be argued that they are in fact linked.

My claim is that the best criterion we have to unequivocally distinguish the nuances in the moral merit and the moral disposition of these four characters is empathy. Taking empathy as a yardstick permits us to affirm that Joan is the more empathic person of the group: she feels affective empathy for the woman, which makes the woman’s discomfort transparent to her (she feels it the moment she observes her) and this in turn motivates her action. The second in the scale of moral virtue is John, who, possessing a lesser degree of empathy (compared with Joan) is unable to perceive the woman’s distress, but who would be ready to help if this distress would be pointed out to him. Then it is the turn of Ted: he is able to acknowledge the woman’s discomfort, but this recognition never crosses the cognitive boundary: it remains at a purely cognitive level (‘I know that she is uncomfortable’) and never reaches the emotional one (‘I feel her discomfort’). The exclusion of any kind of affective empathy for the woman leaves Ted apathetic, unmoved, and unmotivated, without triggering any reactive behaviour. Finally, at the lower stage, we find Bob, who not only displays the same deficit of affective empathy showed by Ted, but also exhibits an absence of cognitive empathy, since he is even unable to recognise the woman’s general state of discomfort.

If we take the example of Joan as a paradigm of ‘perfect’¹⁸ moral virtue, then we may assert that the three other subjects are at different distances from the ‘perfect’ virtue: John has to work on his cognitive empathy, so that it can help him, inter alia, to detect the moral aspects in which the emotions of another living being are at stake; Ted has to work on his affective empathy, so that the recognition of the suffering of others can trigger a similar emotion in him and motivates him to help; Bob, finally, has to work on both forms of empathy if he wants to have a chance improving his seriously callous and unemotional character.

This explanation surely makes sense, but—it could be argued—seems far from being the only viable explanation for the four characters’ behaviour. Critics of empathy like Prinz, Bloom, and others might object that feeling the distress of the woman is not necessary to perceive that she is in a position of discomfort, nor to help her in some way. We may also, for instance, act following a sort of ‘script’, that is a behavioural pattern that we have previously learnt. For instance, if we were raised with the idea that it is good to give up one’s seat to people in discomfort, we would be ready to do it, almost without thinking. Also, in order to perceive that the woman is in an uncomfortable position, empathy seems unnecessary: we can detect it by objective elements in the context of experience. If this is the case, then resorting to empathy is superfluous.

Faced with such an objection, I would again be forced to clarify what, by now, should be patently obvious: my claim is not that empathy is necessary in every single case of moral perception, nor that it is always sufficient to trigger moral behaviour, nevertheless, it ought to be acknowledged that there are cases in which empathy plays a fundamental role in both moral instances. If we go back to Blum’s example, we will soon discover that this is exactly a circumstance in which empathy becomes essential. As Blum describes the situation, there seems to be no objective feature indicating that the woman is in discomfort: ‘the subway car’—Blum says—‘is not packed so tightly as to be uncomfortable for everyone’,¹⁹ the shop** bags are two and only ‘relatively full’,²⁰ the woman, finally, is ‘in her thirties’, thus not too young, nor too old to have sufficient strength to stand, she is not pregnant and she does not show any manifest sign of distress. This being the state of affairs, accepting the objection made above would take us to very questionable consequences: it seems in fact implausible to think of a person, no matter how based on kindness and altruism their education might have been, who would be so aware of others’ distress as to automatically notice it even when there were no clear signs of it, and, what is more, who would be so altruistically oriented as to always give up their seat to anybody being in the woman’s same situation, only on the ground of a mere observation.

Yet again, an objector might want to affirm that there is in fact an emotion driving our attention to the woman’s situation, but it is not empathy, it is, instead, concern.²¹ It is because we are concerned for the woman that we notice her discomfort, and it is because we are concerned about the woman being uncomfortable that we decide to give her our seat. Finally, it is because we are concerned people that we tend to be bothered by conditions like that in which the woman is in. This model certainly makes sense, but it hardly divests the role empathy can play. In fact, what exactly is concern? Prinz does not offer a clear-cut definition of it. He describes it as: ‘[…] a cousin of empathy. It is a fellow-feeling that arises when we consider another’s plight. […] Concern is a negative sentiment caused by the recognition that someone is in need. […] It is canonically expressed by a knitted brow, akin to worry.’²² This definition is rather unsatisfactory, being too vague, as it makes concern undistinguishable from other fellow-feelings, such as compassion or pity. I believe, instead, that what is typical of concern and should have been evidenced by Prinz is its essential dimension of ‘interest’. When we are concerned about a person, about another living being, or about a thing (a cause, a subject, or a place in the environment, for example), what is characteristic of our relation towards the object we are concerned about is that we take a kind of emotional interest in it; we care for it, the object matters to us. If this is a correct representation of concern (and I believe it is), then the question to ask becomes: how can one become concerned about anything? Here, the empathy that we expelled through the main door comes back through the window. Take again the example of the woman in the subway: how can I feel concern for her without putting myself in her position? Notice that, in order to empathise with her, one does not need to feel her same discomfort: it suffices to imaginatively linger in her position and to feel a hint of discomfort. If this is still not convincing, try to imagine how one can become concerned about someone without feeling any empathy. Try to think of how Joan might be able to make John understand that the woman is probably uncomfortable without making use of any typically empathic vocabulary: ‘Try to be in her shoes’; ‘Wouldn’t you feel uncomfortable in her position?’, for example. Granted, I can become concerned about something like climate change because I have read that it is a true menace and because I value my life, the lives of my loved ones, and those of all living beings on the planet, but I claim that the easiest and most common way of becoming concerned about other people is through the empathy we are capable of feeling for them. I cannot be concerned about all the people standing with two relatively full shop** bags in a subway train, equally and at all times. However, I can feel concern for that particular woman because of the empathy I have felt for her, that is, because I have lingered, for a moment, in her inner world and seen the world differently. In so doing, I have widened my perception, my knowledge of all the elements that might matter in the situation, in the context she and I are in, and, based on this knowledge (which is also a knowledge of an affective kind, for the good reason that I feel a part of her discomfort and so a knowledge that motivates me as only states of affairs charged with emotional content can do),²³ I have made a choice. What is more, I have made this choice for the right (moral and altruistic) reasons: not to win something, but because, through empathy, I have begun to care for the woman for her own sake. Empathy has made her condition salient and, along with it, also important to me; her condition has become the condition I might find myself in, and her probable desire has become my desire. This is the special, unique power of empathy. In order to see how fundamental empathy’s role can be, it suffices to take into account the second example Blum gives:²⁴

Theresa is the administrator of a department. One of her subordinates, Julio, has been stricken with a deteriorating condition in his leg causing him frequent pain. He approaches Theresa to help work out a plan by which the company, and in particular their department, can accommodate his disability. Theresa is unable to appreciate Julio’s disability and the impact it is having on his work. Although in principle Theresa accepts the company’s legal obligation to accommodate Julio’s disability, in fact she continually offers him less than he needs and is entitled to.

More generally, Theresa makes Julio feel uncomfortable in approaching her and gives him the impression that she thinks he may be too self-pitying and should just “pull himself together.” It is not that Theresa fails entirely to see Julio as “disabled” and “in pain,” but she does fail to grasp fully what this means for him, and to take in or acknowledge that pain. The level of Julio’s pain and its impact on his mental state is insufficiently salient for Theresa.²⁵

The last sentences in this example are the most important: Theresa knows that Julio is in pain, she perceives it, but, Blum says, she fails to fully grasp what this means, not in general, but for him. She is unable to take in Julio’s pain, it is simply not sufficiently salient for her. In doing this, it is rather obvious that she is neglecting morally significant features in the situation, that is, Julio’s pain and the negative impact this physical distressing condition is having on his work and on his life in general. Notice that Theresa’s behaviour is different from that shown by John. John suffered from a sort of attentional laziness, a ‘situational self-absorption’ says Blum;²⁶ something that could be cured just by drawing his attention to the problem. Even a comparison with the character of Ted (in the previous example) would be inappropriate, since the problem with Ted, as we have described it, was his cold and indifferent personality; instead, Theresa’s condition is more complex. Blum does not describe her as a cold-hearted and uncaring person, but as someone who unconsciously identifies pain with weakness. She becomes uncomfortable when people talk about pain in her presence, or when they display symptoms of it, till the point where she finds herself feeling contempt for these persons, thinking that they are exaggerating their suffering. Whatever the cause for her behaviour might be, it is crucial to point out that her condition is different both from that of a situational self-absorption (John) and from that of a generally insensitive and uncaring disposition (Ted). This also takes the discussion about moral perception to a higher level: far from being just a way of making moral discriminations, of discerning the moral features/elements in a certain situation, moral perception involves also the correct evaluation of these elements. It is, in other words, both a loupe and a scale: it provides the identification of the moral aspects and their weighing, as well; it tells us what matters (morally) in a given situation and how much it matters.

If we consider Theresa’s example and the reasons behind her deficient moral perception, we will soon discover that only empathy can be the appropriate cure. It is in fact the lack of empathy (or, at least, of a sufficient degree of it) that prevents her from perceiving with the suitable amount of salience Julio’s pain and all that this pain entails. Theresa knows that Julio is suffering, but she is unable to see this suffering as he sees it, to feel toward²⁷ this pain in the same way he does.

If, in the example with John, empathy was needed in order to identify the moral aspects of the situation (that were not clearly perceived by him), here it is necessary to weigh them correctly, to give them the appropriate value, the significance they deserve. The mistakes Theresa is making are essentially two and are strictly intertwined and tied to the fundamental dimension of feeling with inherent to empathy. The first one is acknowledging or understanding Julio’s pain at a purely cognitive level, without embracing it at an emotional one. Without the affective dimension in play, Theresa only knows that this suffering exists and is impacting negatively on Julio, but it is quite easy for her to believe that he is overdoing it. Furthermore, this merely cognitive acknowledgement (that could be called a case of ‘cognitive empathy’) leads Theresa to treat Julio’s pain as something which is placed in the exterior, objectively measurable world, as something that can be objectively quantifiable, thereby forgetting (or ignoring) that pain is intrinsically embodied. The only way to morally deal with it is to enter and linger in the other’s world, not deluding oneself with the thought that it is possible to fully understand it by staying, as it were, ‘on the outside’.

Hence, contra Bloom and Prinz, who think that empathy is inherently biased, empathy becomes the path Theresa has to take to eliminate her own prejudices; it cuts through her biases and sheds light on a reality which exists, but of which she was less than fully aware. Notice that I am not arguing that the right amount of salience we have to give to something that regards others (like their pain) is the salience they grant them, but rather that our understanding of a certain condition can be wrong and that the best way to correct it, or at least to put it to the test, is by comparing it with that of others. Empathy with others, or, in other words, the effort of step** into their shoes and seeing things as they see them, should precede all of our judgements about them: about what they think, what they do, what they are, and what they deserve. In fact, how can one believe in judging impartially by adopting only one’s own perspective? Impartiality is not always a matter of ‘subtraction’, that is, of abstracting from all particular point of views to reach an objective one, but often it is a matter of ‘addition’, in other words, of considering, in addition to my own point of view, that of the person/s I am judging, as if I were the spectator of my own behaviour, and of other people, too.²⁸ The first kind of process is a deductive one, and can be used when we have clear rules and principles that we can apply: if the action or person we are judging is clearly categorisable, then judging is easy. For example, under the lex talionis, if a man unjustly attacked another man with a knife blinding one of his eyes, he had to suffer the same fate. However, most of the time judgements are not so straightforward: a number of elements have to be taken into account (among them mitigating circumstances, external influences, and so on). This is why some judicial systems (like the American legal system) established a jury: a group of people appointed to judge the accused and to find a common sentence, not by abstracting, but by listening to one other, by empathising with each other’s perspective, but also with the perspective of the accused and that of the victim(s) of the accused.²⁹

Notice that the practice of submitting one’s own conduct to the judgement of an imagined tribunal thanks to the power of HLE (i.e. narrative- and perspective-taking-empathy) has a long story in philosophy. In fact, even one of the most prominent and influential theorists of empathy, Adam Smith, put exactly this procedure at the base of his famous concept of the impartial spectator. The approval and disapproval of oneself that we call conscience is an effect of judgements made by spectators. This mechanism is, at the end of the day, nothing but the introversion of a mechanism we know very well: each of us judges the behaviour of others as a spectator, and each of us is judged by others as spectators. Thus, we come to judge both our conduct and that of anyone else by imagining how an impartial spectator would judge it, or, using the words of Adam Smith: ‘We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it.’³⁰ In a passage of the first edition of his volume (but which does not appear in the five later versions), Smith is more thorough:

To judge of ourselves as we judge of others […] is the greatest exertion of candour and impartiality. In order to do this, we must look at ourselves with the same eyes with which we look at others: we must imagine ourselves not the actors, but the spectators of our own character and conduct. […] We must enter, in short, either into what are, or into what ought to be, or into what, if the whole circumstances of our conduct were known, we imagine would be the sentiments of others, before we can either applaud or condemn it.³¹

We can see that all features which are typical of empathy (the imaginative enactment, the perspective-taking) are here employed by Smith as the fundamental gearwheel of which the machine of moral judgement is made. Now, the problems with this view are well known. We all are aware of the fact that people are generally fallible and that their judgements are not always impartial. Hence, how can the decision to use their imagined sentiments (of approval or disapproval) be a good technique to arrive at impartial judgements? The analogy of the jury I made above already hints at the right direction: pace Smith (believing that the mere simulation of the judgement of others was enough to reach judgemental impartiality) principles are essential. Exactly like a jury has to ground their judgements on law and/or former courtroom decisions, we also need moral principles as guidelines to assist our empathy. In fact, empathic deliberation does not always invariably overlap with moral deliberation. But let us be systematic. Empathetic deliberation involves, following the definition offered by Oxley: ‘kee** in mind the other’s relevant feelings, reasons and desires and the way they perceive their lives, and thinking about their situation’.³² Though this process is very useful for moral deliberation, it is nevertheless not equivalent to it. In the words of Oxley: ‘Empathetic deliberation becomes moral deliberation when an individual uses moral norms, values, and principles to guide the deliberative process and determine how best to understand that person and the situation.’³³

So, in short, moral deliberation is nothing else but empathic (or ‘empathetic’) deliberation plus ‘moral norms, values, and principles’. Empathic deliberation makes certain features of the person and of the situation salient, but then, in the deliberation process, it is the moral commitments that have to intervene together with empathy. Thanks to empathy, the inner world of the other becomes salient to me and this saliency is maintained in the deliberation. However, this deliberation has to be grounded on principles as well as on empathy. It is not just a matter of informative content, as if the only good of empathy were the capacity to bring about a series of pieces of information about the other’s mental states, about their personal situation, and so on. On the contrary, what is characteristic of (affective) empathy is the capacity to feel, as it were, this information and to regard it not as something that is the case, but as something that matters. Darwall (who Oxley also quotes) affirmed in what is possibly his most famous work that empathy: ‘works to bring others’ view inside our perspective so that they can be part of our own critical reflection and not just recorded as what others think’.³⁴ This observation of Darwall is fundamental. The information gathered by empathy is not just collected, but made salient, which means that empathy does not merely have an informative content, but an informative cum emotional one. It is information that matters for me, because it matters for others.

I said above that morality is intrinsically relational, because it concerns the actions of an inherently relational being as the man is, shaped by relations with others, with the environment, with ourselves, and more. This representation of morality was also shared by Stephen Darwall, who famously founded the normativity of our moral obligations from the second-person standpoint, that is, ‘the perspective you and I take up when we make and acknowledge claims on one another’s conduct and will’ and it is taken up (and this is crucial) when making demands on how one ought to be treated.³⁵ We cannot hope to treat others morally without asking ourselves how they ought to be treated and, in order to do this, we have to concede to their thoughts, their emotions, their beliefs, their intentions, no less attention than what we dedicate to the moral principles driving us.