Empathy, Justice, and Moral Behavior

There is strong evidence that empathy has deep evolutionary, biochemical, and neurological underpinnings. Even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with affective communication, social attachment, and parental care. Social neuroscience has begun to examine the neurobiological mechanisms that instantiate empathy, especially in response to signals of distress and pain, and how certain dispositional and contextual moderators modulate its experience. Functional neuroimaging studies document a circuit that responds to the perception of others' distress. Activation of this circuit reflects an aversive response in the observer, and this information may act as a trigger to inhibit aggression or prompt motivation to help. Moreover, empathy in humans is assisted by other domain-general high-level cognitive abilities, such as executive functions, mentalizing, and language, which expand the range of behaviors that can be driven by empathy.

It is commonly suggested that empathy is a morally important trait to possess. This suggestion assumes that empathy involves feeling concern for others’ welfare. Skeptics challenge the moral importance of empathy by arguing that empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient to feel concern for others’ welfare. This challenge is misguided. Although not all forms of empathy are morally important, empathy in its fullest form with others' concerns for their basic welfare is both necessary and sufficient to care for others' welfare. Empathy in its fullest form includes both the cognitive and affective dimensions of empathy. I further contend that empathy of this form is a moral virtue. It is essential to being an ethical person, it is useful for promoting ethical behavior, and it possesses other traits essential to virtues, such as motivating one to aim for the moral good and disposing one to do virtuous things whenever appropriate opportunities arise.

2017

Any justification ends finally with the rationally gratuitous presence of the emotion of sympathy; if that condition were not met, one would simply have no reason to be moral. Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (11) Alison E. Denham motivated-motivated directly by a non-instrumental or ultimate desire to benefit another, even when doing so incurs personal costs. Batson's particular focus was empathic concern, which he understood as involving "vicarious other-focused emotions, including feelings of sympathy, compassion, tenderness and the like" (Batson, 1991: 113). His studies explored the effect of empathic induction on subjects' preparedness to respond altruistically to others, both in attitude and in action choices, using experimental designs that controlled for egoistic motives of reward seeking, punishment avoidance, and relief from aversive arousal. While his findings have met with many challenges, they are widely regarded as lending support to the 'empathy-altruism' hypothesis-the claim that as "empathic feeling for a person in need increases, altruistic motivation to have that person's need relieved increases" (Batson, 1991: 72). Batson's claim that empathy evokes altruistic motivation harmonizes well with the common assumption that empathy moves us to do the right thing, and is a force for the (moral) good (see Chapter 19, "Empathy and altruism"). In everyday life, however, human empathy can be capricious and double-edged. As Primo Levi observed, its workings are often unreliable and "elude all logic." There is no proportion, for instance, "between the pity we feel and the extent of the pain by which the pity is aroused: a single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did but whose image has remained in the shadows" (Levi, 1988: 56). Levi's skepticism about the contributions of empathy to moral conduct is at least partly borne out by its role in countless everyday, moral failings; as Jesse Prinz has observed, empathy can move us to be "grotesquely partial to the near and dear" and lead us into "profound moral error" (2011b: 224). Even if one rejects the thought that partiality and morality are incompatible, it is clear that empathy can sometimes deform our moral judgments. The same may be said of empathy's contributions to moral motivation. There is compelling experimental evidence that its force is fickle (ebbing and waning whimsically), irrational (unmodulated by the seriousness or size of its targets), and wildly prejudicial (subject to in-group biases, to proximity, salience, and cuteness effects) (Konrath & Grynberg, 2013). Perhaps worst of all, the allure of its verdicts can persist even when they contradict our considered moral judgments (Navarete, 2012; Batson et al., 2004; Batson, Klein, Highberger, & Shaw, 1995). So does morality really want empathy on its side? Perhaps it does, despite these perils. It is generally (and, I think, correctly) assumed that empathy can, in some circumstances, provide a powerful motive to right action that sometimes defeats, and often competes with, the two forces most hostile to morality: indifference and self-interest. Empathy competes with indifference in its epistemic role, by alerting us to circumstances that demand moral attention, and in its motivational role, it serves as a corrective to our default position of egocentrically pursuing our own ends, and only our own ends. The reasoning behind the assumption is straightforward. Other-regarding or altruistic moral requirements often enjoin actions that compete with our concern for our own welfare. If we are to be moved by them, indifference and self-interest must be counteracted by a motive force of equal or greater power. In our species, empathic concern is that motive. Hence empathy is, in such cases, necessary for moral motivation. This reasoning is plausible so far as it goes. Nonetheless, any identification of empathy and moral motivation tout court would clearly be a mistake: countless moral requirements do not directly concern personal welfare at all, and enjoy no direct connection with empathy. Among these empathy-irrelevant norms are various sexual, dietary, and hygiene prohibitions, norms deriving from religious commandments, and norms based on conceptions of social honor and prestige. Empathic responsiveness to human weal and woe will not dissuade a man from acts of necrophilia, nor keep him Kosher, nor prompt him honorably to fall on his sword.

Social Justice Research - SOC JUSTICE RES, 2001

Hoffman's important book summarizes research on empathy, its development, and the vital role empathy plays in moral and just behavior . Hoffman's theories and research have made a significant contribution to our understanding of moral and prosocial development, and this book is the culmination of over three decades of his work. The central focus of his book is on understanding how and why people care about one another and how such caring relates to morality, more broadly defined. Hoffman maintains that empathy and concern for others are vital to survival of our species and that they add to the quality of life and the richness of social interactions. For example, Hoffman asserts that "empathy is the spark of human concern for others, the glue that makes social life possible" (Hoffman, 2000, p. 3). However, he also recognizes the inevitable conflict between self-interest and social obligations, and a central issue in his book is understanding how individuals respond to it. Hoffman includes not only the constructs of empathy and caring in his theory, but also justice, and examines the relation between caring and justice. He explores empathic behavior in five types of moral dilemmas, from the innocent bystander who must decide whether or not to help a person in distress, to the caring versus justice dilemma one faces when he or she experiences a clash between helping another person and personal moral beliefs involving justice and reciprocity. Each of these dilemmas invovles helping another person, feelings related to helping, and the

Social Neuroscience, 2010

Explaining how, and even why, the social brain experiences empathy is a complex integrative endeavor that has been explored by scientists of several disciplines working with both animal and human subjects. Current thoughts on empathy and its connection to behavior—prosocial, altruistic, and cruel alike—were explored by scholars in the fields of biology, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology at a conference in Chicago. The speakers' individually unique perspectives merged to provide an inclusive overview of the biological basis of, and cultural influences upon, empathy. The nature of empathy in nonhuman animals, the endocrine requirements for empathy, the effects of empathy on moral behavior, the social nature of pain, the relation between empathy and altruism, the ethnography of empathy, and empathy in the medical setting were discussed. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference demonstrated the advantages of communicating findings across fields while also delineating the difficulties that can stem from the existence of multiple approaches to, and definitions of, empathy. Future progress will be aided by working toward common definitions for empathy, sympathy, altruism, and so on, in concert with cross-disciplinary dialogues that allow practitioners of each discipline to be informed by paradigms and findings from complementary disciplines.

Neuroscience Research, 2015

In the last decade, the phenomenon of empathy has received widespread attention by the field of social neuroscience. This has provided fresh insights for theoretical models of empathy, and substantially influenced the academic and public conceptions about this complex social skill. The present paper highlights three key issues which are often linked to empathy, but which at the same time might obscure our understanding of it. These issues are: (1) shared neural activations and whether these can be interpreted as evidence for simulation accounts of empathy; (2) the causal link of empathy to our presumed mirror neuron system; and (3) the question whether increasing empathy will result in better moral decisions and behaviors. The aim of our review is to provide the basis for critically evaluating our current understanding of empathy, and its public reception, and to inspire new research directions.

The biology of pro-social attachment is considered as a basis for thinking about ethics and social policy. Empathy may be a powerful motivational force, but it has limits and cannot scale up to the level of urban populations and institutions. On the other hand, utilitarian attempts to make sense of the small-scale filial world are ineffectual.

2000

The authors argue for an interdisciplinary approach to the construct of empathy. Recognizing that the construct has a long history as a biological construct, the idea is placed in a context of new approaches in the medical field. The social psychological approach is taken from the symbolic interaction theory of George Herbert Mead. By developing such a perspective, the authors suggest that communication researchers and educators can understand how empathy is a combination of symbolic processes, which individuals accomplish through their genetic structure, and neurological actions. While the person is empathizing with the other, the brain undertakes an empathic process of its own.

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2013

Empathy allows individuals to share the affective states of others, predict others' actions, and stimulate prosocial behavior. Whilst the proximate mechanisms of empathy, modulated in part by neuropeptides such as oxytocin, control the ways we interact with our social environment, the ultimate causes seem to have arisen along with the mechanisms involved in mammalian parental care. The conceptual boundaries of empathy, however, have been blurred by definitional inaccuracies of mechanisms that can be regarded as phylogenetic precursors or physiological prerequisites for empathy, including mimicry and emotion contagion. Contextual factors such as early experiences with primary care-givers (attachment), current mood states and other environmental contingencies are capable of modulating empathy. Moreover, evidence suggests that there is also a "dark side" of empathy, namely envy and schadenfreude (gloating) that are elicited by social comparison, competition and ingroup-outgroup distinction. This review aims at clarifying some of the open definitional questions related to empathy, and emphasizing the need for considering contextual factors in the study of empathy in both normal and abnormal psychology.

The past decades have seen an explosion of studies on empathy in various academic domains including affective neuroscience, psychology, medicine, and economics. However, the volumes of research have almost exclusively focused on its evolutionary origins, development, and neurobiological bases, as well as how the experience of empathy is modulated by social context and interpersonal relationships. In the present paper, we examine a much less attended side of empathy: why it has a positive impact on others? After specifying what the construct of empathy encompasses, we briefly review the various effects of empathy on health outcomes in the domain of medicine. We then propose two non-mutually exclusive mechanistic explanations that contribute to explain the positive effects of physician empathy on patients. (1) The social baseline theory (SBT), building on social support research, proposes that the presence of other people helps individuals to conserve metabolically costly somatic and neural resources through the social regulation of emotion. (2) The free energy principle (FEP) postulates that the brain optimizes a (free energy) bound on surprise or its complement value to respond to environmental changes adaptively. These conceptualizations can be combined to provide a unifying integrative account of the benefits of physicians’ empathetic attitude on their patients and how it plays a role in healing beyond the mere effect of the therapeutic alliance.

Empathy, which implies a shared interpersonal experience, is implicated in many aspects of social cognition, notably prosocial behavior, morality and the regulation of aggression. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the current knowledge in developmental and affective neuroscience with an emphasis on the perception of pain in others. It will be argued that human empathy involves several components: affective arousal, emotion understanding and emotion regulation, each with different developmental trajectories. These components are implemented by a complex network of distributed, often recursively connected, interacting neural regions including the superior temporal sulcus, insula, medial and orbitofrontal cortices, amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex, as well as autonomic and neuroendocrine processes implicated in social behaviors and emotional states. Decomposing the construct of empathy into subcomponents that operate in conjunction in the healthy brain and examining their developmental trajectory provides added value to our current approaches to understanding human development. It can also benefit our understanding of both typical and atypical development.

Empathy and Morality, 2014

Empathy's role in moral judgment has not received as much attention as its role in moral motivation. Yet given that emotions have at least a causal influence on moral belief, it is plausible that empathy makes an important difference. However, critics like Jesse Prinz point to empathy's inherent partiality and limitations as reasons to think that it has only a limited explanatory role and that it is normatively problematic. Drawing on the classical sentimentalist tradition in philosophy and recent psychological literature, I defend the view that when empathic reactions are subjected to emotion regulation by reference to an ideal perspective, they are after all fit to play a fundamental role in explaining why we make nonself-interested, interpersonally acceptable moral judgments. Getting along with others puts pressure on us to down-regulate empathy with the near and dear and up-regulate empathy with the distant and different. When we successfully do so, there's good reason to think that the resulting judgments are vindicated rather than undermined. In recent years, some striking claims have been made about the importance of empathyroughly, the capacity to share the feelings of others -to morality and prosocial action. Perhaps most notably, Michael ) maintains that empathy is the "cement of the moral universe" that "arguably constitutes the basis of both metaethics and normative ethics" (2010, 4). As inevitably happens with philosophical enthusiasms, there has also been a backlash, even among those who believe emotions are central to moral thought. Within the sentimentalist camp, Jesse Prinz (2011a, b) makes a thorough case against empathy, arguing it's neither constitutively, causally, developmentally, epistemically, nor motivationally necessary for moralizing. Indeed, Prinz argues that empathy is likely to lead us astray in moral thought, however important it is for personal relationships. Shaun Nichols ( ) and

2019

The aim of this paper is the analysis of the moral role of empathy. The main questions I wish to find an answer to are the following: is empathy necessary for morality? Is it sufficient for it? In order to answer these questions, it will be of great help if we split the thick concept of ‘morality’ into three different constitutive parts of it and we reformulate our questions in the following way: is empathy necessary for: (1) Moral judgment? (2) Moral development? (3) Moral conduct?

Progress in neurobiology, 2012

In mammals, empathy is crucial for living in social groups and caring for others. In this paper, we consider the structural and functional organization of empathy. We propose that empathy subsumes a variety of neurobiological processes and partially dissociable information processing subsystems, each of which has a unique evolutionary history. Even the most advanced and flexible forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core subcortical and neurohormonal mechanisms associated with affective communication, parental care and social attachment processes. Considering empathy within a framework that recognizes both the continuities and the changes within a phylogenetic perspective provides a richer understanding of empathy and related neurobehavioral processes.

Empathy reflects an innate ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others coupled with a motivation to care for their wellbeing. It has evolved in the context of parental care for offspring as well as within kinship. Current work demonstrates that empathy is underpinned by circuits connecting the brainstem, amygdala, basal ganglia, anterior cingulate cortex, insula and orbitofrontal cortex, which are conserved across many species. Empirical studies document that empathetic reactions emerge early in life, and that they are not automatic. Rather they are heavily influenced and modulated by interpersonal and contextual factors, which impact behavior and cognitions. However, the mechanisms supporting empathy are also flexible and amenable to behavioral interventions that can promote caring beyond kin and kith.