Essay: Erring in Empathy

Jesse Prinz argues against empathy. He considers himself a Humean sentimentalist, in the sense that he accepts the Humean assumption of approbation and disapprobation as the bases of moral judgment. That is, Prinz agrees that our assessment of actions as moral or immoral is based on our evaluation of them as praiseworthy or condemnable. But Prinz doesn’t agree with Hume’s thesis that approbation and disapprobation are rooted in empathy. He doesn’t accept that empathy is a precondition of approbation or disapprobation and argues that these are rather founded in emotions such as anger, disgust, and admiration. In J.M Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, the title character offers a view of empathy that is useful in considering the implications of empathy as a foundation to morality. I will attempt to expose the weaknesses in Prinz’s dismissal of empathy as a precondition of approbation and disapprobation, focusing on the constitutive and causal preconditions. I will then discuss Coetzee’s treatment of Costello’s stance on empathy, and explore the manner in which it can supplement our understanding of empathy’s role in moral judgment.

Prinz rejects the Humean thesis that approbation and disapprobation are, respectively, “empathetic pleasure redirected outward onto the source of observed well-being”, and “redirected displeasure, brought on by an empathetic response to the suffering of others” (285). As an example, Prinz imagines a situation in which an onlooker observes one person helping another person in need. As the act of assistance occurs, the helper likely experiences “kindness, anxiety or pity” (285) and the recipient presumably feels gratitude. Other than “kindness” being a third-party assessment of approbation rather than something a nice person would feel, so far, so good. Prinz thinks that the onlooker’s moral approbation of the act of assistance will have nothing to do with empathy. The onlooker doesn’t feel anxiety or pity toward the helper, nor does he feel gratitude toward the recipient. Rather, what the onlooker feels is admiration for the helper.

That’s fine. Prinz is correct. The onlooker feels admiration toward this act of kindness.  However, in order to feel admiration toward the helper, the onlooker must have some conception of the meaning of the act. Let us imagine that the helper is a passerby who gives the recipient – a beggar – a dollar. To admire such an act, the onlooker must first consider that the beggar is poor and that a dollar will help the prolonged survival of the beggar. The onlooker has thus put himself in the figurative shoes of the beggar: he understands that the beggar needs money. He understands that the beggar is feeling hungry, or ill, and he needs money to augment these feelings. In other words, the onlooker has empathized with the beggar. This same interpretation also works with Slote’s “agent empathy” constitution thesis that Prinz rejects. Prinz argues that the onlooker does not feel empathy toward the agent, that is, the helper, or in our anecdote with the passerby. I disagree. The onlooker understands that the passerby has parted with some of his well-deserved, hard-earned money. An empathetic response is necessary toward both agent and patient in this scenario. If the passerby learned that the beggar was in fact an actor dressed in rags for a play, and the passerby was his friend returning some cash that he owed him, the onlooker would feel no admiration at all. The onlooker makes a conjecture regarding the situation that he witnesses, a conjecture that necessitates imaginative empathy. Empathy underlies the feeling of admiration that the onlooker feels.

Similarly, I argue that the disapprobation of a large class of crimes whose foundation Prinz dismisses as non-empathetic is, in fact, founded in empathy. Prinz notes that we judge crimes such as stealing, murder, and rape without contemplating the harm they cause their victims. “We are conditioned to immediately despise these action-types without having to contemplate the suffering they cause” (288). This is very true. The direct response of disapprobation toward these acts is reflexive. But clearly, the original reason for the disapprobation is founded in empathy. I turn the headlights of my car on at night automatically, by force of habit; that doesn’t mean I turn the headlights of my car on because it’s my habit. I turn the light of my car on because otherwise, I would crash my car into a brick wall. To ignore the underlying origins of our condemnation of such crimes seems willfully antithetical to the task of examining the bases of moral response. The same applies to crimes whose victims aren’t immediately identifiable to us. We feel that tax evasion is wrong even though its victims are a vague community, rather than a particular individual. When one perpetrator evades a million dollars in taxes, and another just a hundred, is the difference in the response that we feel simply a baboonish “much money bad, little money less bad” reaction? No; we understand that a hundred dollars are negligible, whereas a million dollars could have gone a long way to combat poverty in our state. And we empathize with the imaginary couple dozen children who continue to live in the streets as a consequence.

Throughout his rebuttal of empathy, Prinz assumes that whatever the origin of our moral responsibility, it is always the correct one. In Elizabeth Costello, the title character reads a novel whose author invents taunts that a hangman uses to abuse his victims in the Holocaust. As she reads, Costello is affected by the words. She feels that something evil happens to her during the reading process and that the same evilness must have been transmitted to the author and to other readers of the book. In other words, she feels that the novel encourages empathy with the criminal, rather than the victim; she feels that the novel encourages approbation of a morally condemnable act. Costello argues in a lecture that the book should not be read. The audience rejects this claim, stating “Perhaps we could read what Mr. West writes and learn from it, and come out stronger rather than weaker, more determined never to let the evil return” (110). Costello is not convinced, but she cannot articulate precisely why that is.

I believe that here Coetzee, through the character of Costello, picks up on something about which Prinz and I are in complete agreement. Empathy is not a good motivating force for moral behavior. Rather than empathy, people tend to be propelled to action by the anticipation of reward or the pressure of guilt. Costello’s audience is perfectly versed in the rhetoric of morality. They espouse moral theory reflexively, much as Prinz notes that we do not deeply contemplate the suffering that victimless crimes cause. When moral action is reflexive, we run the danger of forgetting its original purpose; we might forget why we started turning on headlights in the first place, and then crash into that brick wall.

Squeezed too hard

Image by Liz Fitch

Works Cited

Coetzee, J. M. Elizabeth Costello. Milsons Point, N.S.W.: Random House Australia, 2003. PDF file.

Prinz, Jesse. "Against Empathy." Print. Rpt. in Philosophy and Literature Unit Reader. Ed. Moira Gatens. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2012. 282-299. Print.