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