The Ethics of Care and Empathy

Michael Slote

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134002696
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Eminent moral philosopher Michael Slote argues that care ethics presents an important challenge to other ethical traditions and that a philosophically developed care ethics should, and can, offer its own comprehensive view of the whole of morality. Taking inspiration from British moral sentimentalism and drawing on recent psychological literature on empathy, he shows that the use of that notion allows care ethics to develop its own sentimentalist account of respect, autonomy, social justice, and deontology. Furthermore, he argues that care ethics gives a more persuasive account of these topics than theories offered by contemporary Kantian liberalism.

The most philosophically rich and challenging exploration of the theory and practice of care to date, The Ethics of Care and Empathy also shows the manifold connections that can be drawn between philosophical issues and leading ideas in the fields of psychology, education, and women's studies.

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CARING BASED IN EMPATHY

1. The Ethics of Care

Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice¹ speaks of various characteristics associated with women’s distinctive ethical voice, but doesn’t very often mention the specific idea of an ethics of care or caring. However, in Caring² Nel Noddings not only mentions such an ethics, but attempts to spell out in detail its characteristics and commitments. (Although she thinks that an ethics of caring is distinctively feminine, she doesn’t hold that men are incapable of thinking in such terms, or that they shouldn’t be encouraged to do so.) Noddings was the first person to attempt to spell out an ethics of care, and I think it might be useful at this point if I were briefly to outline her (earlier) views and indicate some ways in which one might respond to them.

Noddings sees care ethics as requiring or recommending that individuals act caringly, and this means in effect that we act rightly or permissibly if our actions express or exhibit an attitude/motive of caring toward others. Noddings doesn’t consider cases where our actions may exhibit neither a caring attitude nor its opposite – for example, the act of scratching one’s head. But we can easily expand upon what she says if we distinguish between a caring attitude, on the one hand, and an attitude of indifference or hostility to others, on the other. An action is morally permissible, and even good, if it exhibits caring on the part of its agent, but in normal cases of scratching one’s head, one’s behavior expresses neither caring nor any attitude contrary or opposed to caring, and so what one does is morally all right but certainly not morally good or praiseworthy. Actions, on the other hand, that display indifference or malice toward (relevant) others count, ethically, as wrong or bad. There is more to be said in this connection, but the details needn’t, I think, concern us right now. What does concern us at this point is how an attitude of caring or concern for others relates to those others.

According to Noddings, genuine acts of caring involve an emotional/motivational sensitivity to particular other people. One is concerned about the situation a given person is in, and one’s focus is on the individual herself rather than on any abstract or general moral principles that someone might want to consult in order to determine how to act toward that individual.³ One may be simply and directly worried about how things in the situation and one’s own actions may affect the welfare of the person one is, at the moment, concerned about, and the welfare of other people may be very much a background issue. In a given situation, this latter point may hold even for a utilitarian or consequentialist, but any ethics of care will be avowedly partialistic in a way that utilitarianism and consequentialism, more generally, decidedly are not.

Noddings says, for example, that we can have an attitude of caring toward people we know, but not toward people we are likely never to meet. But Virginia Held and I have argued that there is no good reason to limit the notion of caring in this way: one can have a caring attitude toward (groups of) people one is never going to be personally acquainted with, inasmuch as one is genuinely, altruistically concerned or worried about what happens to them.⁴ Typically, what one is willing to do on behalf of people one merely knows about is less than one is, and should be, willing to do for those one knows personally and is intimate with, so there is a difference in strength between (the moral requirements of) humanitarian caring and (of what we can call) personal caring, but both sorts of caring are naturally called caring, and in more recent work Noddings herself has conceded this point.⁵ This means that, as compared with consequentialism, an ethics or morality of caring is partialistic. It is also, according to the earlier Noddings, incomplete. If we can’t have relations of caring with those we will never know personally, then our moral relations with them (the fact that it would be wrong to invade another country for reasons of national self-aggrandizement, or that it would be wrong not to help people in a distant country suffering from famine or an epidemic disease) are not governed by an ethic of caring, but rather by (largely) separate considerations of justice. However, once we acknowledge that our attitudes toward strangers or distant others can amount to caring (of some kind), the way is open to treating our relations with such people within an ethics of care and even, as I suggested in the Introduction, to understanding justice as a whole in terms of caring.

Noddings also lays great stress on the reciprocity involved in good relationships of caring. The caring relationship between a mother and a baby may not be a relationship of equal or mutual caring, but even a baby has ways of acknowledging the mother’s loving solicitude – smiles, cooing, eagerness for the breast. Such responses are obviously gratifying to the care-giver, the mother, but Noddings thinks that caring needs to be completed in some kind of acknowledgement or acceptance of caring on the part of the one(s) cared for – that the mother’s caring and the relationship between mother and child are ethically less satisfactory where there is no acknowledgement. In addition, she holds that we should not only be concerned about the wellbeing of those with whom we already stand in intimate, caring relationships, but should also try to extend the circle of such caring to include strangers and people we don’t (yet) know. Her ethics of care recommends and/or requires the creation, building, and sustaining of caring relations or relationships.

Thus care ethics, on the whole, has been characterized by a concern not only for individual welfare but for good relationships. However, the present book concentrates mainly on the former issue. I am going to assume that specifically moral attitudes and obligations center around the desire to help (or not hurt) other individuals or groups of such; and I hope to show later that our concern to build and sustain (certain) relationships involves an ethical ideal that takes us beyond the usual distinction between egoism and altruism and thus transcends what is strictly or specifically moral.⁶ I take up this issue more fully in Chapter 7, where I compare and contrast morality with self-interested rationality, but at this point we need to return to our outline of Noddings’s views.

Noddings says that caring involves a ‘displacement’ of ordinary self-interest into unselfish concern for another person, and in Caring she also holds that someone who cares for another not only focuses on a particular individual, but is engrossed in that other person. That means, roughly, that someone who cares deeply or genuinely about someone else is open and receptive to the reality – the thoughts, desires, fears, etc. – of the other human being. When they act on behalf of (for the good of) the person they care about, they don’t simply impose their own ideas about what is good in general, or what would be good for the individual cared about. Rather, they pay attention to, and are absorbed in, the way the other person structures the world and his or her relationship to the world – in the process of helping that person.

Noddings takes pains to distinguish engrossment from empathy, which she says involves a much less receptive and much more active attitude than engrossment. She sees the empathic individual as putting him- or herself into the shoes, into the position, of another person, and such (presumably voluntary) putting oneself into another constitutes a distinctively male way of doing things (think about it!) that stands in marked contrast with the more passive, or at least receptive and feminine, attitude she describes as engrossment. But here Noddings’s usage is somewhat out of touch with the (then) recent psychological literature on empathy. What she calls empathy is actually just one kind of empathy studied by developmental psychologists, which they tend to call projective empathy. But as the psychologist Martin Hoffman points out in Empathy and Moral Development,⁷ a book that usefully summarizes much of the literature in the field, there are other forms of empathy. And one of them, which he calls mediated associative empathy, involves precisely the receptive and, if you will, more feminine character that Noddings says is constitutive of engrossment.⁸

We don’t, in fact, really need the term ‘engrossment’ in developing an ethics of care; we can talk of (the right sorts of) empathy, instead. But, more important still, empathy/engrossment plays a more determinative role in an ethics of care than Noddings or other caring ethicists have appreciated, and one of the main goals of the present book is to demonstrate this. The ethics of caring needs to pay more attention to the psychological literature on empathy than it has previously done, and in what follows I hope, at least in part, to explain why. Let me begin by saying a bit more about how psychologists conceive empathy and how they think it develops.

2. The Nature of Empathy

Before I introduce the literature of psychology, let me just make some preliminary remarks about what the term ‘empathy’ means. To begin with, the word itself didn’t exist in English till the early twentieth century, when it entered the language as a translation of the German word Einfuehlung. That doesn’t mean that the concept or idea of empathy was previously absent from our culture. Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature says important, ground-breaking things about what we would now call empathy, but he used the term ‘sympathy’ to refer to it, though the picture is muddied or obscured by the fact that he also uses the term to refer to sympathy (especially in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals). However, we nowadays have both terms and are constantly chattering about empathy, so it behooves us at this point to distinguish empathy from sympathy. In colloquial terms, we can perhaps do this most easily by considering the difference between (Bill Clinton’s) feeling someone’s pain and feeling for someone who is in pain. Any adult speaker of English will recognize that ‘empathy’ refers to the former phenomenon and ‘sympathy’ to the latter. (Shades of J. L. Austin’s discussion of our intuitive understanding of the difference between ‘by mistake’ and ‘by accident’.) Thus empathy involves having the feelings of another (involuntarily) aroused in ourselves, as when we see another person in pain. It is as if their pain invades us, and Hume speaks, in this connection, of the contagion between what one person feels and what another comes to feel. However, we can also feel sorry for, bad for, the person who is in pain and positively wish them well. This amounts, as we say, to sympathy for them, and it can happen even if we aren’t feeling their pain. But perhaps an even better illustration of how sympathy can take place in the absence of empathy would be a situation where one felt bad for someone who was being humiliated, but in no way felt humiliated oneself.

The recent psychological literature contains many empirical studies of empathy and various discussions of the difference between empathy and sympathy (a small number of which run counter to what I have just been saying). That literature takes us far beyond what was known or available to Hume, but I don’t propose to survey it here. I do, however, want to speak a bit about two books that themselves survey the recent psychological literature on empathy. C. D. Batson’s The Altruism Question⁹ and Martin Hoffman’s Empathy and Moral Development both argue that various studies and experiments show that empathy plays a crucial enabling role in the development of genuinely altruistic concern or caring for others.

Batson considers what he calls ‘the empathy–altruism hypothesis’ in relation to a large literature that discusses whether (genuine) altruism is possible. The hypothesis says, in effect, that empathy is a crucial factor in determining whether someone will feel and act altruistically toward someone in distress or in need; and one thing that seems to favor it is the fact that where people feel empathic distress in the presence of another person’s distress, they very often act to relieve the other’s distress rather than simply removing themselves from the scene and thus from the source of their own distress. Doing the latter would clearly indicate selfish or egoistic motivation, but Batson (much more than Hoffman) thinks that acting on behalf of the person originally in distress, rather than leaving the scene, might also be explainable in subtly egoistic terms. He spends a great deal of his book considering various studies and various ways of conceptualizing what goes on in the kind of situation just described, in order to see whether altruism is the most plausible explanation of the results that have been obtained in different studies and experiments; and in the end he concludes that the existence of genuine altruism and the empathy–altruism hypothesis are the most plausible hypotheses in this area. These conclusions are helpful, even indispensable, to an ethics of caring that assumes there is such a thing as genuine caring and that seeks to understand both the development of caring and various intuitive moral distinctions in terms of empathy. But it is Hoffman’s book that offers us the clearer picture of how empathy actually develops and influences our capacity for caring; and his work also distinctively points the way toward a major conclusion of the present book – that distinctions of empathy and of empathic caring correspond better to common-sense moral distinctions than anything that can be understood by reference to caring taken, so to speak, on its own.

Hoffman argues that individual empathy develops through several stages, and that its connection with ‘prosocial’, altruistic, or moral motivations is more ambiguous or inchoate in the earlier stages of that development. A very young child (or even a newborn baby) can feel distress and start crying at the distress and crying of another child within hearing distance, and this operates via a kind of mimicry and seems like a form of ‘contagion’. But as the child develops conceptual/linguistic skills, a richer history of personal experiences, and a fuller sense of the reality of others, a more ‘mediated’ form of empathy can be (involuntarily) aroused in response to situations or experiences that are not immediately present and are merely heard about, remembered, or read about. It also becomes possible for the (normal) child deliberately to adopt the point of view of other people and to see and feel things from their perspective. Although we sometimes speak of both these forms of later-developing empathy (and especially of the latter, projective type of empathy) as involving identification with the other, Hoffman and others insist that the identification isn’t a total merging with or melting into the other: genuine and mature empathy doesn’t deprive the empathic individual of her sense of being a different person from the person she empathizes with.¹⁰

Empathic identification, then, doesn’t involve a felt loss of identity but, according to Hoffman, it does involve feelings or thoughts that are in some sense more ‘appropriate’ to the situation of the person(s) empathized with than to (the situation of) the person empathizing. And as an individual’s cognitive sophistication and general experience increase, she becomes capable of more and more impressive or sophisticated ‘feats’ of empathy. Thus, at a certain point, empathy becomes capable of penetrating behind superficial appearances, and we may, for example, feel an acute empathic sadness on seeing a person we know to have terminal cancer boisterously enjoy himself in seeming or in actual ignorance of his own fatal condition. In general, as we become more aware of the future or hypothetical results of actions and events in the world, we learn to empathize not just with what a person is actually feeling, but with what they will feel or what they would feel, if we did certain things or certain things happened. Similarly, adolescents become aware of the existence of groups or classes of people and the common goals or interests that may unite them, and this makes empathy with the plight, say, of the homeless or the challenged or various oppressed races, nations, or ethnicities possible and real for adolescents in a way that would not have been possible earlier in their lives.

Finally, Hoffman holds that the development of full moral motivation and behavior requires the intervention of parents and others making use of what he calls ‘inductive discipline’ or, simply, ‘induction’. Induction contrasts with the ‘power-asserting’ attempt to discipline or train a child through sheer threats (carried out if the child doesn’t comply) and with attempts to inculcate moral thought, motivation, and behavior (merely) by citing, or admonishing with, explicit moral rules or precepts. Inductive training depends, rather, on the child’s capacity for empathy with others and involves someone’s noticing when a child hurts others and then making the child vividly aware of the harm that he or she has done – most notably by making the child imagine how it would feel to experience similar harm. This leads the child (with a normal capacity for empathy) to feel bad about what s/he has done. Hoffman believes that if such training is applied consistently over time, the child will come to associate bad feelings (guilt) with situations in which the harm s/he can do is not yet done, an association that is functionally autonomous of parents’ or others’ actual intervention and constitutes or supports altruistic motivation.¹¹ He calls such habitual associations ‘scripts’, and holds that they underlie and power (the use of) moral principles or rules that objectify (my term) that association in claims like ‘hurting people is wrong’.

In what follows, I shall assume what Batson and Hoffman have argued for on the basis of recent studies and experiments, namely that empathy is a crucial source and sustainer of altruistic concern or caring about (the wellbeing of) others. In particular, differences in strength or force of empathy make a difference to how much we care about the fate of others in various different situations, and this is something that Hume’s genius was capable of understanding, even in the absence o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Caring Based in Empathy
• 2 Our Obligations to Help Others
• 3 Deontology
• 4 Autonomy and Empathy
• 5 Care Ethics Versus Liberalism
• 6 Social Justice
• 7 Caring and Rationality
• Conclusion