Autonomy and empathy

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2004, Pages

  Slote, Michael ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI   (United States)

^b University of Miami   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 3042681019     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0265052504211128     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. For their classic discussions of caring and the contrast between masculine and feminine approaches to morality, see Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982; reprint, with new preface, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
2. For their classic discussions of caring and the contrast between masculine and feminine approaches to morality, see Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982; reprint, with new preface, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
3. See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989); Nel Modelings, Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Michael Slote, "The Justice of Caring," Social Philosophy and Policy 15, no. 1 (1998): 171-95, which was incorporated with some changes into chap. 4 of my Morals from Motives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
4. See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989); Nel Modelings, Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Michael Slote, "The Justice of Caring," Social Philosophy and Policy 15, no. 1 (1998): 171-95, which was incorporated with some changes into chap. 4 of my Morals from Motives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
5. See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989); Nel Modelings, Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Michael Slote, "The Justice of Caring," Social Philosophy and Policy 15, no. 1 (1998): 171-95, which was incorporated with some changes into chap. 4 of my Morals from Motives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
6. See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989); Nel Modelings, Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Michael Slote, "The Justice of Caring," Social Philosophy and Policy 15, no. 1 (1998): 171-95, which was incorporated with some changes into chap. 4 of my Morals from Motives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
7. See Annette Baier, "Cartesian Persons" in Annette Baier, Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 84ff.; and the essays in Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, eds., Relational Autonomy: feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
8. See Annette Baier, "Cartesian Persons" in Annette Baier, Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 84ff.; and the essays in Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, eds., Relational Autonomy: feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
9. See John T. Noonan, Jr., "Responding to Persons: Methods of Moral Argument in Debate over Abortion," Theology Digest (1973): 291-307.
10. Modelings (Caring) relies heavily on a concept of "engrossment" that is closely related to (in fact, I think it constitutes one form of) empathy, but when it comes to explaining why we have stronger moral obligations to fellow humans, she relies on facts about the (non) reciprocity of the relevant caring relationships. This allows some further explanation beyond what the idea of caring alone is capable of. However, I believe that it is best to explain our differential obligations vis-à-vis animals and fellow humans in terms of the notion of empathy because of the remarkable explanatory power (as I can here only partly indicate) of the concept of empathy in other areas of normative ethics.
11. Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 4 (1972): 229-43.
12. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (1739; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 316ff., 574ff.
13. Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
14. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Treatise 2: Concerning Moral Good and Evil, sec. 2, pt. 1 (1725), in Complete Works of Francis Hutcheson, vol. 1 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1969-71). For a contemporary discussion of utilitarianism with historical references, see J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
15. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Treatise 2: Concerning Moral Good and Evil, sec. 2, pt. 1 (1725), in Complete Works of Francis Hutcheson, vol. 1 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1969-71). For a contemporary discussion of utilitarianism with historical references, see J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
16. I sketch such an argument in an essay entitled "Sentimentalist Virtue and Moral Judgment: Outline of a Project," in Metaphilosophy 34, no. 1 (2003): 131-43.1 give a fuller treatment in my work-in-progress, Moral Sentimentalism, chaps. 3 and 4.
17. I sketch such an argument in an essay entitled "Sentimentalist Virtue and Moral Judgment: Outline of a Project," in Metaphilosophy 34, no. 1 (2003): 131-43.1 give a fuller treatment in my work-in-progress, Moral Sentimentalism, chaps. 3 and 4.
18. One might at this point also wonder whether a reliance on empathy would lead us to make too many moral distinctions. For example, if people of one race or gender are more empathically sensitive to those of the same race or gender, then the distinctions in our attitudes and behavior that empathy explains, at least some of them, may be morally invidious, and this would represent a serious problem for any attempt to explain morality systematically in terms of empathic caring. I offer a response to such worries in the work referred to above in note 10. However, the solidarity that is shared by an oppressed group can lead to intragroup preferences that seem far from morally invidious, and an appeal to empathy can help us both to account for this and to explain why similar solidarity among the group of oppressors is not morally justified. (On this point see Moral Sentimentalism, chaps. 2 and 5.)
19. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977), 180-83, 272-78.
20. Seyla Benhabib argues that recognizing the dignity of the "generalized other" neces-sitates seeing things from the standpoint of the "concrete other." I think this comes very close to the view I am defending here. See Seyla Benhabib, "The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Feminist Theory," in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds., Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), esp. 89-92.
21. A point made, e.g., in Huffman, Empathy and Moral Development, 63-91.
22. On sss, see Larry Blum et al., "Altruism and Women's Oppression," in Carol C. Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky, eds., Women and Philosophy: Toward A Theory of Liberation (New York: Putnam, 1976), esp. 238.
23. However, it can be argued that one may show a lack of respect for someone if one violates deontological obligations to his detriment in an effort to serve the general good or one's own purposes. In this case, an ethics of empathic caring can encapsulate all morally significant forms of respect only if it can succeed (along lines suggested above in the text) in accounting for deontology.
24. For more specific and detailed discussion of how this might work, see Slote, "The Justice of Caring" (though that article discusses caring without explicitly bringing in empathy) and chap. 5 of Slote, Moral Sentimentalism.
25. Martha C. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 74ff.
26. While they differ in regard to diversity and social justice, both communitarianism and the ethics of empathic caring oppose the idea that morality can be grounded in reason. Also, both place a greater emphasis on personal interconnection than on the (rights of the) individual in separation or abstraction from others. For an influential (but somewhat atypical) example of communitarianism, see Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
27. There is a version of this argument in Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice, 74ff.
28. I am assuming here that the children of empathically caring parents can be raised to be as empathically caring as their parents. In his Empathy and Moral Development, Hoffman offers a theory of the development of empathic concern that clearly supports this assumption. I might add that Huffman's view allows not only for empathic concern vis-à-vis individuals, but also for the kind of empathic concern for whole groups of people (whom one may not be personally acquainted with) that is presupposed in the political applications of empathic caring that I have been and will be making in the text above.
29. J. L. Mackie, Hume's Moral Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 28.
30. Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 154-68.
31. See John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), trans. William Popple, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (New York: Routledge, 1991), 28.
32. In my Morals from Motives (MfM, chap. 5), I described a science-fiction case in which a refusal to grant certain religious liberties would be justified and in no way demonstrate a lack of empathy. But it is difficult to think of a single case in actual human history where religious persecutions or intolerance did not reflect a failure of empathy; so if we wish to defend religious liberties in the circumstances of actual human life, then our sentimentalist approach may give us what we need.
33. For a feminist defense of the assumption, see Susan J. Brison, "The Autonomy Defense of Free Speech," Ethics 108, no. 2 (1998): 312-39; and Susan J. Brison "Relational Autonomy and Freedom of Expression," in Mackenzie and Stoljar, eds., Relational Autonomy, 280-99.
34. For a feminist defense of the assumption, see Susan J. Brison, "The Autonomy Defense of Free Speech," Ethics 108, no. 2 (1998): 312-39; and Susan J. Brison "Relational Autonomy and Freedom of Expression," in Mackenzie and Stoljar, eds., Relational Autonomy, 280-99.
35. Ellen Frankel Paul pointed out to me that a judicial system that allows judges or others to limit civil liberties out of empathic concern for the feelings of certain groups is subject to various forms of abuse. For example, someone might deliberately or unconsciously over-estimate the damage that a certain group would do to the feelings of others out of a hatred of that group or a deficient sense of the value of various freedoms. Of course, all legal systems are subject to abuse, but the criteria of justice urged by the sentimentalist arguably yield distinctive possibilities of abuse. Some of these I discuss in MfM, chaps. 4 and 5, but more will need to be said about this issue on some other occasion. In any event, and finally, public officials take oaths to uphold the law, and this further constrains the actions they may permissibly take out of empathic concern for one group or another. If, however, and as I suggested above, (the) deontology (of promises and oaths) is itself based in empathic factors, then the present sentimentalism may be able to give a realistic account of the considerations that ought, in justice, to move public officiais.
36. I discuss such issues at length in Slote, Moral Sentimentalism chaps. 4 and 5.
37. Since, as I indicated earlier, empathy is evoked less strongly in relation to people we don't know than in relation to those with whom we are personally acquainted, a view that understands individual and social morality in terms of developed human empathy or empathic caring will require different degrees of empathy depending on how closely we are connected to one or another individual or group of individuals. This means that what counts as a failure of empathy toward those who are near and dear might not be criticizable as such in relation to fellow citizens, and it follows, given what has been said above in the text, that what counts as a failure of respect for someone else (for his autonomy) will vary, depending on the degree or kind of relationship that one has to that other person. A state may in all justice be required to show equal respect and equal empathy toward all of its citizens, but have lesser obligations to the citizens of other countries, and what counts as a failure of respect and empathy vis-à-vis one's own children presumably need not count as such in relation to other people's children. So, on the present view, morally appropriate respect for others (for their autonomy) will not always be one and the same thing and will be relative to relationship or connection. However, I do not think this deprives the idea of respect of anything that we need, either as moral theorists or in our lives.