Everyone talks and writes about empathy nowadays, not just presidents who speak about "feeling your pain" or appointing empathic federal judges, but scientific writers, talk show hosts, journalists, and most of the rest of us, too. Scientists tell us about mirror neurons in the brain that might underlie empathic processes and about the various ways in which apes and other nonhuman animals are capable of empathy. And studies indicate that human males are less disposed toward empathy than human females because only the male brain is bathed in testosterone in utero and because the higher testosterone levels that males tend to register throughout their lives are associated with a greater aggressiveness that gets in the way of empathy.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But these studies and this work and all the words from others typically don't make clear what the ethical and broader philosophical implications about empathy might be, and those are precisely the issues I want to address, however briefly, in this article.

First, however, let us be clear about what is meant by empathy. The term "empathy" was invented early in the 20th century. Before that the term "sympathy" was used to refer to what we nowadays refer to as sympathy, but also to refer to what we would now call empathy. So what is the difference? For most of us today, empathy differs from sympathy in the way that "I feel your pain" (empathy) differs from "I feel sorry about your being in pain" (sympathy).

But many current psychologists of moral development accept an "empathy-altruism hypothesis," according to which empathy powers and shapes our sympathy and, more generally, our altruism. Psychologists of empathy think that even young babies are capable of empathic reactions and that as one becomes cognitively more mature, a typical person's capacity for empathy will develop. For example, by the time one reaches adolescence, one will be capable of empathy not only with those one knows or sees around one, but also with disadvantaged people one only knows about through television, the Internet, films, books, or the newspaper. Moreover, the identification with others that empathy involves isn't a total merging or submerging with or into another person--empathic and caring individuals retain a sense of their own identity even when helping others.

How is all this relevant to ethics? Well, philosophical ethics has largely been dominated by ethical rationalism, the view that our moral capacities and tendencies are a function of our rationality, our powers of reason. But all the current talk about caring and empathy--and these notions didn't much figure in common talk in our society as recently as 30 years ago--has led some philosophers, myself among them, to think that being moral is more a matter of empathic concern for or caring about others than it is a question of being rational.

Those of us who think this way are called (moral) sentimentalists, and the earliest sentimentalists were the 18,h-century British philosophers David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith (best known for his work on economics). But nowadays people called care ethicists have revived that tradition and claim it is superior to the ethical rationalism that has dominated philosophical thought since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Morality and empathy dovetail

To reiterate, most care ethicists (like myself) think morality is more a matter of being empathic and caring for others than of being rational. They think that an immoral person is not necessarily irrational in his or her thinking and actions, but can be said to be heartless if he or she is malicious or indifferent toward other people. So care ethics sees being moral as a function of someone's emotional tendencies and capacities. And some care ethicists also believe that our moral thinking is based on empathy. In other words, we believe that one has to be empathic in order to be caring and that the combination of these qualities is what makes people into or makes them count as morally decent or even good people.

But we may also believe that our ability to think in moral terms, to call actions right or wrong, depends on our capacity for empathy--rather than on pure reason, the way rationalists tend to assume. (There are also those who believe our moral thought and capacities refer to or depend on God, but I want to limit our discussion to secular views.) And now that everyone is talking about empathy and people are more inclined to recognize its importance in human life, philosophers and students of ethics are likely to take (more) seriously the idea that our moral thinking and judgment are based on empathy. Hume claimed as much, but his ideas lay dormant for a long, long time, and it is only now that they seem to be coming to the fore, once again, in philosophical discussions.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Let me mention two pieces of evidence that seem to me to support the idea that empathy enters into the very concepts of right and wrong and morally worse and better. First, we are inclined to be more empathic with people we know or whose problems we are directly (perceptually) aware of than with people we don't personally know or whose problems we only know about secondhand. But we also think it is morally worse not to help those we know or see to be in trouble than not to help someone who(se bad situation) we only know about. So in this case (and, in fact, in many others) what goes more against human empathic tendencies is thought of as morally worse, and the easiest or likeliest explanation is that our moral notions contain a reference to empathy. Second, we believe it is wrong to hurt another person through negligence but don't think the same way about people's negligently hurting themselves, and yet surely any given individual can be as rationally and morally worthy as the person the individual negligently hurt.

So what accounts for the distinction? Once again, I think it is due to a difference regarding empathy. Empathy toward others is a viable and familiar notion, but psychologists and we ourselves have a difficult time making any sense of the idea of empathy toward oneself. So the idea that empathy is built into our moral concepts would explain why we regard it as wrong to hurt or neglect others in a way that it isn't wrong to hurt or neglect oneself.

Of course, none of this tells us exactly how empathy enters into concepts like right and wrong, and that is an issue I have been working on very hard in recent years. (See my book Moral Sentimental ism, published by Oxford University Press in 2010.) If empathy somehow enters into our understanding of and thinking about right and wrong, and good and evil, then it has a relevance to our culture, society, and political system that has not really been recognized. If empathy also helps make us morally decent individuals, then, once again, it has a social, political, and individual significance that recent scientific studies of empathy have not really or fully homed in on.

However, it would be a mistake to suppose that the philosophical significance of empathy is restricted to morality or ethics. It also has bearing more generally on how we understand or know about the world, on what philosophers call epistemological questions. And I believe some of the most interesting things that can be said about empathy lie in this direction.

Empathy influences human knowledge

Hume (in his monumental A Treatise of Human Nature) pointed out that feeling can spread by a kind of "contagion" from one person to another (as when we feel another person's pain or joy). But he also said that opinions and attitudes can spread in something like the same way. That latter fact has an interesting bearing on questions about human knowledge and about what, from a cognitive or epistemic standpoint, we have reason to believe. Children take in many of their parents' attitudes and opinions by a kind of empathic osmosis, but even adults can be more or less empathic with the beliefs of others, and a large part of what it is to be open-minded or fair-minded is to be willing and able to see things from the point of view of those one disagrees with.

This clearly involves being empathic, but it is empathy with opinions and arguments--rather than empathy with sheer feelings like pain, pleasure, sadness, and joy--that is most relevant to the cognitive/epistemic side of our lives. Think how important it is in our contemporary world to encourage this kind of cognitive/ epistemic empathy. If people of different nations or religions were more willing to see things from each other's points of view, there might be a lot less conflict and misunderstanding (though, of course, the same could probably have been said in earlier centuries and in relation to different national or international conflicts).

Moreover, if we are empathically concerned with people's welfare in the way that care ethics tells us to be, we will presumably also be morally impelled to try to get people to be more empathically open- or fair-minded, too. Once again, then, the importance of empathy to each of us is philosophically underscored, but this time in a way that goes beyond narrowly conceived moral issues of the kind discussed above.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

There exists another (somewhat contrary) connection between empathy and epistemology that also merits (further) attention. Hume says that people imbibe or soak up other people's opinions and attitudes, but he never mentions the fact that children are more likely to take on their parents' opinions and attitudes than those of other people. In other words, just as we are more likely to empathize with and, as moral agents, want actively to help those who are near and dear to us, our very empathy with those who are near and dear to us can lead us unconsciously and in some sense passively to imbibe or soak up their opinions in a way we wouldn't so readily do with other people.

This fact has considerable philosophical and, in particular, epistemological/ cognitive significance. When children, via empathy, imbibe or soak up the opinions (or attitudes) of parents they love and feel close to, they don't necessarily subject those opinions to critical or evidential scrutiny. So there is something irrational, from a cognitive or epistemic standpoint, about arriving at beliefs in this way--and about retaining them into later life. Yet this is how many or all of us acquire (and retain) many of our beliefs/opinions/ attitudes.

Because of the "insidious" way in which empathy allows or causes the infiltration or infusion of parents' opinions, say, about religion or politics into children, it will turn out that most people (and even--God help us!--a lot of philosophers who think they are highly rational) have acquired and retained beliefs and attitudes that are far from being the product or result of epistemologically warranted reasons or evidence. Epistemological rationalists (who are not the same group, entirely, as ethical rationalists) often tell us that we should be rational in our adoption of beliefs about the world and base them on good evidence. But it would seem that the empathy we have in relation to our love of our parents (or other loved ones) interferes with such rationalistic good habits. So we may invariably and necessarily be less cognitively rational about things than rationalistic philosophers would like us to be.

Maybe all we need is love

Is it a shame that this is so? Not necessarily. Unlike epistemological rationalists, I think there are many times when people are led toward cognitive/ epistemic irrationality by feelings we (almost) all value and desire. Like love, for instance. If one loves another person, one is going to resist evidence that the person has acted criminally or in a highly unseemly or immoral fashion--in a way that a more disinterested and impartial person wouldn't resist. And I think this means that love makes us to some degree evidentially and epistemically irrational (love, we say, is "blind"), but also that we have to accept such irrationality as part of human life if we want to encourage or preserve the relationships that give most meaning to our lives.

In that case, then, we may also have no reason on the whole to regret the fact that children imbibe or soak up beliefs from their parents in ways that don't accord with actual evidence. This may be a byproduct of the empathy that is typical of a close relationship, and we should perhaps accept the cognitive/epistemic irrationality involved here as a price we are or should be willing to pay for such deep, crucial bonds.

In any event, empathy can have a (philosophical) significance for human life that goes beyond anything that has been said by scientists or that arises immediately out of their investigations, data, and theories. And now you can see where I am coming from, right?

Michael Slote, UST Professor of Ethics at University of Miami, is the author of many books and articles on ethics, political philosophy, and moral psychology. Most recently, he has published two books, Moral Sentimentalism (Oxford, 2010) and The Ethics of Care and Empathy (Routledge, 2007), that place empathy at the center of moral thought and practice. Slote is currently working on applying some of this material to fundamental issues in moral education and the philosophy of education more generally. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy for the sciences and humanities and a past Tanner Lecturer on human values. Educated in philosophy at Harvard University (B.A. and Ph.D.), Slote previously taught at Columbia University, Trinity College Dublin, and University of Maryland, College Park. Email him at mslote@miami.edu.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]