Is empathy all we need?

Abstract

Michael Slote’s The Ethics of Care and Empathy (ECE), Routledge, 2007, and Moral Sentimentalism (MS), Oxford University Press, 2010, present two stages in a very ambitious plan, to give an account of both normative morality and metaethics in the same sentimentalist terms, in particular in terms of empathy. ECE is concerned more with normative ethics, and the metaethical views it expresses are tentative. But, of MS, which in its normative ethics repeats much from ECE, Slote writes, “This book attempts to deal with metaethical and normative issues in the same sentimentalist terms, and I believe offers a more thoroughgoing, a more systematic defense of moral sentimentalism than anything that has appeared since Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature.” (MS: i) Proud words. Hume’s own attempt to do better, his Enquiry into the Principles of Morals, is largely ignored, since sympathy in the sense of empathy plays a lesser role there than in the earlier work, and the main sentiment playing a part in its metaethics is not sympathy, but the broader-ranging “sentiment of humanity”. Slote tries to convince the reader that our fundamental moral capacity is empathy, and that degree of wrongness of action is determined in part (ECE) or altogether (MS) by degree of lack of empathy or normal sharing of others’ feelings, a lack that produces a “chill” when we attempt to empathize with those who show it in their actions. “Distinctions of empathy broadly mark or correspond to plausible moral distinctions, and….empathy is crucial to moral motivation.” (ECE: 125) In MS the claim is not just that plausible moral distinctions correspond with degree of empathy, but that the meaning of “right” and “wrong” can be given in terms of higher-level empathy (MS: 68). Empathy felt by agents is taken to motivate action to help others, and knowing what is the right thing to do is knowing what the person with proper empathy, that is empathy we can empathize with, would do. Slote is very proud of his “semi-Kripkean” account of how we fix the reference of moral terms, and tells us it has taken him five years to get it into the form it has in MS. I shall return later to its plausibility.