In Defense of Our Better Angels: On Empathy's Role in Ethics

This dissertation concerns two of the preconditions for moral performance, namely moral perception and relational identity. In both cases, I argue, empathy is an exceedingly useful tool in sustaining skill and accuracy. My analysis takes the form of a descriptive reconstruction of moral performance, emphasizing the relation between moral perception and judgment in particular on the interplay between cognitive and emotional faculties in moral perception. Empathy provides both the motivation to turn our cognition and sensory apparatus toward the moral with the particularity to determine precise appropriate moral action. Through repeated empathic interactions of this kind, empathy also forms and sustains the relational piece of our self-identity, a piece of identity that provides some basis for normativity. The importance of empathy to ethics has come under intense criticism. According to detractors, empathy leads to bias, leads to over sensitivity to individuals over groups, and plays a questionable role in judgment, motivation, and development. What characterizes many of these critiques is a particular construal of what empathy is supposed to do to be morally relevant, a construal that may not hold up under scrutiny. I offer a different definition of empathy, using a combination of Davis, Slote and Hoffman to generate a process model that can survive detractors' arguments. After I have established my basic argument for empathy’s role in moral perception and performance, I argue that because empathy plays this unique and important role, improving our empathic abilities leads to bettering our ability to both know when action is called for as well as understand what action is called for. In this way, we can gain greater empathic fluency, enabling greater capacity and nuance the more we focus on our empathic abilities. What I propose, then, is that applying moral theory to particular situations typically requires empathy, and empathy is the most fluid and natural pathway we have to moral knowledge in particular situations. And, further, that our self-identification as empathetic is vital to fulfilling our duty as citizens in a liberal democracy and, more broadly, as moral agents out in the world.