In the paper “Towards a Clear and Fair Conceptualization of Empathy” (2023a), Caroline Bollen sets up a proposal for an anti-discriminatory and explicitly normative notion of empathy. In a reply, Colin Marshall (2023) raised four challenges to her argument—to which Bollen (2023b) responded. We (Bollen and Marshall) continued this discussion in conversation over Zoom, which resulted in this collaborative concluding discussion. … [please read below the rest of the article].

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After our initial exchanges, we found that a separate challenge had emerged: Bollen’s specified account of empathy left a conceptual gap. More specifically, she argues that empathy requires neither “matching of affective states” nor “motivation to help or provide care”. To briefly recap her line of reasoning, she is concerned with how the conceptual ambiguity and plurality in existing discussions of empathy uphold discriminatory practices of empathy measurements and assessments with regard to autism. Her proposal aims to provide a conceptualization of empathy that is:

1) In line with common colloquial associations with the concept, including that it is normative, and;

2) Open to a variety of ways of being empathetic.

In addition, she actively discourages operationalizations of the concept that narrow down who gets to be considered empathetic for other reasons than ones actually related to moral character. Towards this aim, she tightened down the normative quality of empathy to “appropriately attending to both experiential similarities and differences”, while opening up descriptive qualities of the concept to a diversity of what it can look and feel like in practice.

If we accept this conceptualization of empathy, then one significant phenomenon no longer counts as empathy—one that does explicitly include matching of affective states and has a motivational component to relieve the other’s suffering. To be clear, both properties can be present in empathy and be part of how one experiences empathy, but they are not definitive criteria for the concept in Bollen’s account. As such, the concept of empathy does not refer to these distinctive aspects of intersubjective experience. An excellent candidate to fill this conceptual gap is the concept of compassion (especially as characterized in Schopenhauer 2009 and Marshall 2018). Therefore, in this collaborative continuation of our discussion, we will briefly explore how we can distinguish compassion from empathy, how these concepts relate to each other, and how they both have moral value—albeit of distinct kinds.

The phenomenon we label as “compassion” is a state of matching others’ affecting states, paradigmatically (but not exclusively), being pained by others’ pains. Compassion in our sense has the following five interrelated features, three descriptive and two normative:

Feature 1

It is a motivating state: unless there are competing motivational factors or failures of agential mechanisms, a subject with compassion will act in accordance with their compassionate reaction. This motivation is of the same type as the felt (affective) motivation in the object of compassion, with the same particular target of motivation. For example, insofar as Akhil’s headache comes with felt motivation to get rid of that headache, Berit’s compassion for Akhil comes with felt motivation to get rid of Akhil’s headache (not some real or imagined headache in Berit).

Feature 2

It is an out-ward directed state: unlike (e.g.) emotional contagion, a compassionate subject’s attention and motivation will be directed primarily or exclusively towards another creature. In the paradigm case, they will be motivated to alleviate the pain of the other creature. By contrast, the attention of an empathetic subject will be directed at both themselves and the other, since it concerns comparisons between their experiences.

Feature 3

It is confined to a first-order state: unlike empathy, compassion never itself extends to reflection about whether and how well one’s compassionate reaction actually corresponds to another’s experience. Compassion is thus a state that can bypass “one thought too many” objections about moral motivation (which we say without endorsing those objections). In principle, someone could have such a compassionate state without having empathy. However, for almost any real human agent, compassion that meets the next two criteria will require empathy.

Feature 4

Success notion: a state counts as compassion only if it does indeed match another’s state, modulo the objective differences between subjects (e.g., Akhil experiences his headache as in himself, whereas Berit compassionately experiences that headache as in another). As a result of this being a success notion, a subject might, through no fault of their own, falsely believe that they are feeling compassion. This makes compassion similar to perception, on some understandings. (For example, just as Locke thought that our experiences of shapes sometimes resembled/matched properties of bodies around us, so too compassion in our sense sometimes resembles/matches states of other thinking and feeling beings around us.)

Given that, well-developed empathy is more likely to yield genuine compassion, whereas someone with strong proximistic or distantistic tendencies is more likely to experience mere imitations of compassion.  Similarly, another implication of such success being constitutive of compassion is that empathy can include attentiveness to whether one is feeling genuine compassion, with the recognition that certain biases might imitate compassion.

Feature 5

Moral value: as argued by (e.g.) Arthur Schopenhauer, a subject who feels compassion is morally well-tuned to other beings around them. This is a perceptual or quasi-perceptual success.^[1] As a perceptual or quasi-perceptual ability, a subject is arguably not praiseworthy or blameworthy for their baseline compassionate capacities, though they may be for whether and how they attempt to indirectly cultivate or shape them—something that would typically require empathy. By analogy: people are not typically praiseworthy or blameworthy for their memories, though they may be (e.g.) blameworthy in some sense for damaging their memories (say, through knowingly and voluntarily taking memory-damaging narcotics).

To summarize, then, we offer the following definitions:

Empathy: appropriately attending to experiential similarities and differences, a virtue.

Compassion: matching, first-order affective responses to others’ affective states, with attention and motivation to act directed at the other.

So defined, both empathy and compassion have distinct but complementary moral value:

❧ Empathy corrects biases and warrants praise as it helps us to navigate our intersubjective lives and respecting other subjects as subjects whose experiences partly overlap and partly differ from one’s own.

❧ Compassion has a more Schopenhauerian intrinsic value (matching/revelatory success condition). True compassion isn’t biased, but it’s easy to think we have it when we don’t.

We conclude with a short example that illustrates the distinction and complementary value: A friend informs you they feel bad about something that happened. You feel bad that they feel bad (and so demonstrate some level of compassion), but sincerely do not understand why this event caused a negative emotion (a challenge related to empathy). To better understand the friend, you could ask for clarification: “why did this make you feel bad?”—helping you to get a better grasp of your experiential similarities and differences.

Alternatively, you could say “I’m sorry you feel bad, is there something I can do to make you feel better?”—which would not help you better understand their experience, but instead express and provide care and kindness. The former question stems from empathy, the latter more from compassion. In many cases, you could do both, but which one is best to pursue will depend on our value priorities (and of course on the situation, our relationship with the friend, cultural norms, and other contextual factors). Compassion and empathy thus both have important roles in our moral lives.

References

Bollen, Caroline. 2023a. “Towards a Clear and Fair Conceptualization of Empathy.” Social Epistemology 37 (5): 637–655.

Bollen, Caroline. 2023b. “Empathy as a Virtue: A Response to Marshall.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 12 (11): 94–100.

Marshall, Colin. 2023. “Reply to Bollen’s ‘Towards a Clear and Fair Conceptualization of Empathy’.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 12 (9): 10–14.

Marshall, Colin. 2018. Compassionate Moral Realism. Oxford University Press.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2009. “Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals.” In Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, translated by Christopher Janaway, 113-258. Cambridge University Press.

^[1] That said, mere imitations of compassion (which lack actual matching) can have some amount of moral value as well. See Marshall 2018, 35.

Categories: Critical Replies

Tags: affective states, Arthur Schopenhauer, Caroline Bollen, Colin Marshall, compassion, emotional contagion, empathy, motivating state, SERRC 2/5/2024