Articles, Chapters, and Reviews
Sophie de Grouchy on sympathy, economic inequality, and the corruption of moral sentiments. (draft, for OUP volume The Empathetic Emotions in the History of Philosophy, Eds. Keith Ansell-Pearson and David James)
File
Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy is a collection of eight epistolary essays devoted to analysing and celebrating ‘the disposition we have to feel in a way similar to others’ (LS: 59).The essays appeared in print in 1798 as an appendix to Grouchy’s celebrated French translation of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and this fact about their publication invites questions about the relationship between the Letters and the more famous text with which they were literally bound. The two works undoubtedly have a lot in common. Like The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the Letters locate sympathy right at the heart of human life, as the psychological force that gives shape to our ethical ideas, our patterns of sociality, and even our sense of self. However, commentators have also noticed some differences between Grouchy’s and Smith’s accounts, two of which will be the focus of my discussion here. First, only the Letters trace the origins of sympathy back to infant psychology and physiology. And second, only the Letters propose an extensive programme of economic and social reforms aimed at the rehabilitation of sympathy.It is natural to wonder: Do these differences reflect disagreements between Grouchy and Smith? And what, if anything, do the two differences have to do with one another?
In this chapter, I consider how Grouchy’s dramatic recasting of our basic sympathetic inclinations supports her new diagnosis of extreme economic inequality as a ‘desolating’ force, one that universally strangles sympathy and so threatens the happiness of both the rich and the poor (LS: 151). In Section II, I show how Grouchy’s discontentment with Smith’s developmental psychology informs her alternative account of how our sympathetic inclinations interact with economic inequality. In section III, I show how Grouchy’s departures from Smith at the level of developmental psychology also make it relatively easier for her to occupy the role of a wholehearted agitator for economic equality. Smith does suggest that economic inequality naturally fuels a morally troubling form of sympathetic bias. However, Smith’s own theoretical commitments make it hard for him to coherently condemn either major economic inequality or the sympathetic bias it supposedly fuels. By contrast, Grouchy can readily characterize major economic inequality and its sympathetic repercussions as conditions that all of us have both prudential and moral reason to oppose.
What must be lost: on retrospection, authenticity, and some neglected costs of transformation. Synthese 201 (6): 1-18. 2023.
PDF
A sensibility is, on a rough first pass, an emotional orientation to the world. It shapes how things appear to us, evaluatively speaking. By transfiguring things’ evaluative appearances, a change in sensibility can profoundly alter one’s overall experience of the world. I argue that some forms of sensibility change entail (1) risking one’s knowledge of what experiences imbued with one’s prior sensibility were like, and (2) surrendering one’s grasp on the intelligibility of one’s prior emotional apprehensions. These costs have consequences for Laurie Paul’s ‘problem of transformative experience.’ Paul has argued that when we are poised to become someone new, our inexperience generates problems for authentic choice about our own futures. By reckoning with the epistemic losses involved in sensibility change, I show that this problem must not be confined to novel transformations. Prior experience does not guarantee the knowledge or understanding necessary for choosing authentically (in Paul’s sense). If the problem Paul highlights is indeed a problem at all, then, it is a still more pervasive and intractable one than it has been taken to be.
Empathy, Sensibility, and the Novelist's Imagination. In Patrik Engisch & Julia Langkau (eds.), The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition, Routledge. pp. 218-239 (2023).
PDF of preprint
This chapter weighs a challenge to the attractive notion that by enabling empathy, fiction affords wide-ranging knowledge of what others’ experiences are like. It is commonly held that ‘seeing the world through others’ eyes’ often requires the empathizer to undergo an imaginative shift in sensibility, and we might naturally think that fiction helps us to effect that shift. However, some recent work on empathy and imagination encourages the conclusion that we are actually rigidly restricted to our own sensibilities even in the wildest flights of imagination great literature can inspire. Drawing on the work of the novelist Zadie Smith, the chapter argues that while our imaginative capacities are not entirely unconstrained by our sensibilities, fiction can still help us to learn about a wide range of human experiences, including the experiences of people whose sensibilities substantially diverge from our own. Notably, fiction can work on our patterns of attention in such a way that we become temporarily ‘not ourselves.’
Empathy and the Value of Humane Understanding. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2022).
PDF of preprint
Empathy is a form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective-taking. It is also the unique source of a particular form of understanding, which I will call humane understanding. Humane understanding consists in the direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions. This apprehension is an epistemic good whose ethical significance is multifarious. In this paper, I focus on elaborating the sense in which humane understanding of others is non-instrumentally valuable to its recipients. People have a complex but profound need to be humanely understood. Because we respond to others’ very real need when we pursue this sort of understanding of their emotions, empathy is best understood as itself a way of caring, rather than just a means to promote other caring behavior.
Empathy with Vicious Perspectives? A puzzle about the moral limits of empathetic imagination. Synthese, 2021.
Link to view-only preprint version (email me for printable version).
Are there limits to what it is morally okay to imagine? More particularly, is imaginatively inhabiting morally suspect perspectives something that is off-limits for truly virtuous people? In this paper, I investigate the surprisingly fraught relation between virtue and a familiar form of imaginative perspective taking I call empathy. I draw out a puzzle about the relation between empathy and virtuousness. First, I present an argument to the effect that empathy with vicious attitudes is not, in fact, something that the fully virtuous person can indulge in. At least one prominent way of thinking about the psychology of the virtuous person excludes the possibility that the virtuous could emotionally apprehend the world in a less than virtuous way, and empathizing with vicious outlooks does seem to run afoul of that restriction. Then, I
develop an argument that runs in the contrary direction: virtue in fact requires empathy with vicious outlooks, at least in some situations. There is reason to think that a crucial part of being virtuous is ministering effectively to others’ needs, and there is also reason to think that other people may need to be empathized with, even if their emotional outlooks are at least minorly vicious. Finally, I outline two different
solutions to this puzzle. Both solutions hold some promise, but they also bring new challenges in their train.
Empathy and Testimonial Trust. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84 (2018)
Link to article
Our collective enthusiasm for empathy reflects a sense that it is deeply valuable. In this paper, I show that empathy bears a complex and surprisingly problematic relation to another social epistemic phenomenon that we have reason to value, namely testimonial trust. My discussion focusses on the significance of this relation in the context of ally-ship. Oppressed people suffer from an unjust dearth of trust in their testimony. I first argue that empathy for oppressed people can be a powerful tool for engendering a certain form of testimonial trust, because there is a tight connection between empathy and a (limited) approval of another’s outlook. I next suggest that this picture of how empathy engenders trust also makes it clea why the trust empathy can support is not the only kind that members of oppressed communities might reasonably demand. Empathy can provide no support for trust that persists in the face of the recognition that another’s perspective is alien to us, and there is good reason to believe that this “riskier” form of trust is both needful and something responsible allies can be expected to furnish.
Empathy, Care, and Understanding in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The Adam Smith Review 9 (2016)
PDF
Adam Smith’s explicit pronouncements about empathy’s role in fostering understanding and concern generate a problem. Smith assigns a double duty to the series of mental operations that issue in empathy, treating it as the source of both our understanding of other people and our non-instrumental concern for them. However, if Smith’s empathetic mechanism does generate an accurate understanding of the other, that understanding will simply not be the right kind of acquaintance to generate concern. Only a seriously confused grasp of the attitudes and passions of the other could give birth to a heretofore absent non-instrumental concern for others. The fulfillment of either one of the empathetic mechanism’s supposed functions requires conditions that will make it impossible for the other function to be fulfilled. Smith’s official account of empathy is seriously flawed. However, his theory of human sociability also contains within it the seeds of an important improvement upon the official account. I argue that given Smith’s conception of empathy, he should on pain of inconsistency be committed to a very different conception of concern’s relation to empathy and understanding than the one he more explicitly endorses.
What Knowledge is Necessary for Virtue? Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 4 (2) 2010
Publisher's Version
Aristotelian ethics prides itself on its close fit with the endoxa concerning how virtues are properly conceptualized and invoked in our evaluation of agents. However, some critics contend that its picture of the virtues is, in reality, strikingly unrealistic. One version of this criticism that has proven to have considerable staying power is the argument that Aristotelianism demands too much of the virtuous person in the way of knowledge to be credible. This general charge is usually directed against either of two of Aristotelianism’s apparent claims about the necessary conditions for the possession of a single virtue – namely that 1) one must know what all the other virtues require, and 2) one must also be the master of a preternatural range of technical/empirical knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Aristotelianism does indeed have a very high standard when it comes to the knowledge necessary for the full possession of a virtue, in both of these respects. However, I deny that this has unacceptable implications when it comes to the evaluation of moral agents. The demandingness of the ideal of full knowledge to which Aristotelianism is committed can be effectively counterbalanced by the recognition that some kinds of knowledge are much more important to various virtues than others are. Aristotelians and their critics alike tend to overlook this truth. Nevertheless, it has important implications for our evaluation of agents’ virtuousness.
Review of Sophie de Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy: A Critical Engagement with Adam Smith's the Theory of Moral Sentiments, trans. Sandrine Bergès, ed. Sandrine Bergès and Eric Schliesser. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2020.
Direct Link
A review for NDPR of the 2019 Bergès/Schliesser edition of Sophie de Grouchy's important but long-neglected Letters on Sympathy. Includes a discussion of the differences between Grouchy and Smith's notions of sympathy, and some speculation about her theory's ability to account for the origin and nature of human benevolence.
Review of David McPherson, Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective. Ethics, 2021.
Link
A review for Ethics of McPherson's monograph on the relationship between virtue and meaning. McPherson thinks that taking morality seriously means being committed to a particular form of realism; I suggest that endorsing that form of realism may actually evidence a disturbingly shallow commitment to morality.
File
Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy is a collection of eight epistolary essays devoted to analysing and celebrating ‘the disposition we have to feel in a way similar to others’ (LS: 59).The essays appeared in print in 1798 as an appendix to Grouchy’s celebrated French translation of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and this fact about their publication invites questions about the relationship between the Letters and the more famous text with which they were literally bound. The two works undoubtedly have a lot in common. Like The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the Letters locate sympathy right at the heart of human life, as the psychological force that gives shape to our ethical ideas, our patterns of sociality, and even our sense of self. However, commentators have also noticed some differences between Grouchy’s and Smith’s accounts, two of which will be the focus of my discussion here. First, only the Letters trace the origins of sympathy back to infant psychology and physiology. And second, only the Letters propose an extensive programme of economic and social reforms aimed at the rehabilitation of sympathy.It is natural to wonder: Do these differences reflect disagreements between Grouchy and Smith? And what, if anything, do the two differences have to do with one another?
In this chapter, I consider how Grouchy’s dramatic recasting of our basic sympathetic inclinations supports her new diagnosis of extreme economic inequality as a ‘desolating’ force, one that universally strangles sympathy and so threatens the happiness of both the rich and the poor (LS: 151). In Section II, I show how Grouchy’s discontentment with Smith’s developmental psychology informs her alternative account of how our sympathetic inclinations interact with economic inequality. In section III, I show how Grouchy’s departures from Smith at the level of developmental psychology also make it relatively easier for her to occupy the role of a wholehearted agitator for economic equality. Smith does suggest that economic inequality naturally fuels a morally troubling form of sympathetic bias. However, Smith’s own theoretical commitments make it hard for him to coherently condemn either major economic inequality or the sympathetic bias it supposedly fuels. By contrast, Grouchy can readily characterize major economic inequality and its sympathetic repercussions as conditions that all of us have both prudential and moral reason to oppose.
What must be lost: on retrospection, authenticity, and some neglected costs of transformation. Synthese 201 (6): 1-18. 2023.
A sensibility is, on a rough first pass, an emotional orientation to the world. It shapes how things appear to us, evaluatively speaking. By transfiguring things’ evaluative appearances, a change in sensibility can profoundly alter one’s overall experience of the world. I argue that some forms of sensibility change entail (1) risking one’s knowledge of what experiences imbued with one’s prior sensibility were like, and (2) surrendering one’s grasp on the intelligibility of one’s prior emotional apprehensions. These costs have consequences for Laurie Paul’s ‘problem of transformative experience.’ Paul has argued that when we are poised to become someone new, our inexperience generates problems for authentic choice about our own futures. By reckoning with the epistemic losses involved in sensibility change, I show that this problem must not be confined to novel transformations. Prior experience does not guarantee the knowledge or understanding necessary for choosing authentically (in Paul’s sense). If the problem Paul highlights is indeed a problem at all, then, it is a still more pervasive and intractable one than it has been taken to be.
Empathy, Sensibility, and the Novelist's Imagination. In Patrik Engisch & Julia Langkau (eds.), The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition, Routledge. pp. 218-239 (2023).
PDF of preprint
This chapter weighs a challenge to the attractive notion that by enabling empathy, fiction affords wide-ranging knowledge of what others’ experiences are like. It is commonly held that ‘seeing the world through others’ eyes’ often requires the empathizer to undergo an imaginative shift in sensibility, and we might naturally think that fiction helps us to effect that shift. However, some recent work on empathy and imagination encourages the conclusion that we are actually rigidly restricted to our own sensibilities even in the wildest flights of imagination great literature can inspire. Drawing on the work of the novelist Zadie Smith, the chapter argues that while our imaginative capacities are not entirely unconstrained by our sensibilities, fiction can still help us to learn about a wide range of human experiences, including the experiences of people whose sensibilities substantially diverge from our own. Notably, fiction can work on our patterns of attention in such a way that we become temporarily ‘not ourselves.’
Empathy and the Value of Humane Understanding. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2022).
PDF of preprint
Empathy is a form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective-taking. It is also the unique source of a particular form of understanding, which I will call humane understanding. Humane understanding consists in the direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions. This apprehension is an epistemic good whose ethical significance is multifarious. In this paper, I focus on elaborating the sense in which humane understanding of others is non-instrumentally valuable to its recipients. People have a complex but profound need to be humanely understood. Because we respond to others’ very real need when we pursue this sort of understanding of their emotions, empathy is best understood as itself a way of caring, rather than just a means to promote other caring behavior.
Empathy with Vicious Perspectives? A puzzle about the moral limits of empathetic imagination. Synthese, 2021.
Link to view-only preprint version (email me for printable version).
Are there limits to what it is morally okay to imagine? More particularly, is imaginatively inhabiting morally suspect perspectives something that is off-limits for truly virtuous people? In this paper, I investigate the surprisingly fraught relation between virtue and a familiar form of imaginative perspective taking I call empathy. I draw out a puzzle about the relation between empathy and virtuousness. First, I present an argument to the effect that empathy with vicious attitudes is not, in fact, something that the fully virtuous person can indulge in. At least one prominent way of thinking about the psychology of the virtuous person excludes the possibility that the virtuous could emotionally apprehend the world in a less than virtuous way, and empathizing with vicious outlooks does seem to run afoul of that restriction. Then, I
develop an argument that runs in the contrary direction: virtue in fact requires empathy with vicious outlooks, at least in some situations. There is reason to think that a crucial part of being virtuous is ministering effectively to others’ needs, and there is also reason to think that other people may need to be empathized with, even if their emotional outlooks are at least minorly vicious. Finally, I outline two different
solutions to this puzzle. Both solutions hold some promise, but they also bring new challenges in their train.
Empathy and Testimonial Trust. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84 (2018)
Link to article
Our collective enthusiasm for empathy reflects a sense that it is deeply valuable. In this paper, I show that empathy bears a complex and surprisingly problematic relation to another social epistemic phenomenon that we have reason to value, namely testimonial trust. My discussion focusses on the significance of this relation in the context of ally-ship. Oppressed people suffer from an unjust dearth of trust in their testimony. I first argue that empathy for oppressed people can be a powerful tool for engendering a certain form of testimonial trust, because there is a tight connection between empathy and a (limited) approval of another’s outlook. I next suggest that this picture of how empathy engenders trust also makes it clea why the trust empathy can support is not the only kind that members of oppressed communities might reasonably demand. Empathy can provide no support for trust that persists in the face of the recognition that another’s perspective is alien to us, and there is good reason to believe that this “riskier” form of trust is both needful and something responsible allies can be expected to furnish.
Empathy, Care, and Understanding in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The Adam Smith Review 9 (2016)
Adam Smith’s explicit pronouncements about empathy’s role in fostering understanding and concern generate a problem. Smith assigns a double duty to the series of mental operations that issue in empathy, treating it as the source of both our understanding of other people and our non-instrumental concern for them. However, if Smith’s empathetic mechanism does generate an accurate understanding of the other, that understanding will simply not be the right kind of acquaintance to generate concern. Only a seriously confused grasp of the attitudes and passions of the other could give birth to a heretofore absent non-instrumental concern for others. The fulfillment of either one of the empathetic mechanism’s supposed functions requires conditions that will make it impossible for the other function to be fulfilled. Smith’s official account of empathy is seriously flawed. However, his theory of human sociability also contains within it the seeds of an important improvement upon the official account. I argue that given Smith’s conception of empathy, he should on pain of inconsistency be committed to a very different conception of concern’s relation to empathy and understanding than the one he more explicitly endorses.
What Knowledge is Necessary for Virtue? Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 4 (2) 2010
Publisher's Version
Aristotelian ethics prides itself on its close fit with the endoxa concerning how virtues are properly conceptualized and invoked in our evaluation of agents. However, some critics contend that its picture of the virtues is, in reality, strikingly unrealistic. One version of this criticism that has proven to have considerable staying power is the argument that Aristotelianism demands too much of the virtuous person in the way of knowledge to be credible. This general charge is usually directed against either of two of Aristotelianism’s apparent claims about the necessary conditions for the possession of a single virtue – namely that 1) one must know what all the other virtues require, and 2) one must also be the master of a preternatural range of technical/empirical knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Aristotelianism does indeed have a very high standard when it comes to the knowledge necessary for the full possession of a virtue, in both of these respects. However, I deny that this has unacceptable implications when it comes to the evaluation of moral agents. The demandingness of the ideal of full knowledge to which Aristotelianism is committed can be effectively counterbalanced by the recognition that some kinds of knowledge are much more important to various virtues than others are. Aristotelians and their critics alike tend to overlook this truth. Nevertheless, it has important implications for our evaluation of agents’ virtuousness.
Review of Sophie de Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy: A Critical Engagement with Adam Smith's the Theory of Moral Sentiments, trans. Sandrine Bergès, ed. Sandrine Bergès and Eric Schliesser. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2020.
Direct Link
A review for NDPR of the 2019 Bergès/Schliesser edition of Sophie de Grouchy's important but long-neglected Letters on Sympathy. Includes a discussion of the differences between Grouchy and Smith's notions of sympathy, and some speculation about her theory's ability to account for the origin and nature of human benevolence.
Review of David McPherson, Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective. Ethics, 2021.
Link
A review for Ethics of McPherson's monograph on the relationship between virtue and meaning. McPherson thinks that taking morality seriously means being committed to a particular form of realism; I suggest that endorsing that form of realism may actually evidence a disturbingly shallow commitment to morality.