A post by Jimena Clavel

Is there any value to empathy when it is just an exercise in misunderstanding? I think there is. Consider the following case. In a recent episode of This American Life, “Nine Months Later”, we hear the story of Lilly, a seventeen-year-old teenager, who wanted an abortion after Roe v. Wade had been overturned (see Glass, 2023). Lilly found out about her pregnancy in the ER, with her dad in the room. She was shocked and she could tell that her dad was shocked too: but was he also angry? Mad at her? What was going on in his mind? She wanted to know. In the next few days, Lilly started making arrangements. Her dad checked in with her, but would say very little. For Lilly, this was a sign of disappointment. As it turns out, this was not how he felt. He might have been angry at first. But this was not all. When he heard about her decision, Lilly’s dad was surprised. With Lilly’s personality in mind, he thought that she might not want an abortion. He also realized that his own thoughts about what Lilly should do were selfish. So once she told him what she wanted, he kept to himself to give her space. He was worried that he might put pressure on her otherwise.

Something that caught my attention about Lilly’s story are the attempts both she and her dad made of reading each other’s minds. Both were concerned about what the other thought and both tried to put themselves in each other’s shoes. Their exercises, though, were not accurate. They did not lead to understanding: neither Lilly nor her dad apprehended each other’s mental states.

This conclusion, though, bugs me. These exercises are only unsuccessful when we think about them in terms of accuracy. But this leaves out other aspects of perspective-taking. For instance, although inaccurate, the exercises deployed by Lilly and her dad are caring: they acted with each other in mind. There can be something valuable and rich about these exercises despite their inaccuracy. However, to truly see this value we need to move away from accuracy as a measure of success. Let me rehearse my case for this.

I take empathy, here, as perspective-taking: i.e., an exercise in which someone imagines herself being someone other living circumstances (partially or completely) different from her own. In this exercise, we are asked to take up on the multiple mental states that constitute someone else’s perspective and organize them in the right way. Empathy involves the restructuring of the perspective of the imaginer into the perspective of a target individual. For instance, Lilly’s is meant to think of her dad’s beliefs, as a single father, about her own decision.

Empathy is a valuable enterprise not only because of its epistemic gains, but also in virtue of the moral and political role it can play (see, e.g., Bailey, 2020). Note, however, that we typically think of the value of empathy as primarily epistemic and only secondarily as moral and political. What I mean by this is that empathy is deemed politically and morally valuable because it can fulfil an epistemic role, namely, providing understanding of others. The possibility of achieving this epistemic goal becomes central to considerations about the value of empathy. We partly think that this epistemic goal is achievable in virtue of the features we attribute to perspectives.

As Elisabeth Camp (2017) and Heidy Maibom (2022) have noted, we primarily think of perspective in relation to visual perception. Perspective here is the vantage point of the perceiver determined by her location in space. It is the point in space relative to which a visual scene is organized. Now, although the perspective is relative to the perceiver, there are certain regularities that determine how the scene appears from a certain vantage point. It is in virtue of these regularities that a perspective can be instantiated by multiple perceivers. A perspective is, in that sense, multiply realizable. For instance, if someone of my height was to stand where I’m standing in a room, they could see the scene from my perspective.

When it comes to empathy, perspective is understood in a more robust way. It refers to the specific position someone occupies and from which her circumstances are experienced. Camp defines a perspective as an “open-ended disposition to notice, explain, and respond to situations in the world.” (2017, p. 78). Someone’s perspective determines how she responds or relates to the world, as well as how different aspects of her circumstances are organized and connected. In a similar way to perceptual points of view, we can identify at least some regularities that determine how circumstances are experienced. Arguably, there are some features of the perspective that are invariant independently of who the concrete individual is. For instance, a traffic jam will likely be experienced more negatively by someone who is already under a lot of stress. When we think of the more robust notion of perspective in this way, we can also argue that it can be instantiated by multiple individuals.

The idea that perspectives are multiply realizable might be among the assumptions behind the claim that empathy can fulfil an epistemic role. Perspectives have at least some invariant features that can be taken up by multiple individuals in an imaginative exercise. Precisely because perspectives are multiply realizable, it is possible to engage in perspective-taking.

But what are the invariant features that are relevant to recreate someone’s perspective? Well, the thing is that the precise set of features is not fixed. Instead, it depends on the goals we aim at achieving when engaging in perspective-taking. In some cases, the features that are relevant for me to take up on someone’s perspective are quite abstract. For instance, imagine you’re stargazing with your partner. At some point, she sees a star, but you can’t see it. “You need to look at the sky from where I’m standing,” she says. So, quite simply, she can tell you where to stand and use her hand to direct your gaze. I realize that this is not a case that involves imaginative perspective-taking. All I want to note, here, is that the formal features that need to be recreated are quite abstract, they aren’t sensitive to who’s perspective this is. Similarly, imagine that you’re driving a car with a friend who doesn’t drive. A car in front of you brakes very suddenly and you start cursing at the driver. If your friend doesn’t understand why you got angry, you need to say very little to her: “imagine you’re in your bike behind someone who brakes suddenly, you can get in an accident. It’s upsetting!”. The relevant organization is, again, determined at a very abstract level.

But there are other cases in which the relevant features that need to be recreated are determined by paying attention to finer details of the perspective, to who the concrete individual is. Think, for instance, of cases of micro-aggressions. Depending on their own experience, someone might struggle to appreciate the precise aspects of my perspective that she must recreate to understand why it might be harmful when someone makes a remark about my pronunciation.

While the first two cases I mentioned will likely be successful perspective-taking exercises—i.e., the target perspective will likely be recreated accurately—the last case might not. Furthermore, note that the features that are relevant for the exercise might depend, in turn, on other goals. And these goals might be epistemic, moral, and even political. For instance, when trying to convey why the remark about my pronunciation is harmful, my main goal is moral.

To determine the features that are relevant for the exercise, empathy cannot be unidirectional: it is not a process that simply goes from the empathizer to the target. It is, instead, an exchange between these two, even in cases in which the target does not provide the relevant information directly. Empathy can be better understood as an epistemic interaction. Moreover, we might gain from thinking of empathy in terms of what María Lugones (1987) calls “world”-travelling: perspective-taking that is characterized by playfulness, openness to surprise and uncertainty. Here, accuracy is no longer central to the exercise.

I think that this helps us illuminate the value of empathetic misunderstanding. Think back to Lilly’s case. There clearly is epistemic failure: Lilly thought that his dad was disappointed when he wasn’t, her dad thought she would make a decision she wouldn’t. The precise features that would have been relevant to recreate each other’s perspective were not available to each other, even when they could have been made available. I dare to say, however, that the exercise might have been valuable in another sense. In trying to take each other’s perspective, Lilly and her dad acted as mindfully of each other as they could. Despite the misunderstanding, the exercise was valuable.

References

Bailey, O. (2020). Empathy and the Value of Humane Understanding, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12744.

Camp, E. (2017). Perspectives in imaginative engagement with fiction, Philosophical Perspectives 31(Philosophy of Mind).

Glass, I. (2023, April). Nine Months Later [Audio podcast], This American Life https://www.thisamericanlife.org/.

Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception, Hypatia 2(2).

Maibom, H. L. (2022). The Space Between. How Empathy Really Works, Oxford University Press.