A Conference Report by Christiana Werner

The conference “Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy” in Liverpool, held June 26-28 2023, was the final conference of the DFG/AHRC-project with the same title as the conference.  The German part of the project was located at the University of Duisburg-Essen with Neil Roughley, Katharina Sodoma, and Christiana Werner. On the English side of the project were Thomas Schramme and Elizabeth Ventham at the University of Liverpool. At the conference, the four members of the project presented their recent work related to the project. There were also presentations by four invited guests: Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna College), Yujia Song (Salisbury University), Antti Kaupinnen (University of Helsinki), and Monika Betzler (LMU Munich).

The conference started with a talk by Elizabeth Ventham. She focused on the target states of empathy. Whilst it is often assumed that emotional states are the main target states of affective empathy, she argued that desires should be in the focus of affective empathy. She argues that desires, not emotions, tell us about a person’s relevant goals, ideals and values. For this reason, grasping another person’s desires, she argues, plays a bigger and more important role in understanding the other person than grasping their emotional states.

Antti Kaupinnen talked about “Empathy, Bias, and Reason” and focused on a problematic aspect of empathy, namely that there seems to be a tendency that empathy is biased. We seem to empathize more with in-group members and have difficulties to empathize with members of different social groups or do not even attempt to empathize with them. Keeping this in mind, he argues that there still is a role for empathy in moral judgements.

Monika Betzler’s evening talk focused on affective empathy and argued for its importance for morality. She argued that the way in which the philosophical debate has been framed is unduly narrow in that it more or less tacitly presupposes a mentalist and thus individualist understanding of affective empathy. Once we pay more attention to what affective empathy does to and with the empathizee, we can show that affective empathy is better understood as a normative (rather than merely mental) and a relational (rather than individualist) phenomenon. Betzler claimed that affective empathy alters the normative situation of the empathizee. Affectively empathizing involves the exercise of a normative capacity to create or alter reasons that the empathizee sees themselves as having. To defend this claim, she first showed in what ways affective empathy is conveyed to the empathizee. She then argued that affective empathy is best conceptualized as a normative capacity that can also function in deficient ways. This paves the way for an ethics of affective empathy to be devised.

Neil Roughley argued that, instead of discussing what the “real” empathy might be, it is important to clarify in which sense an empathizer “goes along with” the target, i.e. feels on her behalf. Going along with the emotions of another person has been taken to be a matter of hermeneutic acknowledgment or evaluative endorsement, in particular by advocates of perceptual and cognitive theories of emotion. Roughley argued that going along with another’s emotion is not adequately analysable by either theoretical paradigm. Instead, he proposed an analysis according to which vicarious emoting essentially involves emoting for a reason, whilst understanding that reason as grounded in its apparent relevance for the realisability of goal, a goal the emoter espouses because she believes it to be the goal of the target person.

Thomas Schramme spoke about “Empathy and the Other Minds Problem”. He suggests that we can consider the other mind problem as a problem of interpersonal understanding, as opposed to a problem of gaining knowledge about the content of other minds. He considered especially a perceptual model of empathy, according to which we directly realise expressions of others. He then went on to show that this is not a reliable and wide-ranging route to understanding the conditions of others. Expressions are not reliably connected to specific experiences of others and their meaning depends on contexts. The perceptual model of empathy can nevertheless be used as a foundation for a theory of interpersonal understanding, because the basic form of empathy comes with an epistemic fellow-feeling, an experience of the other person as minded. On this basis, understanding can be expanded, by realising more complex forms of expressions and by engaging other forms of empathy, such as imagination.

The afternoon session started with Amy Kind who talked about “Imagination, Society, and the Self”. In this very inspiring talk Kind talked about the role of imagination for social and personal developments. Philosophers’ focusing on the epistemic value of imagination has had the consequence that large parts of recent debate about imagination has focused on constrained imagination, i.e. imagination which is supposed to represent the world, in contrast to free and unconstrained imagination which has not the purpose of representing the world as it is. The latter however plays an important role, so Kind argues, in developing ideals in social contexts. It is because of the lack of constraints that we are able to imagine a (social) world different to ours or to imagine ourselves different to how we are in the moment of the imagining. These unconstrained imaginings are a source of utopia and ideas of how to change the world and to develop our personalities.

The aim of Christiana Werner’s talk on “Simulating Experiences and Testimonial Injustice” was to argue that unsuccessful simulations can lead to testimonial injustice, in particular in cases of testimony about experiences, i.e. when a speaker tells her hearer what it was like for her to go through a specific experience. It seems that many people use simulations as a proof mechanism of these testimonies. A quick and effortless way to do this is that the hearer puts herself into the speaker’s situation.  However, often when the social background of the hearer differs a lot from the speaker’s background the simulated reaction will differ from the speaker’s real psychological reactions. An unjust reaction on the hearer’s side would then be to trust the simulation more than the speaker. Finally, Werner developed Kind’s idea of “imaginative scaffolding” and presented a way to successfully simulate another person’s experience. This way of simulating is experiential and in case of success provides means by which the simulator learns what it is like for the target to be in her state.

Wednesday morning started with Yujia Song who talked about “Empathic Understanding: Missing the Target?” Song claimed that despite the differences in definitions of empathy in philosophical debates, one basic point of agreement is that empathy is directed at the other – the “target” of empathy – and not the self. Her contention was that philosophical discussions of empathy pay nominal attention to the target. Drawing lessons from real-life empathy simulations gone awry, she showed that the target is missing in (1) the evaluation of one’s attempt at empathy in standard philosophical accounts; (2) the process of empathic imagination construed as a “first-personal experience”; and (3) larger conversations about morally appropriate uses of empathy, including questions about who is to be the empathizer and who the target. This critique prompts a move from the standard epistemic understanding of empathy to a relational account that restores the place of the target while highlighting the vulnerability of the empathizer.

Last but not least, Katharina Sodoma gave her talk “On Being an Understanding Person.” Sodoma started by presenting two ways conceiving of being understanding as suggested by Stephen Grimm and Eva-Maria Düringer. She then went on to develop an alternative account of the moral-intellectual virtue of being understanding, on which it is more closely connected to interpersonal understanding. On this alternative account, an understanding person characteristically tries to understand the person they are interacting with by empathizing with them. This means that they take up the target person’s perspective on their situation in imagination and try to recreate their experience and reasoning processes. The understanding person engages in this activity because they aim to understand others from their point of view. While this is an epistemic motivation, trying to understand others from their point of view is also a way of valuing them. The motivation characteristic of an understanding person is thus epistemic and ethical at the same time. In addition to taking up another person’s perspective in imagination, Sodoma argued, we must keep our own perspective on the situation. While the understanding person will typically attempt to understand others from their point of view, how exactly they will react will depend on their judgment about the situation. These considerations contribute to an alternative account of being an understanding person as a moral-intellectual virtue, which highlights the role of interpersonal understanding and empathy for being understanding as well as the context-sensitive nature of this virtue.

Though the DFG/AHRC-project has now come to an end, we expect the conversations on interpersonal understanding and affective empathy to continue, and we look forward to the project members’ future work on these topics.