Heidi L. Maibom is Distinguished Professor at the University of the Basque Country, and Taft Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at University of Cincinnati. She has explored empathy in articles and in The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (Oxford 2022), Empathy (Routledge 2020), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (Routledge 2017), and Empathy and Morality (Oxford 2014). She also has research interests in emotions, responsibility, wellbeing, and psychopathy.
A post by Heidi L. Maibom and Kyle Furlane
In his essay Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell describes the following encounter with a fascist: “a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.” (Orwell 2021)
In this passage, Orwell describes a Gestalt switch taking place as a result of a seemingly insignificant detail, namely an enemy soldier being half-dressed and holding up his pants. This brings his humanity into view. We want to suggest that this “view” is not entirely metaphorical. Orwell experiences the person as a fellow human being instead of as a fascist.
Kyle Furlane is a Lecturer of Philosophy at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. He researches moral psychology and ethics, especially the connection between empathy, moral perception, and moral imagination.
We have chosen to explicate this idea in terms of Gestalt psychology, namely in terms of the way the environment is perceived, often exemplified in terms of figure-ground. Take, for instance, Rubin’s vase. You either see a vase or two people facing one another. But you cannot see both at the same time. This illustrates not only the way the environment is perceived as some aspects of it being figural or salient, whereas others fall into the background, but also the dynamical nature of this gestalting. We are using the idea in its broader sense, as Kurt Lewin does to apply more broadly to experience (Lewin 1938). So, if you are hungry, potential food items become figural. Or in Sartre’s example, when you are looking forward to seeing Pierre in the café, his absence becomes figural (Sartre 2022).
Lewin suggested that desire is what drives the gestalting. We believe this is too narrow an understanding of the internal forces and mechanisms that produce gestalts. Our expectations, physicality, ways of living, and what we might call our Weltanschauung all go into creating the perspective on the world that constitutes the gestalt. In other words we are taking seriously the ideas arising from the phenomenological tradition that so heavily inspired not only Gestalt psychology, but also Gestalt therapy.
Now, Orwell was a humanist, socialist, and anti-totalitarian. He believed in freedom of thought, social justice, and democracy. As such, he would be inclined to see another human being as such and unlikely to, for instance, shoot (at) him. However, he went to Spain to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. And the man holding up his pants is undeniably a fascist, an enemy of everything Orwell stands for. He should therefore shoot him. After all, going to fight in a war logically implies killing other people. We should therefore expect Orwell to shoot the man. But a half-dressed man exudes vulnerability and vulnerability is a trigger of empathy (Lishner, Batson, and Huss 2011). And it is this empathy, we argue, that triggers the gestalt shift. And this gestalt shift is a shift in moral orientation.
Now, we are neither the first to suggest that something like moral perception (read: experience) exists, nor that empathy can trigger gestalt shifts. Peggy DesAutels, inspired by Carol Gilligan, has argued something similar. She argues that moral gestalt shifts can take two forms, component and framework shifts. Here we focus on framework shifts: “(1) a mental switch from one way of organizing an entire experience to a different way of organizing that experience and (2) some sense in which the two ways of organizing the experience are incompatible-in other words, the two overall organizations cannot be merged into a single overall organization.” (DesAutels 1995) We see such a shift in Orwell. Despite the fact that the person is both a fascist enemy soldier and a fellow human being, Orwell cannot see it this way. It is an either-or. Either he is a fascist and must be shot, or he is a fellow human being who should not be shot. To shoot or not to shoot?
Now follows a Q & A with our inner critics, which we hope will be informative to our reader/critics.
(1) Inner critic: what does this have to do with the imagination? Us: We suggest that it is the imagination that builds perceptual and experiential gestalts following, more or less closely, a recipe set by our desires, expectations, and Weltanschauung. Consider the police officer with the attitude of “helping the community” vs. “catching criminals”. Different attitudes or goals will focus our attention or reveal different salient features of the situation. Sparing many details, gestalt shifts rely on a diverse suite of imaginative and interpretive resources. Most importantly, it often requires empathic imagination; “unless we can put ourselves in the place of another, unless we can enlarge our own perspective through an imaginative encounter with the experience of others, unless we can let our own values and ideals be called into question from various points of view, we cannot be morally sensitive.” (Johnson 1993) Directing our empathic imagination toward others often makes salient features of their internal experience which often go on to shape our perception of the scene as a whole. Like other forms of imagination (Kind 2020) our empathic imagination can be trained and improved. Empathically motivated moral gestalt shifts can play three important roles: (1) it can switch a non-moral scene to a moral one, (2) it can make salient a feature of the scene that forces a reinterpretation, and (3) even if we fail to fully empathize (in terms of “accuracy”) this shift can lead us to mark off parts of (future) scenes as morally important. E.g., attempting to empathize with a pig in a feedlot will not be fully veridical, but it can successfully mark off the pig as morally considerable (which, conceivably, will lead to further shifts in perspective).
(2) Inner critic: This all sounds rather passive. Are you really relegating the role of empathy in moral imagination to a mere triggering role? Us: Great question. Thank you. This allows us to say something about empathy training and moral continuing education. A psychological mechanism cannot be triggered if there is nothing to trigger. But how trigger happy that mechanism is is evidently under conscious control. Some people experience empathy quite easily. Some people experience hardly any at all. Some want to experience more of it, some less, such as Elon Musk and the Christian right. This is unfortunate, we think because empathy makes you a (morally) better person. The point is not the silly one that whenever we empathize with someone we must immediately act only on our feelings of empathy. Many situations present different, and sometimes conflicting, moral demands or requests. Empathy provides you with important data points. The good news is that we can train our ability to be triggered by morally relevant events by increasing our empathic predisposition. There are many ways to do so. Below we suggest some exercises inspired by Gestalt Therapy. These are awareness exercises, meant to make you aware of how you tend to see things, your resistances and attractions. Bringing these to awareness yourself gives you the option to think and act differently.
(3) Inner critic: So the phenomenologists have said something very similar in the past. Contemporary philosophers like DesAutels and Bernard Rollin have argued in favor of empathy’s role in moral perception or imagination and for gestalt shifts. What’s actually new about your position? Us: Ouch. Well, one of us has a decently worked out theory about perspectives and what they are, which supports the idea presented here (Maibom 2022). This provides details about how perspective gestalts experience. Second, we are offering some exercises that follow through on the gestalt idea that we believe will help engender gestalt shifts. Third, this adds to the empathy-positive literature in that it draws our attention to the role of empathy in morality, which has tended to be focused on either judgment or motivation. This focus is too narrow as imagination and perception often do the heavy lifting. Consider, again, Orwell. Contemplation is not what changes his action, a shift in perception does. Moral gestalt shifts highlight how we often go straight from a perception, informed by empathic imagination, to action (or inaction, as it were). As we develop our empathic imagination, we can also home in on what can make others experience a scene differently (if we know what changed our mind, we can conceivably guide others to the same shift). This seems especially crucial when we want to change someone’s mind who is not sensitive to facts, as is all too common today.
Exercises:
(1) Imagine a situation in which you interact with a person or a nonhuman animal in a way that you believe is not morally consequential. Now imagine you are the creature/person interacted with. What are your thoughts and feelings? How do you experience the interaction? Do you wish it were different?
(2) Imagine a situation in which you felt hurt by someone who you believed failed to live up to their obligation to you. Now imagine the situation as having no moral significance.
References:
DesAutels, P., 1996. Gestalt shifts in moral perception. In May, L., Friedman, M. and Clark, A. eds., 1996. Mind and morals: essays on cognitive science and ethics. MIT Press.
Johnson, M., 1993. Moral imagination: Implications of cognitive science for ethics. University of Chicago Press.
Lewin, K. 1938. Will and needs. In W. D. Ellis (Ed.), A source book of Gestalt psychology (pp. 283–299). Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company.
Lishner, D.A., Batson, C.D., and Huss, E. 2011. Tenderness and sympathy: Distinct empathic emotions elicited by different forms of need. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 614-25.
Kind, A., 2020. The skill of imagination. In The Routledge handbook of philosophy of skill and expertise (pp. 335-346). Routledge.
Maibom, H.L. 2022. The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works. New York: Oxford University Press.
Orwell, G. 2021. Homage to catalonia. Oxford University Press.
Rollin, B. E. (1992). Animal rights and human morality. Prometheus Books.
Sartre, J.P., Richmond, S. and Moran, R., 2022. Being and nothingness: An essay in phenomenological ontology. Routledge.