This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.

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Three cheers for More Empathy with Some Additional Sympathy for Adam Smith’s Impartial Spectator: Commentary from Karsten R. Stueber

I comment on Heidi Maibom’s engaging new book with great enthusiasm. It is a pleasure to read and provides us with an astonishingly comprehensive exploration of the different perspectives that characterize the dimensions of interpersonal understanding within the social realm. Maibom distinguishes for this purpose among the agent, the observer, and the interactor perspectives (Part I, chs. 1-5). Based on an extensive review of the psychological literature and well-chosen examples from ordinary life and literature, she deftly analyses the nature of these perspectives and characterizes their potential shortcomings in conceiving of another person’s agency. Maibom focuses mainly on the agent perspective and our ability to acquire interpersonal understanding through empathic perspective taking, allowing us to grasp other persons’ emotional attunement to the world and their motivational framework for their actions. Right from the start, Maibom emphasizes that understanding another person has to be conceptually distinguished from becoming or being that person. Indeed, as she points out even our understanding of ourselves does not differ in kind from the understanding of other persons. It is only in the gap between us, associated with a clear awareness of the distinction between self and other, that interpersonal understanding takes place.

I will focus my comments in the following on the last two chapters of the book. I will be particularly concerned about the relationship between empathy and impartiality.