“Empathy, Mirror Neurons, and Mistaken Judgments about Emotion”

Empathy is proving to be an increasingly lively topic within contemporary philosophical ethics. From so called “care ethics” to the surging interest in sentimentalist metaethics and its intellectual forebears, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, ethical analysis of empathy is on the rise. However, in light of recent empirical research on mirror neurons, a potential danger seems to loom over all these ethical projects; namely, it now seems possible, even probable, that empathy is one facet of the human mirror system. If so, empathy may function in a far more direct and cognitively unmediated manner than seems presumed by the ethical projects which implicate empathy in their theories. To illustrate the problem, I will present a novel possible role for empathy, namely, as a normative standard for emotion itself. Emotions, I will suggest, are justified when they can be empathized with. After sketching this possibility, I will then examine how mirroring explanations of empathy seem to challenge it. Ultimately, however, I will argue that the threat is empty. For, it turns out there is a critical ambiguity over the kind of interpersonal “understanding” mirroring is generally advocated as providing. The end result is a call for careful reconsideration of these claims about understanding, but also a novel and defensible theory of empathy’s role in the normative assessment of emotion.