“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.
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