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Johannes Brandl ◆ Empathy: How to have Feelings for Others
Without Knowing Much about their Minds
Empathy is a social feeling. This is the core meaning of the term on which I will focus in this
talk. To feel empathy always means to have a feeling for somebody. The emotional quality of such
an experience can be of various kinds: it may be a feeling of regret or sadness, of joy or proudness,
etc. Though such feelings could also be self-directed, they are empathetic feelings only if the intentional
object is some other person or group of persons. One cannot feel empathy for oneself. One
might be inclined to say that empathy is a way of knowing how another person feels. This has become
the standard view of empathy in recent philosophy of mind. But the view is too simplistic, as I will
argue. It overlooks that empathy depends in a subtle way on the self-awareness of the empathizer.
The connection is a subtle one because it cannot be directly read off from the intentional description
of such feelings. It needs to be shown that empathic subjects must be aware of the social nature of
their feelings. Why is such awareness necessary for generating feelings for other people? The main
goal of this talk will be to answer this question and thus to exhibit the pivotal role that self-awareness
plays in the generation of empathic feelings. I will start out from developmental data indicating that
empathic feelings become manifest in the pro-social behavior of children approximately at the same
time when they first recognize their mirror image. I will then critically examine cognitive as well as
phenomenological explanations of these findings. The deficits of these explanations will then be used
to support my own thesis: empathizers have to know something about their our own minds, but they
need not know much about the minds of others.◆
Marcos Breuer ◆ How Can Normative Ethics Benefit From Sociolog y?
Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework
Between ethicists and sociologists there is a growing interest in developing an interdisciplinary
approach. It seems clear that normative theorizing entails necessarily sociological aspects and that, in
the same way, sociological studies include a normative dimension. Despite this agreement, there is,
nevertheless, little done toward the elaboration (at a meta-theoretical level) of a framework showing
the ways in which that cooperation could and should concretely take place. This paper offers a first
systematization of the different ways in which normative ethics can benefit from sociology. In that
model, (1) sociology becomes a key source of information on social issues that may elicit and structure
normative reflection; (2) sociology will be understood as an instance to decide if - and to what
extent - and ethical proposal can be realized; (3) sociology will be construed as a discipline showing
the most suitable means to realize a given ethical goal; (4) sociology will be seen as an instance that
can provide a critical analysis on the conception of both the moral actor and the society on which
every normative construction (often implicitly) rests; and finally, (5) sociology will be understood as
offering a reflection on the meaning and possibilities of ethical theorizing “as a whole endeavor in
itself” i.e. as a particular field in society’s cultural production. After showing some examples, I will
insist that the purpose of this model is to further and structure interdisciplinary research, that is, in
this particular case, to facilitate the construction of robust normative theories. If interdisciplinary
collaboration should be promoted, an extreme and unsustainable position should however be ruled
out: that of trying to reduce ethics to sociology or whichever other science.◆
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