Diacritica 25-2_Filosofia.indb - cehum - Universidade do Minho

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BERIL SÖZMEN IDEMEN
respect, especially if she justifi es herself by her conviction that once the
child is there the father will be pleased about it.
Slote’s own strand of care ethics is characterised by his emphasis of
empathy as “a crucial source and sustainer of altruistic concern or caring
about (the wellbeing of) others” (Slote 2007: 15). His usage of the term is
broad and encompasses a variety of its connotations. Slote points out that
a rejection of the concept in favour of the more receptive (and ‘feminine’)
concept of engrossment is misplaced since empathy need not be understood
as only an analytically cool representation of another person’s mental
state (Slote 2007: 12). On the contrary, empathy had better be distinguished
from the older term ‘sympathy’ by precisely the aspect of Einfühlung that
it involves, i.e. the emotional mirroring of the other’s mental state in one’s
own self. Th is sort of ‘projective’ empathy involves identifi cation with the
other but “genuine and mature empathy doesn’t deprive the empathic individual
of her sense of being a diff erent person from the person she empathizes
with” (Slote 2007: 14). Th is understanding of empathy diff ers from
the more ‘engrossing’ one dwelt upon in relational ethics, according to
which the very identity of an individual can only be thought to come to
being via empathic relations with others.
Another point to be emphasised is the fact that empathy is a developmental
task that can be more or less mature. Such ‘mature’ empathy involves
not only the involuntary Mit-fühlung of other peoples’ emotional states but
it takes into account what might result from certain actions, what is plausible
to expect (Slote 2007: 15) and seems related to Aristotelian phronesis.
Th is is a sort of empathy that young children would be incapable of and in
this regard, Slote echoes the virtue ethicists point of moral action not being
the proper application of certain rules or principles to a given situation
as a clever adolescent might be capable of (Hursthouse 2003) but rather
the application of a whole set of cognitive and emotional skills acquired
by experience. As in virtue ethics, moral judgement and behaviour from a
care ethical perspective is therefore something that only certain people are
capable of.
By making empathy to bear on the question of abortion, Slote discusses
the attempt to argue against the rightness of abortion by evoking the idea of
empathy towards a foetus. He dismisses the conclusion that empathy with
a foetus would lead to the expansion of what we deem is due to a new-born
baby to pre-natal stages. Early stages of embryos resemble each other in
most species and Slote argues that the fact that at this stage we cannot feel
Diacritica 25-2_Filosofia.indb 26 05-01-2012 09:38:19