empathy, respect, and humanitarian intervention

Empathy, Respect, and

Humanitarian Intervention

Nancy Sherman*

This essay explores several moral attitudes that undergird a commitmentto humanitarian intervention. Humanitarian intervention is usuallyunderstood to mean assistance or relief, often in the form of a rescue

response by the international community to such emergencies as natural disas-ters, systematic human rights violations, or genocides that take place within theborders of sovereign states. But the term can equally mean aid before the fact,or prevention, as well as longer-term commitments to international justice thatgo beyond emergency relief. 1Whether the aid is relief or prevention, short- orlong-term, and however it relates to broader questions of international justice,the same question applies: How do we come to feel the ethical imperative toally ourselves with those outside our borders? If, as Kant puts it, “ought impliescan,” then what makes the noughts” of intervention psychologically feasible?Of course in international affairs the issue is, more typically, whether certainproposed interventions are politically feasible, Do they promote our nationalinterest? Are they cost effective? Even more practically, will food relief getwhere it is intended to go? Do the rules of military engagement allow us toprotect the victims we are trying to help?

The net of practical feasibility can be cast wider by exploring issues ofmoral psychology, and in particular, the kinds of moral emotions and attitudesthat humanitarianism presupposes and exploits. The position argued here isbased on the notion that moral theory is shaped by psychological capacities,both capacities that we have from the start and those we cultivate. This is nonew claim. Aristotle held that human excellence or virtue was a matter ofhuman nature functioning at its best. The Stoics believed that virtue was acting

*An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Carnegie Council’s 1997 Faculty Institute. I wouldlike to thank Deborah F. Washburn for her insightful editorial comments on the revision.

lSO Robert Johansen argues that in Rwanda, prevention programs-having to do with economic devel-opment, education against bigotry, adjudication of war crimes, and the like—might have averted thegenocide of 1994. See “Limits and Opportunities in Humanitarian Intervention,” in The Ethics and Politicsof Humanitarian Inwrvenfion, edited by Stanley Hoffmann (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 1996),p. 55. For a criticism of humanitarian intervention as rescue, see Amir Pasic and Thomas Weiss, “ThePolitics of Rescue: Yugoslavia’s Wars and the Humanitarian Impulse,” Ethics and International Affairs 11(1997), pp. 105-32.

104 Nancy Sherman

from reason in accord with nature, in general (homologia). Natural-law propo-nents built their theory on claims about human nature, however widely thosetheories differ (from Hobbes’s psychological egoism to Rousseau’s claims ofnatural equality and civility). Perhaps Hume put it most boldly—that moraltheory requires marching right up to the “capital of human nature.” Even Kant,notorious for his insistence that morality be grounded in the noumenal realm ofreason we share with gods and angels, held that a complete theory of humanmorality would include an empirical moral anthropology—what we would call

a moral psychology.2 Moreover, Kant acknowledged that among the capacitiesthat allow us to do what we ought are emotions and emotional sensibilities.Thus, in a crucial way, Kant’s complete moral theory also depends on a theoryof human nature.

Of course, human nature is never fully naked. And every theory, especiallythose of armchair philosophers, has its preferred way of dressing it. But we

moral philosophersneed to peer at nature a little more empirically.At the veryleast, we need to rise out of our armchairs and go to the journals of experimental

psychological research. According to current studies in that field, a crucialaspect of our capacities as social creatures is that we can empathize with others.Our most basic abilities to understand others—to access their minds, to identifywith their plights, to resonate with their joy—rest on capacities for empathy andprotoempathy (that is, precursors to empathy proper). Adam Smith, astuteobserver of human nature as he was (albeit from his armchair), put it aptlyseveral centuries ago: we can “beat time” with others, “trade places in fancy.”3It is through sympathetic imagination, he observed, that we break out of ourselves and our parochialism.

Developmental research suggests that the roots of this capacity are part ofour biological nature. At a remarkably early age we are able to mimic others’emotional responses and experience them as our own, share the gaze of othersin tracking a common object, feel what others are feeling in response to some-thing suspicious, and so on. With the growth of capacities for imagination, wecan see from others’ perspectives and appreciate how they feel in theircircumstances. Empathy and protoempathy are ways we transcend the selfand achieve a kind of social intelligence or understanding. If, as researchsuggests, empathetic capacities are also important contributors to altruisticbehavior, then we would expect to find them buttressing a theory of politicalhumanitarianism.

Yet, at least in terms of the formal discourse of humanitarian intervention,empathy is not a clear player. The emotion or moral attitude we are more likely

‘See Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessi~ of Ertue: Aristotle and Kant on Wtue (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997).

3See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1976).

Empathy, Respect, and Humanitarian Intervention 105

to hear about is respect, which draws not from Smith’s moral philosophy butfrom Kant’s. Here what comes to the fore is respect for the dignity of personsand, derivatively, respect for human rights. In gross abuses of human rights it isrespect that is violated. Humanitarian aid is a way of showing proper respect tothe needy and ravaged.

Though discussions of empathy and respect have their respective sources intraditions that bring to bear different sorts of moral considerations, a hybridmodel is presented here. The argument is that respect for human dignity isgalvanized by empathy—by an envisaging of others in their local circum-stances. Moreover, respect for humanity emerges from the notion of a globalmoral commonwealth. Most literally, to be cosmopolitan means to be a “citizenof the universe. ” A thumbnail history of the notion of cosmopolitanism follows.

RESPECT AND COSMOPOLITANISM

Aristotle and the Polis

Aristotle’s ethical theory displays only the barest glimmer of a cosmopolitanspirit. In Aristotle’s view it is friendship (philia) that is the primary sphere ofbeneficence. We give most excellently or finely when we give to those we knowand like. Friendship is the context for developing altruism, but it is also the

sphere of its best exercise. It is the sphere of justice as well: “The whole ofjustice is in relation to a friend.”4 In these remarks Aristotle might have in mind

a rather wide notion of friendship, spread globally. His report of common

beliefs about friendship suggests as much: popular opinion has it that we praise

“the lover of humanity (philanthropos). One might see in travels how every

human is familiar to and a friend to another.”5 However, when we turn toAristotle’s theoretical development of friendship we never really find a defenseof the true lover of humanity who can extend beneficence beyond a narrowcommunity. Some of the ancients spoke of extending good will to the “furthestMysian”-a catchphrase for proverbial remoteness. But Aristotle does notpromote the case. The widest sort of friendship, in his view, is civic friendship.And this has as its borders the polis.

The Stoics and the Kosmopolit6s

The story is quite different when we come to the Stoics. They maintain that as

a rational agent one belongs to a community of rational agents whose bonds

extend beyond accidents of propinquity and political and familial boundaries.

4Aristot1e, Eudemian Ethics, 1242a, p. 21ff., my trans.‘Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a, pp. 16-21, my trans.

106 Nancy Sherman

Thus the Stoics, stretching the notion of community beyond the borders ofAristotelian civic philia, establish a new kind of affiliation that extends commu-nity (koindnia) to all of humanity in virtue of shared reason. The notion iscaptured in Diogenes the Cynic’s maxim that one is a cosmic (universal) citizen(kosmopolitt%)-or as the Roman Stoics Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus preferto say, a politt% tou kosmou, literally, a citizen of the cosmos or universe.cMarcus in particular relies on explicit political imagery to defend hiscosmopolitan concepts. Reason constitutes a “law”; we are “citizens” of thatlaw, partakers of a “constitution.” The cosmos is itself a “commonwealth”; torun from it is to be an “alien” in the universe (zenos kosmou), a political “exile.”“In what other common government,” he asks rhetorically, “can we say thewhole race of man partakesT’7

Epictetus, an important source for Marcus, defends his cosmopolitanismprimarily through theological assertions of our kinship with god, that we are allchildren of god and servants intertwined in a community of humans and godthrough reason. We are parts of a greater, providential whole, and “we wouldnever exercise choice or desire by any other way than by reference to thewhole.”g Of course it is by no means intuitive that what is good for the wholeis good for its parts, nor that ultimately we best understand our shared humanitythrough the conception that we are parts of some larger whole.

Some of the Stoics tried to cultivate the larger sense of community byinstructing individuals to think of themselves as standing in a series of concen-tric circles that extended outward to the furthest Mysian, so to speak. InHierocles’ well-known rendition of the motif, we must actively imagine thosein the farthest orbits of our lives as connected to us in ways that make themmore like those closest to the center: “It is the task of a well-tempered man, inhis proper treatment of each group, to draw the circles together somehowtowards the centre, and to keep zealously transfeming those from the enclosingcircles in to the enclosed ones.” As Hierocles puts it, we must learn how torespect (timeti%wz)those from the outer circles as if they were in the inner core.9In parallel thoughts by Marcus, the explicit idea is that we establish a sense ofcommunity with others through empathetic identification: you must “enter intothe governing mind of every man and allow every other to enter into your own.”lo

cDiogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminenr Philosophers, 2 vols., trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, Mass.:Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1972), 6.63. Epictetus, Discourses, 2 vols., trans. W. A.Oldfather (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1925),2.10.3, 1.9.2.

7Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, trans. A. S. L. Farquharson (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1989), 4.4; 4.29; 4.4.

‘For example, Epictetus, Discourses, 2.8.12; 1.9.23; 2.10.34; 1.9.6; 2.10.3-4. Note that Epictetushimself was an ex-slave.

9Hierocles (Stobaeus, Eclogae Physicae et .!13hicae,4.671, 7.673, p. 11), reproduced in Long and Sedley,The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), fragment 57G.

lone Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 8.61.


In both the Hierocles and Marcus tracts, respect is enlivened through an actof imagination. So, Hierocles tells us, you must actively envisage others ascloser to you than they actually are. And, Marcus urges, you must somehowtransport yourself to others or transport others to you, so that they can bementally present with you in an active and palpable way. Marcus emphasizes thisfurther by graphically reminding us that we are part of a larger whole; if we cutourselves off from that whole, we lose the integrity of our own rational agency:

If you have ever seen a dismembered hand or foot or head cut off, lying some-where apart from the rest of the trunk, you have an image of what a man makes ofhimself, so far as in him lies, when he refuses to associate his will with whathappens and cuts himself off and does some unneighborly act. You have somewhatmade yourself an outcast from the unity which is according to Nature; for youcame into the world as a part and you have cut yourself off. 11

According to Marcus, since we are already united by shared reason, the forma-tion of a commonwealth of humanity requires, in part, remembering thatoriginal alliance:

Whenever you feel something hard to bear, you have forgotten . . . the greatkinship of man with all mankind, for the bond of kin is not blood nor the seed oflife, but mind (nou koinnia). You have forgotten that every individual’s mind is ofGod and has flowed from that other world. 12

Kant and the Kingdom of Ends

As we turn to Kant’s Enlightenment version of cosmopolitanism, the Stoicsources become quite clear. The kingdom of ends is a commonwealth ofrational agents, each an end in itself, deserving of respect in virtue of his or herrational agency. For both Kant and the Stoics there is a normative aspect tohaving reason: to have reason is somehow to be able to access right reasoning,or common law (ho nornos ho koinos) as the Stoics would put it. 13Of courseKant breaks radically with the heteronomous elements of the Stoic conception.Our reason is not, Kant argues, a mere part of some larger whole. It is indepen-dent and autonomous with each of us. And the cosmopolitan, ethicalcommonwealth we are to live in is not one given to us by a divinity, be it Zeus orthe Judeo-Christian god, but one we must ourselves construct through our ownmoral and political legislation. We are lawmakers, not inheritors of divine law,though the law each of us constructs as an individual is universal, something thatcould in principle be consented to by others. That is what makes it proper law.

Still, the idea of a cosmopolitan community based on the capacity forreason is something Kant shares with the Stoics. And too, there seem to be Stoic

llT&.&feditaliOnSof Marcus Aurelius, 8.34. See dso 1I.8 and 9.23.

‘zIbid., 12.26.13Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 7.85.

108 Nancy Sherman

antecedents for the idea that respect is the attitude due all individuals, good orbad, simply in virtue of their rationality. In Cicero’s words, “We must exercisea respectfulness (reverential adversus hornirzes) towards men, both towards thebest of them and also towards the rest.”14 The Kantian idea that all persons aredeserving of respect merely in virtue of their humanity, however well- or ill-developed it may be, is clearly presaged in this Stoic tract.

Kantiun Respect

We can begin to understand the notion of respect by turning to Kant’s ratherformalized conception of it. Although there are clear problems with his view, itsmajor contours seem to be part of a more generalized popular notion ofuniversal respect for shared humanity. Respect, or Achtung, according to Kant,is the emotional attitude we feel in response to autonomous rational agents(ourselves and others) who are capable of moral conscience. On the one hand,it is a feeling of submission or reverence to an individual’s capacity forautonomous choice making and moral legislation. With this comes a pleasur-able sense of awe and majesty in appreciating that an individual is able toexercise mastery and freedom. On the other hand, respect has a painful dimen-sion. In the case of self-respect, most notably, there is the frustration of havingto curb self-interest and inclination because of the yoke of moral law. This is thesense of being subject to a categorical imperative, or duty, Thus the feeling ofrespect betrays some of the conflict from which moral conscience is often born.What is distinctive about Kant’s view (and less an element of our own popular-ized view) is that respect is not independent of the rational procedures forconstructing morality. Respect is the universal emotional response to the fact ofour reason, and in particular to the fact that our reason is the legislative sourceof our morality. Reason constructs norms of morality. And respect, according toKant, is our affective awareness and record of that.

Positive and Negative Duties

As noted, the more popularized view of respect draws on some aspects of thisKantian conception. We respect the dignity of humanity and rights of persons,in the sense that we respect persons as having moral agency and freedom. Invirtue of that moral agency and freedom, persons can meaningfully choose livesand need to be protected in that pursuit both from being terrorized by othersintent upon making them slaves or political pawns and from the ravages of

IqCicero, On Duties, edited by M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991), 1.99. For a further early reference to the respect aroused by our divine capacity of reason,see Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 3 vols., trans. Richard Gumrnere (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb ClassicalLibrary, Harvard University Press, 1917–22), p. 51.


natural disasters that threaten to annihilate their agency. Thus, with Kant, wehold that there are positive and negative ways of promoting respect. Negatively,we withhold from violating rights and liberties. Positively, we bolster rationalagency when it comes under threat. Within Kant’s Groundwork, maxims ofbeneficence are positive expressions of respecting the rational agency of others.The underlying point is that human rational agents, unlike gods or angels, arenot themselves self-sufficient. They need the aid of others to supply the meansfor fulfilling the ends that they themselves set but cannot alone promote. Now

the respect tradition capitalizes on the impartiality that is often a part of thecosmopolitan view. Respect, according to the Kantian conception, is meant to

be an attitude independent of attachment or propinquity. Unlike friendship orparochial attachment, it is far-flung-universal, attached to personhood ratherthan personality, evoked merely in terms of humanity rather than the contingentappeal of humanity dressed this way or that. While it is personal in the sensethat it deals with individuals (unlike its competitor, utilitarianism), it is alsoimpersonal in the sense of being impartial in its selection and focus. As such,respect is often thought of as a ubiquitous response to fellow persons. It is cool

and hands-off, present and available to all.

But while this may be so in theory, it is not so in practice. We are selectivein our respect; it is neither automatic nor ubiquitous. And even if we hold that

respect reaches out to the dignity of persons and to the basic needs of humanbeings for survival and decency, to whom we show that respect is a matter of

cultivated habit as well as calculated decision. It may be that respect, unlikelove, is due to all. But as a practical attitude dispensed by individuals with finiteresources, the circles are drawn more or less wide.

The positive duty of beneficence, according to Kant, is a wide and imper-fect duty: it requires at a minimum that we do some beneficent acts, withdisagreements about how rigoristic or latitudinarian (that is, narrow or wide)that assistance ought to be. 15Analogous issues are raised concerning the extentand scope of humanitarian assistance. The point here is that wherever we endup drawing the lines, it is through the engagement of empathy that we are ableactively to mobilize the respect that underlies positive duties of aid. Withoutmentally entering the circumstances and contexts of others, without some imag-inative identification with others in their lives, it is unlikely that we could takeseriously their plight, especially when intervention is not obviously a matter ofnational interest. If respect for human dignity is a part of the humanitarian

posture, then it must be thickened with, and made operational through, empathy.

IfSherman, Making a Neces?ity of Virtue,ch.8.

110 Nancy Sherman

EMPATHY

The actual term empathy is of relatively new coinage, though the general ideawas certainly present in Adam Smith’s and David Hume’s eighteenth-centurynotions of sympathy. Smith’s view in The Them-y of Moral Sentiments is that amotive of practical concern, as well as a capacity for moral evaluation, dependsupon understanding others’ circumstances. And this requires the epistemiccapacity to “trade places in fancy, “ “to beat time” with their hearts, to bring thecase home “to one’s own bosom.”16 The imaginative act takes center stage inSmith’s account. Hume opts for a less cognitive, more affective notion. As heputs it in A Treatise of Human Nature, to feel the sympathy requisite for amotive of practical concern requires a vicarious arousal, an affective contagion,as if one were attached by a chord to others and vibrations at one end caused

actual perturbations at the other. 17This essay follows Smith’s lead in empha-sizing the cognitive and imaginative components of empathy, though it cannotbe denied that imaginative role taking in the absence of vicarious arousal isunlikely to be sufficient for a full empathetic response.

It was only in the late nineteenth century that the term empathy came intoits own. The experimental psychologist Edward Titchener, drawing on the workof the German psychologist Walter Lipps, coined the term (from the Greek,empatheia, meaning “in the same emotion”) as a translation of Lipps’s notionof Einfuhlung, literally, to feel one’s way into another. The core idea in Lippsand Titchener is that of “resonating” with one another, which often involvesrole taking, inner imitation, and a projection of self into the objects of percep-tion. Titchener puts it this way:

We have a natural tendency to feel ourselves into what we perceive or imagine. Aswe read about the forest, we may, as it were, become the explorer; we feel forourselves the gloom, the silence, the humidity, the oppression, the sense of lurkingdanger; everything is strange, but it is to us that strange experience has come. . . .This tendency to feel oneself into a situation is called EMPATHY—on the analogyof sympathy, which is feeling together with another; and empathic ideas arepsychologically interesting because they are the converse of perceptions; theircore is imaginal, and their context is made of sensations, the kinesthetic andorganic sensations that carry the empathic meaning. Like the feeling of strangeness,they are characteristic of imagination. In memory, their place is taken by the imita-

tive experiences which repeat over again certain phases of the original situations.ls

IeSmith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 140-42, 146, 167.lTDavid Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge (1739; Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1968), pp. 317-427.IsEdward Titchener, Beginner k Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1915), p. 198, as quoted by L.

Wispc5, “History of the Concept of Empathy,” in Empathy and Its Development, edited by N. Eisenbergand J. Strayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 22.


A precursor of this sort of imaginative transport is motor mimicry. Here itis not so much the mind’s muscle that imitates as our actual body movements.So, Smith observes, in watching a tightrope act we tend to sway with the bodymotions of the acrobat, or when we see someone suffer a blow to their leg orarm, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or arm.19 Similarly,psychologists have observed that neonates, barely a few days old, imitate thecrying of a same-aged neonate, selectively dispreferring the cries of slightlyolder or younger babies. What the research suggests is that we are biologicallyprimed toward taking the view of another.’” We do it spontaneously, and earlyon, through acts of motor mimicry. But we also do it early on in other ways,through tracking a shared object of attention with another. That is, a child asyoung as four months triangulates, as it were—moving her own eyes to the eyesof a parent, then to the target of her parent’s focus, so that the same target objectcan be visually shared. Also, the child will reverse the pattern, moving from atarget object to a parent’s gaze and facial reaction, then back to the object, inorder to know how to assess a new and possibly dangerous entity on thehorizon. If the parent has a smile on her face, then the child understands that theobject is not a cause for concern. A scowl will alert the child to possible dangerahead and the child will avoid the object.2L Very young children also covocalizewith adults, engaging in games of cooing that pick up on a parent’s tone andmodulation22 as well as establish other forms of synchrony and mutual attune-ment with cared-for adults.23

Role-Playing and Knowing Other Minds

Work on empathy by developmental psychologists has spilled over into thephilosophy of mind, with some theorists now suggesting that the way a childbegins to understand another’s mind, and in general the beliefs and desires ofothers, is by acts of empathetic imagination. Consider the following celebratedexperiment by Heinz Wimmer and Josef Pemer, in which a group of childrenare shown a puppet show.24 The puppet Maxi and his mother are in their house.There is box of candy in the house. Maxi goes outside to play, and while he is

lqAd~ Sfith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 48.

‘“’’Empathy and Imagination,” Midwest Srudies 22 (“Philosophy of the Emotions, ” 1998),zl~is research is summarized well by Paul Harris, Children and Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.:

Blackwell, 1989),‘2ZFora summ~ of the literature on motor (and auditory) mimicry, see J. Bavelas et d., “Motor

Mimicry as I%mitive Empathy,” in Empathy and Its Development, edited by N. Eisenberg and J. Strayer,pp. 317-48.

Zgsee especially the work of Daniel Stem, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic

Books, 1985).Z4H. Wimmer and J. Pemer, “Beliefs about Beliefs: Representations and Constraining Function of

Wrong Beliefs in Young Children’s Understanding of Deception,” Cognition 13 (1983), pp. 103–28.

112 Nancy Sherman

out, his mother takes the candy out of the box and puts it in the cabinet. Maxireturns. The children in the audience are asked, “Where will Maxi look forthe candy?”

What the experimenters found was that while most three-year-olds sayMaxi will look in the cabinet, five-year-olds consistently give the responsecharacteristic of adults, that he will look where he last left the candy—namely,in the candy box. How do we explain the difference in answers? Here are twopossibilities offered by philosophers of mind. According to one view of the folkpsychology of the child (that is, the conceptual repertoire relied on to explain,predict, and describe the actions of another), three-year-olds do not yet have amature concept of belief. Without possessing that concept they cannot distin-guish where Maxi thinks the candy is from where they as observers know it to be.

As some have further elaborated, a three-year-old’s knowledge is nonrepre-sentational. What the child believes is what is actually the case. The core ideais that “belief contents directly reflect the world.”25 And it is only when thechild is four or five, according to this account, that she comes to acquire a morefull-blown concept of belief as having a representational content that can comeunstuck from its reference. Once this new theory is an implicit part of her reper-toire, the child can understand how belief operates with desire and certaininductively established laws. This accounts for her newly achieved success inexplaining Maxi’s behavior. The empathy model we have been elaboratinggives a different account. What three-year-olds lack and five-year-olds have is,simply put, imaginative flexibility.26 The five-year-olds can put themselves insomeone else’s shoes. In figuring out others’ behavior, they can leave behindthe egocentric point of view. The three-year-olds cannot. They have not yetmastered the skill of role-playing.

If a mark of a plausible folk psychology heuristic is that it captures the

phenomenology, then the empathy model seems to have the upper hand over thecompeting theory that holds that understanding other minds requires having anincipient theory about the nature of belief and desire. It is unlikely that evenfive-year-olds have a budding philosopher’s sense of these concepts or anunderstanding of the laws or generalizations required to explain various outputsof behavior according to this model. Even if it is argued that this understandingneed only be implicit or procedural, it still seems that what is procedural is aphilosopher’s theory read back onto cognitive development ! What seems moreplausible developmentally is simply that three-year-olds, unlike five-year-olds,

25A. Gopnik and H. Wellman, “Why the Child’s Theory of Mind Really 1s a Theory,” in FolkPsychology: The Theory of Mind Debate, edited by M. Davies and T. Stone (Cambridge, Mass.:Blackwell, 1995), p. 238.

Zcsee A]vin GOIhm’S discussion of Paul Harris in “Empathy, Mind, and Morals,” in Mental

Simulation, edited by M. Davies and T. Stone (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995).


cannot yet prevent their own view of things from leaking into a view of whatsomeone else sees or thinks.27 Five-y ear-olds can experience another viewpointimaginatively without losing their own perspective on events.

This developmental transition is important because it marks the milestoneat which we break out of our egocentric worlds and begin to see, in a substan-tive way, through others’ eyes. This is a moment of stepping deeper into thesocial world, but also into the moral and political world. We understand others’lives and experience because of our capacities to simulate and “become,” as itwere, other people. Within a plausible account of our psychologies, simulationof this sort is the very basis of our ability to know other minds. It is basic tothird-person ascription of beliefs and desires.

The Moral Dimension of Role-Playing

Empathy or imaginative simulation is a basic feature of occupying a social

world, however extended that world may be. It is part of the psychologicalapparatus we rely upon in coming to feel membership in an international moralcommunity. Arguably the more remote and alien the culture and circumstancesanother occupies, the more difficult is effective simulation. How do we becomecharacter actors in a world we have never lived in or tasted? For example, howdo we (who live relatively affluent and politically stable forms of life) knowwhat it is like to make the trek from Rwanda to Zaire and from Zaire (now theCongo) back to Rwanda with starving children at our sides, our husband andson slain by ethnic rivals who now live across the street from the house to whichwe are returning? How do we know what it is like to experience devastatingstarvation, as in Somalia or, more recently, North Korea? Yet, in some cases theremoteness of the culture or the improbability of our living through such geno-cides or famines may not weigh all that heavily against understanding theshared dimensions of human suffering and loss. Scenes of the helpless and soobviously innocent, of starving and orphaned children, may transcend parochialborders; we may understand the dramatic script without much explicitrehearsal. The simulation, or act of empathetic imagination, may be fairly auto-matic, fairly procedural. We may experience a sense of “there but for fortune,”a response that underscores our shared humanity.

In other cases, threats to human dignity maybe harder to simulate. We mayhave to find mediating steps that bridge an alien world and our own so that iden-tificatory mechanisms can be established. So, some have argued, the threat ofrape many women live in fear of, or the prospect of female genital mutilation,may require a sensitivity to women’s vulnerabilities that many men may noteasily come by without education and consciousness-raising. In such cases

‘7This formulation is Alvin Goldman’s. Ibid., p. 194

114 Nancy Sherman

empathy may require working through experiences closer to home. Beatingtime with another’s heart may require an analogical inference that brings theexperience home to one’s own breast first. Even a response to genocide maysometimes work though suffering closer to home, through a reminder of the fateof one’s own ancestors, perhaps of the ghettos of Warsaw and Kovno and theslaughterhouses of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. But ultimately we want tomove from ourselves and our sphere of experience to what it is like for another,in his or her particular circumstances.

In all this, of course, our private imaginations are fed by public images andnarratives. Journalism itself was changed by the pioneers of photojoumalism—those like Chim (David Seymour), Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, theMagnum group covering the Spanish Civil War, World Wars I and II, Unicef reliefwork with children, and so on. They captured narratives, faces, and movementsthat allowed viewers to enter into lives and understand them close up, in the detailof their pain and joy.28 This is what CNN has come to understand all too well. (Ithas been argued, with some plausibility, that differential responses on the part ofthe United States to Somalia and Rwanda may have been the partial result ofwhere the camera happened to go.) This raises large issues, beyond the scope ofthis paper, about the influences of media on the shaping of foreign policy and,more generally, about a conception of morally responsible journalism. Equally, itraises issues regarding the responsibility of a democratic citizenry to be criticalrather than passive consumers of the media and its manipulation.

The discourse of the respect tradition, with its focus on an attitude dueeveryone merely by virtue of personhood, does not lend itself to a focus on thesorts of details and images that it is journalism’s (and empathy’s) business tocapture. And while in the case of intervention we respond to violations ofrespect, these are far from faceless or general. Even if the rights and personhoodof individuals are abstract notions, how individuals are allowed (or not) to bepersons—how they are oppressed, tortured, starved, or forced from their home-lands—is something to which we transport ourselves through concrete images.We visualize and simulate in a way analogous to what literary readers do and,as Aristotle knew, spectators at dramatic tragedy do-tracking the concreteevents of the narrative with an internal enactment lively enough to stimulate (inthe case of tragedy) the identificatory emotions of cathartic pity and fear.

The general point is that we record the circumstances that undo humandignity through an emotional palette broader than respect. Sympathy, compas-sion, pity, horror, disgust, and fear are all called into play. Emotions such asthese allow us to register and, more painfully, be confronted by the horrors.29

Zson ehim’~ photography,SeeIngeBondi, The Photography of David StWOUr (Boston: Bulfinch

Press, 1996).agshe~~, Making a Necessity of Ertue, chs. 2, 4.


They bring us the morally relevant news that a disengaged intellect simply

could not. Often they rivet our attention and force us to remember what a coolerintellect barely notices. But perhaps even more basic than these emotions is the

emotional and cognitive capacity to enter another’s world sufficiently to iden-

tify with that person so that other emotions, such as compassion or pity, have achance to grab hold. This is what empathy enables us to do. Through an act ofimagination and simulation we appreciate, however fleetingly, something ofwhat another experiences, sees, fears, and desires. We recenter ourselves on thatother, seeing through his or her eyes. This may be a conceptually, and in somecases temporally, prior moment to feeling other emotions such as pity andcompassion, as well as respect.

Research on Empathetic Arousal and Altruism

The research program of Coke and Batson corroborates an important relatedpoint.30 Their experiments suggest that taking the perspective of another personincreases empathetic arousal, which in turn increases helping on occasions wherethere are opportunities to help. More specificallyy, two groups of students wereasked to listen to a broadcast of a college senior who had lost her parents in atragic automobile accident. Prior to listening, one group was asked to “imaginehow she felt about her situation,” while others were told to attend in an objective

way to technical aspects of the broadcast. The results, according to prediction,were that subjects in the “imagine” condition experienced vicarious emotion and,

when asked to help, offered significantly more assistance than the students wholistened as more objective observers. The salient point for our study is simply thatempathy predisposes us to sympathy. A related point is that empathy predisposesus to active forms of respect and to a responsiveness to violations of respect.

Another study with children confirms the importance of empathy as a wayof taking seriously others’ plights. A group of six-y ear-olds is told a story inwhich a main character has to say goodbye to a friend because the family ismoving away. The children are given prior instructions to listen to the stories inone of three ways: to feel with the character, to remain detached, or to follow

their own preferences. Children who were told to identify with the characterwere able to remember more about the sad episodes of the story than were theother children. Some of them later explained that they followed the first set ofinstructions by pretending the stories were really happening to them.31 There are

SOJ.Coke, D. Batson, and K. McDavis, “Empathic Mediation of Helping: A TWOStage Model, ” .Journal

of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (1978), pp. 752–66. Also see Batson, The Altruism Question

(Hillsdale, NJ.: Erlbaum, 1991). For further research, see N. Eisenberg, H. McCreath, and R. Ahn,“Vicarious Emotional Responsiveness and Prosocial Behavior: Their Interrelations in Young Children,”Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 14 (1988), pp. 298–3 11.

~lsee Harris, Children and Emotion, for a summary of the 1986 experiment of Meerum Terwogt,

Schene, and Harris.

116 Nancy Sherman

important heuristics here for moral education. How we preface narratives orpresent concrete cases may be relevant to the ease with which our listeners canempathize with the subjects of those stories. Again, the point is not just vividconcreteness in presentation, but simulation on the part of the listener—how itfeels to be another person in those circumstances.

Still, studies involving role-inducing manipulations raise questions aboutthe status of a simulational heuristic. Do we routinely and implicitly take upothers’ roles when we are trying to understand others’ behavior and have notbeen given alternative instructions? Is it our default mode? Or are we likely toengage in empathetic imagination only when explicitly prodded in that direc-tion? This exploration favors a strong thesis, in which simulation is a standardmode for understanding others. But further study of the interplay betweenimplicit and explicit cognitive processes, perhaps paralleling the work beingdone in memory research, would be welcome.32 In addition, much more needsto be understood about the function of different emotions as rapid communica-tors of information (for example, we now know that we are especially rapid-ratereaders of negative faces)33 and the link between that informational function ofemotions in reading facial cues and altruistic motivation in situations of others’

danger or need. Here work on evolutionary aspects of emotion (for example, theadaptiveness of emotion as an early communication system for our socialsurvival) is important, as are neuroscience studies about the interconnection ofdeliberative and emotional centers in the brain.

Nature and Its Cultivation

The overall force of the arguments in this section is that empathy is rooted inhardwired capacities (for example, motor mimicries) that become cultivatedthrough the development of imagination. As the experiment with Maxi reveals,at age three our imaginative skills take us barely beyond our own case and howwe, in fact, see things. By age five, we have secured the difference between selfand others in such a way that we can see from another’s point of view, refo-cusing on a self that is not our own. The empathy required for assistance topeoples unrelated by affinity or propinquity represents an analogous moving of

s2See,for example,Larry Squire,Memory and Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), andDavid Schacter, Searching for Memory (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Squire has shown that there aredifferent centers of memory, one that is the locus of unconscious, implicit knowledge and another that hasto do with explicit, declarative memory. Also, it is now believed that early learning of affect and paradigmsof attachment are laid down in implicit memory centers in the brain: see F. Amini, T. Lewis, R. Lannon,et at., “Affect, Attachment, Memory: Contributions toward Psychobiologic Integration,” Psychiat~ 59(1996), pp. 213-36. Also, Allan Schore, Affect Regulations and the Origins of Self (Hillsdate, N.J.:Erlbaum, 1994).

33See L. Wisp6, The Psychology of Sympathy (New York: Plenum Press, 1991).


the circle outward. We come to imagine eviction from our homeland, devas-tating famine, children languishing because breasts have dried up or a watersupply has become poisoned. We see the particulars of others’ circumstanceswith the vividness of being in their shoes. If enactment is part of the process ofknowing what others are thinking and feeling, if it is part of the very ability to

know other minds, then enactment too is part of an appreciation of a foreignpeople’s plight; it is a becoming of them for a moment.

Empathy must be cultivated in order to reach its full potential. In caseswhere distance or ethnic or racial prejudice erect barriers to our grasping thecommon thread of human suffering, we are morally required to make correctiveadjustments, just as Hume and Smith stipulated in their construction of ideal,moral spectators.34 Empathy, untutored, cannot do proper moral work.

Objections to Extending the Model

The psychological research on empathy and altruism focuses on the personalsphere. The findings are that we are more likely to be moved to help, whenhelping occasions arise, if we have first empathized with the victim.35Humanitarian assistance, however, is not personal beneficence but the work ofnations, of peoples with regard to other peoples.36 If it is beneficence, it iscollective beneficence. If it is a response from the perspective of justice toabuses of rights, it is so at the collective level. Yet some have argued, perhapsmost vocally Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Zmmoral Socie~, that

altruism in the personal sphere does not readily transfer to the conduct of

groups, and in particular, to the conduct of one nation-state toward another. It is

worth briefly considering his remarks:

In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less

capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and

therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group,

reveal in their personal relationships .37

Patriotism is a high form of altruism, when compared with lesser and more

parochial loyalties; but from an absolute perspective it is simply another form of

selfishness. The larger the group the more certainly will it express itself selfishly

in the total human community. . . .Try as he will man seems incapable of forming

JdSee, for example, Hume’s important remarks on the judicious spectator in A Treatise of Human

Nature, pp. 58 1–82.Sssee Coke, Batson, and McDavis, “Empathetic Meditation of Helping. ”Jqt is noteworthy that in recent writings John Rawls has used the term “peoples” rather than “political

states” as the basis of a conception of international justice, in order to construct a reafistic utopia that isnot tied to traditional conceptions of state sovereignty and national self-interest. RawIs, “The Law ofPeoples, ” in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, edited by Stephen Shute and SusanHurley (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

sTReinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scnbner’s Sons. 1932), p. Xl.

118 Nancy Sherman

an international community, with power and prestige great enough to bring socialrestraint upon collective egoism.38

The familiar enough claim is that within the international community, statesare essentially Hobbesian agents—that is, motivated by collective rational self-interest—however non-Hobbesian they may be when turned inward or howeveraltruistic individuals within that state may be when focused on compatriots.Morality degenerates, Niebuhr suggests, as the group gets larger, In the case ofthe global community, the degeneration is most pronounced. We lack thepsychological capacity to transcend ourselves, to identify with a larger group,“to comprehend” or, in the terms of this essay, to empathize with the sufferingof those outside our domestic borders.

The supplementary point can be made from the perspective of internationalrelations theory that the political state, traditionally conceived, has as itsprimary focus national interest. The extension of moral law beyond the politicalstate to the international community requires a reconception of the traditionalrights of a political state to internal autonomy. Equally, it requires a reconcep-tion of the traditional right to wage war for “just” causes, which might includeexpansionist aims to convert other states to one’s religion, acquire territory, orincrease economic strength.

We can respond to the supplementary claim rather quickly. Since WorldWar II international law has paved the way toward a conception of the politicalstate as more firmly planted within an international community. As formulatedby Michael Walzer’s legalist doctrine, just causes for war tend to be restrictedto self-defense (and defense of allies) against aggression, with the rights ofinternal sovereignty themselves limited in the case of gross violations of humanrights.39 So a conception of humanitarian assistance that presupposes a notionof an international moral community is in accord with actual shifts in how inter-national law is presently understood.40

But what of Niebuhr’s more central claim that there are strong psycholog-ical counterpulls that limit extending altruism or justice beyond nationalborders? In the terms we have been pursuing, is empathy necessarily parochial,and especially so when we act as a collective agent such as a state? This is alarge question. In concluding, I shall merely suggest how we might begin toconstruct some lines of response.

Empathy as a Moral Mandate

The force of the earlier remarks is that empathy is not bounded in its applica-tion to what is near and dear, be it family rather than stranger, or compatriot

Wbid., p. 48.sgMichael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977).~Here I arn indebted to Rawls’s discussion in “The Law of Peoples.”


rather than foreigner. Empathy is, in large measure, a cognitive capacity

whereby we imagine ourselves as others, imagine their circumstances and atti-

tudes, enact, however fleetingly, what it would be like to be them in their world.Familiarity makes for ease of empathy, and, indeed, studies confirm Hume’s

and Smith’s assumption that we empathize more with those whom we perceiveas close or similar to us than we do with strangers.41 Is this a fatal flaw in moraltheories that look to empathy for escaping the egocentric perspective? In theend, do we merely trade egocentrism for ethnocentrism, nationalism, or thelike? There is a strong argument that we do not. To the extent that we haveinformation that allows us access into others’ lives—for example, photographs,artwork, journals, oral testimony, and so forth—we have at hand the sort ofmaterial that empathy requires to do its work. We regularly enter lives remotefrom our own through literature and drama as well as through journalistic narra-tives. Moreover, if altruism, collective or personal, is in fact primed by empathy,as the research suggests, then it would seem we have derivative moral duties tocultivate the imaginative skills that underlie a capacity for nonparochial empathy.

The general point is that our natural abilities are always stretched andcurbed in various ways, and indeed must be, as part of the mandate of morality.“Ought implies can.” This is consistent with a moral requirement describing

people as they might be and could be, but not always as they are.42 Analogousremarks hold regarding the responsibility of collective agents. What statesought to do with regard to the international community is not divorced from thewill and sentiment of the public. But the public can be described not simply as

it is, but as it might be and could be.I have assumed from the start the existence of a humanitarian impulse,

however weak or strong, and have explored selective features of the moral

psychology that underpins it. To what degree are we moved by respect forfellow persons, to what degree by empathy? How are these concepts connected?In what sense does a humanitarian spirit require that we cultivate both attitudesas part of a more general moral sensibility? Many of us live by the convictionthat individuals deserve the chance to lead lives in which they experience self--respect and dignity. Humanitarian aid in response to grave need and politicalinjustice is a manifestation of that conviction. The point is that we would notmobilize that respect for persons if we did not transport ourselves to others andtheir circumstances through empathy.

41N. D. Feshbach, “Studies of Empathic Behawor in Children,” in Progress in ExperimentalPersonality Research 9, edited by B. A. Maher (New York: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 1-47,

42Rawls makes similar remarks in “The Law of peoples,” acknowledging his own debt to the openinglines of Rousseau’s .bcid Contracr: “My purpose is to consider if in political society, there can be anylegitimate and sure principle of government, taking men as they are and laws as they might be.”

empathy, respect, and humanitarian intervention

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