ArgumentThe new English term “empathy” was translated from the GermanEinfühlungin the first decade of the twentieth century by the psychologists James Ward at the University of Cambridge and Edward B. Titchener at Cornell. At Titchener's American laboratory, “empathy” was not a matter of understanding other minds, but rather a projection of imagined bodily movements and accompanying feelings into an object, a meaning that drew from its rich nineteenth-century aesthetic heritage. This rendering of “empathy” borrowed kinaesthetic meanings from German sources, but (...) extended beyond a contemplation of the beautiful to include a variety of experimental stimuli and everyday objects in the laboratory. According to Titchener's structural psychology, all higher thought could be reduced to more elemental aspects of mind, and experimental introspection showed empathy to be constituted of kinaesthetic images. The existence of kinaesthetic images, Titchener argued, formed an incisive critique of the view that thought could take place without images, held by one of Titchener's major psychological rivals, the school of thought-psychologists in Würzburg, Germany. The new term “empathy” in early American academic psychology therefore delineated a kinaesthetic imaginative projection that took place on the basis of ontological difference between minds and things. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmpathy has been taken to play a crucial role in ethics at least since the Scottish Enlightenment. More recently, a revival of moral sentimentalism and empirical research on moral behavior has prompted a renewed interest in empathy and related concepts and on their contribution to moral reasoning and to moral behavior. Furthermore, empathy has recently entered our public discourse as having the power to ameliorate our social and political interactions with others.The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent (...) to which such a role can be actually granted. Before focusing on a positive assessment, I will delve into a few problems our ordinary concept of empathy and our commonsensical way of conceiving its connection to ethics will need to face. Specifically, I will show how an exaggerated reliance on the ordinary concept of empathy could lead to an underestimation of its biases and potential limitations, how a naïve conception of its connection to morality can overlook relevant counterexam... (shrink)

After introducing some of the many issues raised by intergenerational justice, the paper will focus in particular on the motivational problem: Why should we be motivated to act in favor of others when sacrifices on our behalf are required? And more specifically, how can such sacrifices be justified when those we act for are neither born nor easily unidentifiable? While many accounts of moral motivation exist, most scholars will grant that emotional engagement is a strong motivational drive. Hence, the paper (...) will focus on such a drive. I will, first, argue that immediate emotions and empathy – understood uniquely as a form of emotional attunement – are insufficient to grant that the acts they motivate are morally acceptable. The case of future generations is a perfect example of such insufficiency. Second, I will discuss the possibility of regulated emotions and sympathy playing such a role. In fact, by regulating and educating emotions, a conscious or “rational” component is added, which could help avoid the biases and limitations immediate affective phenomena show. Such a “rational” component would also enable us to provide a criterion to distinguish cases in which emotions drive us in morally acceptable or unacceptable directions. In the second part of the paper, the sentimentalist tradition will be reconsidered, with particular attention to Adam Smith’s moral proposal – since the sympathetic engagement of an impartial spectator could be an excellent example of a regulated and educated emotional attunement of the kind required to deal with some of the many moral issues future generations raise and, in particular, with the motivational problem itself. (shrink)