Virtuous Empathy: Scientific and Humanistic Investigations

Indiana University received a grant from the University of Chicago (sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation) to study "Virtuous Empathy: Scientific and Humanistic Investigations" from fall 2010 to spring 2012. Richard B. Miller, Poynter Center director, is the PI for the project. Additional support was provided by the IU Institute for Advanced Studies, directed by John Bodnar, the IU Office for the Vice Provost for Research, and the College of Arts and Sciences.

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The Project

The "Virtuous Empathy" project examined empathy as a virtue in an interdisciplinary, collaborative way by coordinating research in the life sciences, information sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Empathy denotes the ability to move from a perspective in which we project our own thoughts and feelings onto someone to a psychological state in which our emotions are conditioned by our awareness of another's feelings and frame of mind. In prototypical instance of empathy, we feel as we take the other to feel, given our perception of his or her circumstances, and we are mindful of how our feelings have been so transformed. Empathy's importance for mental health, moral development, adjudication of conflicts, and self-other relationships cuts across a wide range of cultural, intellectual, and political practices. It enables us to overcome isolation and imaginatively engage others on their own terms. Moreover, knowing that others can or should be empathic allows us to assume that they can be so disposed toward oneself. Empathy's potential for other-regarding and self-regarding dispositions and expectations are vast.

The team from Indiana University examined empathy from a variety of methodological angles, involving IU faculty from Psychological and Brain Sciences, Philosophy, History, Germanic Studies, Cognitive Science, Religious Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the School of Education. The IU team examined whether and on what terms empathy qualifies as a virtue, understood as a habitual disposition of good judgment, feeling, and action, an excellence of character that has personal and civic dimensions. The team's specific objectives are several. Attending to empathy as a potential virtue, the team explored empathy's connection to moral norms in order to distinguish virtuous empathy from rudimentary and less praiseworthy varieties. (Some conceptions of empathy, for example, may view it as an infant reflex or see it as attuning us to emotions that are morally undesirable.) The team also explored whether virtuous empathy is psychologically realistic - within the reach of demonstrable human capacities and subject to cultivation and habituation. The project examined empathy's intellectual pedigree - its roots and cognates in western and east Asian thought. The team members explored empathy's links to public and social responsibility - empathy's potential to connect us with past generations and future stakeholders, both familiar and strange. The team examined obstacles to the expression and cultivation of virtuous empathic character and dispositions in modern life. The IU team pursued all of these aims by coordinating knowledge and methodologies from different disciplines with an eye toward creating a model for future scholarship that bridges the sciences and the humanities.

"Virtuous Empathy" sought to reframe conventional understandings of empathy along the way toward securing its place as a virtue in our moral lexicon. Empathy is typically conceived as a set of dispositions that build on biological capacities that, when developed, enable one person to grasp and attune herself with the circumstances and feelings of another. The IU team considers that picture theoretically under-developed. Drawing on moral theory, history, education, literature, psychology, philosophy, theology, and social thought, these researchers showed that empathy as an excellence of character must satisfy moral norms, e.g., respect for persons; is cognitively complex; occupies a fragile place in modern hopes for human betterment; has clear precursors and cognates in pre-modern western and east Asian thought; invites social cultivation; and connects us to constituencies - both human and non-human - that span complex spatial and temporal contexts. The team developed and disseminated findings through an interdisciplinary workshop, a tutorial session on empirical work in neuroscience, a symposium of team members and invited speakers (November 11-12, 2011), an annotated bibliography, and a series of scholarly essays to be anthologized.