Making Automatic Empathy Useful

The sub-personal, automatic route to affective matching fails to meet the standards of usefulness in a theory of empathy in two ways. First, there seems to be no available practical reason why anyone would think that a feeling that they themselves felt did not originate in them, but rather in someone else. Secondly, even if one did believe that one’s affective state did not originate in oneself, how could the demonstrative ascription of that state to another ever be justified?74

Such concerns are supposed to be blocked by the fourth condition in Vignemont and Singer’s definition of empathy, that one must know that one’s affective state originated in the target of the empathising, but the possibility of that condition being met in any given case seems, prima facie, a very small one.

74 _{Since automatic empathy is not supposed to involve any reconstructive imagining}

it cannot straightforwardly avail itself of the lack of incongruity justification described above.

It could be argued that I have set the bar for usefulness too high. Perhaps empathy need not be useful in the sense that it adds to our understanding of the inner lives of others. It is doubtless plausible that there are many evolutionary advantages to the tendency to spontaneous sharing of affect with our fellows, even if those affective states are never thought of as having originated in anything other than the ‘usual’ way. Even so, it is hard to swallow the idea that simply having a feeling that was caused (in a particular way) by the feelings of another, with no intentional state to link the feeling to that other, counts as empathy at all.

I can, however, hypothesise two scenarios that could plausibly lead to somebody having a reason to question the source of their affective state. As far as I know there is no empirical evidence that speaks to the plausibility of these explanations. Perhaps neither of them ever actually occurs. However, if we are to preserve the notion that the mirroring route is indeed a form of empathy, then the following suggestions seem like they would be worth considering.

Scenario 1: O is angry, S becomes angry via a mirroring process. S’s anger is incongruous with regards to certain other features of S. S begins to reason counterfactually about her own psychology, asking herself questions such as “what kind of person would I have to be to respond in this way?” S reaches the conclusion that she would have to be very much like the sort of person O is and, knowing what sort of person O is, ascribes the state to O.

Scenario 2: O is angry, S becomes angry via a mirroring process. S’s anger is incongruous with regards to certain other features of S. This incongruity leads S to think in general terms about her anger, and in the course of this wonders if anyone present might be feeling the same way. S imagines herself as each other person present in order to satisfy her curiosity and, upon finding that her state could plausibly be occurring in the psychology she imagines of herself when she is

In both suggested cases I am once again employing the notion of ‘congruity’ of affect with situation and character, though this time its epistemic role is to motivate the whole empathic project, and not just a belief in the verisimilitude of the imagined experience. The ‘features of S’ that I mentioned could be features of either S’s character or situation that would make her mirrored anger appear as an unexpected, perhaps jarring, feature of her experience. Finding oneself experiencing an unexpected feeling does seem to prompt one to, and give one a reason for, thinking about it in general terms (“Why do I feel like this?” “Why would one feel as I do?” etc.). Although it is also plausible that in both cases many people would just dismiss their feelings as irrational, or as the product of some underlying mood that they had not previously attended to. However, someone who is not given reason to be curious about the feelings of others is someone who does not have a reason to empathise, and scenarios such as the ones above seem to provide such a reason. Someone who is not made curious about their mirrored state, because it is absolutely congruous with their own character and situation, is not empathising and nor should we suppose they would try. Not only would they have no reason to doubt that the affective state in question was generated by their own psychologies in the usual way, but it would likely be of benefit to them to consider it as such. If those around you are angry, afraid, joyous, etc., and there is nothing in your situation or character that would conflict with your finding yourself with the same feeling, then it is probably appropriate for you to have that state at that time. That state would neither prompt nor form a part of an empathic process, since it would never be considered anything other than a product of your own psychology.

I think that scenarios such as these two could plausibly occur with some regularity. If one undergoes n mirroring episodes per day, then I am suggesting that only and all those that feature incongruity will be candidates for empathy, while all those congruent with one’s current

situation will just be taken as one’s own affective responses. Since I can see no way that congruent feelings stemming from mirroring processes could be candidates for empathy in any case, I believe I have provided the largest possible set that could serve some role in an empathic imaginative project.

One important thing to note, however, is that both of the scenarios I put forward involve the use of proto-empathies in order to justify the concluding ascription. Indeed, this is true of any scenario that could both plausibly occur and involve demonstrative ascription (as opposed to the mirrored feeling prompting a purely cognitive ascription; ‘Omar feels that he is afraid’ rather than ‘Omar feels like this’). Any scenario in which the bare bones of an empathic understanding are gained from a mirrored response (that is, an understanding based on the sensory experience of the mirrored feeling) will necessarily involve some experiential imagining against which to test the feeling’s congruity. Since the only reason for using the mirrored feeling as a prompt to embark on an empathic project lies in its incongruity with the empathiser’s self or situation, it will not become any less

incongruous without bringing into imagination some other beings- with and doings-with that may make a better fit. Indeed, no matter how we come by the state that, at the end of an empathic project, we will demonstrably ascribe to our target, it seems the only way to justify that ascription will be to engage in some variety of proto-empathic imagining.

In the light of these thoughts I suggest that automatic empathy should be considered as distinct from empathy proper. Even if we can find a reason to suspect that a feeling given to us by emotional contagion did not originate in ourselves, it seems that the only way to empathically ascribe it to another is to engage in proto-empathic imaginings. Since proto-empathic imaginings are the preserve, are in fact definitive of, the reconstructive route to empathy, it seems reasonable to conclude that when automatic empathy is to behave like empathy, it must

become reconstructive empathy.