Empathic justification: The value of interpersonal viewpoints and affective unity in the normative assessment of emotion.

Abstract

We often criticize people's emotions, including our own, as right or wrong, correct or incorrect, appropriate or inappropriate, etc. Can such criticism be justified? My dissertation attempts to answer this question. In particular, I focus on a neglected possibility for the justification of emotion, an empathic standard. Emotions are justified when they are <italic>empathically intelligible </italic>---that is, when one can make sense of an emotion in virtue of being able to empathize with it. Here 'empathy' is not merely an epistemic device for identifying <italic>what</italic> a person feels, as the term is sometimes used in simulationist theories of mind-reading. Empathy is an actual correspondence of emotion based on the judge's genuine response to the same object that provoked the emotion of the judged. Empathy is thus argued to carry its own distinctive normative import because it inherently acknowledges the emotion of the judged to be understandable---and understandable just because the judge feels the same way. Fully explicating this possibility requires investigation into the workings of empathy and the paradigmatic narrative-structured discourse in which empathic justification is couched. Moreover, the empathic model highlights an underappreciated dimension of emotion assessment. Recent philosophical work has stressed evaluations of emotions in terms of <italic>fittingness,</italic> that is, by whether the emotion's evaluative outlook matches the evaluative facts---e.g., whether something is genuinely angering, as it seems in anger. It is more common, however, to judge emotions, not as an incorrect <italic>type</italic> of response to a given object, but rather as involving an incorrect <italic>degree</italic> of response, as overreactions or underreactions. This brings to the fore a distinct question from that of fittingness, namely, whether a degree of feeling is reasonable, that is, to be permitted or tolerated. And this ties it to a heretofore unnoticed, but central element of our moral lives---respect for our emotional selves. All this, it is argued, is fully explained by the empathic model. Empathic justification thus explains intensity assessment while yielding a more flexible normative judgment reflecting <italic>acceptance </italic> of the way a person feels with no implication that this is the way anyone similarly situated ought to feel.