Welfare and Rational Care by Darwall Stephen.;

Author:Darwall, Stephen.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400825325
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Sympathy

Over the past fifteen years, Batson and his colleagues have been finding experimental support for what they call the “Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis.”35 Because of the difference between Batson’s definitions and ours, this research bears only indirectly on the relationship between empathy and sympathy as we are defining them. But the indirect light is pretty bright nonetheless.

Batson’s experiments work by testing differences in the behavior of subjects who are given an opportunity to help someone they experience as being in need. The subjects are partitioned in two cross-cutting ways. One is a partitioning between “low empathy” and “high empathy” subjects. For example, some subjects might be told (as in Stotland’s experiments) to imagine how the person they are observing feels (high empathy condition) with the rest being told to attend carefully to the information they learn from observing the person (low empathy). The other variable is “ease of escape,” how easily subjects can avoid actually helping without retaining vicarious distress. In a wide range of experimental conditions, designed to rule out a wide variety of alternative hypotheses, high empathy subjects show a remarkable disposition to help others even when they can easily escape doing so without vicarious personal distress.

I take this as evidence of a psychological connection between empathy and sympathy in our terms. So far as I can see, all that is directly manipulated in Batson’s experiments are forms of projective and proto-sympathetic empathy. Thus, when subjects are told to imagine what another person is feeling, they are being instructed to empathize, specifically, to engage in proto-sympathetic empathy, not to feel sympathy.

What Batson’s subjects directly exhibit is helping behavior rather than sympathy. But Batson claims his experiments show that what explains this helping is a motivational state whose “ultimate goal” is “increasing the other’s welfare.”36 I conjecture that, in many cases at least, this motivational state is sympathetic concern or sympathy.

Sympathy, again, is a feeling or emotion that responds to some apparent obstacle to an individual’s good and involves concern for him, and thus for his welfare, for his sake. Introductory psychology students in one of Batson’s early experiments hear an audiotape they believe to be of a fellow student, Carol, who has had to miss a month of class while hospitalized as the result of an auto accident. The subjects are asked if they will help Carol make up missed work. Subjects in the “difficult escape” condition are told that Carol will be back in their discussion section in a week, and those in the “easy escape” condition, that she will be studying at home, conveniently out of view. Subjects whose empathy is heightened by imagining what Carol must be feeling show a remarkable tendency to help, even in the easy escape condition (71 percent).Why?

Assume that Batson is right that his experiment shows that what moves these students is an other-directed rather than self-directed motive like the desire to remove vicarious personal distress. What is the nature of this other-directed motive? Of course, it might be that the subjects had

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