8.1 EMPATHY AND MORALITYA long philosophical tradition connects empathy to morality (Ugazio et al.,
2014). More recent scholarship, however, has emphasized the equivocal defin-
itions of empathy as well as the complexity of the link between empathy and
morality (Maibom, 2014). Broadly speaking, the everyday notion of empathy
involves some kind of emotional resonance with others and is usually con-
sidered a good thing and a source of morally right behavior. The folk-theory of
the relationship between empathy and morality can be captured by the intuition,
“if only people would empathize more, the world would be a better place.”It is
evident, however, that simply feeling what others feel cannot provide sufficient
motivation for moral action. For example, developmental theories of distress
(e.g., Hoffman, 1987) traditionally stated that young infants feel only personal
distress when they are faced with someone else’s distress and thus seek to reduce
their own discomfort (for example, by seeking comfort from their mother).
Although recent empirical work has shown that young infants do feel empathic
distress (for example, by looking at the distressed peer’s mother rather than at
their own mother; McDonald & Messinger, 2012; Liddle et al., 2015), the debate
illustrates that for scholars the concept of developed empathy involves more
than emotions.
Before outlining a cognitive model of empathy, let us consider how people
make sense of other people’s thoughts and feelings, which will be also crucial
for understanding how empathy works for textual interpretation. The ability
to understand the thoughts and feelings of other people is calledmentalizing
or the Theory of Mind (Leudar, Costall, & Francis, 2004; Goldman, 2012; see
section 2.2.2). Whereas one model of the Theory of Mind (also called“theory
theory”) suggests that this ability depends on developing concepts of other
people’s minds, an alternative explanation (called the“simulation theory”)
suggests that we can think of others’thoughts and feelings because we simulate
them in our own minds (Meltzoff, 2011; Gallese, 2014; Goldman & Shanton,
2016). For example, one-year-old children who have experience of wearing a
blindfold are less likely than other children to follow the eye-gaze of a
blindfolded person (Meltzoff & Brooks, 2008). We can also mention another
experiment, in which three-month-olds who practiced goal-directed actions
(“grasping”objects with Velcro-covered“sticky mittens”) subsequently saw
goals in others’actions (reaching out toward objects with a“sticky mitten”),
whereas infants who only practiced by observation (watching others using the
mittens but not receiving such training themselves) did not get that insight
(Woodward, 2009).^2 An important aspect of the Theory of Mind is the ability
to attributefalse beliefsto other people, that is, beliefs that are different from
(^2) Whether infants perceive an action as goal-directed can be established by measuring
the duration of directing their eye-gaze to the action. When watching someone repeating a
168 Cognitive Science and the New Testament