This terminal chapter revisits the conclusions of this work’s four substantive studies on the disambiguation of the term “empathy”, on compassionate empathy’s conceptual and empirical profile, on the question of its moral value, and finally on the place of empathic responding in the process of moral deliberation in order to interpret their significance for practical and professional ethics education. The discussion is loosely framed in terms of the three areas of moral emotion education referred to in Chapter 6 as “imagination”, “imitation”, and “reappraisal”.
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References
See Rethorst (1997) for a discussion of this quote and the question of the relationship between art, imagination, and moral education.
In this instance, I am using “perspective-taking” as the faculty of other-directed insight as it tends to be used in social psychology. It was seen in §3.4 that perspective-taking so broadly conceived may be highly imaginative or be mediated by simpler associative cognitive operations and conditioning.
Admittedly, compassionate empathy and personal distress are not invariably distinct phenomena. It is possible and indeed probably not uncommon for personal distress to become empathic distress as when feelings of repulsion at a person’s aversive state turn to thoughts for her well-being. In this way, she becomes the object of those feelings and concurrently the object of genuine compassionate empathy. This point is discussed in §3.2.1.
These “reactive” and “introspective” processes implicated in experiences of compassionate empathy were described and compared in detail in §3.4.
For one discussion of this point see Hoffman (2000, pp. 33–35).
As research theme in empirical moral psychology, this problem is studied under the heading of moral motivation and has today coalesced into an agenda investigating the interconnected constructs of moral identity, moral personality, the moral self, and moral exemplarity (cf. esp. Lapsley & Narváez, 2004).
“The three judgements” are Nussbaum’s analogues to the “judgements of compassionate empathy” presented in §3.1.
Owing to this, Nussbaum treats childhood primarily as a period of latency where the principal achievement is the development of the imagination viewed as a “soft skill” in preparation for fully fledged compassion which comes only at a later stage (2001, cf. pp. 426–428). This underestimates children’s capacity for compassion and identification for reasons already elaborated upon.
This section draws heavily on Maxwell (2006) where a more elaborated version of this critique of Nussbaum’s curricular proposal is presented.
In the early 1980s, James Rest developed the four-component model of morality in order to combine various theoretical perspectives on moral functioning into a single coherent framework (cf. Rest, 1983). Rest perceived that the theories of moral functioning vying for dominance during that period—the cognitive-developmental approach, the psychoanalytic approach, the empathybased approach, and the socialization approach—made unwarranted claims to comprehensiveness. In his alternative view, each theory was better conceived as highlighting just one of several aspects of moral functioning. These aspects became the basic constructs of his multi-component model. Much as Rest intended it (cf. 1986), the four-component model continues to have taxonomic importance, loosely delineating four branches of moral psychology as a field of empirical research and four corresponding areas of moral educational intervention. You and Bebeau (2005) have recently reviewed the empirical research on the construct of moral sensitivity.
The unique exception was the study by Ofsthun (1986) which investigated the impact of a novel pedagogical model specifically designed for the purposes of enhancing moral sensitivity and connected processes.
The finding that moral sensitivity is not dependent on affective capacities of response should not be taken to imply the reductivist thesis that moral sensitivity is therefore “nothing but” a form of moral judgement. Moral sensitivity’s status as an analytically distinct component of moral functioning depends in no way on it being predominantly affective.
This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “moral segmentation” (cf. Rest, 1979). Both moral segmentation and décalage are theoretical postulates which are supposed to account for empirical data on moral judgement which speaks against Kohlberg’s Piagetan hypothesis that the stages of moral judgement are “structured wholes” (cf. Colby & Kohlberg, 1987). The long and short of it is that according to classical stage theory an individual should consider any cognitive problem from the perspective of his or her current stage of development but data on moral judgement almost always seems to record a stage preference “spread” over not two but three stages; if subjects showed preference for two stages, these data could presumably be accounted for by the hypothesis that they are in transition from one stage to another. Some authors speak of décalage and moral segmentation as two distinct constructs (cf., e.g., Beck et al., 1999) but for our purposes it is sufficient to treat them as interchangeably referring to the assumption that people commonly use different stage principles or, in more common parlance, moral standards in different situations.
The phenomenon of patient dehumanization in medical culture was brought to widespread public attention by Shem’s novel, The house of God (1986) and Konner’s anecdotal non-fictional work, Becoming a doctor (1987).
See the discussion of this point in §1.2.
Extensive critical discussions of the three general theories of normative ethics can be found in Baron et al. (1997).
The standard pedagogical approaches to teaching practical ethics and the theory-based/ case-based teaching distinction is discussed in more detail in §1.5.
See Schrader (1993) for an example of a model of ethics education for professionals in education based on Kohlberg’s theory of cognitive moral development.
It is worth noting that the notion that learning about the theory of cognitive developmentalism is favourable to cognitive moral development, by contrast, is not open to this objection but one should not lose sight of the fact that those exposed to the theory probably benefit not from learning about the theory as a whole but from the explication of the stages of moral reasoning one step above their own and, connectedly, the inadequacies of their own current level of moral development and those levels below it. To my knowledge, the hypothesis that the traditional introductory unit on approaches to normative ethics in practical ethics courses is beneficial to the development of moral reasoning competencies has never been the subject of empirical investigation.
There seems to be a state of theoretical stalemate over whether the correct conceptualization of “being in” a particular stage of moral development is best characterized as a “preference” for or “consistent acceptability-rating” of certain types of justificatory reasons corresponding to Kohlberg’s basic 6-stage schema. The Defining Issues Test, a standard psychological measure in North America supposes “stage-preference” whereas Lind’s upstart Moral Judgement Test, widely used in Europe, is constructed on the “stage-consistency” approach (cf. Rest et al., 1997; Lind, 2002). The admittedly awkward formulation attempts to recognize both approaches without taking a position on the question.
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(2008). Compassionate Empathy in Professional and Practical Ethics Education. In: Professional Ethics Education: Studies in Compassionate Empathy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6889-8_7
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