Limits Of Empathy Research Articles

Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy. Glenda Carpio

Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy. Glenda Carpio

Testimony of Oppression and the Limits of Empathy

Testimony of oppression is testimony that something constitutes or contributes to a form of oppression, such as, for example, “The stranger’s comment was sexist.” Testimony of oppression that is given by members of the relevant oppressed group has the potential to play an important role in fostering a shared understanding of oppression. Yet, it is frequently dismissed out of hand. Against the background of a recent debate on moral testimony, this paper discusses the following question: How should privileged hearers approach testimony of oppression if they aim to do so in an ethically and epistemically sound way? Should they defer or try to understand? Both strategies constitute ways of learning from testimony of oppression. However, they differ in important respects and exclude each other. Because testimony of oppression is often based on personal experience, empathizing with the speaker can play an important role in trying to understand testimony of oppression. While the fact that empathy can change your mind and the advantages of understanding over knowledge support trying to understand as the right approach to testimony of oppression, considerations of the “limits of empathy” and the value of deference support deferring. I argue that, on balance, these contrasting arguments allow for a limited defense of the role of empathy in learning from testimony of oppression. We should try to understand testimony of oppression by empathizing with the speaker, but not treat our ability to understand as a condition on accepting a speaker’s claim.

The limits of empathy in literature?

The limits of empathy in literature?

Decolonizing Extinction

The now three species of orangutan populating the islands of Borneo and Sumatra represent some of the most threatened primates in the world, and growing global consumption of palm oil is only exacerbating the destruction and continual fragmentation of their habitats. In her book, “Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation,” Dr. Juno Parreñas outlines a new approach to many common conservation concerns surrounding these Great Apes. Parreñas reimagines what it means to decolonize within the context of conservation and rapid extinction threat on both a population and genus level. With specific attention paid to the Bornean orangutans of Sarawak, Malaysia (Pongo pygmaeus pygmaeus), Parreñas argues for thinking outside the traditional aims of most current conservation initiatives, acknowledging the inherent limitations and shortcomings of these approaches, and for looking towards co-habitation and a shared vulnerability with the non-human other. Parreñas expertly crosses disciplinary boundaries by highlighting the complexity of relations and contexts that situate all conservation efforts: the underlying biases inherent to sexual inequality and privilege, which behaviours are considered normal or natural, and the limitations of empathy when wage labour is so depended upon it replaces traditional beliefs and taboos that had previously connected humans to non-human others, like orangutans, quite intimately. This review of her book provides a brief overview of the themes within “Decolonizing Extinction,” summarizing the main points of the chapter sections, and emphasizes the need for thinking outside the box when planning for conservation of the non-human other.

Émile Zola’s Black Lives: Colonial Experiments and the Limits of Empathy in La Joie de vivre

ABSTRACT Émile Zola's allusion to (fictional) colonial medical experimentation in La Joie de vivre requires us to reconsider the impact of racial and geographical distance on empathy. Cazenove, a doctor whose formative years were spent with the colonial navy, recalls his own experiments with vivisection on Black women, and trying out poisons on Asian subjects. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of empathy by Carlo Ginzburg and Paul Bloom, this article argues that the novel shows us the limits of empathy. Zola explores suffering and ‘la bonté', responding to Schopenhauer's idealisation of empathy and Claude Bernard’s theories of experimental medicine.

“We Need to Talk About Empathy”: Dutch Humanist Chaplains’ Perspectives on Empathy's Functions, Downsides, and Limitations in Chaplaincy Care

This paper investigates the functions, downsides, and limitations of empathy in chaplaincy care. Data were collected from 20 humanist chaplains working in health care, prison, and military settings using semi-structured interviews. According to the participants, empathy is at the heart of their profession but has disadvantages as well. The analysis yields seven major functions of empathy with corresponding downsides and limitations: (1) to connect, (2) to understand, (3) to guide, (4) to acknowledge, (5) to motivate, (6) to inspire, and (7) to humanize. We argue for a need to "talk about empathy" since despite its importance and challenges, there is little professional and academic discussion about empathy in chaplaincy care. We hope that the findings of this study can function as starting points for the discussion and thus contribute to the ongoing professionalization of chaplaincy care. To that end, we propose three topics for further reflection and conversation.

Understanding, Disruption and Recognition: The Road to “Expanded Empathy” in the Case of Angie

ABSTRACT This discussion of Joye Weiselbarth’s paper, Shame and Punishment: The Case of Angie, examines the concept of “expanded empathy”. This concept was introduced to address the difficulty of empathic understanding of a woman who had vastly different life experiences from Joye. I suggest that empathic responsiveness is needed to establish enough connection and trust for the analysis to survive the inevitable disruption that occurred when the disconnect between their worlds became painfully evident. Further, I suggest that it is necessary for the analyst to face both the limits of empathy as a foundation for understanding as well as the invisible demands that silence the recognition of traumatic racism in psychoanalytic practice.

Learning and Growing in The Analytic Dyad: Discussion of “Shame and Punishment: The Case of Angie” By joye Weisel-Barth

ABSTRACT This discussion centers around Weisel-Barth’s question about the limits of empathy and the use of what she refers to as expanded empathy. The author views some of the clinical moments Weisel-Barth describes through the lens of a trauma and dissociation informed perspective resting on the presumption of the multiplicity of the self. The explosive disruption Weisel-Barth describes is viewed as an enactment expressing multiple layers of trauma, including intergenerational trauma.

Luther's Tears: Hagar and the Limits of Empathy

In his Enarrationes in Genesin, Martin Luther finds stories of suffering he can ‘hardly read with dry eyes’. Recent scholars attribute profound ethical value to Luther's tears, especially those shed over the suffering of female characters. This article reconsiders the ethical salience of Luther's tears as a demonstration of interpretive empathy by examining his reading of Hagar and its modern reception history. By comparing Luther's reading of the enslaved Hagar to his reading of her master Abraham, it is argued that gender, power and inequality shape the very conditions in which terms like ‘empathy’, ‘charity’ and ‘suspicion’ appear and this, in turn, invites a reconsideration of the ethical responsibilities we incur as we read texts of terror in light of their role in enduring histories of violence.

The potential and limitations of empathy in changing health-relevant affect, cognition and behaviour

ABSTRACT Global challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the impending climate change require each and every one of us to perform long-term self-restrictive behaviours, implying personal costs, for the sake of vulnerable others and future generations. We argue that empathy – conceptualised as other-oriented moral emotional process – can impact how we think, feel and act towards others in times of such disruptive global developments. Our research highlights how and under which circumstances empathy fosters solidarity with others in need. We review our findings which corroborate empathy’s potential in directly changing health-relevant behaviour (such as hand hygiene behaviour or adherence to COVID-19 pre-emptive measures) and as well as pro-environmental actions, which serve to protect others’ well-being through self-discipline and self-restriction. Furthermore, we also review and discuss research which indicates potential boundary conditions of empathy-induced prosocial responses to the plight of vulnerable individuals.

Creating the ‘virtual’ witness: the limits of empathy

ABSTRACT This article analyses two interactive exhibits – The National Holocaust Centre and Museum’s ‘The Forever Project’ and the Shoah Foundation’s ‘New Dimensions in Technology’ – which have created digital versions of Holocaust survivors who will respond to visitors’ questions, with the intention of creating meaningful ‘interactions’ with these survivors long after the ‘biological’ witnesses have passed away. It argues that the formal qualities of these ‘virtual witnesses’ have cognitive and emotional associations that inhibit viewer empathy: first, since the digital avatar is a form normally associated with games and play, participants may consciously or subconsciously ‘test’ the limits of this interactive technology; second, people use vocal commands to interact with the avatar, much like ‘virtual assistants’ found on personal digital devices; and third, their ‘uncanny valley’ appearance is affectively disturbing. It concludes by querying as to the use of these and other technologies for memorial exhibits.

Limits of empathy: The dementia tōjisha movement in Japan.

How can we imagine someone's experience of illness-even extreme cases, like, for example, psychosis-to the extent that we begin to empathize as if the experience were nearly our own? Based on 5 years of archival research and anthropological fieldwork, I investigate how different forms of understanding and empathy have emerged through the work of people living with dementia (dementia tōjishas), some of who have advocated for the cause in Japan. I show how those with dementia used to be regarded as incommensurable beings, who were sometimes romanticized as having a transcendental power, and how those who care for them have changed their perspectives as they began to see dementia tōjisha as possible versions of their future selves. I also describe the rise of the tōjisha movement and the ways in which it has raised questions about the limits of empathy and instead asserted rights as a basis of understanding. In doing so, dementia tōjisha may be questioning the very foundation of Japanese society, highly invested as it is in the virtue of empathy for maintaining social relations.

Shared Belief and the Limits of Empathy

AbstractTo show affective empathy is to share in another person's experiences, including her emotions. Most philosophers who write about emotions accept the broadly cognitivist view that emotions are rationally connected with beliefs. We argue that affective empathy is also rationally connected with belief; you can only share in another's emotions insofar as you can share certain of her beliefs. In light of that claim, we argue that affective empathy brings both epistemic dangers and epistemic benefits, that the ideal of universal empathy cannot be built upon affective empathy, and that affective empathy cannot be the basis of morality.

Unethical reading and the limits of empathy

Unethical reading and the limits of empathy

Discussion of “Hunting the Real”

This discussion of Hannah Wallerstein’s paper, “Hunting the Real,” approaches racial difference from the perspective of a white psychoanalyst. Themes of racial injustice, the limitations of empathy, and the ethical mandate to explore these issues in treatments are discussed.

Understanding A.I. — Can and Should we Empathize with Robots?

Expanding the debate about empathy with human beings, animals, or fictional characters to include human-robot relationships, this paper proposes two different perspectives from which to assess the scope and limits of empathy with robots: the first is epistemological, while the second is normative. The epistemological approach helps us to clarify whether we can empathize with artificial intelligence or, more precisely, with social robots. The main puzzle here concerns, among other things, exactly what it is that we empathize with if robots do not have emotions or beliefs, since they do not have a consciousness in an elaborate sense. However, by comparing robots with fictional characters, the paper shows that we can still empathize with robots and that many of the existing accounts of empathy and mindreading are compatible with such a view. By so doing, the paper focuses on the significance of perspective-taking and claims that we also ascribe to robots something like a perspectival experience. The normative approach examines the moral impact of empathizing with robots. In this regard, the paper critically discusses three possible responses: strategic, anti-barbarizational, and pragmatist. The latter position is defended by stressing that we are increasingly compelled to interact with robots in a shared world and that to take robots into our moral consideration should be seen as an integral part of our self- and other-understanding.

Towards a relational conceptualization of empathy.

Empathy is a fundamental concept in health care and nursing. In academic literature, it has been primarily defined as a personal ability, act or experience. The relational dimensions of empathy have received far less attention. In our view, individualistic conceptualizations are restricted and do not adequately reflect the practice of empathy in daily care. We argue that a relational conceptualization of empathy contributes to a more realistic, nuanced and deeper understanding of the functions and limitations of empathy in professional care practices. In this article, we explore the relational aspects of empathy, drawing on sources that offer a relational approach, such as the field of care ethics, the phenomenology of Edith Stein and qualitative research into interpersonal and interactive empathy. We analyse the relational aspects of three prevalent components of empathy definitions: the underlying ability or act (i.e. the cognitive, affective and perception abilities that enable empathy); the resulting experience (i.e. empathic understanding and affective responsivity) and the expression of this experience (i.e. empathic expression). Ultimately, we propose four inter‐related understandings of empathy: (a) A co‐creative practice based on the abilities and activities of both the empathizer and the empathee; (b) A fundamentally other‐oriented experience; (c) A dynamic, interactive process in which empathizer and empathee influence each other's experiences; (d) A quality of relationships.

Unethical reading and the limits of empathy

192 aria tumarkin, who was born in Soviet Ukraine and emigrated to Australia as a teenager, everywhere exhibits in her work the hard-­ won knowledge that authentic civic-mindedness often produces, and requires—an estrangement from consensus and the deadening language of common sense. Tumarkin’s fourth book, Axiomatic (2019), challenges reflexive frameworks of grief and trauma, offering instead the specificity of individual lives in their entanglement with the lives of others. Such vigilance is a quality Tumarkin shares with the Zambian novelist, critic, essayist, and scholar Namwali Serpell. Author of the critical study Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014); of the novel The Old Drift (2019), a multigeneric, multigenerational conversation Namwali Serpell and Maria Tumarkin Unethical reading and the limits of empathy M exploration of Zambia’s history and future; and, most recently, of Stranger Faces (2020), a series of linked essays, Serpell displays throughout her work a rigorous attention to affect, aesthetics, and ethics, and how they are enmeshed with our individual and collective histories. In 2019, Serpell published an essay in The New York Review of Books called “The Banality of Empathy,” in which she questioned our assumption that art promotes empathy—or that it should. The problem, she argued, is not simply that empathy substitutes for action, but that it promotes its own kind of moral callousness, a fascination with others’ pain. Assuming a basic fungibility between self and other, empathy of this kind is particularly dangerous when it comes to race: “Black pain, black death, is the clarifying limit case for the use of art for empathy. Its very seamlessness condemns it.” Over an exchange of emails, she and Maria Tumarkin revisit her argument about the banality of empathy in the context of the present, while also discussing their respective interests in narrative, the ethics of time, and the fraught nature of writing and reading. —the editors maria tumarkin I must say that by talking about the banality of empathy in your 2019 essay of the same title, you articulated very precisely something (a disquiet, a protest, a sick feeling) that had been in my head for over a decade. I wonder, with the world being what it is, whether you see any “non-­ banal models” of ethics that could describe some (potential) ethical work that literature can do or has done. Or perhaps there is something intrinsically banalizing and self-­ serving about “ethicalizing” conversations about reading and writing (e.g., “giving voice to the voiceless”—yet another pungent banality…)? namwali serpell Iris Murdoch has a remarkable anecdote in her book The Sovereignty of Good. She’s arguing against the models TUMARKIN | 193 194 | SERPELL of ethics so prominent in philosophy courses: theories of moral action and utilitarianism. And, because she’s a writer, she tells a story about a woman, a mother (M), who is struggling with her relationship to her daughter-­ in-­ law (D): “M finds D quite a good-­ hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him.” Now, M doesn’t ever reveal this view of D: she “behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way.” But, as I’ve written elsewhere, even if her behavior doesn’t alter in the least, if M “‘observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters,’ then any internal change ought to seem moral to us.” Which is to say, our general understanding of morality is as much about thinking, reflecting, and changing internally as it is about external actions. This means that perfectly quotidian, internal experiences of consciousness— like reading and writing—can be a mode of ethics. Now, Murdoch never says exactly how M’s perspective on D changes; she doesn’t even suggest that empathy is the ground of her deliberate reflection. Murdoch leaves all of this to our imagination , which is a beautiful trick, in that it demonstrates precisely what telling...

Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human by Elena Past

MLR, .,   I Suffer, erefore I Am is a stimulating, innovative, and insightful discussion of empathy and the reading process in relation to narratives of suffering. Furthermore, as well as considering the limits of empathy, Robson also challenges the limits of the reader by compelling him/her to engage with and reflect on difficult narrative themes such as parental grief and filicide. is study will appeal to a wide range of readers and researchers from diverse areas such as French Studies, Women’s Writing, Affect Studies, Trauma Writing, and Feminist eory. M U J R Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human. By E P. (New Directions in National Cinemas) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. . xi+ pp. $ (ebk $.). ISBN –––– (ebk ––––). Among the myriad challenges facing the world today, arguably the greatest and most pressing is climate and ecological breakdown, a crisis that is now both political and existential in nature. Yet it is only comparatively recently that film studies has begun to engage seriously with environmental issues through pioneering works such as Ecocinema: eory and Practice, ed. by Stephen Rust, Salma Monai, and Sean Cubitt (London: Routledge, ). Ecocritical approaches to film and the moving image fall broadly into two camps: those addressing the environmental impacts of film practice and those examining the representational practices through which films depict the natural world and environmental issues. e most comprehensive works attempt to do both, and to link the two. Elena Past’s Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human is one such book. It is also one of the first to apply an ecocritical framework to a specific national tradition and, as the author notes in her Introduction , Italy constitutes a particularly rich and pertinent case study, both because Italy was one of the first countries to make the protection of the landscape part of its constitution and because abuses of these laws have had a particularly dramatic effect on the country’s landscapes and environment. In addressing such a broad topic, the author sensibly opts for a case-study approach, focusing on five films, all bar one of which were produced in the new millennium, when environmental issues finally became central to political discourse. e case studies range from established classics (Michelangelo Antonioni’s Deserto rosso/Red Desert, ) to some of the most internationally successful and critically acclaimed recent Italian films (Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra/Gomorrah, , and Michele Frammartino’s Le quattro volte, ), but also include one title little known outside Italy (Giorgio Dritti’s Il vento fa il suo giro/e Wind Blows Round, ) and one documentary (Giovanna Taviani’s Fughe e approdi/Return to the Aeolian Islands, ). is choice of case studies is exemplary, not solely for its range but also because it allows the author to approach the subject from a multitude of perspectives. us, the book embraces a variety of topics such as: ‘cinematic sound, nonhuman actors, cinematic waste, the toxic elements of filmmaking, and cinematic and volcanic “recycling” of archival material’ (p. ). One of the most striking and effective methodological choices underpinning this  Reviews analysis is the decision to use first-hand interviews with ‘ordinary’ crew members as a primary resource. Eschewing the usual focus on directors, scriptwriters, and producers , the author instead draws on first-hand interviews with location managers, set designers, sound recordists, production secretaries, etc. is rare perspective results in some original and highly revealing insights into contemporary (Italian) production practices. A second strength of the project is that it ‘reaches across disciplinary boundaries to draw on insights from fields as diverse as Italian screen studies, volcanology, animal studies, philosophical ethnology, and acoustic ecology’ (p. ). Past is at her best here, bringing a wide-ranging intellectual enquiry to bear on her insightful and convincing textual analysis of the films themselves. e final, and perhaps most unusual, facet of her approach is the way in which she integrates her own experience and research process into the account, mirroring the imbrication of production practices and representational strategies within her analysis. is makes for a highly provocative and readable account of the way in which Italian cinema has interacted with the natural world and with environmental issues, while making it clear that such an...

Breaking bad? Down and Dirty with Military Anthropology

ABSTRACT This article revisits the debate around the frequent problematisation of anthropological research on ‘our troops’ within the wider anthropology community. Engaging my research on Danish expeditionary forces and my fellow anthropologists’ disheartening responses to that research, this study examines controversies over military anthropology as a fundamental question of the apparent tension between empathy and critique. Drawing upon my uneasy experiences of ‘breaking bad’, in terms of becoming an ‘embedded anthropologist’ in a Danish combat unit, I argue that one answer as to why military anthropology tends to be frowned upon is to be found in failures to empathise as well as in different (mis)conceptions of empathy and critique. I show that ‘our troops’ and ‘their anthropologist’ are subjected to processes of othering at the limits of empathy, and I reflect on the trouble with empathy as a research tool and its consequences for a twenty-first-century military anthropology.