Response to: “Reason, Other-ness and Ethical Empathy” by Kevin Houser

“Reasons, Other-ness, and Ethical Empathy,” Kevin Houser, Indiana University

Nussbaum, Kennett, Breithaupt, Prinz, and others argue that empathy is either no help or a positive detriment to ethical relations. Overlooked in these debates: claims about whether empathy is a help or hindrance to ethical living are relative to prior substantive claims about the nature of ethical life. Recent discussions/denials of the ethical contributions of empathy all pre-suppose the same such substantive claim: ethical relations are anchored—not by what separates us, but by what we share/have in common. This thesis about ethics accepted, a natural corollary about empathy follows: empathy is ethically helpful because (i) ethics is based on what we share, and (ii) empathy is a kind of sharing—whether of feelings, imaginative positions, or identities. I’ll employ Cavell’s notion of acknowledgment, and his comments on the isolating and imperative power of suffering, to reject, then replace, this ‘sharing’ picture of ethics; I'll then track how this shift to an other-centered ethic requires substantial changes to claims presently made about empathy's nature and ethical function.