Julinna C. Oxley

Care and Loyalty in the Workplace

There is significant debate in business ethics regarding the place of loyalty and gratitude in business relations. While most accounts of loyalty—both of employers to employees and of employees to employers—suppose that duties of loyalty are ultimately grounded in contractual agreements, our view is that these relationships are also personal and develop elements of friendship that involve emotional bonds. Although relationships of employment begin as contractual and maintain that character as long as the contract endures, such relations are interpersonal as well as contractual, and for this dimension of the relationship, the ethics of care can give important guidance in understanding the moral nature of the relationship and obligations that flow from it. Our aim in this chapter is to argue that the approach that care theorists take toward personal relationships—which involves emphasizing the importance of personal relationships, sustaining connections with others, and using highly contextual reasoning to make moral decisions—also applies to the personal relationships developed between employers and employees. On this view, it is virtuous to replicate relationships of care, empathy, and concern for others in the workplace, especially when employers and employees maintain more intimate and personal relationships.

The Ethics of Policing: A Feminist Proposal

This chapter uses a feminist lens to articulate the central problems facing policing today: (a) a decayed sense of trust in law enforcement, (b) the cultural influence of toxic or hegemonic masculinity, and (c) policing practices that perpetuate racial, gender, and social oppression. A normative model of feminist policing based in care ethics, called the community protector model, is proposed as the solution to these problems. Feminist care ethical policing values actions of caring justice—not just law and order—and identifies care and concern for others as the most rational basis for law enforcement. Finally, this model is applied to the issues in policing today, and the chapter shows how it can be used to create new protocols, change cultural gender norms, improve communication, replace authoritarian structures with community-based, interactive and educational ones, decrease discriminatory policing practices, and build soft power in law enforcement as a resource for engaging with citizens.

Empathy, Contractual Ethics, and Justification

To this point, I have shown that empathy makes a valuable epistemic contribution to producing sensitive understanding of others, and that it can play an important instrumental role in enabling moral deliberation as it is defined in a variety of ethical theories. I now turn to examining empathy’s role in contractual ethical theories in particular, specifically, those of John Rawls, John Harsanyi and David Gauthier. Contractual ethical theories are distinct from other normative ethical theories because they are based on the idea of rational agreement through a kind of social contract, and seek the public justification of moral principles. Public justification involves showing that an action, principle, or practice is reasonable because a variety of people have reasons in favor of that action, principle, or practice. My aim here is to show that contract theories model different types of perspective-taking empathy and empathetic deliberation. This means contract theories express the reasoning of empathetic deliberation, in that they provide a rationale for agreement to moral or political principles that takes into account a variety of perspectives, or points of view that are thought to be irreconcilable. Insofar as contract theories seek to express the reasoning of a variety of perspectives, they seek what could be called both public justification and interpersonal justification.

Conclusion: Implications for Feminist Ethics

This book has covered considerable territory, surveying the nature of empathy, its epistemic functions and how they are important to moral deliberation, why empathy alone is unsuitable as the sole basis of moral judgment, how contractual ethical theories model empathy, and how empathy can be used in moral education. By way of conclusion, I want to make clear the significance of the arguments that have gone before and discuss directions for further research on related topics that I have not treated in detail. There is a great deal of interesting work being done on topics related to empathy—including narrative approaches to empathy, empathy in animals, and empathy in religious ethics (which might see these topics differently from secular ethics)—that I have been unable to examine here.11 close by demonstrating the practical application of my argument as it applies to feminist ethics in particular.

The Epistemic Functions of Empathy

The previous chapter provided a working definition of empathy that was broad enough to include different phenomena called empathy, but specific enough to allow identification of different kinds of empathy. Although my proposed definition, feeling a congruent emotion with another person, in virtue of perceiving her emotion with some mental process such as imitation, simulation, projection, or imagination, does not necessarily resolve the debate on how to define empathy, it provides a frame-work for how to interpret and understand the variety of phenomena called empathy. But from this point forward, my discussion of empathy will identify a particular type of empathy, one that fits the functional account of empathy, and examine it in detail. My goal in the book is to examine the role of empathy in moral deliberation and judgment, and I have already suggested that empathy alone is insufficient for moral judgment. My argument to this conclusion is laid out in this chapter. By examining different kinds of empathy and their corresponding functions, I show that feeling empathy alone does not express a moral judgment.

What is Empathy

The previous chapter mentioned eight different ways that empathy has been defined in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. How should empathy be defined in philosophy and normative ethics in particular? Several proposals have been made. Ethicist Justin D’Arms defines empathy as both an act and a capacity: empathy involves responding “to the perceived feelings of another with vicarious emotional reactions of one’s own, and empathy is the capacity for, or the occurrence of, such a vicarious experience.”1 This definition captures the idea that empathy involves responding to another’s emotion by acquiring a similar emotion, and focuses on the “feeling another’s emotion” aspect of empathy.

Empathy and Moral Deliberation

One of the most important features of empathy is that it brings information to our attention and is one of the few ways that we have to connect with others’ emotions and points of view. This enables empathy to have the epistemic functions of information-gathering and understanding others, outlined in Chapter 3. But what can empathy contribute to moral thought and deliberation? Perspective-taking empathy in particular impacts our beliefs about others, our judgments about them, and our motivation to perform certain actions, and so it seems central to moral deliberation. But in order for empathy to contribute to moral deliberation and provide adequate moral guidance, the tendency to empathize with those who are most similar to ourselves, or empathic bias, must somehow be surmounted. This can happen when empathy is used in tandem with moral principles, and informed by moral concerns, so that empathy can motivate the achievement of a variety of ethical ends.

The Empathy-Morality Connection

In recent years, empathy has received significant popular attention from scholars and pundits who believe it is the basis of the moral life, and who suggest that developing empathy will be the solution to our moral failings. When Phoebe Prince, a 15-year old from South Hadley, Massachusetts, committed suicide after being bullied by her schoolmates, TIME magazine ran a story stating that research in empathy suggests that it is a “key, if not the key, to all human social interaction and morality.”1 Psychologists and moral educators interviewed for the article argued that to prevent severe bullying in schools, students needed to be taught how to “put themselves in another person’s shoes,” so that they can consider others’ feelings and stop abusing their peers. In a similar vein, political advisor and activist Jeremy Rifkin states in The Empathie Civilization that empathy is the “social glue” that keeps society functioning as a cohesive whole. “Without empathy it would be impossible to even imagine a social life and the organization of society … Society requires being social and being social requires empathic extension.”2

Empathy and Moral Education

Empathy is essential to the moral life. The person who empathizes is able to understand others in a sensitive way and gather information about them that can be used to make a moral decision. But can empathy be taught? Recent research in moral education suggests that it can, and the earlier it is taught, the better. Many organizations have developed curricula for teaching empathy, and I will showcase here the variety of methods that are used in these ground-breaking programs. One surprising example is the U.S. Army, which now recommends that leaders in the Army demonstrate empathy to both their peers and subordinates. The 2006 Army Field Manual states that, “Army Leaders [should] show a propensity to share experiences with the members of their organizations. When planning and deciding, try to envision the impact on Soldiers and other subordinates. The ability to see something from another person’s point of view, to identify with and enter into another person’s feelings and emotions, enables the Army leader to better care.”1

Empathy, Altruism and Normative Ethics

Empathy contributes to our knowledge of others, but empirical research on empathy also suggests that it tends to cause or motivate altruistic action. The empirical evidence suggests that when individuals empa- thetically take up the perspectives of others and feel others’ emotions, they put the concerns and needs of those others ahead of their own. Such studies do not nullify the idea that empathy has epistemic functions, for it is entirely possible that certain types of empathy have epis- temic functions and motivate altruism. This chapter will examine this possibility and investigate the relationship between the epistemic functions of empathy and the consequences of empathy. My suggestion is that the empirical research is important for understanding the psychological and moral effects of perspective-taking empathy in clinical settings, but it does not tell us about when people actually empathize in real life situations, when they ought to empathize, or how empathy relates to our moral duties and obligations to others. Moreover, while empirical research reveals the likely effects of empathy, it also shows that people tend to empathize with those who are most similar to themselves. Empathy appears to be biased in favor of those with whom one is most similar.