‘Empathy and the boundaries of interpersonal understanding’ – introduction

One of the reasons why empathy is a topic of enduring interest is the role it can play in understanding others. Empathy can help us to predict each other’s future actions and explain past ones; to see things from a different perspective; to share in (or validate) someone’s experiences; and to better understand how someone wants to be treated. And although empathy is not the only way to come to know more about another person, there is arguably a special kind of understanding – based on shared affective experience – that empathy is in the best position to give us.

The papers in this special issue are all in one way or another concerned with the prospects of empathy in cases where interpersonal understanding is particularly difficult to achieve, cases in which we might reach the boundaries of interpersonal understanding. Drawing on recent research in the philosophy of empathy and imagination, they provide a nuanced assessment of the potential of empathy to promote interpersonal understanding even in these difficult cases as well as the pitfalls associated with seeking understanding through empathy. In this introduction, we provide more details about the background as well as an overview of the contributions collected in the special issue.

The background

It is difficult to overstate the importance of interpersonal understanding. Unsurprisingly, there are lively debates on the nature of social cognition and the role of empathy in understanding others (Coplan and Goldie 2011; Currie and Ravenscroft 2002; Davies and Stone 1995; Goldman 2006; Maibom 2017; 2022; Stueber 2006). Some philosophers argue that interpersonal understanding involves more than mere mental state recognition (Bailey 2022; Grimm 2016). This view seems to be supported by considering difficulties of interpersonal understanding. In some cases, ‘imaginative resistance’ (Gendler 2000; Gendler and Liao 2016; Walton 2006) prevents successful empathizing (Bailey 2021). This suggests that moral commitments can play a role for understanding others. In other cases, we don’t understand another person because we do not know ‘what it is like’ to have their experience. This suggests that interpersonal understanding requires phenomenal knowledge of the target’s mental state (Boisserie-Lacroix and Inchingolo 2021; Cath 2019; Coplan 2011; Werner 2023; Wiltsher 2021). It also highlights the importance of factors such as social background, biography, or character traits in the endeavour to understand another person (Sodoma 2024).

As old as debates about how exactly to define empathy (see, e.g. Coplan 2011) are debates about its potential role in ethics. Recently, this debate has been revived, driven by a decidedly critical stance towards empathy’s potential moral impact. Influential recent work argues that empathy is either severely limited in how it could positively influence moral action, or even harmful for it (e.g. Bloom 2016; Denham 2017; Prinz 2011a; 2011). This criticism was met by novel attempts to defend empathy’s potential role for morality (e.g. Kauppinen 2017; Masto 2015; Simmons 2014; Ventham 2023). While this debate might prima facie seem to be orthogonal to the debate on empathy’s role for interpersonal understanding, they are in fact connected. One recent particularly interesting source of resistance to criticism of empathy’s moral significance draws on empathy’s role in promoting a specific form of interpersonal understanding. Bailey, in a 2022 paper called ‘Empathy and the Value of Humane Understanding’, argued, for example, for empathy’s significance in understanding each other in a particularly personal way. She also argued that this is not only valuable for the agents who came to understand more about others, but for the targets of empathy themselves in coming to be understood. One reason why empathy is morally significant is thus because it promotes a specifically rich form of interpersonal understanding that has moral value. The recent debate on the ethical significance of empathy thus provides renewed motivation to explain and account for the difficulties and boundaries in both empathy and interpersonal understanding. After all, knowing more about the varieties and limitations of empathy can have both important theoretical consequences in teaching us about the phenomena themselves, and practical consequences in knowing what this means for us as moral and epistemic agents. The papers collected in this special issue contribute to this investigation.

The themes and papers

The contributions in this special issue cluster around the following three types of boundaries of interpersonal understanding:

• (1) Differences in moral outlook: Are there any moral limits to empathic understanding or can we feel free to extend our empathy to any perspective? Are vicious agents especially difficult to understand, if so, why, and how can we strive to overcome this limitation? Do extremists who commit to morally outrageous worldviews have the capacity to take up other viewpoints? Olivia Bailey’s, Katharina Anna Sodoma’s, and Thomas Schramme’s contributions explore these questions.

• (2) Differences in emotional sensibility and experiential difference: While differing social identities and experiences pose serious challenges to interpersonal understanding and empathy, shared experience is often seen as enhancing mutual understanding. Julia Langkau & Patrick Engisch’s, Luke Roelof’s, and Christiana Werner’s contributions explore how these differences can generate failures of understandings as well as ways to compensate for the absence of shared experience or sensibility via forms of empathy, imagination, and simulation.

• (3) Contexts and means of communication: In addition to differences in perspectives, the context and means of communication can be another limiting factor for empathy. One salient context in which empathy might be impaired is communication in online spaces. If interpersonal understanding is at least in part dependent on empathic processes, which themselves frequently involve responses to bodily features, to what extent is understanding in such contexts impaired or reconfigured? What role does aesthetic presentation play? Nick Wiltsher’s, Elizabeth Ventham’s, and Lucy Osler & David Ekdahl’s contributions explore these issues from different angles.

While several pieces are in conversation with one another, no shared picture of empathy emerges. As elsewhere, authors differ in how exactly they understand empathy and in how optimistic or pessimistic they are about its contribution to interpersonal understanding. What unites the contributions is a nuanced and in-depth assessment of the workings and limits of empathy that is informed by the most recent philosophical research on the topic.

Olivia Bailey begins the special issue by exploring the role of empathy in the context of extremist outlooks. She argues that it is characteristic of extremists that they are unable to consider other viewpoints and that this compromises their epistemic autonomy.

Katharina Anna Sodoma offers an explanation for why severe moral transgressions are often difficult to understand based on obstacles for empathy such actions generate. She suggests that we might have reason not to overcome these obstacles.

Thomas Schramme discusses empathy as a strategy of interpersonal understanding even in difficult cases and defends it against recent moral worries regarding empathy with certain perspectives.

Julia Langkau and Patrik Engisch discuss a specific kind of barrier to empathy with others that has played an important role in recent discussions of empathy: differences in ‘sensibility’, that is, differences in dispositions to react emotionally to certain situations. They argue that this barrier can be overcome by relying on ‘imaginative scaffolding’.

Luke Roelofs looks at another potential barrier to interpersonal understanding via empathy: differences in gender experience, which they understand widely to cover differences in gender identity and gender-based attraction, among others. They distinguish different kinds of obstacles and discuss whether we can be confident that empathy can bridge these gaps.

Christiana Werner describes a particular kind of failure of understanding in cases where empathy is difficult to achieve due to negligence. Integrating the discussion of empathy with the literature on testimonial injustice, she shows how this can lead to an unjustified credibility deficit independently of the presence of identity prejudices.

Nick Wiltsher argues for the previously under-appreciated importance of our aesthetic selves in understanding each other. But despite that importance, our aesthetic selves prove to be a particularly elusive thing to understand, and not one easily reachable through empathy.

Elizabeth Ventham’s contribution focuses on empathy in the context of online spaces. Against a widespread belief that empathy online is difficult to achieve, she argues for a moderate optimism. She does this firstly by diagnosing one of the main problems that might make the difference between online and offline interactions (the difference in information flow, and the additional control over information flow), and then showing how such problems might be overcome, if not now then soon.

Lucy Osler and David Ekdahl continue the optimism for our potential interactions online, as they give a thorough account of how our online capabilities aren’t static, but rather how they can evolve and improve over time. This developmental framework takes existing research on social capacities and applies it in a new and important context.

The editors of this special issue came together because of an internationally funded project called ‘How Does It Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy’. The project spanned two universities: The University of Liverpool, where Thomas Schramme and Elizabeth Ventham worked on the project funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), and Universität Duisburg-Essen, where Neil Roughley, Katharina Anna Sodoma and Christiana Werner worked on the project funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). We thank the AHRC and the DFG for their generous support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katharina Anna Sodoma

Katharina Anna Sodoma is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at LMU Munich. Her research focuses on topics at the intersection of ethics and political philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.

Elizabeth Ventham

Elizabeth Ventham is a Postdoctoral Research Associate working at The University of Salzburg. Before this, she worked on empathy at The University of Liverpool. Her other philosophical interests include desire and practical reasoning.

Christiana Werner

Christiana Werner is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research focuses on empathy, imagination and understanding in the context of philosophy of mind, aesthetics and epistemology.