Customer Reviews

The Ethics of Care and Empathy

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This book aligns itself with care ethics, a rather new approach to ethics first elaborated by philosophers such as Sara Ruddick, Nel Noddings, Annette Baier and Virginia Held largely spurred on by the early child developmental psychological work of Carol Gilligan and Lawrence Kohlberg. However you do a far better service to yourself (and care ethics!) by reading these other philosophers. Slote has his own idea of what care ethics is. Unlike these other philosophers who tend to have very nuanced and sophisticated groundings for their ethics and definitions of what they mean by 'care', Slote seems to think that care is just an extension of empathy.

Slote's "care ethics" as he describes it in this work ignores or glosses over almost entirely the major issues which are commonly found to be problematic for care ethics such as the problems associated with distributive justice, rights, racism, sexism, and other kinds of isms. It is hotly debated whether anything like a care ethics can deal with these issues in the philosophical literature. Slote's grounding of care ethics on empathy not only conveniently dodges these problems which are also problematic for his system (while other care ethicists have actually attempted to engage with them within a care-theoretical framework for decades) but has additional problems with its own. Just one example, we seem to be more empathic towards those who are more similar to ourselves; there doesn't seem to be any way around that natural bias but our political system, our conceptions of global justice, and our law seeks (and can be argued rightfully so) an impartiality that tries to go beyond such biases. To Slote's credit, he does spend some effort discussing the tensions care has with different notions of "autonomy" but his replies still ring unconvincing. At times Slote seems to hint that a utilitarian framework can patch up some of these problems but then the obvious tensions between utilitarianism and his care ethics (or care ethics in general) are not dealt with. It also begs the question that any use of a consequentialist grounding of the problem renders Slote's theory just that, a consequentialist theory instead of a care-theoretic theory. In fact, at one point (p. 86) Slote seems to be throwing his hands up in the air and admitting these tensions pose problems he cannot resolve. There are also objections from more traditional feminist perspectives against care ethics which I believe are serious and must be addressed in any major work on care.

Scientifically, the evidence Slote uses are from the psychological and sociological sciences but he consistently gets them wrong. For example, he argues that the evidence presented by psychology suggests that women are more empathic than men (and thus they are morally superior on his view). Moreover, he sees that the main reason why men are less empathic than women is because of the hormone testosterone.

Slote says

[M]y particular development of care ethics stresses empathy, and arguably, women are, on the whole or on average, more empathic than men. This is something...for which there seems to be a great deal of independent evidence.

...

At any rate in another work, Gilligan seems quite comfortable with the idea that the voice of caring and connection, which is almost exclusively found in women, is morally preferable to the voice of justice and autonomy as traditionally understood." (p. 71).

Both of these biological essentialist and reductivist claims are not supported by the combined overall body of empirical evidence. Studies on gender differences in empathy suggests that the differences between men and women on measures of empathy are statistically insignificant or inconclusive. Moreover, Gilligan never suggested that the "voice of caring and connection" is "exclusively found" in women. In fact, she has always claimed that both "voices" are to be found, to varying degrees, in both sexes. In looking at his citation for these claims, Slote uses sources such as studies by J. Philippe Rushton, a "scientist" who has a notorious history of cherry picking, misinterpreting, outright misrepresenting the empirical evidence, and a history of reprimands for scholarly misconduct to further his theories of the mental inferiority of blacks and women.

One does much better by looking at the combined overall body of evidence on empathy and gender by mainstream social and medical scientists. Meta-studies show that while women tend to score higher on self-reported tests of empathy and empathic expressivity (probably due to social desirability bias and gender stereotypes, see citations below), when empathic accuracy is taken into a holistic account of empathy, there does not seem to be any differences or that it is inconclusive which gender is more empathic because different measures of these empathic indexes give results in different directions.

See, e.g.:

Ickes, W. (1997). Empathic accuracy. New York: The Guilford Press.

Eisenberg, N., & Fabes, R.A. (1990). Empathy: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Relation to Prosocial Behavior. Motivation and Emotion, 14, 131-149.

Klein K. Hodges S. (2001) Gender Differences, Motivation, and Empathic Accuracy: When it Pays to Understand. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 27, No. 6, 720-730


In suggesting that men are less empathic because of the hormone testosterone, Slote cites the work of Simon Baron-Cohen but Cohen's theory of the "extreme male brain" is extremely controversial in cognitive science and there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that it is wrong.

Slote also does not represent the latest work on gender differences in developmental psychology in the last 30 years which shows that the alleged differences found in the earlier work of Kohlberg and Gilligan are likely relics of superficial differences in linguistic profiles of boys and girls instead of cognitively relevant differences in moral reasoning. Boys and girls score differently because they interpret the questions slightly differently; when the questions are reworded or given a different context, the gender differences are not apparent or even reversed. Ironically, much of this later work is done by Gilligan herself whom Slote cites approvingly throughout the book. Cross-cultural research in the last 30 years has also shown that men and women in non western cultures have similar ethical reasoning/perspectives (mostly towards the care perspective) thus undermining biological and gender essentialist explanations for the apparent differences found in western societies.

In another passage, Slote says

"The literature on testosterone and human behavior indicates that autistic people (including Asperger's syndrome) males are incapable of empathy and have even higher testosterone levels than typical males." (p. 73).

This is simply false. Those with autism and Asperger's syndrome often exhibit remarkable empathy towards others. They do tend to have difficulty picking up certain social cues to understand the inner mental states of others but once those inner states are successfully conveyed (in some form or another), those with autistic spectrum disorder are as empathic as anyone else.

See, e.g.:

Rogers K, Dziobek I, Hassenstab J, Wolf OT, Convit A. Who cares? Revisiting empathy in Asperger syndrome. J Autism Dev Disord. 2007 Apr;37(4):709-15.

Other areas where Slote has gotten the empirical findings wrong is a reference he makes to the "gender gap" in political orientation between the sexes in an end note. When you take in to account the historical findings, it is simply false that "women tend to be politically left of men."

See, e.g.:

http:// news dot stanford dot edu/pr/96/961030gendergap


Psychopaths also seem to be a glaring counter-example to Slote's main argument that empathy should be the central focus in any system of ethics. Psychopaths are sometimes seen as the paradigms of immorality. But it is well known in the literature on psychopathy that psychopaths can be remarkably good at empathizing with others. In fact, they often use their empathic ability to understand and manipulate others. The problem seem not to be empathy per se but the affective component that normally follows empathy, namely, sympathy, feelings of commiseration, feelings of compassion, etc. Psychopaths only seem to sympathize and commiserate with those they like and deem worthy of their affections but have no regard for the well-being of everyone else.

For both scientific and philosophical reasons, this work is seriously problematic. It is generally well written but it lacks the substance that an introduction to care ethics should have in responding to the traditional problems associated with care ethics from its critics and giving an overview of the different conceptions of care that have been advocated so far. The empirical evidence given to support Slote's views are decidedly one-sided and the overall body of evidence countering it is ignored. Slote also does not mention the vast body of work done in cognitive science on empathy. From my reading, Slote seems to favor a "simulation theory" of empathy in his remarks about how he understands the term but such an understanding ignores the sea of literature in support of a "theory theory" understanding. The book simply ignores or glosses over all such relevant literature while at the same time begs the question of how a grounding of care on empathy, to borrow a phrase, bakes any philosophic bread, cuts any philosophic cake, or in short, makes care any better off philosophically. One does much better by reading the care theorists mentioned at the start of this review.