Slote: The Roots of Empathy
Material quoted here is drawn from the paper by Michael Slote, UST Professor of Ethics in the Philosophy Department at the University of Miami, which was published in “Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology and Psychology” edited by Nancy E. Snow, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Professor Slote is, in his words, a “care ethicist”. He writes:
“Caring about others is an emotional attitude/ motive, and care ethics sees that as central to the moral life in a way that ethical rationalism does not. But if the emotion of and involved in caring about others is ontogenetically based on gratitude, and precluded by anger, in relation in the desire to be loved, then these latter feelings/emotions are also important to the moral life.”
Slote’s thesis, broadly stated, is that the ability of a person to feel empathy toward another is rooted in the feeling of gratitude that is cultivated in a child for the (principally) parental love and care received by the child in early childhood.
“Children are disturbed and angry if they aren’t loved (let us assume), but—and this is the focal point of the present chapter—they also feel gratitude if and when they empathically register the love that some parents, good parents, feel toward them. This gratitude is the emotional basis, I shall argue, of the possibility of further moral education and development. But where rage is felt instead of gratitude, our basic capacity for empathy—something which ‘normal’ children are often said to possess and show from infancy on—can be frozen, crushed, or nipped in the bud. So a great deal often depends on what happens emotionally very early in life…”
So, gratitude is the response engendered by parental love and care; anger and rage are engendered by the lack of care and by abuse. It is this pairing of positive and negative emotion with good versus damaging parental attention that really occupies Slote in this paper and so its relevance to our review of values-study is limited. However, Slote makes several points that are of real interest in other ways.
The virtue of altruism is closely associated with the Golden Rule by many scholars and on this point Slote presents an interesting idea.
“The focus in care ethics, as with most of the psychological literature on moral development, is on the origins of altruistic motivation in general. In other words, the focus is on what makes us (or is required for us to) intrinsically care about the well-being of other people—care enough to help them in cases that involve a certain degree of self-sacrifice on our part.”
“Altruism toward a given individual clearly doesn’t depend on feeling grateful toward that person in particular. And the psychologists of moral development and the care ethicists (and I consider myself a care ethicist) have been right to that extent. But what they and I haven’t seen is that all this altruism may depend on a more primordial and pervasive (and inarticulate) sense/feeling of gratitude: gratitude that babies or young children who need love feel when they are given love. This gratitude is gratitude toward their parents for the love their parents show them, but I think it is also a larger and more diffuse sense of gratitude toward the whole world for having met their basic need for love. And in any event, I think that absent this sense of gratitude, the capacity for moral development and for eventual altruism will likely be stunted or destroyed. So you can see why I say that gratitude plays a larger role in adult altruism than care ethicists and developmental psychologists have thought.”
Two critical points are made here:
1. Slote sees a person’s impulse toward altruism as deriving from his receipt of generally loving care during childhood, which creates a disposition toward generalized gratitude expressed as altruism.
2. Without that loving care in childhood the person’s acquisition of a feeling of generalized gratitude will be “stunted or destroyed”, which will then be reflected in a diminished or nonexistent capacity for altruism.
Does Slote really believe that, in essence, a person cannot overcome a difficult childhood?
It appears that he does!
In a footnote, he writes: (Comment in footnote 4)
“Let me also point out that the presumed fact that certain kinds of abuse can contribute to making some people/children incapable of developing moral motives and sentiments implies that a person’s status or character as a moral being can depend on factors of luck. Various traditions (e. g., Confucianism and Kantian ethics) that stress the importance of moral self-cultivation or self-improvement play down such factors of luck, play down (in a way that Aristotle, in fact, did not) the typically crucial role that other people play in someone’s moral education/ development. But although it would be nice to think that people can or do (successfully) take their moral development into their own hands, I believe that there are fewer realistic possibilities for or instances of this than advocates of moral self-cultivation have thought.” (emphasis added)
I disagree with Professor Slote’s overall suggestion that we are, essentially and almost irreversibly, a product of our early childhood experience. There is no question that a difficult experience will probably cause problems that will have to be overcome in later life. And overcoming those problems will likely be a very difficult task. But there are far too many examples of individuals who have accomplished that task and become extremely worthy and morally accomplished persons to accept such a pessimistic (and deterministic) view of human development.
Slote’s ideas regarding a causal link between feelings of childhood gratitude and a generalized altruistic approach to others are very interesting.
It is clear, though, that gratitude and forgiveness practices, which have become well known, can have profound and positive effects in the lives of those at any age and in any life situation. The damage of a difficult childhood is all too real but it is not necessarily irreversible.
©Charles R. Lightner