WIP session: Virginie Simoneau-Gilbert- "Empathy in Animals: Its Epistemic Moral Relevance and Limitations"
The Jarislowsky Chair will be hosting Virginie Simoneau-Gilbert, a PhD candidate from Oxford University for a WIP session on January 31 2025 from 3:30-5:00PM.
Please write to julia.houwen [at] mcgill.ca to confirm attendance and to receive a copy of the draft that will be discussed.
Virginie will discuss a draft of an upcoming paper titled "Empathy in Animals: Its Epistemic Moral Relevance and Limitations". See the abstract below:
Emotional contagion, which consists of catching others’ emotions, has been observed in infants and most species of social mammals and birds. It is often considered a very primitive form of empathy by psychologists and ethologists. In this paper, I take up the challenge of providing an account of its epistemic relevance to morality. More precisely, I argue that basic empathy like emotional contagion plays an epistemic role. Empathetic animals can have access to the badness of others’ suffering although they cannot entertain a moral proposition like “Suffering is bad” and directly evaluate the suffering of others as bad. A creature’s emotional contagion is morally relevant in an epistemic way in virtue of three components: (1) the intentional object of her empathy is another individual in a state of suffering, (2) she suffers in tune with the sufferer, and (3) this feeling allows her to have access to the badness of others’ suffering. No other criterion, like motivation to help, is needed to access this moral fact