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鈥� 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鈥� suffering although they cannot entertain a moral proposition like 鈥淪uffering is bad鈥� and directly evaluate the suffering of others as bad. A creature鈥檚 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鈥� suffering. No other criterion, like motivation to help, is needed to access this moral fact