On Three Types of Empathy: the Perfect, the Truncated, and the Contaminated

Abstract

In the paper a distinction is made between perfect empathy, truncated empathy, and contaminated empathy. Perfect empathy is defined as the combination of three elements: cognitive empathy (the capacity for a comprehensive and ethically proper understanding of other people’s emotions), affective empathy (the tendency to emotionally respond to other people’s emotions in an adequate way: sorrow to sorrow, and joy to joy), and a tendency to undertake an ethically proper action (e.g., to relieve the sufferer’s pain) as a result of the emotional response to other people’s emotions. The phrase ‘ethically proper’ in the above definitions shows that perfect empathy is not a free-standing ethical capacity. An empathic emotional reaction and empathic action are justified only if they are based on the comprehensive and the ethically proper understanding of the other person’s emotion, i.e., the understanding which enables one to assess whether this emotion is justified by its causes. But such an understanding is impossible without a sense of justice, or more generally, without the knowledge of ethical rules which say in what
circumstances an emotion of sorrow or joy is justifiable, and, additionally, what action is ethically proper in a given situation. Truncated empathy, which may take various forms, lacks one of the free elements of perfect empathy. Finally, contaminated empathy arises by admixing one of the four following amoral or non-moral elements to perfect or truncated empathy, namely: thankfulness at the contrast between our fortune and the sufferer’s misfortune; the feeling of anxiety, arising at the sight of the sufferer’s misfortune, about our own good future; the unpleasant feeling of distress, arising at the sight of the sufferer’s sorrow; or pity.