Is the Empathy-Induced Motivation to Help Egoistic or Altruistic: Insights from the Neo-Confucian Cheng Hao

Abstract

Empathy is generally regarded as an emotional contagion between what one person feels and what another, the empathic person, comes to feel. This essay focuses on one aspect of the altruism/egoism debate involving empathy, that is, whether the empathy-induced motivation to help is egoistic, altruistic, or neither, and demonstrates that the philosophy of the Neo-Confucian Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032-1085) can provide unique insights. By referring to Cheng's conceptions of empathy and oneness involved in his famous notions of benevolence (ren 仁) and "ten thousand things in one body" (wanwu yiti 萬物一體), the present essay claims that the notions of egoism and altruism are inapplicable. It will introduce the notion of empathy in contemporary Western philosophy and psychology and of Cheng before turning to the debate and Cheng's contribution. II. Empathy in Ethics and Moral PsychologyAlthough a unified definition of empathy in ethics and moral psychology remains to be seen, it basically refers to the feeling of what others feel mainly by means of perception, inference, or perspective-taking. It is not "an emotion in its own right but a way of feeling emotions" (Maibom 2014, p. 9; italics in original). Namely, it is a kind of operation or mechanism of emotion but not an emotion per se. In empathy, there are at least the empathic agent or person (the "empathizer") and the one who is the object of empathy (the "empathized"). Besides, the feelings to be felt may be positive, negative, or neutral, although this essay focuses on the negative ones. It may help to note some influential definitions of empathy in the literature of contemporary ethics and moral psychology. According to Martin Hoffman, empathy is "the vicarious affective response to another person," with "the involvement of psychological processes that make a person have feelings that are more congruent with another's situation than with his own situation" (Hoffman 2000, pp. 29-30) as the key requirement. According to Michael Slote, empathy involves "having the feelings of another . . . aroused in ourselves, as when we see another person in pain" (Slote 2010, p. 15). Jesse J. Prinz regards empathy as "a kind of vicarious emotion" that is "feeling what one takes another person to be feeling" (Prinz 2011, p. 212). 1 These definitions are basically consistent.