Empathy and Ethos: Care Ethics and Virtue Epistemology in Non-Ideal Worlds

Empathy as a “skill of understanding” is often claimed to be crucial for care ethical deliberations. However, postcolonial scholars show how empathy across transnational borders is notoriously problematic and reinforces colonial hierarchies. But then, is ethics of care relevant for global justice agendas? This worry is addressed by embedding empathy in a virtue-epistemological framework. Based on Dan Zahavi’s phenomenological analysis (2014), empathy is first shown to be a politically sensitive faculty or a reliabilistic virtue. Second, Puig de la Bellacasa’s articulation of the relationality of care as a “care ethos” ( Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017) is read as foregrounding responsibilist intellectual virtues that can be labelled “virtues of vulnerability.” The two are then brought together because empathy as a reliabilist epistemic faculty needs to be guided by responsibilist virtues of vulnerability, in order to function well in non-ideal worlds. This two-tiered virtue-theoretical analysis enables effective and politically robust empathic caring in power-infused, transnational contexts.