Abstract
The educational goal of fostering compassion and cognate traits among students in higher education has particular poignancy in professional and practical ethics where affective engagement with others’ perspectives has long been considered a basic capacity. Understood in this sense, compassionate empathy is not merely that personal disposition of heightened sensitivity to others’ suffering universally considered as a desirable personal quality among human service professionals but rather a moral disposition that contributes to a sense of fairness and an interest in others’ well-being. Recognizing the essential role that compassionate empathy plays in ethical deliberation and moral functioning, scholars from various corners of professional and practical ethics can be found urging educators to assign greater priority to compassion as an educative goal. A body of descriptive work has thus emerged in the academic literature which documents educators’ attempts to pursue this goal using a range of approaches encompassing the study of novels and poems, role playing and drama, interactive perspective-taking exercises, direct contact with stakeholders, video games and reflective writing. This chapter provides an evidence-based standpoint on compassionate empathy pedagogy in higher education by way of three pedagogical principles intended to be useful both in the critical assessment of the potential educational value of approaches described in the literature and as a starting point for developing new approaches. Psychologically informed and conceptually sound empathy pedagogy in higher education, the paper argues, assumes the normalcy of a basic empathic disposition, is centrally concerned with correcting forms of empathic décalage and draws on the wide range of psychological processes known to mediate the experience of compassion.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The rationale behind using this term is that it helps reduce some of the ambiguity that surrounds the terms ‘compassion’ and ‘empathy’, terms which are commonly taken as synonymous in discourse on higher education. The semantic problem, stated succinctly, stems from the fact that ‘empathy’, as the term is used in psychology , standardly refers to imaginative involvement in another person’s situation whether or not such involvement is accompanied by emotions . ‘Compassion’, the term of choice in the philosophical literature, refers to experiencing emotions that are more appropriate to another person’s situation than one’s own while perceiving or otherwise attending to another person’s adversive state. Authors writing on compassion or empathy as a goal in higher education generally (but not always) have in mind imaginative involvement with another person ’s adversive state accompanied by ‘negative’ emotions appropriate to experiencing adversity. Hence the term ‘compassionate empathy’. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see Maxwell 2008: 25–43.
- 2.
The idea of literary study as a form of education for compassion is of course hardly unique to Nussbaum. Steven Pinker (2011) advances the emergence of novel reading as an explanatory factor in the decline of violence in the West. Medical educators see in the idea a way to promote empathy in medical students (Charon 2000; Hunter et al. 1995; Shapiro et al. 2004). It is the premise of a criminal rehabilitation programme that has been introduced in prisons in the United States and the United Kingdom (Trounstine and Waxler 2005) and is a source of inspiration for the use of literature as a means of fighting prejudice and enhancing social skills among young children (Selman 2003; Solomon et al. 2001).
- 3.
For a similar assessment of empathy as a faculty of moral perception from the perspective of healthcare, see Tong (1997).
- 4.
In presenting these ideas, Coombs credits Bricker’s (1993) Aristotelian perspective on ethics for professionals in education.
- 5.
The unique exception was a study by Ofsthun (1986) that investigated the impact of a novel pedagogical model specifically designed for the purposes of enhancing moral sensitivity and related aspects of moral functioning.
- 6.
For a summary review of this research, see Maxwell (2008, pp. 62–67).
References
Akabayashi, A., Slingsby, B. T., Kai, I., Nishimura, T., & Yamagishi, A. (2004). The development of a brief and objective method for evaluating moral sensitivity and reasoning in medical students. BMC Medical Ethics, 5(1), 1–7.
Annis, D. B. (1992). Teaching ethics in higher education. Metaphilosophy, 234(1 & 2), 187–202.
Barnbaum, D. R. (2001). Teaching empathy in medical ethics. Teaching Philosophy, 24(1), 63–75.
Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Batson, C. D. (2011). Altruism in humans. New York: Oxford University Press.
Beauchamp, T. L., & Childress, A. F. (2012). Principles of biomedical ethics (7th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Bevis, O., & Watson, J. (1989). Toward a caring curriculum. New York: National League for Nursing.
Bloom, P. (2016). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. New York: Ecco.
Blum, L. (1991). Moral perception and particularity. Ethics, 101(3), 701–725.
Bricker, D. C. (1993). Character and moral reasoning: An Aristotelian perspective. In K. A. Strike & P. L. Ternasky (Eds.), Ethics for professionals in education (pp. 13–26). New York: Teachers College Press.
Buyx, A. M., Maxwell, B., & Schöne-Seifert, B. (2008). Challenges of educating for medical professionalism: Who should step up to the line? Medical Education, 42, 758–764.
Callahan, D. (1980). Goals in the teaching of ethics. In D. Callan & S. Bok (Eds.), Hastings center report on ethics teaching in higher education (pp. 61–80). New York: Plenum Press.
Charon, R. (2000). Literature and medicine: Origins and destinies. Academic Medicine, 75, 23–27.
Coombs, J. R. (1998). Educational ethics: Are we on the right track? Education Theory, 48(4), 555–570.
Coulehan, J., & Williams, P. (2003). Conflicting professional values in medicine. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 12(1), 7–20.
Davis, M. H. (1994). Empathy: A social psychological approach. Madison: Brown & Benchmark.
Doukas, D. J. (2003). Where is the virtue in professionalism? Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 12(1), 147–154.
Eisenberg, N., & Miller, P. (1987). Empathy, sympathy and altruism: Empirical and conceptual links. In N. Eisenberg & J. Strayer (Eds.), Empathy and its development (pp. 292–316). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, J. (2013). Moral development and reality (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Hébert, P. C., Meslin, E. M., & Dunn, E. V. (1992). Evaluating ethical sensitivity in medical students: A study at the University of Toronto. Journal of Medical Ethics, 18(3), 142–147.
Hilfiker, D. (2001). From the victim’s point of view. The Journal of Medical Humanities, 22(4), 255–263.
Hoffman, M. (2000). Empathy and moral development: Implications for caring and justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hunter, K. M., Charon, R., & Coulehan, J. L. (1995). The study of literature in medical education. Academic Medicine, 70, 787–794.
Kristjansson, K. (2005). Justice and dessert-based emotions. London: Routledge.
Kuczewski, M. G. (2003). Responding to the call of professionalism. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 12(1), 144–154.
Labaree, D. F. (2016). An affair to remember: America’s brief fling with the university as a public good. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 50(1), 20–36.
Landau, R.L. (1993) …And the least of these is empathy. In H.M. Spiro, M.G.M. Curnen, E. Peschel, D.S. James (Eds.), Empathy and the practice of medicine: Beyond pills and the scalpel (pp. 103–109). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lapsley, D. K. (1996). Moral psychology. Boulder: Westview Press.
Maxwell, B. (2006). Naturalized compassion: A critique of Nussbaum on literature in education for compassionate citizenry. Journal of Moral Education, 35(3), 335–352.
Maxwell, B. (2008). Professional ethics education: Studies in compassionate empathy. Dordrecht: Springer, 25–43.
Maxwell, B., & Le Sage, L. (2009). Are psychopaths morally sensitive? Journal of Moral Education, 38(1), 75–91.
Maxwell, B., & Racine, E. (2010). Should empathic development be a priority in biomedical ethics teaching? A critical perspective. Cambridge Quarterly of Medical Ethics, 19(4), 433–445.
McKie, J., & Richardson, J. (2003). The rule of rescue. Social Science & Medicine, 56(12), 2407–2419.
More, E. S., & Milligan, M. A. (Eds.). (1994). The empathic practitioner: Empathy, gender and medicine. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Morton, K. R., Worthley, J. S., Testerman, J. K., & Mohoney, M. L. (2006). Defining features of moral sensitivity: Pathways to moral reasoning in medical students. Journal of Moral Education, 35(3), 387–406.
Murphy, P. E. (1999). Character and virtue ethics in international marketing. Journal of Business Ethics, 18, 107–124.
Noddings, N. (1998). Thinking, feeling, and moral imagination. In P. A. French & H. K. Wettstein (Eds.), Midwest studies in philosophy (Vol. 22, pp. 134–145). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Nussbaum, M. (1995). Poetic justice. Boston: Beacon Press.
Nussbaum, M. (1998). Cultivating humanity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2001). Upheavals of thought. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ofsthun, H. A. (1986). Developing professional responsibilities in counseling psychology students: A teaching model evaluation study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Pinker, S. (2011). Better angels of our nature. New York: Penguin.
Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rest, J. (1986). An overview of the psychology of morality. In J. Rest (Ed.), Moral development: Advances in research and theory (pp. 1–27). New York: Praeger.
Scholz, S., & Groarke, L. (1996). Seven principles for better practical ethics. Teaching Philosophy, 19(4), 337–355.
Self, D. J., Gopalakrishna, G., Kiser, W. M., & Olivarez, M. (1995). The relationship of empathy to moral reasoning in first-year medical students. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 2, 448–453.
Selman, R. L. (2003). The promotion of social awareness. New York: Russell Sage.
Shapiro, J., Morrison, E. H., & Boker, J. R. (2004). Teaching empathy to first year medical students: Evaluation of an elective literature and medicine course. Ethics and Humanities, 17(1), 73–84.
Sherman, N. (1990). The place of emotions in Kantian morality. In O. Flanagan & A. O. Rorty (Eds.), Identity, character and morality. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Solomon, D., Watson, M., & Battistich, V. (2001). Teaching and schooling effects on moral/prosocial development. In V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (4th ed.). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
Surdyk, P. M. (2003). Educating for professionalism: What counts? Who’s counting? Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 12(1), 155–160.
Tong, R. (1997). Feminist perspectives on empathy as an epistemic skill and caring as a moral virtue. The Journal of Medical Humanities, 18(1), 153–168.
Trounstine, J. R., & Waxler, R. P. (2005). Finding a voice: The practice of changing lives through literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Verducci, S. (2000). A conceptual history of empathy and a question it raises for moral education. Educational Theory, 5(1), 63–80.
Warnock, M. (1996). Moral values. In J. M. Halstead & M. Taylor (Eds.), Values in education and education in values (pp. 45–53). London: Falmer.
You, D., & Bebeau, M. (2005). Moral sensitivity: A review. Conference paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Moral Education, Cambridge, MA.
You, D., Maeda, Y., & Bebeau, M. J. (2011). Gender differences in moral sensitivity: A meta-analysis. Ethics and Behavior, 21(4), 263–282.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Maxwell, B. (2017). Pursuing the Aim of Compassionate Empathy in Higher Education. In: Gibbs, P. (eds) The Pedagogy of Compassion at the Heart of Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57783-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57783-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-57782-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-57783-8
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)