Social wellbeing is reliant upon empathy. It allows for a unique source of humane understanding which is key to developing relationships and ethical significance.

In the above passage, Shelley describes a perfected version of an activity that his readers are supposed to intimately acquainted with. He has in mind the activity of imaginatively adopting another person’s perspective, in a way that somehow engages the emotions of the one doing this imaginative work. I will call this activity ‘empathy.’ Shelley’s claim about empathy’s moral significance, that it is a form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective-taking. It is also the unique source of a particular form of understanding, which I will call humane understanding. Humane understanding consists in the direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions. This apprehension is an epistemic good whose ethical significance is multifarious. In this paper, I focus on elaborating the sense in which humane understanding of others is non-instrumentally valuable to its recipients. People have a complex but profound need to be humanely understood. Because we respond to others’ very real need when we pursue this sort of understanding of their emotions, empathy is best understood as itself a way of caring, rather than just a means to promote other caring behavior. great instrument of the moral good, is presented not as the conclusion of an argument, but rather as a reminder of what we already know. And it does have the ring of a familiar truth. We tend to think that being empathetic is an important part of being a worthy leader, a good friend, a virtuous person. But exactly what contribution does empathy make to our ethical lives, such that empathy deserves to be counted among the greatest of our moral psychological resources. One enduringly popular answer to this question is that empathy plays a crucial role in generating altruistic concern. This claim dates back to the first wave of interest in empathy, in the mid- to late 18th century, and it continues to be buoyed by major research projects in social and developmental psychology. However, it has also recently come in for criticism from philosophers and psychologists who suspect that empathy might be not just unnecessary for altruism, but also perniciously motivationally distorting. Consider for example the position of social psychologist Paul Bloom. Bloom (2016: 71) argues that we don’t need empathy, “the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does,” to inspire altruistic action. Compassion, a form of feeling for others that does not involve an imaginative emotional experience, can provide the requisite motivational spur. What is more, he argues, we ought to prefer compassion to empathy as a motivational source. Unlike compassion, empathy is objectionably narrow and inevitably biased. We are bound to empathize more fully with people who resemble us, who feel familiar, and who are attractive,and we are not capable of extending our empathetic capacities to everyone who deserves our care. Consequently, Bloom concludes, empathy leads us to care too much for some and not enough for others. 2Many champions of empathy have moved to defend its motivational significance against suchcharges.3 However, the debates over empathy’s status as a source of altruism have tended to over-shadow consideration of some of empathy’s most significant features. Here is what I am going to argue: even if Bloom is right that empathy is narrow and biased, and even if it isn’t needed for securing or sustaining altruistic motivation, people who lack the capacity or willingness to empathize will still be missing out on something critically important to virtuous human life. To get a proper handle on empathy’s moral significance, we have to reckon with how it matters epistemically. I will make the case that empathy is the unique source of a particular form of under-standing, which I will call humane understanding.4 Humane understanding consists in the direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions. This apprehension is an epistemic good whose ethical significance is multifarious. Here, I will focus on elaborating the sense in which humane understanding of others is non-instrumentally valuable to its recipients. People have a complex but pro-found need to be humanely understood. Because we respond to others’ very real need when we pursue this sort of understanding of their emotions, empathy is best understood as itself a way of caring, rather than just a means to promote other caring behavior. This form of care plays a significant role in a variety of relationships central to human flourishing. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that within the context of some therapeutic relationships, humane understanding is so important that it is literally a matter of life or death. I will begin by expanding on my conception of empathy. Then, I will draw upon the work of Adam Smith to introduce humane understanding. Smith suggests that the capacity to empathize just is the capacity to grasp what he calls the “just and proper” quality of others’ emotions. If we take on board a few reasonable claims about the nature of emotional experience, we will see that Smith is right that empathy affords us a unique appreciation of an important normative feature of others’ emotions. More specifically, when we empathize with others, we directly understand how their emotions reflect the evaluative properties the objects of those emotions appear to have. After explaining what humane understanding is, and how it is connected to empathy, I will look to E.M. Forster’s novel A Room witha View to motivate my proposal about the moral significance of humane understanding.