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Empathic Reason : Imagination, Morality, and the Minds of Others.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Roelofs, Luke.
- Series:
- Philosophy of Memory and Imagination Series
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (214 pages)
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2026.
- Summary:
- This book offers an attempt to rigorously prove that caring about other people is rational. Empathy toward others is how we grasp their reality. When we empathize, it pushes us to relieve their suffering and help fulfil their desires. By contrast, always treating people unempathically is, in the extreme, equivalent to viewing them not as real people but as something like robots or NPCs, fictional characters in our own egoistic story. Because it's obviously irrational to think that other people aren't real, ignoring other people's needs proves to be irrational.
- Contents:
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- 1 Why Care About Other People?
- The Challenge of Grounding Morality
- The Surprising Claim
- The Obvious Objection
- Empathic Rationalism
- The Solipsistic Diagnosis
- Empathy and Morality
- 2 What Is Empathy?
- Empathy as Imaginative Simulation of Other Minds
- Empathy as Sharing a Feeling
- Empathy as Perspective-Taking
- Empathy, Sympathy, and Compassion
- Empathy with Oneself?
- What Is Simulation?
- Anatomy of a Simulation
- Simulation, Theory, and Belief
- Voluntary and Involuntary Simulation
- Conscious and Unconscious Simulations
- What Is Imagination?
- The Difficulty of Defining Imagination
- Imaginings and Their Counterparts
- Which Simulations Are Imaginative Simulations?
- "Imaginative Simulation" or "Mental Simulation"?
- What Are Empathic Feelings?
- Defining "Feelings"
- Imaginative Counterparts of Feelings
- Are Empathic Feelings Real Feelings?
- Conclusion
- 3 What Does Imaginative Simulation Justify?
- Can Imaginative Simulation Justify Anything?
- Why Think Imagination Can Justify?
- Constrained Imagination
- Informative and Indispensable Imagining
- Can Imaginative Simulation Justify Action?
- Why Think Imagination Can Justify Action?
- The Just-Factual-Beliefs Challenge
- The Just-Existing-Desires Challenge
- The Just-Metacognitive-Beliefs Challenge
- Can We Really Imagine Being Someone Else?
- Misunderstanding Role Reversal
- Indexicals in Imaginative Simulation
- How the Self-Other Distinction Matters
- Is Egoism Just Brutely Rational?
- Rival Conceptions of Rationality
- The Force of Simplicity
- What Are the Principles of Imaginative Justification?
- What If We Don't Empathize?
- Foreseeable Rational Effects
- Regulation by Empathy
- The Redundancy Challenge
- 4 How Do We Understand Other Minds?.
- Understanding from the Inside
- Failing to Understand
- Understanding How It Makes Sense
- Understanding How It Feels
- Physicalism and the From-the-Inside Thesis
- Understanding from the Inside as Imaginative Simulation
- Direct and Indirect Understanding
- Simulation and Recruitment
- Simulation and Memory
- Simulation and Theory
- Simulation, Perception, and Interaction
- Understanding Enabled by Capacities
- Scientific Understanding
- Regulating by a Capacity
- Lack of Understanding and Lack of Belief
- 5 How Is Egoism Possible?
- Fleshing Out the Obvious Objection
- An Argument Against the Solipsistic Diagnosis
- What Is Pretense?
- Layers of Representation
- Pretense and Emotion
- Immersive Fictions
- Target-Discordant Feelings
- Muted Empathy
- Pretense and Prediction
- Useful Fictions
- As-If Beliefs
- Other Minds as a Useful Fiction
- Pretense and Introspection
- Is Self-Misunderstanding Even Possible?
- When Is Self-Misunderstanding Plausible?
- The Plausibility of the Solipsistic Diagnosis
- Comparing Fictionalisms
- Solipsism and Immorality
- Solipsism and Everyday Moral Failings
- Solipsism and Psychopathy
- Solipsism and Social Inequality
- 6 Is Empathy a Good Basis for Morality?
- Empathic Rationalism as Moral Rationalism
- Is Empathic Rationalism a Realist Theory?
- Defining Moral Values
- Reason and Emotion
- Moral Disagreement and Moral Error
- Defending Empathy-Based Morality
- Empathy and Bias
- Empathy with Multiple People
- Empathy and Autonomy
- Empathy and Justice
- Empathic Rationalism and Empathic People
- No Requirement to Feel
- The Varieties of Regulation by Empathy
- Problematic Arguments About Autism
- Bibliography
- Index.
- Notes:
- Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.
- ISBN:
- 0-19-751996-2
- OCLC:
- 1584387821
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