Celine Boisserie-Lacroix

Cet article examine la plausibilité d’un ancrage extrinsèque des normes émotionnelles. Son point de départ est la position, peu explorée dans la philosophie contemporaine, selon laquelle les émotions répondraient à des « sentiments de valeur ». L’objectif est de montrer que cette thèse s’accompagne d’une conception extrinsèque de la normativité émotionnelle. Après avoir énoncé le défi auquel cette conception doit répondre, l’article présente les principaux modèles possibles pour rendre compte du sentiment de valeur – un modèle perceptuel, un modèle quasi perceptuel et un modèle intuitionniste – afin d’évaluer leur pertinence. Cette approche entend jeter une lumière nouvelle sur la valeur épistémique des émotions.

The relationship between empathy, understood here as a cognitive act of imaginative transposition, and reasons, has been discussed extensively by Stueber :156–180, 2011; Emot Rev 4:55–63, 2012; in: Maibom The Routledge handbook of philosophy of empathy, Routledge, New York, pp 137–147, 2017). Stueber situates his account of empathy as the reenactment of another person’s perspective within a framework of folk psychology as guided by a principle of rational agency. We argue that this view, which we call agential empathy, is not satisfying for two main reasons that we will examine consecutively. First, agential empathy cannot satisfactorily account for the case of emotional actions, which requires to take into account the phenomenal dimension of the mental states they stem from. We argue that Stueber overlooks this aspect, which is not reducible to understanding the reasons behind an agent’s behavior. We introduce the notions of experiential empathy and phenomenal insight to account for the imagined representation of the subjectively felt dimension of the target’s experience. Second, in virtue of his restrictive view of empathy, Stueber partly misconstrues this process: action explanation is not all there is to say about empathy. We argue that we have to go beyond the scope of agential empathy to do justice to the epistemic richness of empathy. Experiential empathy can in principle be available independently from reasons explanations: the main epistemic achievement of empathy can be indeed a matter of phenomenal insight only.