Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic

In this paper, I argue that autistic individuals experience a specific kind of injustice: autistic injustice. I will argue that this form of injustice is closely tied to emotional norms, which are the standards dictating, for instance, how emotions should be expressed appropriately and which emotions are deemed suitable in particular contexts. I will build on Damian Milton’s (2012) concept of the “Double Empathy Problem,” which challenges the traditional view that autistic people lack empathy. However, I propose that Milton’s focus on individual psychology could complement a structural account that centers on emotional norms. My argument is that these emotional norms, which govern most of our social interactions, are predominantly designed to meet neurotypical needs and expectations, often disregarding the needs and preferences of autistic individuals. This, I argue, constitutes an affective injustice.

What is salient to us and what we attend to play a fundamental role in shaping how we perceive, think about, and act in the world. Salience and attention shape our mental lives in ways that have profound epistemic significance, determining how we gather evidence, what sorts of inquiries we undertake, and what we do with the beliefs we form as a result of that. And yet they have not traditionally fallen within the purview of epistemology. We have a lacuna in our epistemic resources: What should be salient to us? What should we attend to? How should we evaluate how we prioritize and select information? We need a framework for evaluating salience and attention from a distinctively epistemic perspective. This book proposes a novel construct, salience structures, which describes how our informational landscape is contoured by a range of causes, reflecting what is salient to us, and what we are likely to attend to. It then offers an evaluative framework for salience structures, describing the epistemic norms which apply to them. It applies that framework to a range of phenomena, including ignorance and inquiry, showing how it helps us better understand the nature of prejudice and the role of search engines in our lives.

In cases of so-called self-gaslighting, a person starts out with a certain belief---for instance, the belief that she has been sexually harassed---but then begins to worry that other people will be skeptical of it. Prompted in some way by this worry, she scrutinizes her original belief and ultimately gives it up. This kind of self-doubt is sometimes presented as one of the characteristic harms that women face under sexism. But it is difficult to say what exactly the harm could consist in, especially since the reasoning that we describe as self-gaslighting is in some cases perfectly rational. I suggest that self-gaslighting is morally problematic because it involves a coerced change in the way that the subject structures her inquiry.

Are there nonhuman animals who behave morally? In this paper I answer this question in the affirmative by applying the framework of care ethics to the animal morality debate. According to care ethics, empathic care is the wellspring of morality in humans. While there have been several suggestive analyses of nonhuman animals as empathic, much of the literature within the animal morality debate has marginalized analyses from the perspective of care ethics. In this paper I examine care ethics to extract its core commitments to what is required for moral care: emotional motivation that enables the intentional meeting of another’s needs, and forward-looking responsibility in particular relationships. What is not required, I argue, are metarepresentational capacities or the ability to scrutinize one’s reasons for action, and thus being retrospectively accountable. This minimal account of moral care is illustrated by moral practices of parental care seen in many nonhuman animal species. In response to the worry that parental care in nonhuman animals lacks all evaluation and is therefore nonmoral I point to cultural differences in human parenting and to normativity in nonhuman animals.

In this paper, I evaluate one of the most prominent accounts of how emotion regulation features in empathy. According to this account, by Nancy Eisenberg and colleagues, empathy develops into either personal distress or sympathy depending on the ability to regulate one’s empathic distress. I argue that recent evidence suggests that empathic distress and sympathy co-occur throughout the empathic episode, that a certain degree of empathic distress may be necessary for prosocial motivation, as high emotion regulation leads to loss of this motivation, and that emotion regulation is not an unmitigated good since much of it is achieved by dehumanizing the sufferer or minimizing her pain. A fertile ground for further research, I suggest, is the role of up-regulation of sympathy.