Elizabeth Waldberg

This commentary argues that Maibom, in her book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works, offers compelling epistemic reasons for empathizing with nonhuman animals. Maibom suggests that we learn more about the world when we empathize with those unlike ourselves, rather than reserving empathy only for those most like us. We argue that this conclusion extends beyond human-to-human cases of empathy, imploring us to practice empathy with other animals. We ground our case in Maibom’s claim that empathy, as a form of perspective taking, is an inherently embodied and embedded process. Through the exploration of three test cases, we show that the common features of embodied experience allow humans to extend their empathy to animals, and that doing so has significant consequences for the ethics of animal welfare.

One central commitment of comparative psychology is the prohibition against using folk-psychological concepts to explain nonhuman animal behavior, which requires us to disavow “the attribution of human qualities to other animals, usually with the implication it is done without sound justification” (Shettleworth 2010). Many scientists and philosophers believe attributing human folk-psychological concepts to nonhuman minds constitutes an egregious violation of the anti-anthropomorphism principle. Penn and Povinelli (2007) describe the practice as “insidious” and stemming from our “folk-psychological imagination.” Alternatively, others believe the prohibition against folk psychology is misguided and unnecessary. Andrews (2020) suggests “folk psychology plays an essential role in comparative psychology as the starting point, but not the end point, of our research.” I adjudicate this debate by examining our use of folk psychological concepts in comparative psychological research.