Riana Betzler

Contemporary healthcare environments are becoming increasingly informationally demanding. This requires patients, and those supporting them, to engage with a broad range of expert knowledge. At the same time, patients must find ways to make sense of this information in the context of their own values and needs. In this article, we confront the problem of communication in our current age of complexity. We do this by focusing on a field that has already had to grapple with these issues directly: genetic counseling. We articulate an empathy-based framework that provides a way to integrate the teaching and counseling models of genetic counseling. As well as being useful for those providing genetic counseling in the era of genomic medicine, this framework has the potential to address challenges of communication in healthcare settings beyond genetic counseling. Furthermore, it has important ramifications for ethical debates about autonomy and decision-making.

Many people think of empathy as a powerful force for good within society and as a crucial component of moral cognition. Recently, prominent theorists in psychology and philosophy have challenged this viewpoint and mounted a case against empathy. The most compelling versions of this case rely heavily on empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience. They contend that the inherent partiality and parochialism of empathy undermines its potential to serve moral ends. This paper argues that the argument against empathy overreaches; it makes an unwarranted inference from descriptive evidence about our empathic capacities to normative claims about the proper role of empathy in culture, society, and ethics. The paper concludes with suggestions about how to use insights from the empirical literature to build a more nuanced and contextually sensitive account of the role of empathy in our ethical lives.

In 1949, the social psychologists Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. and Rosalind Dymond wrote a paper calling for increased attention to the empathic responses in empirical social psychology. The empathic responses, they wrote, “occupy a crucial position in human interaction and adjustment” (Psychiatry 12(4):355–359, 1949, https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1949.11022747 ). Not only practically important for therapy and communication, the empathic responses were considered to be foundational for the very development of the self. In this paper, I examine challenges that arose in the 1940s and 1950s, when researchers attempted to subject empathy to scientific scrutiny. I focus specifically on conceptual and methodological problems that Dymond faced in developing her measures of empathy, which are typically considered to be the first in existence. This foray into the history of empathy measures offers a case study for considering questions about validity and coherence in the philosophy of psychological measurement.

We have noticed a worrying trend of students receiving failing grades because they disappear. They stop showing up to class and stop submitting work. They become unresponsive to email and do not take up offers of help. In a real sense, these students fail but have not taken the class. In this essay, we attempt to address this issue by examining systemic and structural features of higher education that contribute to this phenomenon, using our home institution, San José State University, as an example. We look at add/drop policies and argue that they create an environment that is hostile for the student population our university serves—primarily first-generation students of color with low socioeconomic status. We argue that these policies constitute an instance of structural injustice that becomes systemic when combined with other sources of injustice in our students’ lives. We situate these structural and systemic injustices within larger discussions of the hidden curriculum and decolonial approaches to pedagogy. Finally, we conclude with a call to action. We urge others to consider university-level policy as a source of structural injustice that interacts with wider systems of injustice. The details of how this works, however, will differ depending on contextual details particular to individual systems.