Seisuke Hayakawa

This volume boldly expands intellectual horizons on care and the ethics of care. Centered on human emotionality and interdependence, the ethics of care was developed in the 1980s by feminists Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings. Bringing together important insights from different areas of philosophy, the contributors of this volume engage in two vibrant dialogues, offering a unique and timely contribution to the field. First, they examine the care perspective through a cross-cultural lens, illuminating its rich potential through dialogues with Chinese and Japanese philosophy. Second, they address cross-field dialogues, building connections between the ethics of care and epistemology, virtue theory, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and enactivism. Previously unexamined categories and distinctions are introduced into care discourse, refining our theoretical and practical understanding. Contents: 1 Introduction (Seisuke Hayakawa and Michael Slote). 2 Care Ethics and Beyond (Michael Slote). 3 Qi, Ki, and Affective Attunement: Towards a Cross-Cultural Dialogue of Phenomenology of Care (Yukiko Kuwayama). 4 Dialogue as Human Existence: Ueda Shizuteru’s Zen Buddhist Philosophy and a Care Ethics of Play (Yuko Ishihara). 5 Caring and Ma’ai as Distancing: For the Sake of the Non-Legal Communality of Humanity (Tetsuya Kono). 6 Empathy and Ethos: Care Ethics and Virtue: Epistemology in Non-Ideal Worlds (Vrinda Dalmiya). 7 Epistemic Care, Self-Care, and Subservience (Heather Battaly). 8 The Veridictive Force of Embodied Care (Maurice Hamington). 9 Epistemological Divides and Moral Ambivalence in Global Politics: A Feminist Care Ethics Perspective (Fiona Robinson). 10 Toward Establishing Intellectual Receptivity as an Epistemic Good (Rie Iizuka). 11 Empathic Receptivity as a Source of Epistemic Justification (Hirohiko Abe). 12 Empathic Knowing and the Completion of Care (Georgina Campelia and Aaron Wightman). 13 Temporal Respect and Relational Autonomy: Empathy in a Temporalized Care-Ethical Framework (Seisuke Hayakawa). 14 Enacting Epistemic Respect: Reconciling Care and Respect (Katsunori Miyahara). 15 Schema Care Ethics: The Philosophy and Psychology of Caring Amidst Woundedness (Anton Sevilla-Liu).

This chapter refines the care-ethical framework to interpret respect as an inherently temporal phenomenon. As temporal beings, we each have our own pace, timing, and timeframe for daily activities. I aim to demonstrate that these temporal individual differences have significant implications for respect for persons in social interactions. I first delineate the key features of the care-ethical approach and introduce the integration of respect and care into a concept called “care respect” (Dillon, Respect and Care: Toward Moral Integration. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (1): 105–132, 1992; Slote, The Ethics of Care and Empathy. New York: Routledge, 2007). Next, I explore the temporal dimension of care respect, defining it in terms of responding to specific temporal needs and vulnerabilities. The care-ethical approach is then broadened to accommodate these temporal dimensions within its theoretical framework by developing the idea of empathy as other-oriented pace-taking. Following this, I examine how my temporalized account can complement a recent account of relational autonomy. Finally, the chapter concludes by noting that this temporalized account should expand its focus beyond the needs and vulnerabilities of care recipients to address those of caregivers and others seeking to offer care respect.(Please feel free to email me if you would like a copy of this paper: seisukehayakawa[at]gmail[dot]com)

[The two authors contributed equally to this work.] We often seek empathy from others by asking them to listen to our stories. But what exactly is the role of listening in empathy? One might think that it is merely a means for the empathizer to gather rich information about the empathized. We shall rather argue that listening is an embodied action, one that plays a significant role in empathic perspective-taking. We make our case via a descriptive analysis of a paradigm case of empathy mediated by listening or what we can call empathy through listening. On our view, empathy through listening involves three distinctive features: (1) dynamic unfolding, (2) collaboration, and (3) mutual perspective reshaping. Listening contributes to this process by initiating and sustaining a feedback loop of receptivity that occurs between empathizing and empathized agents.

***This paper was published along with Professor Amy Coplan's commentary, "Response to 'Empathy, Timeliness, and Virtuous Hearing'." ** This paper aims to demonstrate how the notion of timeliness enriches our understanding of empathy and its associated virtuous hearing as discussed in liberatory virtue epistemology. I begin by showing how timeliness is relevant to empathy. Next, I apply this insight to the idea of virtuous hearing, in which empathy plays a significant role. I thus broaden the liberatory-epistemological conception of virtuous hearing as a corrective to timing-related injustice. Finally, I connect virtuous hearing with the ancient Greek concept of kairos, clarifying the conditions under which virtuous hearers must be sensitive to another’s opportune timing to testify.

Socially extended knowledge has recently received much attention in mainstream epistemology. Knowledge here is not to be understood as wholly realised within a single individual who manipulates artefacts or tools but as collaboratively realised across plural agents. Because of its focus on the interpersonal dimension, socially extended epistemology appears to be a promising approach for investigating the deeply social nature of epistemic practices. I believe, however, that this line of inquiry could be made more fruitful if it is connected with the critical notion of epistemic responsibility, as developed in feminist responsibilism. According to feminist responsibilists, at the core of epistemic responsibility is a critical disposition toward correcting epistemic injustice. This epistemic idea is highly relevant to the epistemological context of illness, where patient testimony is often disregarded. Hence, though restricted to the epistemological context of the experience of illness, this chapter delves into epistemic injustice and its robust mechanisms. I thus explore what responsible epistemic practices should involve in order to redress that injustice and how epistemic responsibility should be socially extended. The discussion proceeds as follows. First, by relying on Arthur Frank’s innovative work on illness narratives, I focus on chaotic bodily messages from patients overwhelmed by suffering and then explain why these messages should count as genuine narratives or testimonies despite their inarticulateness. Second, I elaborate on how epistemic injustice concerning such narratives (i.e., chaos narratives) is produced and reproduced, in particular how both a dominant sociocultural norm and our inherent vulnerability can contribute to its production and reproduction. Finally, I propose an extended form of epistemic responsibility that ameliorates this aspect. Laying particular emphasis on the epistemic role of mature empathy, I characterise the extended epistemic responsibility in terms of extended empathic knowledge.

In this chapter, I attempt to provide a richer account of reflective agency than standard theorists do, by focusing on the deep connection between the role of empathic receptivity and that of reflection. In From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Michael Slote innovatively introduces the idea of receptivity as a virtue into the domains of epistemology and ethics, and argues that the virtue of receptivity plays a crucial role in the realization of a good life (2013). In contrast, I incorporate receptivity as a virtue into the domain of philosophy of action, particularly the philosophical analysis of reflective agency, an aspect on which Slote does not place much emphasis. To date, standard theories of reflective agency have concentrated on analyzing its self-governing aspect (e.g., Bratman 2007; Frankfurt 1999; Korsgaard 1996). Such an analysis is undoubtedly important because autonomous agency is a central value in the modern world. However, standard theorists’ strong commitment to individualistic, self-determining agency appears to have hindered them from appreciating the fundamental significance of empathic receptivity toward others’ perspectives in our rational, reflective lives. To remedy this tendency, I demonstrate how empathic receptivity significantly contributes to the development of our reflective activity. In our temporally extended lives, empathic receptivity is not only associated with an event at a single moment but also with a dynamic process unfolding over time. In my view, such diachronic receptivity helps us to deepen our understanding of others’ perspectives, and in so doing, to reflectively examine our own ways of thinking and acting from different angles that we have not previously recognized. Given that our agency unfolds temporally, practical rationality appears to be partly a matter of how we can develop our reflective capacity conducive to continuous learning from others. My receptivity-based account aims to capture such interpersonal and learning aspects of reflection and thus overcome the individualistic, introspective model of reflection that has long dominated the mainstream philosophy of action. The discussion proceeds as follows. In Section 1, I begin by arguing for receptivity’s centrality in empathy and then briefly sketch how the virtue of empathic receptivity functions in our temporally unfolding lives. In Section 2, I attempt to offer a realistic, dynamic account of the relationship between empathic receptivity and reflection. Particularly, I discuss how a receptively virtuous person can appropriately confront anxiety caused by encountering another’s serious challenge. In the last section, I clarify the strength of my receptivity-based model of reflection by comparing it with Michael Bratman’s policy-based model of reflection.(Please feel free to email me if you would like a copy of this paper: seisukehayakawa[at]gmail[dot]com)

In one sense of the term, empathy refers to the act of sharing in another person’s experience of and perspective on the world. According to simulation accounts of empathy, we achieve this by replicating the other’s mind in our imagination. We explore a form of empathy, empathic perspective-taking, that is not adequately captured by existing simulationist approaches. We begin by pointing out that we often achieve empathy (or share in another’s perspective) by listening to the other person. This form of empathy, which we call “empathy through listening”, involves four distinctive features: (i) the actual sharing of a perspective; (ii) dynamical unfolding; (iii) collaboration; and (iv) mutual transformation. Next, we consider the individual basis of empathy through listening. We argue that it requires an attitude of “receptivity” and elaborate on this elusive concept in terms of “epistemic respect”. Finally, we consider whether this form of empathy can be adequately explained within the simulationist framework. We argue that simulationist approaches must be complemented by a receptivity-based conception of empathy—that is, a conception that envisions empathy not so much as an individual imaginative enterprise, but rather as a collaborative practice of engaging with the other while paying her due epistemic respect.