Lakoff - The link between empathy and democracy has been established historically by Professor Lynn Hunt of UCLA in her important book, Inventing Human Rights. Click here to hear her speak.

2008-11-19  - Lynn Hunt - Inventing Human Rights: An Empathetic Understanding

Yet the newfound power of empathy could work against even the longest held prejudices. In 1791, the French revolutionary government granted equal rights to Jews; in 1792, men without property were enfranchised; and in 1794, the French government officially abolished slavery. Empathy and acceptance of individual autonomy thus were skills that could be learned, and long-accepted limitations on rights could be — and were — challenged.

Autonomy and empathy are cultural practices, not just ideas, and they are therefore quite literally embodied, that is, they have physical as well as emotional dimensions. Individual autonomy hinges on an increasing sense of the separation and sacredness of human bodies: Your body is yours and my body is mine, and we both should respect the boundaries between each other’s bodies. Empathy depends on the recognition that others feel and think as we do, that our inner feelings are alike in some fundamental fashion. To be autonomous, a person must be recognized as legitimately separate and protected in his or her separation, but to have human rights, a person’s selfhood must be appreciated in some more emotional fashion. Human rights depend on both self-possession and on the recognition that all others are equally self-possessed. It is the incomplete development of the latter that gives rise to inequality and opens the door to abuse of human rights.

.....our sense of who has rights and what those rights are ultimately is grounded in our informed empathy for others.

"Empathy only develops through social interaction; therefore, the forms of that
interaction configure empathy in important ways. In the eighteenth century,
readers of novels learned to extend their purview of empathy. In reading, they
empathized across traditional social boundaries…. As a consequence, they came
to see others—people they did not know personally—as like them, as having the
same kinds of inner emotions. Without this learning process, ‘equality’ could
have no deep meaning, and in particular no political consequence (Hunt, 40). "

• Book: Inventing Human Rights: A History

• BY JOHN SANFORD Human rights: A novel idea?

  • Empathy with literary characters helped spur concept of human rights, scholar says

  • argued that the novel, through its power to provoke "imagined empathy," led in part to the development of the idea of human rights.

  • "Human rights as a notion depends on empathetic identification with individuals who are now imagined to be, in some fundamental way, like you,"
     

Lynn Hunt: Inventing Human Rights

• Human Rights doctrines rely on the claim of Self-Evidence

• Thomas Jefferson: Declaration of Independence :

  • We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

• UN Declaration on Human rights: legalistic -

  • Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

  • claim of self evidence?

• If self evident, why just now recognized?

• Where did the rights of man come from

  • first - Rousseau social contract.

• Stories of torture 1600, 1700

• Torture was questioned

• 1760's - anti torture crystallized

  • various countries abolish torture

• French revolutionary government abolishes torture

• public opinion against torture

• even criminals have souls

• Identification or empathy with others

  • even lower class and criminals

• New attitudes about the self and body

• 25:00 People learned how to empathize across social boundaries

  • thanks to reading

  • rise of the novel

  • novel reading helped create shared understanding

  • understanding the pains of the body

  • sense of separation of bodies

  • example of novel Richardson's Pamela.

  • identifying with ordinary characters

  • all people are similar because of inner feelings

  • empathy through passionate involvement through the novel

  • Diteraou (sp?) - talks about his experience

    • describes his personal experience.

    • You recognize yourself in the characters, You feel the feelings of the characters

    • empathy depends on identification

    • novel through experience and not moralizing

  • expansion of empathy thought novel reading

  • plus rise of self contained person

  • painting of portraits of common people

  •  

The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age by Palumbo-Liu, David (review)
"As Lynn Hunt puts it in Inventing Human Rights: A History (2007), “in the eighteenth century, readers of novels learned to extend their purview of empathy. In reading, they empathized across traditional social boundaries…. As a consequence, they came to see others … as like them, as having the same kinds of inner emotions. Without this learning, ‘equality’ could have no deep meaning and in particular no political consequence” (40). Even more schematically, she notes that “new kinds of reading (and viewing and listening) created new individual experiences (empathy), which in turn made possible new social and political concepts (human rights)” (Hunt 2007, 33-4). Expressed here is a twofold faith: first, that reading literature makes its readers more tolerant by allowing them to identify with others; and second, that this tolerance leads to improved political relations with these others."