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Any justification ends finally with the rationally gratuitous presence of the emotion of sympathy; if that condition were not met, one would simply have no reason to be moral.Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (11) 1 The Empathic Motivation HypothesisThe thought that empathy plays an important role in moral motivation is almost a platitude of contemporary folk psychology. Unlike many folk platitudes, however, it also has a long and distinguished history in philosophical theory. Early British sentimentalists accorded to it (or to "sympathy," as it was then labeled) a central role; Hume's premiss that "the minds of men are mirrors to one another's" lay at the heart of his etiology of the "moral distinctions" and their ability to move us to action (Hume, 1739(Hume, / 1978. In the nineteenth century, Adam Smith followed him in locating the affective power of moral claims in our natural propensity to reflect one another's behaviors and inner lives (Smith, 1759(Smith, / 2002. Parallel themes were mooted in German moral philosophy and aesthetics in the 1700s, and versions of the empathy construct remained prominent in continental accounts of moral motivation through the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries (

This book examines the parallels between moral and metaphorical discourse, and the ways in which our engagement with literary art, and metaphorical discourse in particular, informs our moral beliefs. It suggests that there are three ways in which one's beliefs can be improved: if more of them are true, if more of them are warranted or justified, or if the warrant or justification for some of them is strengthened. So the book considers whether and how such improvements can be made to moral beliefs, and what role metaphor can play. It is an integral aim of the work to discern to what extent moral and metaphorical discourses deserve to be regarded as cognitive at all. This involves investigating to what extent such discourses are capable of truth or falsehood, warrant or justification, and how it is that we understand moral judgements and metaphorical expressions. This investigation is founded on an account of the nature of value and of our experience of value.

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Experience can be difficult to describe and hence requires the use of figurative devices such as metaphors and similes. This chapter argues that figurative language sometimes succeeds in representing aspects of experience which resist characterisation in literal terms. According to the Inexpressibility Thesis, the truth-conditions of some metaphors can not be represented by terms contained in the strictly literal lexicon (of a given language). By proposing a special category of phenomenological metaphors, this chapter offers an account of metaphor that both explains and supports the Inexpressibility Thesis. It also examines non-cognitivism and reductionism, metaphor and experience-dependent concepts, two models of similarity judgements, and phenomenological metaphors.