Empatia: un possibile ponte tra autonomia e vulnerabilità

Autonomy and vulnerability have long been considered as opposites. In contrast, drawing from Catriona Mackenzie’s work in which she proposes to reconcile autonomy and vulnerability through a relational concept of autonomy, I will argue that empathy could be a suitable tool to detect and address the vulnerabilities of other people. However, I will show that empathy – if understood as a particular kind of perspective-taking that usurps the other’s agency, or as independent from the sociocultural context or as a merely individualized and depoliticized trait of character – could be unable to promote a relational concept of autonomy and, therefore, it could hinder the reconciliation between vulnerability and autonomy. I will conclude that the account of empathy proposed by Elisa Magrì could be the ideal candidate to overcome these issues in virtue of its use of both Darwall’s notion of recognition respect and a phenomenological approach to empathy.