Empathy, Environmental Motivation, and Phenomenology

In this paper, I explore whether empathy can be a necessary condition for motivating environmental action, as argued by the «empathy sustainability hypothesis». First, I cast some doubt on the claim that cognitive and afective empathy can play this role, because they seem unable to extend their scope from the local to the global dimension, given the structural limitations of our imaginative and afective sharing capacities. I then suggest that a phenomenological account of empathy might provide a better defnition of the empathic phenomenon. However, while it may better capture our empathic experiences, it cannot and, most importantly, does not attempt to play a motivational role. Instead, phenomenological empathy is one of the epistemic tools we have at our disposal to gain a basic, albeit fundamental, understanding of other human and non-human animals and the natural world we all share. Only in this specifc sense can phenomenological empathy be considered a prerequisite, if only epistemically, for our relationship with the environment.