Kantian universalisation secretly depends on empathy and cannot stand alone

Evidence

1 This is revealed, as Karen Green (1993) has argued, by a consideration of the example of Hare’s fanatic, who puts adherence to ideological principles before considerations of suffering. The fanatic can universalise, but is incapable of the empathic leap which enables sympathy with the victims of his doctrines. The fanatic thus arrives through universalisation at such ethical conclusions as ‘If I were a woman [a black], I too would wish to be kept under’. The failure of this process of universalisation to bring out adequate moral principles in the case of a person who is insensitive to the sufferings of others shows that universalisation alone will not suffice, but that the plausibility of Kantian ethics depends on a suppressed reliance on such empathic processes as sympathy and putting oneself in the other’s place. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 785

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the impartiality-fails-concrete-need and ethics-of-care threads (ch 29) in this same book, and to ecofeminist critiques in the polyad of Kantian/rationalist ethics. — connects to: Impartiality frameworks breed indifference to concrete need — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 686; Escaping moral dualism needs both rules and particular relationship, not either alone — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 787
• SEED: The fanatic example is a compact, quotable wedge for an essay on why abstract universalizing moral systems let oppressors rationalize domination of the feminized/naturalized other.