LLC Seminar: Marta Benenti and Cristina Meini

Climate change presents a profound paradox: despite overwhelming scientific consensus on its urgency, individual and collective responses remain strikingly insufficient. This gap between knowledge and action reveals not merely informational deficits, but deep psychological and social barriers to engagement. Climate change unfolds across dispersed temporal and spatial scales, fostering a sense of distance, unpredictability, and emotional detachment. Moreover, dominant modes of risk communication—often framed in apocalyptic terms—can induce paralysis, helplessness, and disengagement rather than motivating change. The resulting inertia enables entrenched economic and geopolitical interests to maintain the status quo, reinforcing a cycle in which scientific urgency meets psychological resistance. This talk explores the hypothesis that empathy toward nature and natural entities may offer a promising affective pathway for overcoming these barriers and fostering pro-environmental behavior. Drawing on philosophical and psychological accounts of empathy—most notably Daniel Batson’s influential taxonomy—we examine whether empathetic responses, traditionally understood as interpersonal, can meaningfully extend to non-human nature. Empirical evidence, including Tam’s (2013) behavioral studies, suggests a robust correlation between empathy for animals and plants and both private and public pro-environmental actions, particularly when individuals perceive their actions as effective. However, the moral and motivational power of empathy remains contested. Critics such as Jesse Prinz and Paul Bloom argue that empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient for moral action, highlighting its susceptibility to bias, emotional exhaustion, and narrow focus. These concerns are especially pressing in environmental contexts, where the targets of concern—ecosystems, species, or future generations—are diffuse, abstract, and temporally distant, and where sustained, future-oriented engagement is required. By critically examining both the promise and the limits of environmental empathy, this talk assesses whether—and under what conditions—empathy toward nature can function as a stable and effective driver of ecological responsibility, or whether it must be supplemented or reconfigured within broader motivational frameworks for environmental action.

https://www.llc-philosophy.unito.it/events/llc-seminars#h.mn673ey2jvc1

room TBA