Recent work on empathy has drawn attention to several important political functions that empathy can play in democracy: empathy can help reduce political polarization, facilitate understanding, and improve deliberation. For empathy to play these political roles, it seems that it must be possible for democratic citizens to empathize with social groups; however, philosophers typically conceive of empathy as a dyadic phenomenon which takes place between an individual empathizer and an individual target person whose perspective they empathize with. This generates a puzzle for defenders of empathy’s democratic functions: is it possible to genuinely empathize with groups? If so, how should we make sense of this idea? If not, can we still vindicate the important political functions of empathy? This paper explores the available options for grappling with this puzzle. The most straightforward adaption of empathy to groups—empathizing with group agents—comes with controversial metaphysical commitments. However, we consider several alternative ways to understand group empathy—empathy with representative members of groups; empathy with hypothetical agents who we take to be representative of a group; and empathy with shared group “perspectives”. The latter proposal, we show, offers a promising way to understand group empathy and to vindicate its political functions.

Many relational egalitarians argue that friendship embodies the ideal of equality and can illuminate what it means to relate as equals on a broader social scale (Viehoff 2014, 2019; Scheffler 2015; Kolodny 2014; Wilson 2019). However, Joseph Chan (2021) has provided a forceful critique of this view, arguing that friendship is not governed by the norms of relational equality. While persuasive, Chan’s critique may lead one to think that friendship has no relevance for our normative theorizing. In this paper, I argue that this is not so, and that the model of good personal friendship can inspire a different approach to social justice—relational sufficientarianism (Bengtson & Nielsen 2023; Lippert-Rasmussen 2021). This is because friendship is governed by the norm of reciprocity, which requires us to reciprocate the relational benefits (e.g., care, concern, support, or love) received from our friend. While the norm of reciprocity may sometimes (incidentally) lead to equality of such benefits within friendship, its primary purpose is to prevent our friendships from becoming lopsided. Good friends relate as “sufficients” by not allowing each other to fall below the minimal threshold of relational benefits enjoyed within the relationship. Good friendship, thus, offers us a different understanding of what relational justice requires.