Dr Rowan Williams: Empathy and Ethics: A Complicated Relation?

It’s 100 years since the first Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures were held in 1925. To mark the centenary, the 2025/6 London Lecture Series focuses on the theme Philosophy in Retrospect and in Prospect. Distinguished philosophers have been invited to reflect on where their area of the discipline has got to over the last hundred years, and/or where it might go – or should go – over the next hundred.

All lectures include a post-lecture "in conversation" session with our Academic Director Edward Harcourt, followed by audience Q&A.

There is a lot of current literature suggesting that empathy is the key to ethical and political values. Dr Rowan Williams will argue that this is a risky half-truth: empathy can mask a reduction of the strangeness of another's experience to the proportions I can cope with; and it can replace granular issues of practical support to matters of intensity of feeling. At the same time, a robust account of human rights that is more than procedural or abstract needs to cultivate the capacity to imagine alien perspectives. Can we find ways of hanging on to a proper valuation of empathic understanding without sentimentality?

Rowan Williams was born in Swansea, studied theology at Cambridge and wrote a thesis in Oxford on modern Russian religious thought. After teaching theology and working in various pastoral contexts, he became Bishop of Monmouth in 1992 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002, until 2012. From 2013 to 2020 he was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has written widely on theology, literature and current questions, and his book Solidarity: The Work of Recognition is due out in early 2026. He has also published several collections of poetry.

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