Against Empathy
Kindle Highlights
Highlights
we want to be good and caring people, if we want to make the world a better place, then we are better off without empathy.
The problems we face as a society and as individuals are rarely due to lack of empathy. Actually, they are often due to too much of it.
make a case for the value of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday life, arguing that we should strive to use our heads rather than our hearts. We
last book, Just Babies, was about the origin of moral understanding, and I argued there that even babies have some sense of right and wrong—and
We have gut feelings, but we also have the capacity to override them,
First, our moral decisions and actions are powerfully shaped by the force of empathy. Second, this often makes the world worse. And, third, we have the capacity to do better.
Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now. This makes us care more about them, but it leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blind as well to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with.
Empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism. It is shortsighted, motivating actions that might make things better in the short term but lead to tragic results in the future.
our empathy for those close to us is a powerful force for war and atrocity toward others. It is corrosive in personal relationships; it exhausts the spirit and can diminish the force of kindness and love.
spotlights only illuminate what they are pointed at, so empathy reflects our biases.
millions of dollars rolled in to this relatively affluent community. There was a dark comedy here, with people from far poorer communities sending their money to much richer people, guided by the persistent itch of empathic concern.
Empathy is particularly insensitive to consequences that apply statistically rather than to specific individuals.
what really matters for kindness in our everyday interactions is not empathy but capacities such as self-control and intelligence and a more diffuse compassion.
Making children suffer temporarily for their own good is made possible by love, intelligence, and compassion, but yet again, it can be impeded by empathy.
this understanding of the minds of others is an amoral tool, useful for effecting whatever goals you choose. Successful therapists and parents have a lot of cognitive empathy, but so too do successful con men, seducers, and torturers. Or
turns out that the relationship between empathy and goodness is weak.
problems with psychopaths may have more to do with lack of self-control and a malicious nature than with empathy,
effects of mindfulness meditation suggesting that the boost in kindness that this practice results in part because meditation allows one to stanch one’s empathy, not expand it.
the right thing to do is to expand our moral compass to include members of a once-despised group, empathy for members of that group can bring us there.
Empathy is used as a tool by charitable organizations, religious groups, political parties, and governments, and to the extent that those who spark this empathy have the right moral goals, it can be a valuable force.
We are often quick to point out the good that empathy does but blind to its costs.
one might agree that empathy is on the whole unreliable yet still argue that we should exploit people’s empathy for good causes. I have some sympathy with this position, but I worry about the racism analogy.
aspire to a world in which a politician appealing to someone’s empathy would be seen in the same way as one appealing to people’s racist bias.
We have alternatives to emotions like empathy; other people don’t. This is possible, I suppose. But for what it’s worth, it doesn’t match my own experience.
I’ve never met anyone who was insensitive to data and argument in the moral realm and who wasn’t capable, at least sometimes, of using moral reasoning to override his or her gut feelings.
empathic response to someone else’s experience can involve the same brain tissue that’s active when you yourself have that experience.
Which would hurt a stranger more: stubbing her toe or slamming her hand in a car door? You could try to figure this out from scratch, like a scientist looking at the biological workings of a novel species, but a better way is to assess memories of your own pain
Our empathic experience is influenced by what we think about the person we are empathizing with and how we judge the situation that
good at understanding other people and bad at feeling their pain. They have high cognitive empathy but low emotional empathy.
Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists. Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don’t like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient.
even given all these considerations in favor of finding an effect, there isn’t much of one.
“The (Non)Relation between Empathy and Aggression: Surprising Results from a Meta-Analysis.” They report that only about 1 percent of the variation in aggression is accounted for by lack of empathy.
“Empathy-induced altruism is neither moral nor immoral; it is amoral.”
Empathy is not the only facet of our moral lives that has a spotlight nature. Emotions such as anger, guilt, shame, and gratitude are similar. But not all psychological processes are limited in this way. We can engage in reasoning, including moral reasoning, that is more abstract. We can make decisions based on considerations of costs and benefits or through appealing to general principles. Presumably this is what the people who chose not to move Sheri Summers up the list were doing—they
If one is going to do something good, and empathy motivates one to do something less good, then empathy is to blame. But if one isn’t going to do something good, and empathy motivates one to do it, then empathy is a plus.
counter
It turns out that the kindness motivated by empathy often has bad effects. It can make the world worse.
‘Pity is a most dangerous emotion,’ said Ou Virak, the founder of a human rights organization in Phnom Penh. ‘Cambodia needs to get out of the beggar mentality. And foreigners need to stop reacting to pure emotion.’
But doing actual good, instead of doing what feels good, requires dealing with complex issues and being mindful of exploitation from competing, sometimes malicious and greedy, interests.
The Effective Altruists define themselves as: “a growing social movement that combines both the heart and the head.” It’s
the real problem is that often people don’t care about math. But they can be persuaded to. People can be encouraged to think rationally about policy issues.
unintended consequences, such as the concern that focusing on individual giving might erode support
others like detachment if we get too reason oriented. reason isnt infallible
one consideration in favor of Effective Altruism as it’s currently carried out is its epistemic humility.
Alexander makes a distinction between “man versus nature” problems and “man versus man” problems. Healing the sick is an example of “man versus nature,” and this is the sort of thing that effective altruists now focus on. Fighting global capitalism is “man versus man.” This has the potential for long-lasting change for the better, but the outcome is less certain. After all, many people are in favor of global capitalism, and many honestly believe that the spread of market economies is what will make the world a better place.
someone who relies on empathy will focus on individuals with the goal of making their lives weighty, of making their joy and suffering and experience matter as much as one’s own. This sounds noble, but we are not good at it.
Don’t try to make them more weighty. Rather, make yourself less weighty. Bring everyone to the same level by diminishing yourself. Put yourself, and those you love, on the level of strangers.
While liberals advocate for government programs that they believe make the world a better place—universal health care, say, or universal early education programs such as Head Start—conservatives worry that these never work out as planned.
empathy is always on the side of the censor.
The case for free speech, in contrast, is pretty unempathic.
politics of empathy drives concerns about people in the here and now. This meshes well with some liberal causes and some conservative causes.
distinguish between “sentimental compassion,” which corresponds to what we would call empathy, and “great compassion,” which is what we would simply call “compassion.” The first is to be avoided, as it “exhausts the bodhisattva.” It’s the second that is worth pursuing. Great
Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.”
empathic distress most likely gives rise to negative health outcomes. On the other hand, compassionate responses are based on positive, other-oriented feelings and the activation of prosocial motivation and behavior.
meditation-based training enables practitioners to move quickly from feeling the distress of others to acting with compassion to alleviate it.” Less empathy, more kindness.
is a nice idea that I can actively work to shut down my emotional response without losing my compassion.
If my niece is delighted because she just won a scholarship, this will make me happy, but not because I’m vicariously experiencing her pleasure. Instead it’s because I love her and want her to do well.
Consider finally our dealings with a friend who is sad. We are capable of exercising empathy here, but there are reasons why we might choose not to.
to say we dont wannt t o feel empathy forr frinns is simplistii and first order. of course we dont want to blinddy mirror sadnnensss. but to respond in thr rifht way we may benefot fro briefly empathizing to imagine bhoww to best help
an apology involves an acknowledgment that it is unacceptable to harm someone without just cause. For this to work, it has to be somehow costly;
Throughout history, many people have had Strangers = 0%; in my last book, Just Babies, I argued that this is the default mode of human nature.
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Perhaps empathy is like milk. Adults don’t need milk; we do fine without it. But babies need milk to grow.
Natural selection might be selfish (in a metaphorical sense), but if so, it’s selfish about genes, not individuals. The
The “goals” of natural selection transcend our bodies.
From the perspective of natural selection, the “goal” of eating is to sustain the body, to keep it going so that the genes we carry can replicate themselves. But this isn’t what motivates dogs, ants, tigers, and people to eat. We eat because we’re hungry,
When you look at pictures of the interactions, you see the victim’s face contorted in anguish, but you don’t see anguish in the consolers, just concern. If it’s hard to read human minds, it’s really hard to read other species’ minds, but it sure looks as if the chimps care about the creatures they are helping—but are not mirroring their feelings.
violence is part of human nature, shared with other animals, evolved for punishment, defense, and predation. And unless we are transformed into angels, violence and the threat of violence are needed to rein in our worst instincts.
If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest.”
man who went with his wife and children to the beach in Dubai. His older daughter, a twenty-year-old, went out for a swim and started to struggle in the water and scream for help. The father was strong enough to keep two lifeguards from rescuing her. According to a police officer, “He told them that he prefers his daughter being dead than being touched by a strange man.” She drowned. Now you’d be seriously missing the point if you saw the father’s action as the product of sadism, indifference, or psychopathy. It was the product of moral commitment, no different in the father’s mind than if he were struggling to prevent his daughter from being raped.
I concede that empathy can serve as the brakes in certain cases. But I will argue here that it’s just as often the gas —empathy
empathy tilts the scale too much in favor of violent action. It directs us to think about the benefits of war—avenging those who have suffered, rescuing those who are at further risk.
the more empathic people are, the more they want a harsher punishment.
psychopaths and empathy: They do tend to be low in empathy. But there is no evidence that this lack of empathy is responsible for their bad behavior.
For some people, this is why empathy is so important. Empathy blocks dehumanization and allows us to see people as they really are. If so, this would be a powerful case in its favor. Not surprisingly, I reject this view.
Reason is the rudder; rage propels us forward.
To argue for the centrality of deliberative reasoning is seen as philosophically naive, psychologically unsophisticated, and even politically suspect.
regardless of reason’s virtues, we just aren’t any good at it.
Eagleman muses: “It is not clear how much the conscious you—as opposed to the genetic and neural you—gets to do any deciding at all.”
Statistically significant doesn’t mean actually significant. Just because something has an effect in a controlled situation doesn’t mean that it’s important in real life.
nobody will care if you discover that people’s feelings about punishments are influenced by the severity of the crimes or the criminal’s past record. This is just common sense.
people often get confused when presented with problems that are expressed in terms of statistical probabilities and abstract scenarios; we are better at reasoning about problems that are expressed in terms of frequencies of events, which is just what we would expect based on the circumstances under which our minds have evolved.
every demonstration of our irrationality is also a demonstration of how smart we are,
high intelligence is not only related to success; it’s also related to good behavior.
Self-control can be seen as the purest embodiment of rationality
cultural values that prize self-control are good for a society.
“superior reason and understanding” and “self-command.” The first is important because it enables us to appreciate the consequences of our actions in the future: You can’t act to make the world better if you aren’t smart enough to know which action will achieve that goal. The second—which we would now call self-control—is critical as well, as it allows us to abstain from our immediate appetites to focus on long-term consequences.
This sure does look stupid. But there is another way to think about these findings. Yes, certain political attitudes and beliefs might not be the products of careful reasoning, but perhaps they’re not supposed to be. Think about sports fans.
Political views share an interesting property with views about sports teams—they don’t really matter.
Unless I’m a member of a tiny powerful community, my beliefs have no effect on the world. This is certainly true as well for my views about the flat tax, global warming, and evolution. They don’t have to be grounded in truth, because the truth value doesn’t have any effect on my life.
failure of people to attend to data in the political domain does not reflect a limitation in their capacity for reason. It reflects how most people make sense of politics. They don’t care about truth because, for them, it’s not really about truth.
We are not more empathic than our great-grandparents. We really don’t think of humanity as our family and we never will. Rather, our concern for others reflects a more abstract appreciation that regardless of our feelings, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.