
Against Empathy - gmays
http://bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy
======
psweber
"Against Empathetic Distress" or "Against Excessive Empathy" would have been a
more accurate titles. Based on the actual title, I was hoping for something
more interesting/surprising :P

TLDR; Don't just mirror the feelings of those you love, understand their
feelings and use that information in a truly helpful way.

~~~
ewzimm
I have gone my whole life thinking that this was the definition of empathy,
understanding other people's feelings and how they are connected to their
behavior. I always thought the concept of feeling what someone else feels was
a metaphor for understanding it, because how could anyone ever know what
emotions are running through someone else's mind? Emotions are chaotic and
very particular to millions of unique chemical and electrical reactions in in
the brain, which are then interpreted by someone's unique experience.

I can't say I ever thought I felt what someone else was feeling, so maybe I
just have no empathy. I also don't ever get angry, so maybe that's related. (I
make one exception for misbehaving computers with no clear reason or solution,
but I'd call that frustration.)

So generally, I agree with the author that understanding others and responding
in supportive ways is much more useful than feeling what you think they are
feeling. I am just skeptical that anyone would argue, and I would be surprised
if that's what the quoted people had in mind.

------
gwern
A longer treatment is available in “Is Empathy Necessary For Morality?”
[http://subcortex.com/IsEmpathyNecessaryForMoralityPrinz.pdf](http://subcortex.com/IsEmpathyNecessaryForMoralityPrinz.pdf)
(excerpts:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/7xr/not_by_empathy_alone/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/7xr/not_by_empathy_alone/)
)

------
practicalpants
I think his point is relatively obvious: Empathy is not a substitute for
analysis of moral consequences (societal consequences). Understanding how
someone feels should not guide the way we evaluate their actions or decisions,
the trite example being rather evil people in history genuinely believed what
they were doing was good - if you just "looked from their shoes" you might
altogether miss the evilness of what they were doing.

Many people claim that without empathy there would be moral chaos. They are
equivalent to people who claim that without religion there would be moral
chaos. Empathy is not the basis of morality.

------
matthewwiese
The author offers a fair amount of utilitarian arguments, which can be debated
ad infinitum. No matter your stance on this issue, I don't believe

> Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse
> than one

is valid. Who are we to make such decisions? I myself believe utilitarianism
is a real good tool for assisting in these moral dilemmas, but not
particularly useful here.

On a personal note, I don't believe in this "removal of empathy" idea that's
been tossed around by a few psychologists. If psychopaths are effectively
those people who lack empathy, then who shall we become if we throw it to the
wayside?

~~~
djokkataja
> Who are we to make such decisions?

We have to make these decisions all the time whenever we vote or suggest
perspectives to influence friends and acquaintances about one public policy or
another. If we don't make the decisions, someone else will, and it matters for
things like how we respond to acts of terrorism, road safety laws, funding for
the treatment of diseases, and so on. And ignoring the moral weightiness of
the decisions doesn't remove the consequences or our responsibility for
ourselves as a society.

> On a personal note, I don't believe in this "removal of empathy" idea that's
> been tossed around by a few psychologists. If psychopaths are effectively
> those people who lack empathy, then who shall we become if we throw it to
> the wayside?

The author suggested that cultivating compassion for others without choosing
to imagine the experience of suffering their pain may be a better way to help
other people. He uses some examples of Buddhists who choose to devote their
lives to helping other people--they avoid experiencing empathic attachment
because it burns them out, which would defeat their entire purpose. So if we
throw empathy to the wayside, we might become more like Buddhist monks, if you
want to read into it that way. The author proposes moderation more than
extremes one way or the other, though; he recognizes that some degree of
empathy is health in relating to other people.

Anecdotally, I agree with the author's perspectives because of my own
experiences. For the past year I had a close family member who was
hospitalized and continuously in pain. It was really impossible to allow
myself to empathize strongly with her every time I saw her, because it would
have been too psychologically exhausting to continue visiting on a regular
basis.

~~~
matthewwiese
> We have to make these decisions all the time whenever we vote or suggest
> perspectives to influence friends and acquaintances about one public policy
> or another. If we don't make the decisions, someone else will, and it
> matters for things like how we respond to acts of terrorism, road safety
> laws, funding for the treatment of diseases, and so on. And ignoring the
> moral weightiness of the decisions doesn't remove the consequences or our
> responsibility for ourselves as a society.

You make a good point. It is (more often than not) better to make the tough
decisions as opposed to passively going with someone else's choice or not
taking a position at all.

> He uses some examples of Buddhists who choose to devote their lives to
> helping other people--they avoid experiencing empathic attachment because it
> burns them out, which would defeat their entire purpose.

I see where the author comes from with this statement, and I think I better
understand his stance. I reacted more emotionally than I should have to this
text and threw out his ideas altogether. However, I still remain wary of its
benefits to larger society as opposed to certain circumstances.

------
boh
I wish I didn't spend so much time reading this article. The rational is
pretty basic and narrows the definition of empathy to make the argument more
plausible.Despite the author's claim empathy can be defined as the general
understanding of other people rather than a biased attitude towards good
looking people. Also, empathy doesn't only apply to kindness. It can be argued
that both Lincoln and Hitler had empathy, given their ability to understand
and deal with other people. Decisions are rarely made based solely on empathy.
The point of excluding it completely from the decision making process hasn't
been explained very well by the author.

This is an opinion a piece, and I disagree with the opinion.

------
ianbicking
On the public policy side, I have begun to wonder if empathy-based theories of
social change get in the way of the goals of social justice movements. That
is, social justice movements are pining after something they cannot achieve
through empathy, and are distracted from their goals as a result.

A rather pedestrian example, I was having a discussion about transit planning
with a group of people. Despite the less than enthusiastic reception transit
gets from typical middle class white people, there's still a sense that the
system is biased towards them, and doesn't serve communities of color/etc as
well. The modern urbanist sensibility here is to have community engagement,
neighborhood meetings, etc. All very grassroots. But who shows up to these
things? Older white educated people mostly, usually with negative opinions to
share. In this discussion people were very concerned about how we could get
more representation from other communities, how we could hold more of these
meetings in relevant neighborhoods, at times when working people could attend,
etc.

The underlying logic of this participatory model is basically empathetic.
People individually express themselves so that they can influence each other
and the decision makers. They do this through empathy. The decision makers are
generally more white, more privileged, more educated (and we can't expect to
recruit more uneducated urban planners!) These people will be more receptive
to perspectives coming from people like them. The response is often to
increase the participation, be more inclusive, broaden the perspective. But
minorities will always lose out, increasing participation doesn't disrupt that
empathy bias. You can have more meetings in neighborhoods with minorities, and
the white people even in those neighborhoods will _still_ out-influence the
minorities.

Can we fix the empathy problem in policing by getting more minorities on the
force? That has not seemed very effective. Can we create better services for
minorities by listening to their needs and responding? Eh, the best I've seen
is people feel listened to, which is too often the substitute for real change.
So I wonder if instead we stop relying on empathy in these circumstances, as
emotionally attached as we are on the idea of empathy.

Going back to the original example, if we want to design a decent transit
system we need to ditch the community feedback and go to data. In that model
everyone is counted the same. Hidden bias isn't enough to create a model where
a black person as 3/5 of a white person. And of course people still select
models based on feedback, and that feedback will be biased, but it's way
better than what we have now. Instead of trying to fix bias in order to fix
social injustice, I think we'd do better constructing systems that remove the
effect of bias in those places – which is the opposite of what most social
justice advocates intend when they suggest we address the "root" of the
problem.

~~~
gohrt
What data do you propose? There is data -- data from surveys that the "older,
middle-class white people" fill in.

Empathy means understanding other people's experience, not using oneself as
the only use case.

~~~
ianbicking
If your data is "who talks at the meeting" then yes, it would be the same. But
we have statistical methods to get data much better than that, including
correcting for different response rates to surveys.

My argument is that we are predisposed, perhaps inevitably, to have more
empathy with people like ourselves, and so removing empathy (rather than
trying to fix it) may in some cases be the best way to get a fair result.

~~~
jacobolus
How do you suggest “removing empathy” from the decisionmaking process?

Basically, as far as I can tell, you’re advocating pulling the “politics” out
of “policy”, but that’s really damn difficult, perhaps impossible. Just
stating it as a goal is not useful, without some kind of concrete proposal.

The people in charge are always going to advance their own interests, and
there’s no way anyone has figured out to put a completely impartial and
dispassionate authority in charge of a government.

The way the US does things (ideally; in theory) is to build a system of checks
and balances in the government, and try to spread the power widely enough in
the population (e.g. via elections of local representatives who meet together
to make policy) that any particular group is unable to exert their will
without some measure of consensus and cooperation from everyone else.

The problem in practice is that some groups have gained so much power and
wealth, compared to everyone else, that they can game and coopt many or most
of these institutions; meanwhile, other groups have so little power or
visibility that they are effectively unrepresented.

I guarantee you, if you build an institution designed to be “empathy free” —
for instance, some board of highly trained unelected technocrats — to make
decisions, their process will be analyzed and gamed to the extent possible by
the super-rich.

~~~
noobermin
I'd add that emotion cannot be uncoupled from some policy decisions. A
wonderful example is gay marriage. There is no "data" one can fit to decide
whether it is right or wrong to permit/recognize as valid. If all US states
decided to legalize gay marriage or ban it, there is no way anyone could
decide whether it was a "net benefit" to society, mostly because homosexuals
are a minority of the population. The rights of any minority, granted they are
small enough to be but a ringing ontop of your signal, it shouldn't matter if
you are just thinking like a utilitarian.

So, from whence comes individual rights? The usual argument is, "imagine if
that were you!"\--that's empathy. More seriously, we guarantee individual
rights for others because that means we have them for ourselves.

This leads to my second point: I think the reason empathy even is a thing is
that we are inherently selfish, and for anything to be really done for the
"greater good" individuals need to either have a stake in that greater good or
they need to trick their selfish selves into thinking they are actually in
that situation too, which, again is empathy.

Empathy works for the most part. It sounds like the author is trying to fix
something that isn't broken. I'd say the current problems in Washington are in
fact a lack of both listening to data _and_ a lack of empathy. I think more
empathy would be beneficial, not detrimental.

~~~
pixl97
>there is no way anyone could decide whether it was a "net benefit" to
society,

That's a viewpoint problem in itself. Liberties and individual rights should
never be added because they are a 'net benefit'. I see the converse as being
true, liberties and individual rights should only be removed if they are a
significant detriment to society. In your example of gay marriage there is no
data that it is harmful, therefore no reason to prohibit such actions.

Of course proving something is harmful is not a carte blanche to prohibit most
actions. For example our 'war on drugs' motivated as doing good against the
evils of drugs as turned into a rather harmful system in itself. Other systems
that treat drug users rather than punishing them have much better outcomes.

------
istjohn
AGAINST AGAINST EMPATHY

This article is linkbait without real substance. It's smooth legerdemain to
make a false statement become seemingly true, not by insight, but by guile.
Yes empathy can be maladaptive in as much as emotion without reason can
mislead and anything in excess can be harmful, but empathy is usually
understood to mean nothing more than recognizing other people as individuals
both separate from ourselves and joined with us in our shared humanity.
Inasmuch as they are separate from us, they have a unique perspective, and
inasmuch as they share our humanity, we can imagine what their subjective
experience might be. When Obama exhorts us to practice empathy, he is asking
us to humanize the human elements we too often objectify. He asks us to go
beyond the boxes of politics, race, culture, class, and nationality we divide
the world into, and to see the human experiences of others. And we all know
that's what he's saying, and that's what others advocate when they extol
empathy. Yes, empathy can go wrong, especially when you consider all of the
different concepts that are tagged with that word. But if anything, the
article reinforces the importance of empathy as commonly meant and understood
by outlining the exceptions that prove the rule.

------
AlisdairO
> In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more
> moral once we put empathy aside.

I think the problem is less that we relate more to the few than the many, and
more that we don't really relate to the many at all. Junking caring as much
about individuals will likely just result in us not caring enough about
_anyone_.

~~~
Contero
I found it odd that the author seems to think that empathy for the individual
is somehow at odds with caring for the many, instead of being closely
correlated. As if removing empathy would somehow get people to care more about
each other, rather than less.

