Against Empathy

http://bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy

by gmays • 12 years ago

60 27 12 years ago

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?

tekacs2• 12 years ago

If naught else, psychopaths of the sort you mention are surely then those with all the more comprehensive control of themselves, through their ability to better regulate their emotion? That sounds like a useful quality in stable figures of authority or indeed anyone who would prefer to limit their irrational judgement.

gwern2• 12 years ago

If naught else, psychopaths of the sort you mention are surely then those with all the more comprehensive control of themselves, through their ability to better regulate their emotion?

Regular psychopaths are a poor example here because one of the features of the disorder is a lack of control; they are impulsive and unable to balance risk with reward in gambling tests, and can have difficulty classifying others' emotions. (See the _Handbook of Psychopathy_.) They are more 'broken' than 'empathy selectively turned off', so it's not clear what, if anything, you could learn from them.

gohrt2• 12 years ago

Especially because, in practice,

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

usually means

"a hundred deaths [of our in-group] are worse than one [of our team, plus a thousand of an out-group]"

djokkataja• 12 years ago

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.

matthewwiese3• 12 years ago

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.

aidenn0• 12 years ago

> Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one
Who are we to make such decisions?

We are human beings who have free will. Do you suggest we allow both the hundred and the one to die, given that we lack the resources to save both?

matthewwiese3• 12 years ago

Oh not at all. I'm not well-read enough to make such decisions. Though not it good to pose such a question for the sake of discussion.

eli_gottlieb• 12 years ago

Who are we to make such decisions?

Answer: decent, thinking people who can spot that we want our government to consider us to have moral weight, and therefore vote in favor of considering all citizens to hold equal moral weight before the State. Or, as certain textbooks on insurance or law teach: when we "refuse for moral reasons" to put a finite price on a human life, what we are actually de facto doing is setting a surprisingly low price on human life. The trade-offs don't go away just because we feel uncomfortable making them!

gwern2• 12 years ago

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

ianbicking2• 12 years ago

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.

gohrt2• 12 years ago

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.

ianbicking2• 12 years ago

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.

mrxd• 12 years ago

I agree that empathy is ineffective for the social justice movement. We wouldn't empathize equally with a slave-owner and a slave, or a Nazi and Jew. Justice isn't achieved by listening to both sides and trying to find a middle ground.

psweber• 12 years ago

"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• 12 years ago

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.

vacri• 12 years ago

Thanks for the TLDR - I was struggling with the low contrast, given the verbosity and the long time coming to the point.

I was getting the sense that the author had decided to use a twisted definition of empathy, and came to a series of faulty conclusions because of that. At the start, the author says "When I say empathy, I mean sympathy", in which case... the term "sympathy" should be used. In my experience, people don't use them interchangably; sympathy is feeling sorry or happy for someone, empathy is understanding where (and why) that person is coming from. Or at least, trying to.

I got through a third of the article and it really started shaping up as "I don't like sympathy" rather than empathy; starting from faulty premises, the author gets to have his 'shock value' statement, but it's not accurate.

AlisdairO• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

practicalpants• 12 years ago

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.

istjohn• 12 years ago

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.

boh• 12 years ago

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.

Against Empathy

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