The Empathy Trap

Dec 12, 2016 Peter Singer

Our emotions often motivate us to do what is right, but they are equally likely to motivate us to do what is wrong. In making ethical decisions, it is our ability to reason – not our ability to feel the pain of others – that should play a crucial role.

PRINCETON – Soon after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, he told a young girl: “We don’t have enough empathy in our world today, and it is up to your generation to change that.” Obama expressed a widespread view, so the title of a new book, Against Empathy, by Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom, comes as a shock. How can anyone be against something that enables us to put ourselves in others’ shoes and feel what they feel?

To answer that question, we might ask another: For whom should we have empathy? As Donald Trump prepares to succeed Obama, analysts are suggesting that Hillary Clinton lost last month’s election because she lacked empathy with white Americans, particularly Rust Belt voters yearning for the days when the US was a manufacturing powerhouse. The problem is that empathy for American workers is in tension with empathy for workers in Mexico and China, who would be even worse off without jobs than their American counterparts are.

Empathy makes us kinder to people with whom we empathize. That’s good, but it also has a darker side. Trump, in his campaign speeches, made use of the tragic murder of Kate Steinle by an undocumented immigrant to stoke support for his anti-immigrant policies. He did not, of course, offer any similarly vivid portrayals of undocumented immigrants who have saved the lives of strangers, although such cases have been reported.

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Peter Singer

Writing for PS since 2001
191 Commentaries

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and founder of the non-profit organization The Life You Can Save. His books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason), Rethinking Life and Death, The Point of View of the Universe, co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, The Most Good You Can Do, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, One World Now, Ethics in the Real World, Why Vegan?, and Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction, also with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. In 2013, he was named the world's third "most influential contemporary thinker" by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.

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Tom W Dec 19, 2016

This is an essential message for our times. Calling for "more empathy" has become the latest bromide. The context of such statements often implies that reason - or any analytical and scientific approach - is at odds with empathy and that empathy is equivalent to compassion. Proposals that "feel cold" are rejected in favor of those that make the observer feel good, even if there is a net harm.
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John Cowan Dec 18, 2016

What, because we leftists don't think blind loyalty, authoritarianism, and sanctimony count as moral virtues?
- John Cowan Dec 18, 2016
  
  (This was meant to be a response to Amy Boone below.)
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Robert Bruce Dec 18, 2016

I think the author is badly abusing the true meaning of empathy. I strongly suggest reading an in-depth explanation from a leading expert such as Roman Krznaric, who knows what he is talking about. If you are short on time, try this short youtube video by Krznaric on "The Power of Outrospection".

https://youtu.be/BG46IwVfSu8

This explains there are two key forms of empathy. The most obvious is "shared emotional response" which emphasises how human beings share the same feelings. If we are hurt we all feel pain, so we can "sympathise" with others who are suffering, and if our favourite team scores a goal we all share the feeling of celebration together.

The less intuitive, but far more powerful form of empathy is "perspective taking". This is when we try to enter into the experience of people who are very different to us. A straight man can seek to understand what it might feel like to be gay, even though he can never share these feelings. A Democrat may hate the policies advanced by a right wing Republican, but can still seek to understand why they might think differently. It is only by taking the perspective of others, particularly those who we disagree with, that we come to a more respectful understanding of how their own history and experience might have led them to have needs, or hold views that we may fail to understand.

Empathy is not about a cuddly World where we all learn to love others and help them out at our own expense. It is in fact about undrstanding that our own judgements are always subjective, as each of us can only ever truely experience life from one point of view. However, by exploring our understanding or "empathy" for others, we broaden this perspective in ways than enable compromise and cooperation, even when this means dealing with people who may hold very different values and beliefs to our own.

This is all very basic psychology 101. If Paul Bloom is trying to point out that decisions should be taken on a rational rather than purely emotional basis, than I am in full agreement. But if we want to take rational decisions it is essential to gain a proper understanding of the true emotional needs of others, rather than just assuming we can project our own feelings about the World onto them.

Perhaps Mr Bloom needs a better understanding of his chosen subject. Krznaric would be an excellent starting point.
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Marcelo Menegali Dec 18, 2016

My first reaction to this post was negative, but then I understood that it's a semantic problem: the author and I use the same words (i.e., "empathy" and "compassion") to refer to different ideas.

From Wikipedia:
- Empathy: "Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other being's frame of reference."
- Compassion: "Compassion is the response to the suffering of others that motivates a desire to help."

My use of the words match those in Wikipedia, while the author's use of the words seems to be the exact opposite.
- Tom W Dec 19, 2016
  
  Thank you for posting those definitions, but by my reading of the article the author is using those terms according to those definitions. The example of the Buddhist certainly aligns with those definitions. All of the examples the author provides also align with the definition of empathy that you posted.
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AMY BOONE Dec 18, 2016

This very subject is dealt with by Jonathan Haidt in his (non-partisan) work described in The Righteous Mind, specifically, the "moral matrices" which Haidt finds correlated with political positioning on the left-right spectrum. Right-of-centre types give more equal weight to a range of six basic elements of moral reasoning, whereas left-of-centre types prioritise "compassion" (empathy), equality, and fairness (yes I know those are relative and mushy terms, but Haidt defines them in greater detail) to the near exclusion of other values. The problem with relying on compassion (particularly to a perceived underdog) as a main consideration to policy-making is that competing values (public good, societal order, etc.) are lost, with the predictable cost to levels of order, public good, etc. Hence the way in which some in western societies fear a mass influx of those with different (and not particularly compatible) values because of the potential harm to societal order, but this can be practically neutralised with the poignant: "Have you no compassion?"
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Christine Constable Dec 17, 2016

Peter, I fear that the loss of "empathy" is commensurate to the massive increase in the world's population. We are suffring from a huge population explosion which has been quietly growing and growing until it has burst out of the confines of Africa and the Middle and Far East and has made its way to the West.

The world is creaking under the weight of billions of the worlds disadvantaged and lost fleeing war torn and tyrannical regimes; global warming; lack of opportunity and grinding poverty.

We can all be empathetic when the first few hundred migrants come through the door, when the trickle turns into a tsunami empathy will become short on the ground because the issues are massive and self preservation comes before empathy to the stranger.

It is clear that if the billions of poor and dispossed are to get a slice of the cake then that cake must be given by the west to the rest of the world - under those conditions western "empathy" becomes a rare commodity as the question to be asked your family or the incomer? Who will you "empathise" with first?
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Karen Davis Dec 15, 2016

A question is why, if most people presumably are more attracted to "cute" creatures with "big eyes" than they are to others, why would they be more likely to empathize with robots than with chickens or fish? Why would they empathize with insentient objects more readily than with alive, sentient individuals? Also, not only emotion, but logic and reason, detached from emotion, may produce just as much havoc, cruelty and injustice, and be just as blind, as unregulated emotion. It is true, as suggested, that sadism involves "empathy" with the victim, as in "I feel your pain and it gives me pleasure to vicariously experience your suffering."
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Emanuel Müller Dec 14, 2016

Empathy as "feeling in" is a very important psychological tool, notably a torturer that doesn't use, or isn't able to use empathy might be very limited in his ability to extract information, as he is not able to finely assess if the psychological or physical technics applied do really hurt the torturee in the desired way. Similarly, the power surge that rapists are allegedly addicted to does seem to require empathy, the ability to feel the pain inflicted inside of the victim, with the apparent exception of rape cases on sleeping victims or even dead victims, which might originate in a different type of psychological mechanism.

Compassion as "suffering with" is a different matter, as by definition it consist in sharing the subjective situation of the other and is allegedly a natural state of mind for the "awakened" mind, that is free from duality in buddhism, in the sense that the mind doesn't e.g. think that anything exist per se, independently from space, space that is in turn a continuum.

Ethical norms, as derived from what is subjectively perceived as right or wrong , change from place to place and from period to period. The aspiration for truly "master" ethical norms that can be accessed and followed rationally might be originating in the emotional need for an attachment to something reassuring, fixed, outside of us, that if complied to, will insure our safety, however "the thought that phenomenons dependent on causes or conditions are real is ignorance", in other words nothing exists per se.

Matthieu Ricard as a biochemist turned buddhist lama is an interesting figure that can reveal a lot about the people's tendency to be cultural-centric or ethnocentric. For example a westerner will believe it to be true if a "specialist" says that carbon has six protons, because he knows that if he want to prove it to himself, it is available to him to study physics and to ultimately redo the lab work. However as buddhist lamas are specialists from a different culture, if ,e.g. they say there is such a thing as reincarnation, we will be tempted to dismiss it as simply beliefs by less advanced people, that will be dispelled with time, instead of realizing that it is also available to us to do the study and work necessary to perceive and understand reincarnation.

Something more self evident happens in mathematics, where we can admit that statement X has been proven if the "specialists" say so, however if we don't have to background to read the proof we will not be able to understand it. Once we have done the study, we can understand the proof, but only internally to ourself, as to someone that doesn't have the tools to understand it we will not be able to show that we understood it and why we understood it.
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jean nutson Dec 14, 2016

Passion and total commitments to what one does seem to be the strongest driving force of events and proceedings in the world rather than empathy,sympathy,kindness etc. and should be the guidelines to the study of human behavioral patterns.
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vivek iyer Dec 13, 2016

Both empathy and reasoning skills are the product of evolution and characterize deceptive behavior- e.g. pretending some action, we happen to be championing for a tactical reason, is ethically or aesthetically right, or soteriologicially efficacious, whereas some other action is shameful or wicked.

It makes sense to give money in charity to people you don't care about because you gain 'obligatory passage point status' in certain decision making processes from which you can personally benefit and, more importantly, it's fun, when times get tough, to cut off without a penny the victims of your charity.
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Curtis Carpenter Dec 12, 2016

If an individual lacks the ability to empathize, the question of who or what (s)he will empathize with seems moot doesn't it?.

I look forward to the author's essay on "the compassion trap," since that argument too can be made -- and along similar lines. Also an essay on "the reason trap" since there is ample evidence that it too can lead us to do the wrong things, particularly where normative issues are involved.
- Curtis Carpenter Dec 19, 2016
  
  That's not the way I read it Tom W. At best, Singer is saying that empathy is a crap shoot.
  
  Deontic and utilitarian attitudes toward ethics want to put reason at center stage. But I subscribe to Hume's view of the passions and reason, and believe that virtue ethics take a more balanced approach to the emotional content of ethical decisions.
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- Tom W Dec 19, 2016
  
  Read the final sentence of the article "Empathy and other emotions often motivate us to do what is right, but they are equally likely to motivate us to do what is wrong. In making ethical decisions, our ability to reason has a crucial role to play."
  
  The author clearly means that empathy is important in motivating us to do good and that reason is essential in harnessing that emotion so that we are not simply reacting to our own emotions in ways that may harm.
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Peter Schaeffer Dec 12, 2016

From "Shooting of Kathryn Steinle"

"On July 1, 2015, a man fired a stolen gun on Pier 14 in the Embarcadero district in San Francisco, California. The bullet ricocheted off the pavement, then struck 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle in the back, causing her to die two hours later at a hospital. A homeless man, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, was arrested and charged with murder.

Lopez-Sanchez is an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had previously been deported on five different occasions. The shooting sparked controversy and political debate over San Francisco's status as a sanctuary city. President-elect Donald Trump has cited Lopez-Sanchez in support of his proposal to deport foreign nationals living illegally in the United States, and mentioned Steinle during his acceptance speech at the Republican national convention."
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Peter Schaeffer Dec 12, 2016

So much for online integrity. A comment pointing out the illegal aliens are "illegal" gets deleted. Apparently, we have entered the "post-truth" era where only PC rhetoric is allowed.
- Tom W Dec 19, 2016
  
  An individual speeding on the highway is committing an illegal act. We would say the driver is "speeding", which identifies it as an illegal act. The term "undocumented" sounds like an administrative detail, whereas the term "illegal" makes clear that a crime is being committed. I personally dislike the term "illegal aliens", preferring phrases like, "people in the country illegally" that, though more cumbersome, contain the truth of the illegal act while reminding us that these are *people*, not scary "aliens". (And most of them in the United State are very good people, IMO, even though they are breaking a law.)
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- John Cowan Dec 18, 2016
  
  People who speed on the highway are illegal too. So what? They are "us" and illegal immigrants are "them", that''s what.
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Peter Schaeffer Dec 12, 2016

The correct term is "illegal aliens", not "undocumented immigrants". Illegals have lots of documents... Ids from their own countries, stolen ids from Americans, etc. They are heavily documented, not just legal in the USA. An immigrant is defined (under U.S. law) as a lawful permanent resident of the U.S. Illegals are (wait for it), illegal.
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Jose araujo Dec 12, 2016

I think this is an article more against Fallacies and Demagogy than against empathy.

And for sure empathy is used a lot in demagogy, but is also something missing in a psychopath personality, which unfortunately is becoming the norm in our leaderships.
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