The problems caused by empathy

From the transcript, lightly edited :

The sense of empathy that I'm concerned about is the capacity to put yourself in the shoes of other people and feel what they feel. I hate terminological arguments. I don't care what you call it. But my argument is that feeling the suffering of other people, experiencing their pain—many people view this as the core of morality. I think this is mistaken. I think it makes us worse people. Empathy is morally corrosive, and we're better off without it.

No matter what kind of empathy fan you are, you've got to acknowledge that it's not essential to moral judgement. There are all sorts of things we appreciate that are wrong even if we can't find anybody to empathize with—any identifiable victim. Throwing trash out of your car window or cheating on your taxes or contributing to climate change—you can't point to somebody and say, "Well, that person is going to suffer," but you might still view these as morally wrong.

Then there are cases where empathy can clash with other moral values. A wonderful example is by the empathy scholar Dan Batson. He tells a story of an eight-year-old girl named Sheri Summers.

Sheri Summers is going to die. There's nothing you can do about that. But there's a treatment you could give her that will alleviate her suffering and pain. The problem is she's low on the line for treatment. She'll die before she could get it because others kids have been waiting longer and are in even more desperate need.

You ask people: "Would you move her up the line? You're a hospital administrator. You just move her to the top line," knowing that if you do so, some other kid is going to move down the line.

Most people say no. They say: "It's too bad, but if it's a fair list, we should leave things as they are." Another group of people get exactly the same story but are told something. They're asked: "Put yourself in her shoes. Feel her pain." Now, all of a sudden, responses shift, and people want to move her up. Batson points out that this is a case where empathy leads us astray; it overrides other moral motivations that we should be keeping in mind.

My critique is stronger. I think empathy really is like a spotlight. It zooms you in on people... like a spotlight, we could point it in the wrong places, so it's subject to bias and myopia, and like a spotlight, it's insensitive to numbers. It's innumerate and ultimately irrational.

The psychologist Paul Slovic noticed that when Natalee Holloway went missing, there was 18 times more network coverage devoted to her than to the ongoing crisis in Darfur, which took the lives of tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of people... There are numerous experiments showing that you care more about one person than eight people if your attention is drawn to the person as an individual.

It turns out that analyses, even at the time, suggested that the furlough program was working, that is, because of the program, there were fewer assaults, fewer murders, and fewer rapes. But our emotions are insensitive to that sort of data. It is easy to feel tremendous empathy for someone who is assaulted or raped, but you can't feel empathy for some statistical abstraction of people who would have been raped but weren't.

Whenever politicians in a democratic society want to incite anger and hatred against a group and want to motivate a group to war, they tells stories about victims—sometimes true, sometimes not true—and our feelings for the victims. I remember, for instance, that the horrific stories of Saddam Hussein's monster sons and the atrocities they've committed energized us, and our empathy them energizes us to want to strike out.

If you could forgive me an anecdote, my uncle was ill last year with cancer. We were in Boston. I went with him to see different doctors. The sort of doctors he got along well with, he liked, were ones not who felt his anxiety, not who mirrored his anxiety, his worry, and his stress, but were respectful, confident, clear, and honest, ones who didn't echo his suffering but rather responded to it. You don't want to mirror people; you want to respond to them with love, compassion, and caring.

It's true that psychopaths—you can do a psychopath test; you could all do it online—one of the features is low empathy. But it's also true that of all the features of psychopathy, low empathy has zero predictive power when it comes to predicting bad behaviour toward people. What really matters in predicting whether a psychopath is going to reoffend are issues like aggression and lack of self-control.

Experiment after experiment... finds that when you're in an empathic state, it activates different parts of your brain than when you're in a compassionate state. But more to the point, they find that compassion invigorates you. It leads to more helping. Empathy exhausts. Compassion charges you up. It makes people better helpers, more efficient helpers, and kinder helpers.

Also reminds me of this :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qjy-ydl9QE

Originally shared by Joe Carter

Those of us that feed on the passion bound vision produced by hyper moral ideas that are built on comparing what is to some form of Utopian expectation of what could or "should" be, tend to think that taxing or even destroying the current system in service of that Utopian vision will result in the realization of it, rather than the destruction of both.

It is shallow thinkers that become drunk on moralistic passion that are the most dangerous to the stability of fruitful relationships, including the stability of social structures are indeed imperfect and can be improved, but that also work. Nature provides propositions that are bloody and bloodier, not perfect and imperfect. It is those of us that demand perfection with too much zeal that sacrifice what is possible on the altar of those expectations of perfection now.

One of the axioms that feeds this recurrent tragedy of the shallow minded commons is the fact that power, influence and status can be mined by sowing discontent on a foundation of promised perfection. It is like the cheap comic that wins laughs on fiery insults or attacks on the things held sacred which also are the bones of coherent social structure. Power hungry political parasites reap a harvest of power by sowing discontent. It is like inviting the community to a celebratory victory meal but failing to mention that community is what is on the menu.

Those of us who believe these shallow thoughts that render the world into a false clarity of either “good or bad” become erronously convinced that the image we is correct because it is clear. In this case we lose sight of the larger, scarier and messier picture of reality in a shower of our own moralistic masturbations . We lose sight of the sacrifices our push will make in tribute to the unrealistic ideas we see so clearly; and when the destruction comes on the heels of this well intentioned folly, the only prize to console ourselves in those ashes from the believers will be more pointed fingers, still clinging to a false vision of a world of either angels or demons. A society that values real contributions to progress must be able to tell the difference between glamorous and significant. Significance doesn't get the recognition that best serves real progress in a society that worships the superficial. When we find and highlight the “problem” with one hand, and preserve it with the other because it's the social currency of status and power, we drown in a parasitic cesspool of blame, becoming the authors of our own poverty.

Can we be better? Of course we can. Should we? Of course, but to cultivate our best it takes a certain recognition on a zeitgeist level that our common ground is Earth, that our growth, and mature conversion of opportunity to experience happens when we cultivate each other's potential, not when we feed on each other. When we see our common enemy as things like cancer and poverty and a failure to cultivate places where people can contribute effectively are fostered and strengthened, not weakened, when we see that the enemy is not each other, then we can realize our mature potential. Then we can know that revolution is not the same as resolution; that revolution merely shifts the role of oppressed and oppressor, and that resolution is built on having each other's backs to face our common enemy, not being on each other's backs, making ourselves the enemy. The third estate (we the commoners) need to resist being carved up on the table of the manipulator class that divides the population in service of their narrow ends. I could be missing something(s)

I think Paul Bloom has a fair point about the danger of falling into the trap of hyper empathetic identity and action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6J9dI4QniY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6J9dI4QniY