Read: Against Empathy

It argues that empathy is a poor motivator for moral decision making, and that rational judgment should be used instead.

One important note to make is he makes a distinction between “cognitive empathy,” or what I might call sympathy, or intellectual understanding of what someone is feeling, and empathy proper, which is actually feeling what they are feeling. He sees value in the first, and empathy below always refers to the second.

Empathy can hijack your decision making. Example of the study of people told the story of a girl waiting in line for a medical procedure involving a transplant, and when people were told her story and made to empathize with her, they would say to move her up in line for the procedure, even when told that the people in front of her were more in need of the life saving procedure. Empathy didn’t pursue justice, but rather it increased special concern for the target of the empathy despite the cost to others. Those told not to view the story empathetically but to remain objective did not say to move her up. Empathy is a spotlight, illuminating one thing but obscuring all else.

Example of cop who shoots a black man, and liberals want you to empathize with the trials the black guy faced and conservatives argue we need to empathize with the difficulty of being a police officer and being put into life or death situations, but neither is a good way to analyze the situation. 

We experience empathy to different amounts for different people. People we identify with or feel sorry for we will have more empathy for. Studies have shown people have more empathy for fans of the same sports team, and for those suffering from an illness if the illness was not a result of their actions.

To be fair and impartial we have to escape empathy and instead apply rules and principles and the calculation of costs and benefits.

Empathy is different and distinct from caring about people. One response to empathy is trying to alleviate a suffering. But another, just as common response is to try to remove the suffering from your vision so you “don’t have to think about it.” Example of the woman in Nazi Germany writing a letter asking the concentration camps to either stop committing in humane acts, or else do them where they aren’t seen from over the wall.

The conclusion of many studies on empathy and good behavior is that high levels of empathy have either no or just a very weak correlation to being a good person. And even more surprisingly, very low levels of empathy don’t predict aggression or bad behavior. 

Chapter 3 has a lot of interesting points on how empathy causes useless/harmful charity. Examples of adopting 3rd world children & actually increasing the demand for such children that orphanages start intimidating single parents to give their kids up, donating food to 3rd world countries and putting their local farmers out of business or enable wars or child slavery to continue, and many more. I am becoming fairly convinced that the real best way to help a 3rd world nation financial is to start/support businesses there, in a capitalist way.

On politics, he wants to present being against empathy as something nonpartisan, that everyone can get behind. And he talks about conservatives who were empathetic like Reagan and liberals who present themselves as problem solvers like Al Gore. And liberals care more about climate control, which isn’t an empathetic argument. Both parties often couch their arguments in empathetic ways. Often the debate is over who to really empathize with, Ex: gun control, immigration. But he does concede that their are on the average empathetic differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals tend to be more empathetic. They care about the moral values of “fairness” and “reducing harm” above things like purity, loyalty, and authority, while conservatives care about all of them more equally. Most interestingly, he mentioned research that concluded that if men were as empathetic as women their would be no gender gap in party affiliation (as women are more empathetic than men). I definitely will remember that point when discussing women’s suffrage and the decline of society.

Shockingly to me, he argues empathy is bad even when applied to intimate relationships. He makes a distinction between empathy and compassion. “In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other; rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s well-being. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.” Uncontrolled empathy makes you suffer when faced with those who are suffering, which can make you less effective at helping. Compassion and empathy show up very differently in brain scans; they are distinct. We can care for people without feeling what they are feeling. Good example of a therapist who would be useless to her clients if she felt hopelessly depressed with every client who suffered from depression. Rather she should have a concern and care for her clients. A similar example is available with doctors. This unempathetic compassion is not coldness or heartlessness.

He argues empathy can be a negative for parenting, as feeling your children’s feelings makes it hard to cause them to suffer now for their long term good. He also says that empathy could be “evolved” primarily for mothers and their children. He didn’t spend enough time on the topic to flesh it out.

He discusses the issue of giving preference to your friends and family over strangers, and whether that is wrong. If one impartially weighed every life as equal, we wouldn’t spend such an inordinate amount of our time and money on ourselves and even our families. He (and I) doesn’t that caring more about your family is wrong. It is reasonable to be willing to do more for your child than a stranger. Blood is thicker than water. (This is the principle that is applied for Nationalism by the way.) But even conceding that, he doesn’t think that validates empathy. Their can be a rational compassion that prioritizes family over strangers, while still caring about strangers. 

Empathy causes violence. Some politicians today say the solution to wars and violence is putting ourselves in the other side’s shoes. More empathy. But ironically, wars are often if not always motivated by empathy itself. When we bomb Syria, we hear tales about the atrocities of Assad, When Israel attacked palestinians, it was in response to the murder of Israeli teens, Nazi hatred of jews started from stories of jewish pedophiles molesting german girls. Empathy is a spotlight, and it is wired to shine on those closest to you. On top of that studies have found that people with higher levels of empathy will actually select harsher punishments for criminals. An interesting tie in to empathy being designed for mothers and their children, a huge effect of empathy is the desire to protect, violently if necessary, those one feels empathy for. 

Good quote on IQ: “Scores are correlated with all sorts of good things, such as steady job performance, staying out of prison, good mental health, being in stable and fulfilling relationships, and even living longer. A long time ago people said things like ‘IQ tests just measure how good you are at doing IQ tests,’ but nobody takes this seriously anymore.”