Do we need less empathy and morality?

An edited version of this article was printed in Humanism Ireland, November-December, Vol. 149 (2014) 

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mpathy is the capacity to recognise the feelings of others in such a way that one can identify and understand the experiences of another being’s circumstances. It is where one can transfer one’s own feelings and emotions onto the subjective experiences of another. The term ‘empathy’ has been only around for less than a century, and is a translation of a German psychologist's neologism whose exact definition is ‘feeling into’.

One remarkable thing about humans is their ability to empathise with the suffering of others. The idea of empathy being a positive trait is widely accepted, since it normally stimulates motivation for moral and altruistic behaviour. As expected, many believe that if people had more empathy and moral motivation the world would be a much better place. In his book, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty (2011), the cognitive neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen argues that violence of any sort takes place in the absence of empathy—something he terms ‘empathy erosion’. And the American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, has claimed that one of the main ingredients for world citizenship and to cultivate humanity is to empathise with others and put oneself in their place. 

The call for more empathy is also something we hear some politicians conveying: Barack Obama, for instance, said that when we choose to “empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.”  More recently, the British Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, claimed that “decency and empathy are the most underrated virtues” in politics.  

However, not everybody sees empathy as the main driver for moral progress, nor something we need if humankind is to survive environmental destruction, violence and war. In an article for the New Yorker last year, the Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom declared that “[e]mpathy has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.”

Bloom refers to several examples to support his view. Firstly, our empathy and subsequent sense of generosity are often triggered by the sort of circumstances we are acquainted with. He cites one study where a group of subjects were asked how much money they would be willing to give in order to help develop a drug that would save the life of a child, and then asked another group how much they would give to save eight children. The answers were much the same for both. However, when a third group were also given a child’s name, age, and photo the donations increased significantly.

Similarly, after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, the local community was overloaded with so much charity that it became a strain attending to it all. In this way, a sense of pain and desire to help was responsible for the donation of millions of dollars to a relatively affluent community, yet, at the same time, close to 20 million American children go to bed hungry every night, not to mention the estimated one third of all children in developing countries that are living in extreme poverty.

Secondly, empathy can steer us in wrong directions when we are motivated to act honourably, in ways that are often oblivious to—or else unconcerned about—the long-term consequences. Bloom cites another study where subjects were asked what they thought was the best way to take action against a company for creating a vaccine that caused the death of a child. Some of them were told that a higher fine would make the company work harder in order to produce a safer product; others were told that a higher fine would restrain the company from manufacturing the vaccine, and given that there were no viable alternatives on the market, the punishment on the whole would cause more deaths. For most people, however, that didn't matter; they wanted the company to be heavily penalised, no matter what the consequences.

We also see something similar happening in cases where a government proposes restrictions on CO₂ emissions and where opponents then empathise with particular victims, like those who will be harmed by the extra costs and possible business closures. On the other hand, their empathy seems short-sighted; it fails to consider the millions of people at some unidentified future date that will suffer the catastrophic consequences of our current inaction on tackling climate change. It is much easier, on the whole, to empathise with a small identifiable group of people affected by something at present, than a large group of unidentifiable people at some future date, which we can only recognise, at this moment, as numerical abstractions.  Empathy makes us react to terrifying events, like earthquakes and hurricanes, but less so to even worse long-term problems, like global poverty and curing preventable diseases.

Coming from a similar direction, the psychologist Steven Pinker proclaims in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) that harm and suffering are often the result of too much morality; if we were less moralistic, he argues, we would be less inclined to act aggressively. Most violence, contrary to popular belief, is not the calculated and unwarranted administering of harm for its own sake, carried out by someone who is inherently wicked, and imposed on a victim who is honest and good. We often tend to suppose all perpetrators of harm are sadists and psychopaths, but quite often they are ordinary people who act in ways they feel are fair and just. In short, most people do not see themselves as evil or bad.

It is true that some people do bad things purely for sadistic reasons and others for instrumental reasons—like greed, selfishness or ambition—yet, as the psychologist Roy Baumeister points out in Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (1997), a large proportion of violent atrocities are deliberately perpetuated by those who have lofty moral or idealistic aims. “Many of the greatest crimes, atrocities, and calamities of history,” he says, “were deliberately perpetrated by people who honestly and sincerely wanted to do something good.”

Acts like capital punishment, Baumeister claims, are usually conducted as a way of bringing about revenge, retribution and justice. Those who carry out acts like torture, execution, or the invasion of an enemy’s terrain, often have strong moral goals, and consider it the appropriate way of achieving them. Anti-abortion groups, for instance, that act aggressively outside abortion clinics, and on occasion even commit murder, are often carried out by individuals or groups who have strong religious and moral beliefs that abortion is wrong. Political terrorist organisations that detonate explosives in densely populated urban zones, killing innocent bystanders, usually hold strong idealistic motives, and consider the victims of their actions as an unfortunate side effect of their higher moral objective. In other words, the aggressive acts are justified by focusing on the virtue and honourability of the primary goal.

Ideological purity can also be a motivator for a licence to hate. Someone who strongly believes she’s on the side of 'good' is likely to think that those who oppose or reject her view are against the side of 'good'—they are, in turn, 'bad'. To identify them as something less is to dilute one’s own claim of 'good'. Idealism and utopianism, for this reason, can move one to accord a licence to hate. As a result, if you hate your opponents because they are 'bad', then there are strong reasons for you to want to set upon them.

The possession of pure moral ideals can also diminish the opportunity for compromise. As Baumeister explains: “If two countries are fighting over disputed territory and neither can achieve a clear victory on the field, they may make some kind of deal to divide the land in question between them. But it is much harder to make a deal with the forces of evil or to find some compromise in matters of absolute, eternal truth. You can’t sell half your soul to the devil.” (Baumeister’s emphasis).

Some racist groups are also obsessed with purity and fear of contamination—both in the literal and metaphorical sense—from outsiders. Along these lines, they view taking adverse steps against outsiders who threaten their idea of purity as a just cause. Indeed, some fascists of the 20th century often championed a puritanical lifestyle—one that was anti-alcohol, anti-tobacco, anti-gambling, anti-pornography. Numerous religious faiths have also most-liked a puritanical code of behaviour, that moralises certain things that don’t necessarily lead to harm, like homosexuality, artificial contraception, and masturbation.  

Paul Bloom

What are we to make of all this? Should we refrain from encouraging empathy and moralistic sentiments? A community consisting of many empathy-free agents may not be the best way for society to flourish, and I doubt it would be desirable for many either; empathy and a sense of moral virtue, after all, are a central part of what it means to be human. In spite of this, when we are looking for ethical guidelines, we should be sceptical about relying on empathy. It can betray our sense of justice by making us more myopic and less universal in our outlook; it can make us favour someone who is part of the ‘in-group’, at the expense of someone who is in the ‘out-group’, but who needs our support more. If we want to live in a world that is more equal and fair, where we can make the best moral choices available to ourselves, then diminishing our sense of empathy is preferable.  If so, then Bloom is surely right in saying a “reasoned, even counter-empathetic analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences is a better guide to planning for the future than the gut wrench of empathy.”

Someone might say we should try instead to expand the sentiment of empathy more universally, so that it takes everyone’s interest into account. But it is very doubtful that anyone would be capable of empathising with seven billion strangers in the same way they can with their family, friends and acquaintances. The 18th century moral philosopher Adam Smith understood the limits of human moral psychology; in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) he conjures up a scenario where all the inhabitants of China were swallowed up by an massive earthquake, and where a European man of humility, upon hearing the details, expresses strong sorrow at the suffering that was experienced by so many people, but soon afterwards would pursue his business or his pleasure at the same ease and tranquillity as if no earthquake had occurred. However, a much less significant incident, like the thought of losing his finger the following day, would deprive him of sleep that night; most likely he would snore soundly, though, in the knowledge that a hundred million strangers perished in a distant land.

The exercise of reason by itself may also be futile, and it could be that an initial spark of empathy is necessary to inspire moral action; but soon afterwards it has to surrender to something else. In The Expanding Circle (1981) Peter Singer argues that moral instincts can only bring us so far, and if we want to expand our point of view, so that it includes the interest of all humanity, and indeed all sentient beings, then reason is a better guide for moral direction. With this in mind, when we are looking for adequate ways to address problems like climate change, global poverty, and ethnic conflict, it may be important at first to remember that we don’t have to empathise with faraway strangers for us to accept that their lives are as significant as the ones we ourselves hold dear.