I already posted How Empathy Makes Us Cruel and Irrational by Gurwinder in my Friday links, but rereading it in order to extract a quote to send to someone, I am convinced it needs more emphasis.
The main use of empathy is to help people form personal connections with others. It’s a social guide, not a moral or judicial guide. And yet people are being encouraged to use empathy as a moral guide, and in this capacity it becomes dangerously delusional.
A chief reason empathy misleads us is that we never empathize with people, only with the people we think they are. We take the bare bones of what we know about them, and flesh the rest out with assumptions. Sometimes we fallaciously use ourselves as the model for them, presuming our own feelings and motivations are theirs. More dangerously still, we begin to idealize them.
Empathy is an act of opening ourselves up to the feelings of others, and in doing so, we become vulnerable to feelings that can cloud our judgment. If we identify too strongly with someone, our emotional connection to them can cause us to behave like their lawyers, engaging in mental gymnastics to defend our idealized image of them.
4 comments:
Is the problem that we can't apply good moral judgment to other people who are in the grip of strong emotions, simply because we have the same flaw in our own moral reasoning? We hear people excuse appalling behavior because they simply felt so strongly in the moment: "I never meant to have the affair, it just happened." I think about Tyler Robinson's father, who must have entered very strongly into his son's anguish, not to mention contending with his own, but he still did the right thing, in part because he expected his son to do the right thing despite his own all-too-palpable anger and terror.
People who are practiced in behaving well, even under the influence of strong feelings that tempt them to buckle, may be able to empathize strongly with others without falling into the error of excusing them. As they say, kindness to the guilty can be cruelty to the innocent.
"Kindness to the guilty can be cruelty to the innocent."
Would people still scream for justice when a black man is killed by the cops if they knew that the one who called the cops in the first place was a battered black woman?
“A chief reason empathy misleads us is that we never empathize with people, only with the people we think they are.”
Yes, exactly. It was conceived as any art criticism standard. A work like Hamlet that can make a member of the audience suffer ‘with’ the character is a good work. But the character is not suffering; he doesn’t exist. Nor is the actor suffering.
It’s only in the mind of the member of the audience that there’s any need for revenge. Yet they do feel it; propaganda and active measures turn on making these illusions seem real to the audience.
Easy as pie. If the prime directive is to blame white supremacists or cops or whatever, you just point out that the bad guys created the conditions that led to the black woman being beat--root causes and so on. And throw in something about how white guys beat their wives, too, but get off easy.
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