CHAPTER 1
Other Peopleâs Shoes
For the last couple of years, when people ask me what Iâve been up to, I say that Iâm writing a book. They ask for details and I tell them, âItâs about empathy.â They tend to smile and nod when I say the word, and then I add: âIâm against it.â
This usually gets a laugh. I was surprised at this response at first, but Iâve learned that being against empathy is like being against kittensâa view considered so outlandish that it canât be serious. Itâs certainly a position thatâs easy to misunderstand. So Iâll be clear from the start: I am not against morality, compassion, kindness, love, being a good neighbor, being a mensch, and doing the right thing. Actually, Iâm writing this book because Iâm for all those things. I want to make the world a better place. Iâve just come to believe that relying on empathy is the wrong way to do it.
One reason why being against empathy is so shocking is that people often assume that empathy is an absolute good. You can never be too rich or too thin . . . or too empathic.
Empathy is unusual in this regard. We are more critical when it comes to judging other feelings, emotions, and capacities. We recognize their nuances. Anger can drive a father to beat his infant son to death, but anger at injustice can transform the world. Admiration can be wonderful if directed toward someone who deserves it; less wonderful if one is admiring, say, a serial killer. I am a fan of deliberative reasoning and will push for its importance throughout the book, but Iâll admit that it too can steer us wrong. Robert Jay Lifton, in The Nazi Doctors, talks about the struggles of those who performed experiments on prisoners in concentration camps. He describes these doctors as smart people who used their intelligence to talk themselves into doing terrible things. They would have been better off listening to their hearts.
For just about any human capacity, you can assess the pros and cons. So letâs give empathy the same scrutiny.
To do so, we have to be clear what we mean by empathy. There are many definitions thought up by psychologists and philosophers: One book on the topic lists nine different meanings of the word. One team of researchers notes that empathy is used for everything âfrom yawning contagion in dogs, to distress signaling in chickens, to patient-centered attitudes in human medicine.â Another team notes that âthere are probably nearly as many definitions of empathy as people working on this topic.â But the differences are often subtle, and the sense of empathy that Iâll be talking about throughout this book is the most typical one. Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.
Empathy in this sense was explored in detail by the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, though they called it âsympathy.â As Adam Smith put it, we have the capacity to think about another person and âplace ourselves in his situation . . . and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.â
That is how Iâm thinking about empathy. But there is a related sense that has to do with the capacity to appreciate whatâs going on in the minds of other people without any contagion of feeling. If your suffering makes me suffer, if I feel what you feel, thatâs empathy in the sense that Iâm interested in here. But if I understand that you are in pain without feeling it myself, this is what psychologists describe as social cognition, social intelligence, mind reading, theory of mind, or mentalizing. Itâs also sometimes described as a form of empathyââcognitive empathyâ as opposed to âemotional empathy,â which is most of my focus.
Later in this chapter, Iâll talk about cognitive empathy, rather critically, but right now we should just keep in mind that these two sorts of empathy are distinctâthey emerge from different brain processes, they influence us in different ways, and you can have a lot of one and a little of the other.
Empathyâin the Adam Smith sense, the âemotional empathyâ senseâcan occur automatically, even involuntarily. Smith describes how âpersons of delicate fibresâ who notice a beggarâs sores and ulcers âare apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies.â John Updike writes, âMy grandmother would have choking fits at the kitchen table, and my own throat would feel narrow in sympathy.â When Nicholas Epley goes to his childrenâs soccer games, he has to leave the row in front of him clear for âempathy kicks.â And it takes someone sturdier than me to watch someone bash himself on the thumb with a hammer without flinching.
But empathy is more than a reflex. It can be nurtured, stanched, developed, and extended through the imagination. It can be focused and directed by acts of will. In a speech before he became president, Barack Obama described how empathy can be a choice. He stressed how important it is âto see the world through the eyes of those who are different from usâthe child whoâs hungry, the steelworker whoâs been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like thisâwhen you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangersâit becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.â
I like this quote because it provides a nice illustration of how empathy can be a force for good. Empathy makes us care more about other people, more likely to try to improve their lives.
A few years ago, Steven Pinker began a discussion of empathy with a list:
Here is a sample of titles and subtitles that have appeared in just the past two years: The Age of Empathy, Why Empathy Matters, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, The Science of Empathy, The Empathy Gap, Why Empathy Is Essential (and Endangered), Empathy in the Global World, and How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy. . . . [Other examples include] Teaching Empathy, Teaching Children Empathy, and The Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child by Child, whose author, according to an endorsement by the pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, âstrives to bring about no less than world peace and protection for our planetâs future, starting with schools and classrooms everywhere, one child, one parent, one teacher at a time.â
As I started to write this book, I kept my eyes out for similar examples. Right now, there are over fifteen hundred books on amazon.com with empathy in their title or subtitle. Looking at the top twenty, there are books for parents and teachers, self-help guides, marketing books (âHow to use empathy to create products people loveâ), and even a couple of good scientific books.
There are many Web pages, blogs, and YouTube channels devoted to championing empathy, such as a website that lists everything Barack Obama has said about empathy, including this famous quote: âThe biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit.â After I published an article that explored some of the ideas in this book, I was invited to join a series of âempathy circlesâ: online conversations in which individuals talk about the importance of empathy and work self-consciously to be empathic toward each other. Books on empathy fill my shelves and my iPad, and Iâve been to several conferences with âEmpathyâ in their names.
I became sensitive to the way empathy is discussed in response to certain public events. In the fall of 2014, there was a series of incidents in which unarmed black men died at the hands of the police, and many people expressed their anguish about the lack of empathy that Americansâand particularly police officersâhave with racial minorities. But I would read as well angry responses complaining about the lack of empathy that many Americans have with the police, or with the victims of crimes. The one thing everyone could agree on, it seemed, was that more empathy is needed.
Many believe that empathy will save the world, and this is particularly the case for those who champion liberal or progressive causes. Giving advice to liberal politicians, George Lakoff writes, âBehind every progressive policy lies a single moral value: empathy. . . .â Jeremy Rifkin calls for us to make the âleap to global empathic consciousness,â and he ends his book The Empathic Civilization with the plaintive question âCan we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avoid global collapse?â
For every specific problem, lack of empathy is seen as the diagnosis and more empathy as the cure. Emily Bazelon writes âThe scariest aspect of bullying is the total lack of empathyââa diagnosis she applies not only to the bullies but to those who do nothing to help the victims. The solution, she suggests, is âto remember that almost everyone has the capacity for empathy and decencyâand to tend that seed as best as we possibly can.â Andrew Solomon explores the trials of children who are different in critical ways from their parents (such as dwarfs, transgender children, and children with Down syndrome). He worries that we live in xenophobic times and diagnoses âa crisis of empathy.â But he suggests as well that these special children can help address the empathy crisis and notes that parents of such children report an increase in empathy and compassion. This argument is familiar to me: My brother is severely autistic, and when I was growing up I heard it said that such children are a blessing from Godâthey teach us to be empathic to those who are different from us.
Perhaps the most extreme claim about lack of empathy is advanced by Simon Baron-Cohen. For him, evil individuals are nothing more than people who lack empathy. His answer to the question âWhat is evil?â is âempathy erosion.â
It makes sense that empathy would be seen by so many as the magic bullet of morality. The argument in its simplest form goes like this: Everyone is naturally interested in him- or herself; we care most about our own pleasure and pain. It requires nothing special to yank oneâs hand away from a flame or to reach for a glass of water when thirsty. But empathy makes the experiences of others salient and importantâyour pain becomes my pain, your thirst becomes my thirst, and so I rescue you from the fire or give you something to drink. Empathy guides us to treat others as we treat ourselves and hence expands our selfish concerns to encompass other people.
In this way, the willful exercise of empathy can motivate kindness that would never have otherwise occurred. Empathy can make us care about a slave, or a homeless person, or someone in solitary confinement. It can put us into the mind of a gay teenager bullied by his peers, or a victim of rape. We can empathize with a member of a despised minority or someone suffering from religious persecution in a faraway land. All these experiences are alien to me, but through the exercise of empathy, I can, in some limited way, experience them myself, and this makes me a better person. In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman put it like this: âI do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I myself become the wounded person.â
Empathy can be used to motivate others to do good. Just about all parents have at some point reminded children of the consequences of bad acts, prodding them with remarks like âHow would you feel if someone did that to you?â Martin Hoffman estimates that these empathic prompts occur about four thousand times a year in the average childâs life. Every charity, every political movement, every social cause will use empathy to motivate action.
And thereâs more! I havenât yet told you about the laboratory research, the cognitive neuroscience studies, the philosophical analyses, the research with babies and chimps and ratsâall said to demonstrate the importance of empathy in making us good.
Even the biggest fan of empathy should admit that there are other possible motivations for good action. To use a classic example from philosophyâfirst thought up by the Chinese philosopher Menciusâimagine that you are walking by a lake and see a young child struggling in shallow water. If you can easily wade into the water and save her, you should do it. It would be wrong to keep walking.
What motivates this good act? It is possible, I suppose, that you might imagine what it feels like to be drowning, or anticipate what it would be like to be the childâs mother or father hearing that she drowned. Such empathic feelings could then motivate you to act. But that is hardly necessary. You donât need empathy to realize that itâs wrong to let a child drown. Any normal person would just wade in and scoop up the child, without bothering with any of this empathic hoo-ha.
More generally, as Jesse Prinz and others have pointed out, we are capable of all sorts of moral judgments that arenât grounded in empathy. Many wrongs, after all, have no distinct victims to empathize with. We disapprove of people who shoplift or cheat on their taxes, throw garbage out of their car windows, or jump ahead in lineâeven if there is no specific person who appreciably suffers because of their actions, nobody to empathize with.
And so there has to be more to morality than empathy. Our decisions about whatâs right and whatâs wrong, and our motivations to act, have many sources. Oneâs morality can be rooted in a religious worldview or a philosophical one. It can be motivated by a more diffuse concern for the fates of othersâsomething often described as concern or compassion and which I will argue is a better moral guide than empathy.
To see this at work, consider that there are people who are acting right now to make the world better in the future, who worry that we are making the planet hotter or running out of fossil fuels or despoiling the environment or failing to respond to the rise of extreme religious groups. These worries have nothing to do with an empathic connection with anyone in particularâbecause there is no particular person to feel empathic towardâbut are instead rooted in a more general concern about human lives and human flourishing.
In some cases, empathy-based concerns clash with other sorts of moral concerns. As I write this, there is a debate going around in the academic community over whether professors should announce in advance that material presented in the lecture hall or seminar room might be upsetting to certain people, particularly those with a history of trauma, so that the students have a chance to absent themselves from class during that period.
The arguments in favor of these âtrigger warningsâ have largely been based on empathy. Imagine what it would be like to be the victim of rape and suddenly your professorâin a class that isnât about rape at allâshows a movie clip depicting a sexual assault. It might be terrible. And you would have to either sit through it or go through the humiliating experience of walking out in the middle of the class. If you feel empathy for a student in this situation, as I imagine any normal person would, this would make you receptive to the idea that trigger warnings are a good idea.
One scholar derisively summed up the move toward trigger warnings as â âempathetic correctness.â â She argues that âinstead of challenging the status quo by demanding texts that question the comfort of the Western canon, students are . . . refusing to read texts that challenge their own personal comfort.â But this is too dismissive. While concerns about âpersonal comfortâ might be poor reasons to restructure the curriculum, real suffering and anguish are a different story and certainly have to have some weight.
What about the arguments against trigger warnings? These are also about the welfare of peopleâwhat else could they be, ultimately?âbut they arenât inherently empathic, as they donât connect to concerns about any individual person. Instead, they rest on considerations that are long term, procedural, and abstract. Critics claim that trigger warnings violate the spirit of academia, in which students benefit from being challenged by new experiences. They worry that since itâs impossible to anticipate what will set people off, they are impractical. They argue that by focusing on trigger warnings, colleges and universities will divert attention from more important issues, such as better mental health care for students.
Of course, someone making such arguments can try to evoke empathy for individuals, real or imaginedâin moral debate, empathy is a spice that makes anything taste better. But concern for specific individuals is not, ultimately, what the anti-trigger-warning arguments are about, so this debate illustrates that there is more than one way to motivate moral concern.
As another example of how empathy can clash with other moral considerations, C. Daniel Batson and his colleagues did an experiment in which they told subjects about a ten-year-old girl named Sheri Summers who had a fatal disease and was waiting in line for treatment that would relieve her pain. Subjects were told that they could move her to the front of the line. When simply asked what to do, they acknowledged that she had to wai...