*A look at empathy in influencing our decisions *

Empathy

What I mean by empathy is what used to be known as sympathy by the scholars of the 17th and 18th century and I draw upon the work of Adam Smith, this is the way many psychologists used the term but they get it from Adam Smith and Smith describes the following situation as exemplifying empathy as follows:

We place 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.
Adam Smith

When what we see a person we place ourselves in his situation and become in some measure that person. Basically we put ourselves in other people's shoes.

Smith's example:

When we see a stroke just ready to fall upon a leg or arm of another person we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or arm and when it does fall we feel it in some measure and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer and like.
Adam Smith

There is a large amount of interest in a psychological and neural net emissions of empathy. We know now from a couple of decades of work that when you feel empathy with somebody, someone who's in pain for instance you, yourself feel this pain, perhaps to a lesser degree. It is found that the same neural system that would be active if you yourself with being poked or shocked become active if you watch somebody being poked or shocked.

For all the guys, kind of like watching someone getting kicked in the nuts! A lot of people suggest that guys have no empathy for others, this example proves otherwise.

Empathic Dilemas

Before discussing the issues of empathy, one thing that even the biggest empathy proponent should agree with, is that there is other causes motivating good moral reasoning and good moral action besides empathy.

So take the classic philosophical example you're walking by the river and you see a child drowning and struggling in the water. Now everybody knows the right thing to do is reach in and pull the child out. But I ask (rhetorically) is empathy involved? Well it could be, you could feel what it's like to be drowning imagine the experience of vicariously drowning or you could imagine what it'd be like for the parents of the child to hear their child has drowned and feel that sorrow and pain through an imagined empathic extension, you could do all that, but that's kind of ridiculous, no? If the kid is drowning you reach in and pull the kid out of the water. You don't need to go through all this empathic nonsense, you just respond based on your instinct and knowledge. This is why reason appealing to prior knowledge can not be abandoned.

There are cases where empathy pushes us another way and morality or a more attuned moral sense pushes us in perhaps a different way.

An example here is from Daniel Batson, who is a really astute empathy scholar, very pro empathy but also very cognizant of empathy limitations. Carried out studies in which he tells participants in the first group about a young girl that has a degenerative disease and she's going to die relatively soon. Also there was a treatment that won't save her life however it will alleviate her pain. but she's on a list for the treatment and low on the list, she is never gonna get the treatment and this is the question to the participants do we move her up the list or not. Obviously that means someone else who's on the list was going to go down and not get the treatment and as you would expect most people say no.

The next group is told exactly the same thing but he adds just a few lines, try to feel what she's feeling put yourself, in her shoes. The results flip and most people say, "yeah I would move her up the list".

The way Batson puts it, is that that:

empathy is clouding you to a more objective moral judgment and upon reflection, the first answer is the right one, you shouldn't her move up the list, just because you feel what she feels. Empathy is distorting their judgment.

Now here more generally we could see Empathy as a spotlight. What empathy does is zero you in on, typically an individual (or group) and motivate your concern and your kindness for that individual.

Fans of empathy often argue that empathy can take someone who's been indifferent and catalyze the moral response. This is not a new insight, all sorts of people pointed this out in different ways.
Joseph Stalin for instance was purported to say:

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

Mother Teresa said

If I look at the mass I will never act, if I look at the one, I will.

There's a large body of psychological research looking at it. The work of a Debra Small and George Lowenstein, in one study, people were given the description of a crisis and asked how much money one would donate to the charity and they would get a dollar or so. In the next study they were given a picture and a name and there, the donations shot up significantly.

Scholars find that you'll give more to save one person, than to save five people, so long as that one person has a face and a name.

Empathy serves as a spotlight and what I want to suggest here is what we could see are the worries of "identity spotlights" having narrow focus. Spotlights only focus on what you point them at and sometimes you point them in the wrong places.

As a result empathy is: biased, innumerate, concrete and myopic.

Paul slovic, points out that when the world was transfixed by the Holloway case (a kidnapping case) there was a famine in Darfur of which tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people would die. Yet Holloway got 13 times more coverage on mainstream media than the Darfur famine. Point being we care less about the masses dying then the single, emotive case that we empathose with.

Mass shootings are a terrible thing but if you look at the numbers and you calculate the proportion of homicides in the United States that, mass shootings its point one percent (at time of research). When what that means is, if you could magically ensure that there is never another mass shooting in the USA, no one will ever be able to tell by looking at the numbers that you did. that is to say that it wouldn't even be greater than the error allowed for rounding in the statistical data.

the point isn't that these cases don't matter, it is that they don't matter in the same proportion that we may give to much worse loss if life.

I'm not saying that empathy is to blame for all of it, I think there are general patterns of bias and focus on a identifiable victim that transcend any single emotion. My point rather, is that empathy is uniquely vulnnerable to this because itzooms you in on an individual. Neural findings of empathy, where they look for neural signatures of empathy, find that we are exquisitely sensitive to facts like in-group, out-group, race, nationality and so on.

Using Empathy

One response to this is to say empathy isn't imperfect its biased, zoom you in on individuals and so on but still it's better than nothing. it makes the world a better place, maybe not perfect but the best we have.

It is easy to see that this is mistaken. For example Linda Pullman who interviewed warlords in Africa, who would chop of the arms of children, her question being why do this? She was surprised to here the response, that "we do this for you". In other words they are exploiting the empathy of wealthy people to get a response. NGOs go to the countries and when they go, they pay taxes which directly benefits the warlords.

When I was in Indonesia there are a lot of beggars, often an adult with a child, my immediate response is to give money, after all it was so little for me. However I later learned that a lot of the children were intentionally maimed, made to cry and sometimes sold off for their potential to make money from begging. The giving of charity in these cases created a criminal market.

the answer to this is not that we should do nothing, rather I think a better answers from that we decide what to do you should use both your heart and your head.

The use of empathy clouded a more rational action.

what replaces it though what else do we do? True moral action involves distancing oneself not engaging and requires wisdom and self control.

Adam Smith's two requirements for good action are:

• Superior reasoning and understanding

• Self command

David Hume pointed out that:

in order to be a good person you need some sort of motivation unless you have some sort of emotional pull driving you to be a good person. Unless there is a push driving tou to be a good person you're not going to, you might know all the moral answers in the world but that will do nothing for you.

What I'll say is, the impetus to be a good person does not have to be empathy. I think what you need to be a good person is a level of compassion and the care for others coupled with cold hard rationality to figure out how to best effect the goals for yourself and for others.

Empathy & Liberty

This may have been a long winded way to get to this. However the point needed to be illustrated. What I want you to think about is the dangerous behaviour of relying on empathy as the desicion driver in society, law, justice (including so called "social justice) and economic desicions of a country, state or city.

We may feel like we have done the right thing, however only history will show that it was the wrong thing and may have significantly worse results.

More concerning still, is the trend of the shift in what is considered morality today. In the near future an empathic desicision based on someones idea of morality, may not be the same desicision that you would he thinking of today.

Furthermore, because of the susceptibility for empathy to be biased, a shift to trying to reason using empathy, will create a society that is not only easily swayed, but brutally unjust. Prone to making emotive judgements.

Bibliography:
Batson, C.D (2014). The Altruism Question. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.
Bloom, P. (2016). Against Empathy.

LB🤓
psychobabblin with the best of em