People who think empathy is everything

[Paige]

I think empathy for others can prompt us to reconsider our premises and the other person's position and perhaps motivate us to examine our own premises or look for a 3rd way. Sometimes we are wrong on an issue and we really feel that we are correct. Empathy won't convince me that something I think is correct is wrong, but it may lead me to think about the subject and conclude that I was wrong. Without empathy, I never would have spent the time evaluating my premises and considering if my logic had flaws. I would have gone blindly ahead in life feeling I was correct in my position with no motivation to reconsider. 

 

Yeah.  I think I've always believed that truth is a higher value than kindness, and explicitly so after reading Plato.  I was reminded of it recently in the book group I was attending which is I think what prompted me to mention it on the boards.  It's not that Truth doesn't contain love, because it does and you can't escape that, but you have to order them correctly or you will soon find the outcomes are unloving.  There is too much literature and psychology and myth and art directed toward that reality to poo-poo it IMO.

 

But I think this idea of performing empathy is what I am finding difficult particularly.  It's not just having someone say, we need to remember to think about people's experiences around this, or even that they think it's more important be kind than focus on truth.  It's the sense that there is supposed to be some sort of demonstration.  I'm not exactly a demonstrative person, and I don't come from a very demonstrative culture either.  And it seems to me like something that could be very easily faked and so I can't put much value on it - I don't see how it helps the people in question.

 

I think you can't have kindness without truth in most situations. It is unkind to be untrue. You can have truth without kindness, however.

[Bluegoat]

I think empathy for others can prompt us to reconsider our premises and the other person's position and perhaps motivate us to examine our own premises or look for a 3rd way. Sometimes we are wrong on an issue and we really feel that we are correct. Empathy won't convince me that something I think is correct is wrong, but it may lead me to think about the subject and conclude that I was wrong. Without empathy, I never would have spent the time evaluating my premises and considering if my logic had flaws. I would have gone blindly ahead in life feeling I was correct in my position with no motivation to reconsider. 

 

 

I think you can't have kindness without truth in most situations. It is unkind to be untrue. You can have truth without kindness, however.

 

This is certainly true.  Intuition too can work this way - it alerts us that we may have missed something.

 

I'm not sure how I would fit it in to the idea of showing more empathy in a discussion?  I suppose someone could say "if you empathize with X, you might rethink your position".  But of course it might not make someone rethink, they could just as easily say their reasoning was still solid or the facts remained the same.

[forty-two]

Kind of jumping in way late, but hopefully this is more-or-less pertinent to the ongoing discussion :).

 

I think that feelings can be a guide to finding objective capital-T Truth - they provide a complementary approach to logic. We're human, we're going to have emotions, period - the ideal of dispassionate thinking is just not human reality (and I don't think it's even desirable as an ideal). (I'm thinking of C.S. Lewis and "men without chests" - emotions are *strong*, and principles that aren't backed by emotions aren't principles that actual human beings can hold strongly in practice, when push comes to shove.). Our feelings, like our thinking, are going to help or hinder us in seeking truth; what our feelings aren't going to do is stay out of the way. Just because we think we are thinking dispassionately doesn't mean we are; it just means we aren't aware of what we are feeling - and how it is affecting us. (And ditto for people who think their feelings are untainted by logic or thinking; there's thinking involved - it might be *bad* thinking - but it's not absent from the party.). And just as we can learn to think and examine our thinking in ways that help guide us *to* truth (or that pull us away from it), we can learn to feel and examine our feelings in ways that help guide us to truth (or pull us away from it). And our feelings can be a corrective for faulty thinking just as much as our thinking can be a corrective for faulty emotions.

 

(I once read a logical argument that seemed airtight to my eyes, but whose conclusion morally repulsed me. And though it bothered me to not be able to find flaws in his argument, I did not change my position. I let my moral feeling trump my logic - and I acknowledged as much to myself. It was somewhat ironic, as the arguer taught that if you are unable to poke holes in a logical argument, you are *morally obligated* to accept the conclusion as true. If you felt otherwise, those feelings were by definition lying to you, because logic is the only path to truth. Now, rejecting a logic argument as false because you hate the conclusion is bad logic, of course. But rejecting your moral feelings as false because a single logic argument came to a contrary conclusion - idk, I think that's a recipe for bad living, myself. It's not great, when your feelings and thinking are at odds - but I don't think ignoring your feelings and going whole-hog on your thinking gets you any closer to the truth than ignoring your thinking and going whole-hog on your feelings would.)

 

But I think that empathy is different - it's more a guide to understanding someone else's *subjective* experience. I think it can be useful and helpful in keeping the impact of objective truth on actual humans front and center in our considerations. But sometimes I think people combine empathy with a belief that anything that causes someone pain (or certain kinds of pain) is inherently wrong. And that can allow subjective experiences to trump objective truth - where objective truth is delegitimized not by showing it is objectively wrong, but by showing that it causes *subjective* pain. Empathy, which allows us to share someone else's subjective experience, then can then become a way to side-step having to wrestle with finding objective truth, instead of input to consider in wrestling with finding objective truth.

Edited January 31, 2018 by forty-two

[Bluegoat]

I think that's a good way to differentiate between empathy and emotion more generally forty-two, and I think you are right about the sense that some people think that subjective pain is always inherently wrong.  

 

I fid that in many cases, that leads to making choices about which people count - because there often are several persons or groups that are affected in different ways and it's not really possible to alleviate them all.  So somehow when the goal becomes eliminating pain or suffering it tends make people want to say that she of that suffering is real and some isn't, or to rank the suffering as a way out of the bind.  Whereas if that isn't the only or main goal, it seems less necessary to deny or rank the pain and suffering of some.

 

I suppose it isn't for no reason that the nature of suffering is a significant topic in more than one major religion.

 

I also agree with you about how we evaluate questions when our emotional radar is very out of line with logical arguments.  

 

In both of those kinds of scenarios, it seems to me that often when the outcome is really best it is because the lack of cohesion between the elements - reason and emotion or different groups related to a problem - leads us to make a leap that in a way transcends the elements we see and allows us to reach some new synthesis or understanding.

[Violet Crown]

Just ran across this in Blaise Pascal's Pensées:

 

"Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling have no understanding of matters involving reasoning. For they want to go right to the bottom of things at a glance, and are not accustomed to look for principles. The others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles, have no understanding of matters involving feeling, because they look for principles and are unable to see things at a glance."

 

(Pascal thought both were necessary, especially in matters of religious belief.)

[Bluegoat]

So, interested in a thought experiment - Blue People and Red People both believe they state the truth. These truths are in direct conflict with each other. (Assume that there is, in fact, an objective truth to be found.) Regarding public policy, if Blue group's truth is accepted, Red group's rights are impacted. If Red group's truth is accepted, Blue group's rights are impacted. One of these groups is much, much larger than the other. Assume neither group has privilege over the other, because all claims of privilege rest on which truth is accepted.

 

How do you solve this - in any way - through empathy ?

 

 

I don't know how you would.  One thing that strikes me is that I've never observed that identifying privilege is especially helpful with problems like this.  Which makes me wonder - is this what some people really mean when they are asking for empathy - to identify who they think is less privileged?

[poppy]

So, interested in a thought experiment - Blue People and Red People both believe they state the truth. These truths are in direct conflict with each other. (Assume that there is, in fact, an objective truth to be found.) Regarding public policy, if Blue group's truth is accepted, Red group's rights are impacted. If Red group's truth is accepted, Blue group's rights are impacted. One of these groups is much, much larger than the other. Assume neither group has privilege over the other, because all claims of privilege rest on which truth is accepted.

 

How do you solve this - in any way - through empathy ?

 

So basically Israel and Palestine.  I don't think empathy comes much into play, does it.  

 

I don't accept that view of privilege, though.  Two sides can be similar, or two sides can be disparate, but it's never completely subjective.

[Bluegoat]

So basically Israel and Palestine.  I don't think empathy comes much into play, does it.  

 

I don't accept that view of privilege, though.  Two sides can be similar, or two sides can be disparate, but it's never completely subjective.

 

I would say people very often bring empathy into discussions of that conflict, though, much the same way they do in other types of discussions.  So I'm curious to know what you see as the real distinction between that and any of the other examples like immigration etc?

 

I'm not clear what you mean about privilege here as I didn't understand Sadie as saying it was subjective, but I could be misunderstanding that.

[Pam in CT]

re Objective Truth

So, interested in a thought experiment - Blue People and Red People both believe they state the truth. These truths are in direct conflict with each other. (Assume that there is, in fact, an objective truth to be found.) Regarding public policy, if Blue group's truth is accepted, Red group's rights are impacted. If Red group's truth is accepted, Blue group's rights are impacted. One of these groups is much, much larger than the other. Assume neither group has privilege over the other, because all claims of privilege rest on which truth is accepted.

How do you solve this - in any way - through empathy ?

 

 

There's already a name for this: Tyranny of the Majority.

 

If there one group is "much, much larger than the other" that IS a form of power * .

 

 

And seriously and literally, it isn't a thought experiment; empirically it happened.  Blue people held as a premise that Red people were not, actually, full people.  The had much, much more power; they enslaved the Red people. Red people's rights were impacted.

 

 

There was all sorts of evidence and data available to support vigorously that the Red people's premise -- that they were, in fact, fully human, was Objective Truth.

 

However, evidence-based reasoning to convince Blue people of that Objective Truth was not how the badly-impacted suppressed-Red-rights problem was ultimately addressed: it took both a moral grappling towards different, third and fourth and fifth, narrower principles ("mothers shouldn't be torn from their children", "beating a living creature to death is wrong" (a sentiment applicable to horses and dogs, not limited to humans), and a civil war (another exertion of another form of power) to get there.  And we're still not done.

 

 

 

 

 

( *  I won't belabor the argument that vastly greater numbers is a form of "privilege" -- because language -- but inherent in your thought experiment parameter that there is no privilege is a begged question: if there is no privilege, then how did Team Blue "win" the policy development struggle?  How did policy end up reflecting their Truth when Objective Truth pointed the other way?).

Edited February 1, 2018 by Pam in CT

[8circles]

I would say people very often bring empathy into discussions of that conflict, though, much the same way they do in other types of discussions.  So I'm curious to know what you see as the real distinction between that and any of the other examples like immigration etc?

 

Can you explain what you mean by "bringing empathy into discussions"? I'm trying to understand what your expectations are of empathy but I'm honestly confused. You started out talking about people who think empathy is everything and now it sounds like you don't think empathy has any place in these discussions. 

 

Since we have a concrete example of the Israel/Palestine conflict, I don't know how to have a discussion about it that is devoid of empathy. Most people I know personally are very pro-Israel, anti-Palestine. They have absolutely zero empathy for Palestine, to the point of rejecting all facts about their plight. I present them with factual information but I don't think appeals to their empathy are somehow inappropriate or worthless or less effective. Honestly, both factual and empathy appeals have had zero effect so at least IME they are equally effective for this example.

[poppy]

Can you explain what you mean by "bringing empathy into discussions"? I'm trying to understand what your expectations are of empathy but I'm honestly confused. You started out talking about people who think empathy is everything and now it sounds like you don't think empathy has any place in these discussions. 

 

Since we have a concrete example of the Israel/Palestine conflict, I don't know how to have a discussion about it that is devoid of empathy. Most people I know personally are very pro-Israel, anti-Palestine. They have absolutely zero empathy for Palestine, to the point of rejecting all facts about their plight. I present them with factual information but I don't think appeals to their empathy are somehow inappropriate or worthless or less effective. Honestly, both factual and empathy appeals have had zero effect so at least IME they are equally effective for this example.

 

 

That's funny, most people I know have zero empathy for Israel [ the state of Israel, not the Jewish people ].

 

I don't think empathy is a factor in that conversation because it's kind of a zero sum game.  In a Blue Group and Red Group conversation.

 

In Pam in CT's example, US slavery, the appeals to empathy made by the abolitionists are only one side of the conversation. There were also appeals to empathy on behalf of the other side.  Imagine all the slaves, including so many children,  who who would starve if not taken care of by their owners. They would own no land,  have no assets!  Imagine  all the white women who would be put in harm's way if black men were free to do as they pleased.   And so on.    This all  sounds absolutely disgusting from our modern POV.  Because ....it is.  But these were sincerely held beliefs and common arguments. Remember there were millions of enslaved people at the time, about 1/3 of the population of several states.  My point is empathy on both "sides" existed, didn't really matter, it took a war, and the war could have gone either way.  

[8circles]

That's funny, most people I know have zero empathy for Israel [ the state of Israel, not the Jewish people ].

 

I don't think empathy is a factor in that conversation because it's kind of a zero sum game.  In a Blue Group and Red Group conversation.

 

In Pam in CT's example, US slavery, the appeals to empathy made by the abolitionists are only one side of the conversation. There were also appeals to empathy on behalf of the other side.  Imagine all the slaves, including so many children,  who who would starve if not taken care of by their owners. They would own no land,  have no assets!  Imagine  all the white women who would be put in harm's way if black men were free to do as they pleased.   And so on.    This all  sounds absolutely disgusting from our modern POV.  Because ....it is.  But these were sincerely held beliefs and common arguments. Remember there were millions of enslaved people at the time, about 1/3 of the population of several states.  My point is empathy on both "sides" existed, didn't really matter, it took a war, and the war could have gone either way.  

 

I think that empathy is a factor because I think the lack of empathy makes one ignore objective truth to only believe facts that serve your own empathy. So this would obviously be a negative caused by empathy, but I don't believe that it is possible to completely get rid of empathy so it needs to be used to serve the objective truth. 

 

Gotta run to the bus stop. I probably didn't explain well.

[Bluegoat]

Can you explain what you mean by "bringing empathy into discussions"? I'm trying to understand what your expectations are of empathy but I'm honestly confused. You started out talking about people who think empathy is everything and now it sounds like you don't think empathy has any place in these discussions. 

 

Since we have a concrete example of the Israel/Palestine conflict, I don't know how to have a discussion about it that is devoid of empathy. Most people I know personally are very pro-Israel, anti-Palestine. They have absolutely zero empathy for Palestine, to the point of rejecting all facts about their plight. I present them with factual information but I don't think appeals to their empathy are somehow inappropriate or worthless or less effective. Honestly, both factual and empathy appeals have had zero effect so at least IME they are equally effective for this example.

 

I've heard empathy used on all sides of this argument.  And, I think, without it being untrue.

 

Empathy for the position of Jewish people worldwide before and during WWII.

 

Empathy for Jews living in that region before then and their political and social position.

 

Empathy for Israelis living in a very small country with enemies all around, and little sense of physical security on a day to day basis.

 

Empathy for the Palestinians political position and social position (and that or Arabs in Israel-proper, too.)

 

Empathy for Palestinians whose daily lives have been impacted significantly.

 

Empathy for people on both side who are harmed in conflicts, or whose loved ones are harmed

 

......

 

There are things that trying to put ourselves in those positions can tell us, I think.  If I imagine wha it's like to be an Israeli citizen, or a Palestinian,  I realize that most people living their daily lives in that kind of environment are going to have certain responses, certain kinds of reactivity.  That it will make finding solutions much more difficult than it would be otherwise.  It might help me avoid feeling angry when it seems like people are not in good faith.

 

And I think it might be helpful in suggesting that certain possibilities are unlikely to be workable.

 

I don't see it doing much to come up with solutions or even really understand the real sources of conflict, or come to some conclusions about what is just.  ETA:  And the other side of that is I think the argument from empathy is often used, in practice, to obscure the question of what is just, or what could work, or even what the historical facts are.

Edited February 1, 2018 by Bluegoat

[8circles]

 

I don't see it doing much to come up with solutions or even really understand the real sources of conflict, or come to some conclusions about what is just.  

 

Forgive me, I've become quite ill today so this will probably be my last post but I'm not ignoring you.

 

For me, personally, and I would guess for some other people - maybe even the person who your OP was about - empathy plays a large role in understanding the real sources of conflict and in coming to conclusions about what is just. I think it is virtually impossible for me to approach those topics devoid of empathy.

[Bluegoat]

Forgive me, I've become quite ill today so this will probably be my last post but I'm not ignoring you.

 

For me, personally, and I would guess for some other people - maybe even the person who your OP was about - empathy plays a large role in understanding the real sources of conflict and in coming to conclusions about what is just. I think it is virtually impossible for me to approach those topics devoid of empathy.

 

Oh, I hope you recover soon.

 

When you get a chance, I'd be interested if you could give a concrete example of how it would help with that kind of determination - how could empathy suggest a way forward for land division, for example.

[Pam in CT]

Steven Pinker says empathy is not enough.

 

Helpful surely in all cases; and necessary probably for solutions to be sustained over the long haul, but not sufficient.

 

That seems to me to be about right.

 

 

_____

 

In trying to tease out what role empathy can have in both informing individual opinion and in shaping aggregate policy solutions, I think it's also important to be mindful, as always, that we don't all necessarily mean quite the same thing when we use the use the word.

 

Buddhists and other deep-divers into the concept of compassion make important distinctions between compassion vs pity -- related and overlapping but not the same.  Empathy is yet a third construct -- closer IMO to compassion but not quite it, either.

 

I understand empathy to be the thing at the center of both the positive and the negative formulations of the Golden Rule, formulations that all major faith traditions arrived at in ancient times, well before the abstract concepts of both "empathy" and "individual" were particularly well developed.

 

As close to the axiom of "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" as we have, in moral reasoning.

 

To my understanding, empathy doesn't mean "feeling sorry for ______" or "I feel ______'s pain," but something closer to "I acknowledge that _____ is the center of ________'s universe as surely as I am the center of my own."

 

The immediate corollary of which is: "I acknowledge that what to me is a bedrock foundation premise TO ME may not be foundational at all to ______; I acknowledge that the traditions and texts which hold primacy TO ME may not matter at all to ______; I acknowledge that MY relative ranking of competing values and claims may be different from _________'s."

 

Which, bad news, makes dialogue incredibly difficult.  And, good news, also makes it possible, albeit circuitous and inefficient and difficult, since none of us in ordinary life go around trying to peel back all the way to OUR OWN bedrock foundational premises, let alone have any visibility into anyone else's.

 

______

 

So, for example, to wade in (with great trepidation) to poppy's example of Israel / Palestine...

 

There are real differing premises on When The Clock Starts:  Team Red holds, foundationally, that the clock started in ancient times; Team Blue holds, foundationally, that it started very much later, generally somewhere in range where the Ottoman Empire began to decline and Arab-speaking leaders gained ascendancy.

 

Relatedly, there are real differing premises in What Are the Guiding Adjudicating Documents: Team Red holds, foundationally, that a text which is sacred TO THEM is either absolutely the last and only word on the subject (a sub-set of Team Red, if you will), or at least informs the historical and moral claim; while that text is neither sacred to Team Blue, nor has any standing to guide any aspect of the conflict today; Team Blue assigns adjudication authority to UN resolutions and other international agreements speaking to sovereignty and statelessness.

 

Also relatedly, there are real differing premises on Whose Land Was It To Begin With: Team Red holds either that it was God's to grant (again: a subset) or the legitimate spoils of a civil war that arose in the vacuum created by the UK's unilateral withdrawal at a particular historical moment; Team Blue holds -- again looping around to When The Clock Starts -- that the UK was itself an illegitimate colonial occupier, and that right to the land is tied to self-determination of the people, defined mostly around linguistic characteristics... before outsiders began pouring in from Europe for reasons they had nothing to do with.  (Team Bluegoat might hold as a premise: Morally, land shouldn't be owned anyway.)

 

 

(That's before even getting into very divergent differing ideas on whether The Sins of the Father Should Be Wreaked On the Sons, or the responsibilities of states to ensure people are not stateless, or the rights of refugees, or ninety nine other Very Important Ideas and the respective premises to which each of those can be peeled back.)

 

____

 

In this world, empathy -- at least in the reductive sense of "I feel your pain" or "I'm sorry about your plight" is not enough.

 

Empathy is accepting that to get to a sustainable solution that will hold, we have to build out a starting point that is neither Team Red's nor Team Blue's.  Because Team Blue will NEVER accept an argument rooted in a sacred text that is not theirs, and Team Red will NEVER accept an argument rooted in the assertion that Zionists pouring into the land during the British Mandate, at British invitation, were illegitimate outsiders who had no right to come, and therefore neither do their great-great-grandchildren have a right to be there now.  

 

And building out a starting point that is massively difficult, time-consuming, multi-armed octopus work.  Requiring partners on both sides of heroic proportions, boundless patience, and unimaginable blocks of time.  Simultaneously.  Who are also able to herd the cats of their respective Teams and bring them along even though they're only reading Twitter-sized bytes rather than hours in the weeds of the nuanced tradeoffs.

 

 

Edited February 1, 2018 by Pam in CT

[Bluegoat]

Steven Pinker says empathy is not enough.

 

Helpful surely in all cases; and necessary probably for solutions to be sustained over the long haul, but not sufficient.

 

That seems to me to be about right.

 

 

_____

 

In trying to tease out what role empathy can have in both informing individual opinion and in shaping aggregate policy solutions, I think it's also important to be mindful, as always, that we don't all necessarily mean quite the same thing when we use the use the word.

 

Buddhists and other deep-divers into the concept of compassion make important distinctions between compassion vs pity -- related and overlapping but not the same.  Empathy is yet a third construct -- closer IMO to compassion but not quite it, either.

 

I understand empathy to be the thing at the center of both the positive and the negative formulations of the Golden Rule, formulations that all major faith traditions arrived at in ancient times, well before the abstract concepts of both "empathy" and "individual" were particularly well developed.

 

As close to the axiom of "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" as we have, in moral reasoning.

 

To my understanding, empathy doesn't mean "feeling sorry for ______" or "I feel ______'s pain," but something closer to "I acknowledge that _____ is the center of ________'s universe as surely as I am the center of my own."

 

The immediate corollary of which is: "I acknowledge that what to me is a bedrock foundation premise TO ME may not be foundational at all to ______; I acknowledge that the traditions and texts which hold primacy TO ME may not matter at all to ______; I acknowledge that MY relative ranking of competing values and claims may be different from _________'s."

 

Which, bad news, makes dialogue incredibly difficult.  And, good news, also makes it possible, albeit circuitous and inefficient and difficult, since none of us in ordinary life go around trying to peel back all the way to OUR OWN bedrock foundational premises, let alone have any visibility into anyone else's.

 

______

 

So, for example, to wade in (with great trepidation) to poppy's example of Israel / Palestine...

 

There are real differing premises on When The Clock Starts:  Team Red holds, foundationally, that the clock started in ancient times; Team Blue holds, foundationally, that it started very much later, generally somewhere in range where the Ottoman Empire began to decline and Arab-speaking leaders gained ascendancy.

 

Relatedly, there are real differing premises in What Are the Guiding Adjudicating Documents: Team Red holds, foundationally, that a text which is sacred TO THEM is either absolutely the last and only word on the subject (a sub-set of Team Red, if you will), or at least informs the historical and moral claim; while that text is neither sacred to Team Blue, nor has any standing to guide any aspect of the conflict today; Team Blue assigns adjudication authority to UN resolutions and other international agreements speaking to sovereignty and statelessness.

 

Also relatedly, there are real differing premises on Whose Land Was It To Begin With: Team Red holds either that it was God's to grant (again: a subset) or the legitimate spoils of a civil war created by the UK's unilateral withdrawal at a particular historical moment; Team Blue holds -- again looping around to When The Clock Starts -- that the UK was itself an illegitimate colonial occupier, and that right to the land is tied to self-determination of the people, defined mostly around linguistic characteristics... before outsiders began pouring in from Europe for reasons they had nothing to do with.  (Team Bluegoat might hold as a premise: Morally, land shouldn't be owned anyway.)

 

 

(That's before even getting into very divergent differing ideas on whether The Sins of the Father Should Be Wreaked On the Sons, or the responsibilities of states to ensure people are not stateless, or the rights of refugees, or ninety nine other Very Important Ideas and the respective premises to which each of those can be peeled back.)

 

____

 

In this world, empathy -- at least in the reductive sense of "I feel your pain" or "I'm sorry about your plight" is not enough.

 

Empathy is accepting that to get to a sustainable solution that will hold, we have to build out a starting point that is neither Team Red's nor Team Blue's.  Because Team Blue will NEVER accept an argument rooted in a sacred text that is not theirs, and Team Red will NEVER accept an argument rooted in the assertion that Zionists pouring into the land during the British Mandate, at British invitation, were illegitimate outsiders who had no right to come, and therefore neither do their great-great-grandchildren have a right to be there now.  

 

And building out a starting point that is massively difficult, time-consuming, multi-armed octopus work.  Requiring partners on both sides of heroic proportions, boundless patience, and unimaginable blocks of time.  Simultaneously.  Who are also able to herd the cats of their respective Teams and bring them along even though they're only reading Twitter-sized bytes rather than hours in the weeds of the nuanced tradeoffs.

 

 

That's an interesting way to put it, because in a way it seems to me that you've almost removed over-identification with the individual or group perspective from the question.

 

If I was describing to someone else what you've described here, I would tend to say that it was actually removing the question from the realm of the subjective and placing it in a more abstract place.  So empathy as you are describing it isn't so much to identify with the other (though that happens in process) as it is a way to allow you to overcome your identification with your own position.  And the same for the other person.  So, you have a place to start.

 

I think the is probably a true function of compassion, and it also rings true in a way with what Sadie said early about the Buddhist thinking on suffering, and I think also with the Christian view.  There is a way in which suffering, through love, transcends the realm of suffering.

 

What I would say though is I don't think this is at all what was being suggested in the conversation that prompted me to write the OP.  I think that when I've seen the word empathy used in such cases, it seems very much about locating the question within a kind of subjectivity, or maybe about bringing the subjectivity into the starting place.

[Pam in CT]

re empathy as a tool that enables stepping-out of one's own centrality:

That's an interesting way to put it, because in a way it seems to me that you've almost removed over-identification with the individual or group perspective from the question.

 

If I was describing to someone else what you've described here, I would tend to say that it was actually removing the question from the realm of the subjective and placing it in a more abstract place.  So empathy as you are describing it isn't so much to identify with the other (though that happens in process) as it is a way to allow you to overcome your identification with your own position.  And the same for the other person.

 

______

 

So, you have a place to start.

 

 

Yes, that is close to how I define empathy.  

 

Overcoming our own over-identification with our own (nearly always unstated, very often unexamined, often unacknowledged even to ourselves) premises is ESSENTIAL to beginning.  It often takes rather a lot of time and work, just to get to the beginning.

 

I don't have the temperament for Thomas Nagel's View From Nowhere (I came, I saw, I tried, I retreated in weary head-spinning exhaustion) but it may well be up your alley.

 

This brief and highly accessible bit of fiction from one of *my* reasoning heroes Rebecca Goldstein (Idiot's Guide to Philosophical Reasoning) helped me to clarify and articulate how I understand the concept.  (She does not, however, label the concept as "empathy."  FWIW she is married to Steven Pinker.)

 

 

...

I think the is probably a true function of compassion, and it also rings true in a way with what Sadie said early about the Buddhist thinking on suffering, and I think also with the Christian view.  There is a way in which suffering, through love, transcends the realm of suffering.

 

What I would say though is I don't think this is at all what was being suggested in the conversation that prompted me to write the OP.  I think that when I've seen the word empathy used in such cases, it seems very much about locating the question within a kind of subjectivity, or maybe about bringing the subjectivity into the starting place.

 

 

"Subjectivity" is yet another word, and perhaps (?) a different concept, and I am not sure I'm following you here.

 

 

FWIW, although I'm all in for both freewheeling navel gazing and far ranging cosmic eternal ruminations... I find it nearly impossible to follow wholly abstract arguments-- actually to be able to take one mental step and move on to the next and follow along someone else's reasoning --  unless I do "slot in" concrete examples (such as, wrt this thread, Israel/Palestine, or slavery, or gender identification).  Without a concrete example I cannot hold on to and make any sense of the abstractions.  I lose the thread, I lose interest, I wander off: this is what I mean, in saying I singularly lack the philosophical disposition.

 

I NEED a subject, if you will, to be able actually to follow the reasoning.  I don't know if that's what you mean by "subjective."

 

 

 

 

 

eta one's "own" centrality

Edited February 1, 2018 by Pam in CT

[poppy]

Oh, I hope you recover soon.

 

When you get a chance, I'd be interested if you could give a concrete example of how it would help with that kind of determination - how could empathy suggest a way forward for land division, for example.

 

Do you think empathy has any appropriate role in these conversations at all?

[Pam in CT]

"performing" the "right level" of empathy

See, I think there's an assumption here that anyone not performing the right level of empathy hasn't already examined their previously held premises. What if a person has already done that ? Already examined what they held, fairly thoughtlessly, to be true, and have found those beliefs lacking ? Empathy then is meant as a tool to convince someone they were mistaken in their examination of prior beliefs and biases ?

 

_____

I think that conceiving of empathy as a tool to convince is somewhat morally bankrupt. To me. Others obviously feel different. It felt bankrupt when I used it in that way, it feels bankrupt when others use it that way. Empathy is not for persuasion, imo. It's for connection and understanding....

 

 

We must not be using the term the same way.  Empathy as I use the term is not an activity done alone, once.  Nor is it "performed."  It is a means to plumb and define -- in dialogue, out loud, with each other -- where I'm coming from and why, where you're coming from and why.  So that you could describe to a third person the whole chain of my premises, my relative hierarchy of values, how I derive at my thinking on the subject, in a manner that was not only respectful in "tone" but also coherent in describing A to B to C via the values of D, E and F.  And I could do the same, speaking of your premises and thought process.

 

(Not that we ACCEPT each other's end positions... or premises or reasoning steps.  But we can RELAY a coherent beginning-to-end thought process.)

 

______

 

Re "conceiving of empathy as a tool to convince is somewhat morally bankrupt" -- yes.  Me too.

 

I conceive of empathy as a tool to understand.  No more.  

 

That "connection and understanding" can be enough, sometimes, to enable policy or negotiation progress, because it is enough, sometimes, to render not-previously-visible alternatives, visible.  Not, however, by dragging the other person over: that to me would be what you upthread called moral coercion.

 

..
I'm sorry you feel this is freewheeling navel gazing. I would happily be more concrete, but charges of being lacking in empathy would result.

 

:lol:

 

I'm good with navel gazing, and slotting in other (ahem) "easier" concrete examples like slavery and Israel/ Palestine so as to follow the abstractions... or we can take it over to Politics if you want to carry on with a particular, other concrete.  Either's fine.

 

[Bluegoat]

Do you think empathy has any appropriate role in these conversations at all?

 

I'm not sure that it's something I thing it's generally useful to talk about, unless it's the point of the conversation.  (As in, what is it like to be in such and such a position?)  And there are lots of times people have discussions like that.

 

In other cases I think it can show us when, say, a proposed course of action will be untenable.  If someone suggests a solution to Israel/Palestine problem that would mean that all the people on one side will suffer some terrible hardship, that is an important consideration.  It doesn't mean the assessment of the nature of the problem or what is fair is wrong in itself, but it might show that there needs to be some action to mitigate outcomes or just a different kind of solution.

 

But as far as shedding light on the discussion of the issues in themselves, no, I don't think it is something that it really helps to discuss it.  It's more of a private orientation.  And no one that it is always easy to see in others, whether or not it is there.

[eternalsummer]

I also like concrete examples, I understand things better through them.

 

 

I think that sometimes there are different sets of considerations: one, maybe, is when you're discussing whether something is True or False, and another is when you're discussing whether something is Right or Wrong.  They're related but not necessarily interchangeable.

 

So I can say, it is true that some people (largely men) have an attraction to prepubescent children.  I don't think anyone would really argue the truth of it, and I can empathize with people who feel that way in that it must be difficult to reconcile the way you feel your sexuality works naturally with the way society requires it to work (that is to say, you're not allowed to have sex with prepubescent children).  But if we're having a discussion about whether it is Right or Wrong for society to allow men to have sex with 7 year olds, the empathy doesn't come into play; it is still Wrong.

 

A different sort of discussion might be people who think the world is flat (no splitting hairs this time, I'm not talking about flat for the purposes of building a house or whatever, but actually flat, like with the dome and everything).  In this case, either the world as a whole is flat or it is not flat.  I don't know that it's Wrong or Right to believe that the world is flat, but either it is flat or it isn't, and it makes sense for a society (imo) to allow people to say or believe what they like but make policy and scientific decisions based on the Truth of the matter.

Edited February 1, 2018 by eternalsummer

[eternalsummer]

If someone says to me, when I am providing evidence that the world is round and suggesting that NASA operate as if the world is round and etc., that I can't insist that the schools teach that the world is round and that we can't allocate money to organizations that do science based on the idea that the world is round not because the world is not round but because insisting that the world is round hurts the feelings of people who think it is flat, or fails to empathize with their position, that just sounds like an avoidance of the issue, to me.

 

ETA: If instead the person said that I can't do those things because the world is not round and here is the evidence that it is flat, okay.  Now we're having a discussion.  

Edited February 1, 2018 by eternalsummer

[eternalsummer]

As for the slavery example, I'm not well versed enough in history to know how people were converted, intellectually, from a pro-slavery position to an abolitionist position. 

 

But I would suggest that maybe it's not as simple as having people realize that it's wrong to take a mother from a child or wrong to beat someone to death.  I would say that most slaveholders already thought those things were wrong.  They just didn't think, maybe (again, I am speculating) that those considerations applied to slaves, or maybe that they didn't apply to non-Christian non-white people.  Or maybe they thought there was a secondary consideration that made the institution justified.

 

When we talk about factory farming, for example, we all think animal abuse is wrong.  If people did to their pet dogs or cats what we do to pigs, we'd condemn them; it's not a matter of thinking the behavior is okay but a matter of thinking it doesn't apply to pigs or other farm animals.  They suffer the same, they are not substantially different in terms of animalhood or suffering, in the way slaves weren't different in terms of personhood or suffering, but we class them as a different sort of thing to which the rules of animal abuse don't apply - maybe because we see a secondary consideration as justifying the dichotomy (that is to say, the availability of animal products) or maybe because we can separate them in our minds as different classes and thus having different moral rules apply to them.

 

I've tried many times to get people to empathize with the plight of factory farmed animals, and while they often express sorrow or disgust, they don't on the whole (almost ever) think it necessitates a change of behavior on their part or of the law on society's part.  So it is not that they're not empathizing, it's something else.

 

 

[Bluegoat]

I also like concrete examples, I understand things better through them.

 

 

I think that sometimes there are different sets of considerations: one, maybe, is when you're discussing whether something is True or False, and another is when you're discussing whether something is Right or Wrong.  They're related but not necessarily interchangeable.

 

So I can say, it is true that some people (largely men) have an attraction to prepubescent children.  I don't think anyone would really argue the truth of it, and I can empathize with people who feel that way in that it must be difficult to reconcile the way you feel your sexuality works naturally with the way society requires it to work (that is to say, you're not allowed to have sex with prepubescent children).  But if we're having a discussion about whether it is Right or Wrong for society to allow men to have sex with 7 year olds, the empathy doesn't come into play; it is still Wrong.

 

A different sort of discussion might be people who think the world is flat (no splitting hairs this time, I'm not talking about flat for the purposes of building a house or whatever, but actually flat, like with the dome and everything).  In this case, either the world as a whole is flat or it is not flat.  I don't know that it's Wrong or Right to believe that the world is flat, but either it is or it isn't, and it makes sense for a society (imo) to allow people to say or believe what they like but make policy and scientific decisions based on the Truth of the matter.

 

 

Well, your first example is interesting, because actually I have had discussions about pedophiles, including on the boards, where I felt like people had essentially consigned group who didn't entirely choose their lot in life to the category on non-human.  And similarly with other sexual offenders or criminals who seem to be really entirely choosing to act in evil ways.  I've occasionally been shocked by things said about such people.  Of course from my perspective that says nothing about what I think about the nature of their actions - they are evil actions and yet the people aren't sub-human (and I'd actually draw a logical connection between the two statements.)

 

So perhaps in a certain sense I felt that the people making those statements were lacking in empathy.  

[eternalsummer]

Yes, they were lacking in empathy - and that can have an impact on how you might arrange policy to address the issue.  But it doesn't impact whether the action is wrong, or whether society is required to accept the action as acceptable.

[Bluegoat]

As for the slavery example, I'm not well versed enough in history to know how people were converted, intellectually, from a pro-slavery position to an abolitionist position. 

 

But I would suggest that maybe it's not as simple as having people realize that it's wrong to take a mother from a child or wrong to beat someone to death.  I would say that most slaveholders already thought those things were wrong.  They just didn't think, maybe (again, I am speculating) that those considerations applied to slaves, or maybe that they didn't apply to non-Christian non-white people.  Or maybe they thought there was a secondary consideration that made the institution justified.

 

When we talk about factory farming, for example, we all think animal abuse is wrong.  If people did to their pet dogs or cats what we do to pigs, we'd condemn them; it's not a matter of thinking the behavior is okay but a matter of thinking it doesn't apply to pigs or other farm animals.  They suffer the same, they are not substantially different in terms of animalhood or suffering, in the way slaves weren't different in terms of personhood or suffering, but we class them as a different sort of thing to which the rules of animal abuse don't apply - maybe because we see a secondary consideration as justifying the dichotomy (that is to say, the availability of animal products) or maybe because we can separate them in our minds as different classes and thus having different moral rules apply to them.

 

I've tried many times to get people to empathize with the plight of factory farmed animals, and while they often express sorrow or disgust, they don't on the whole (almost ever) think it necessitates a change of behavior on their part or of the law on society's part.  So it is not that they're not empathizing, it's something else.

 

 

Yes, actually in terms of slavery, I think it's even more different than what you are suggesting.  Slavery falling out of favour was about a real change in worldview, independent from the question of whether slavery was an acceptable institution, rather than some new ability to empathize with the position of slaves.  When in that new worldview slavery was no longer compatible with the understanding of what it meant to be human, it started to be pushed back in various ways.  (Not that this happened all at once.) The last vestiges of it were particularly nasty, I suspect ,because they had to go through all kinds of contortions to justify it in what was now a well-established worldview, and that sort of conscious contradiction always seems to become particularly ugly.

 

[Bluegoat]

Yes, they were lacking in empathy - and that can have an impact on how you might arrange policy to address the issue.  But it doesn't impact whether the action is wrong, or whether society is required to accept the action as acceptable.

 

And I'd argue it doesn't really impact whether some people are sub-human or not, those are matters of truth and falsehood.

 

So - the question of whether they empathize in that instance, anyway, comes back to a question of another kind, what kind of thing i a person.  Or in your factory farming example, it might be what kind of thing is an animal (although possible there are other reasons there for people's response.)

[poppy]

As for the slavery example, I'm not well versed enough in history to know how people were converted, intellectually, from a pro-slavery position to an abolitionist position. 

 

But I would suggest that maybe it's not as simple as having people realize that it's wrong to take a mother from a child or wrong to beat someone to death.  I would say that most slaveholders already thought those things were wrong.  They just didn't think, maybe (again, I am speculating) that those considerations applied to slaves, or maybe that they didn't apply to non-Christian non-white people.  Or maybe they thought there was a secondary consideration that made the institution justified.

 

When we talk about factory farming, for example, we all think animal abuse is wrong.  If people did to their pet dogs or cats what we do to pigs, we'd condemn them; it's not a matter of thinking the behavior is okay but a matter of thinking it doesn't apply to pigs or other farm animals.  They suffer the same, they are not substantially different in terms of animalhood or suffering, in the way slaves weren't different in terms of personhood or suffering, but we class them as a different sort of thing to which the rules of animal abuse don't apply - maybe because we see a secondary consideration as justifying the dichotomy (that is to say, the availability of animal products) or maybe because we can separate them in our minds as different classes and thus having different moral rules apply to them.

 

I've tried many times to get people to empathize with the plight of factory farmed animals, and while they often express sorrow or disgust, they don't on the whole (almost ever) think it necessitates a change of behavior on their part or of the law on society's part.  So it is not that they're not empathizing, it's something else.

 

Because BACON !! Yum!! (says people who would be appalled if someone put a dog through one day of a factory farmed hog's life)

Right there with you. 

 

[8circles]

I'm not sure that it's something I thing it's generally useful to talk about, unless it's the point of the conversation.  (As in, what is it like to be in such and such a position?)  And there are lots of times people have discussions like that.

 

I thought that WAS the point of this discussion. 

 

 I would happily be more concrete, but charges of being lacking in empathy would result.

 

This sounds really passive-aggressive to me. I'm not sure how this conversation got here.

 

Oh, I hope you recover soon.

 

When you get a chance, I'd be interested if you could give a concrete example of how it would help with that kind of determination - how could empathy suggest a way forward for land division, for example.

No, I don't think this is a productive conversation. I've been asking questions that remain unanswered and now there are passive-aggressive comments and apparently a thread about people who "think empathy is everything" isn't actually about empathy. I'm clearly lost.

[Bluegoat]

I thought that WAS the point of this discussion. 

 

 

This sounds really passive-aggressive to me. I'm not sure how this conversation got here.

 

No, I don't think this is a productive conversation. I've been asking questions that remain unanswered and now there are passive-aggressive comments and apparently a thread about people who "think empathy is everything" isn't actually about empathy. I'm clearly lost.

 

I'm not sure if you mean this discussion or the one I was having elsewhere.

 

As far as this discussion goes, yes, I suppose it's about understanding what the individuals in the other discussion, as well as maybe other people who say similar things, were thinking about.  Several people have given their thoughts about that, or about what the topic means to them personally.

 

As far as the other discussion, no, it was not about anything like that, it was about policy choices.

 

I think Sadie was a bit hesitant to use real examples because of the same dynamic I observed which seems pretty standard at the moment - which is people who have a view, or sometimes even raise a question, that is not seen as correct, are accused of being hateful or unkind.  I don't think that has happened in this discussion, but it's something that happens quite a lot and is shocking to people the first time they have it happen to them.

 

I'm not sure which questions you feel were unanswered, I'm sorry if we've missed something.