Empathy
"Empathy is intuitive, but is also something you can work on, intellectually."
- Tim Minchin
Overview
Empathy is the capacity to model another's experience as if it were one's own. Psychologists distinguish affective empathy, feeling something of what another feels, from cognitive empathy, understanding what they feel and why without necessarily sharing it. Compassion, the wish that another's suffering be relieved, is a third thing again, and the one that actually does the work.
Notes
- Empathy is the motivational engine of morality. Because the suffering of others registers as a cost to the self, self-interest and altruism are far less opposed than they first appear. It is also why moral claims can be grounded in human interests without needing a lawgiver: we are built to count other people's interests, imperfectly, as partly our own.
- It is a poor guide on its own. Affective empathy is parochial: it is strongest for one identifiable person who resembles us and weakest for a million strangers, which is the opposite of what the arithmetic of harm requires. The Veil of Ignorance is one attempt to correct for that; Utilitarianism is another.
- The cognitive kind can be trained, as Minchin says. Steelmanning is empathy applied to an argument: modelling the opponent's position well enough to state it in a form they would accept. Most bad debate is a failure of exactly this.
- Lack of empathy is not the same as disagreement. People who hold views I find appalling (Holocaust Denial, say) usually have the full complement of empathy for their own side; the failure is in who gets counted, not in the capacity.