Empathy is a terrible basis for ethics. Empathy is our capacity to understand the emotional state of others based on our ability to model those others and feel what they are likely to be feeling. The problem with it as a basis of ethics is that this process is easier the more we have in common with those others. We want our ethics to be universal, not to apply most to the people we can best identify with.
I came to this position via Paul Bloom's work and book on empathy, though my position goes a bit further than his does. My position confuses a lot of people. To illustrate it, I often told the story from my own life, of how I would invest money and time protesting apparently unnecessary US military interventions, e.g. the first Gulf War (for which there were enormous protests in Chicago, though they seldom made the news). But I wouldn't actually cry when I read news about those events. Problems like being a conscript in a desert being carpet bombed were too alien for me to really imagine. September 11th made me cry though, because being from Chicago, I more or less knew exactly how the people of New York City felt. That empathy didn't though alter my moral assessment of the context. For example, I was mortified at the amount of money spent on the world trade memorials, compared to what we were spending for the vastly greater numbers of people dying in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere at the same time as part of related events. My ethics is based on my reasoning (e.g. all lives matter) not my feelings.
Nevertheless, I still want to have empathy for other humans – to understand as much as I can. One of the many things I felt liberal guilt for having no real capacity of empathy for was the situation in Gaza. That's over now since having read this beautiful article, which makes it evident that life in Gaza really had been more conceivable and accessible than some of the propaganda had led me to understand, but also what it is like now. „Beautiful buildings fall like columns of smoke.“ As an American, I can only visualise this as a September 11th, only every day, at irregular times, with smaller, more beautiful buildings.
Comments