Is empathy a core strength? Here’s what philosophy says

In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, billionaire and The President megadonor Elon Musk offered his thoughts about what motivates political progressives to support immigration. In his view, the culprit was empathy, which he called “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”

As shocking as Musk’s views are, however, they are far from unique. On the one hand, there is the familiar and widespread conservative critique of “bleeding heart” liberals as naive or overly emotional. But there is also a broader philosophical critique that raises worries about empathy on quite different and less political grounds, including findings in social science.

Empathy can make people weaker – both physically and practically, according to social scientists. Consider the phenomenon known as “empathy fatigue,” a major source of burnout among counselors, nurses and even neurosurgeons. These professionals devote their lives to helping others, yet the empathy they feel for their clients and patients wears them down, making it harder to do their jobs.

As philosophers, we agree that empathy can take a toll on both individuals and society. However, we believe that, at its core, empathy is a form of mental strength that enables us to better understand the impact of our actions on others, and to make informed choices.

The philosophical roots of empathy skepticism

The term “empathy” only entered the English language in the 1890s. But the general idea of being moved by others’ suffering has been a subject of philosophical attention for millennia, under labels such as “pity,” “sympathy” and “compassion.”

One of the earliest warnings about pity in Western philosophy comes from the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. In his “Discourses,” he offers general advice about how to live a good life, centered on inner tranquility and freedom. When it comes to emotions and feelings, he writes: “He is free who lives as he wishes to live … And who chooses to live in sorrow, fear, envy, pity, desiring and failing in his desires, attempting to avoid something and falling into it? Not one.”

Feeling sorry for another person or feeling pity for them compromises our freedom, in Epictetus’s view. Those negative feelings are unpleasant, and nobody would choose them for themselves. Empathy would clearly fall into this same category, keeping us from living the good life.

A similar objection emerged much later from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche framed his discussion in terms of “Mitleid” – a German term that can be translated as either “pity” or “compassion.” Like Epictetus, Nietzsche worried that pity or compassion was a burden on the individual, preventing them from living the good life. In his book “Daybreak,” Nietzsche warns that such feelings could impair the very people who try to help others.

Epictetus’s and Nietzsche’s worries about pity or compassion carry over to empathy.

Recall, the phenomenon of empathy fatigue. One psychological explanation for why empathic people experience fatigue and even burnout is that empathy involves a kind of mirroring of other people’s mental life, a mirroring that can be physically unpleasant. When someone you love is in pain, you don’t just believe that they are in pain; you may feel it as if it is actually happening to you.

Results from neuroscience and cognitive psychology research indicate that there are different brain mechanisms involved in merely observing another’s pain versus empathizing with it. The latter involves unpleasant sensations of the type we experience when we are in pain. Empathy is thus difficult to bear precisely because being in pain is difficult to bear. And this sharpens the Stoic and Nietzschean worries: Why bother empathizing when it is unpleasant and, perhaps, not even necessary for helping others?

From understanding knowledge to appreciating empathy

The answer for why one should see empathy as a strength starts with a key insight from 20th century philosophy about the nature of knowledge.

That insight is based on a famous thought experiment by the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson. Jackson invites us to imagine a scientist named Mary who has studied colors despite having lived her entire life in a black and white room. She knows all the facts about the spectrum distribution of light sources and vision science. She’s read descriptions of the redness of roses and azaleas. But she’s never seen color herself. Does Mary know everything about redness? Many epistemologists – people who study the nature of knowledge – argue that she does not.

What Mary learns when she sees red for the first time is elusive. If she returns to her black and white room, never to see any colored objects again, her knowledge of the colors will likely diminish over time. To have a full, rich understanding of colors, one needs to experience them.

Thoughts like these led the philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell to argue that experience delivers a special kind of knowledge of things that can’t be reduced to knowledge of facts. Seeing, hearing, tasting and even feeling delivers what he called “knowledge by acquaintance.”

We have argued in a book and recent articles that Jackson’s and Russell’s conclusions apply to pain.

Consider a variation on Jackson’s thought experiment: Suppose Mary knows the facts about pain but hasn’t experienced it. As before, it would seem like her understanding of pain is incomplete. In fact, though Mary is a fictional character, there are real people who report having never experienced pain as an unpleasant sensation – a condition known as “pain asymbolia”.

In Russell’s terminology, such people haven’t personally experienced how unpleasant pain can be. But even people without pain asymbolia can become less familiar with pain and hardship during times when things are going well for them. All of us can temporarily lose the rich experiential grasp of what it is like to be distressed. So, when we consider the pain and suffering of others in the abstract and without directly feeling it, it is very much like trying to grasp the nature of redness while being personally acquainted only with a field of black and white.

That, we argue, is where empathy comes in. Through experiential simulation of another’s feelings, empathy affords us a rich grasp of the distress that others feel. The upshot is that empathy isn’t just a subjective sensation. It affords us a more accurate understanding of others’ experiences and emotions.

Empathy is thus a form of knowledge that can be hard to bear, just as pain can be hard to bear. But that’s precisely why empathy, properly cultivated, is a strength. As one of us has argued, it takes courage to empathically engage with others, just as it takes courage to see and recognize problems around us. Conversely, an unwillingness to empathize can stem from a familiar weakness: a fear of knowledge.

So, when deciding complex policy questions, say, about immigration, resisting empathy impairs our decision-making. It keeps us from understanding what’s at stake. That is why it is vital to ask ourselves what policies we would favor if we were empathically acquainted with, and so fully informed of, the plight of others.

Emad H. Atiq is a professor of law and philosophy at Cornell University.

Colin Marshall is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Washington.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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