Empathy
Plus our upcoming café on knowledge, suggested readings and resources, and more.
Introduction
By Adrian Ma
Growing up, many of us were taught two things about empathy: 1) that it is the capacity to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes,” and 2) that more of it is always a good thing. Should either claim be taken for granted? At our Curiosity Café last Tuesday, moderated by philosophy PhD student Leena Abdelrahim and our very own Marybel Menzies, we explored the nature and nurture of empathy and the role it plays (or ought to play) in moral decision-making. Below, you can find a recap of some of the ideas we exchanged during our collaborative two-hour discussion. But first:
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Curiosity Café Recap: Empathy
Community Survey
Upcoming Events
Toronto Events
Readings & Resources
Curiosity Café Recap: Empathy
By Adrian Ma
Our latest Curiosity Café, moderated by Leena Abdelrahim and Marybel Menzies, began with a foundational question: What, exactly, does it mean to empathize with others? After all, while empathy is often described as a kind of feeling “with” (as opposed to feeling “for”) another person, it is not always clear what feeling “with” involves. Does it require understanding what another person is feeling? Does it involve sharing or mirroring those feelings, or does it only require that we feel what we think they might be feeling? What is the difference between empathy and sympathy? Is empathy a trainable skill, or just a capacity one is or isn’t born with?
Here’s a small—but only a small—selection of your responses:
Empathy is a function of relatability, which is why we can empathize much better with someone whose background or experiences are similar to ours.
If empathy consists in sharing another person’s feelings, it does not require feeling them to the same degree. To empathize with my friend, I don’t have to match the intensity of their sadness or anger. What matters is that my feelings belong to the same category.
One of the factors that distinguishes empathy from sympathy is distance. Sympathy, to use a famous metaphor, is when you see someone stuck in a hole and say, “It’s bad, huh?”; empathy is when you get down into the hole with them.
We tend to view empathy as a deeper or more meaningful form of engagement than sympathy. However, we sometimes talk as though empathy is the foundation of sympathy, as when we say: “I can sympathize with x or y because I’ve been in their situation before.” Is our language simply confused?
Some participants described empathy as cognitive and sympathy as emotive. Others thought it was the other way around—sympathy involves judging another person’s situation to be unfortunate, whereas empathy involves feeling their misfortune.
Sympathy may be “failed” empathy—a kind of feeling or understanding that we settle for when we lack the prerequisite knowledge or experience for empathy.
Does this framing of sympathy imply that it is always “second-best,” and that we should aim for empathy wherever possible? Or are there cases in which sympathy is ultimately preferable to empathy, even when we are capable of both?
Sometimes, it may be wise for the sake of our well-being to opt for sympathy instead of empathy. Empathy can be exhausting—if we empathized with every person we encountered, our mental and emotional resources would be quickly depleted.
To empathize with someone, it isn’t enough to guess what they are feeling, or to feel what they might be feeling. This is a start, but true empathy is a multi-step process in which I continually reexamine and refine my response by connecting with and learning more about the other person. Empathy is interpersonal, not solipsistic.
We can understand empathy better by comparing it to attunement. Attunement involves being there with someone, but without quite picturing ourselves in their place. In other words, attunement preserves the distinction between self and other, while empathy makes it much less distinct.
Empathy may be a kind of social contagion, in that it involves “catching” the emotional state of another person or group of people. If so, it appears to be a particularly demanding form of social contagion. Unlike laughter, which one can “catch” without being amused by or even getting the joke, empathy seems to require feeling what the other person is feeling or understanding what they are going through.
In summoning empathy, I attempt to reconstruct what another person might be feeling by mixing and matching certain fundamental building blocks of human experience (such as sadness, grief, anger, and loneliness). However, these building blocks are not always sufficient, and it’s easy to get the arrangement or combination wrong.
To empathize with someone, I don’t need to have experienced the exact situation they are going through; having undergone a meaningfully analogous experience should be enough. For example, I can empathize with my friend’s experience of losing their grandmother by drawing from my experience of losing my cousin. In such cases, I transpose my experiences (or what I can recapture of those experiences) onto another person, whose situation appears to be comparable to mine.
However, there are downsides to this approach. My belief that I already know how another person is feeling may discourage me from investigating or appreciating how they actually are feeling. Moreover, what I assume to be empathy might simply be a re-experiencing of my prior emotional states, rather than the product of sincere interpersonal engagement.
As with talents, people are born with greater or lesser capacities for empathy. But this capacity, like any talent, can be cultivated or neglected, and practice can go a long way toward compensating for natural disadvantages.
Art is a good way of cultivating empathy, because it involves taking up the perspectives of characters whose backgrounds and experiences you don’t (and maybe can’t) share.
After the break, our attention shifted from the nature and meaning of empathy to its moral benefits and drawbacks, its potential for use and abuse. As Leena and Marybel write:
You might think that overall, empathy is a good thing. Many of us do. We tend to think of empathetic people as taking other’s perspectives into account more frequently, and as making better moral decisions. A person who empathizes with their grieving friend, might be moved to check in on them regularly. A person who empathizes with victims of an earthquake might be moved to donate to their cause. But you might also think that although empathy is a positive thing overall, it’s a bad guide for moral decisions. After all, we seem to show greater empathy to people who are similar to us. Given these biases, is empathy a reliable tool in making moral decisions? Are there better ways to take other people’s perspectives into account in our decisions?
Here’s what some of you had to say:
Empathy is key to a meaningful relationship, because it allows us to see the world through another person’s eyes and thereby brings us closer together.
Like any tool, empathy can be used for good or bad. Understanding how another person is feeling can put us in a better position to help them, but it can also, for example, make us better at hurting or manipulating them.
Empathy has a built-in safeguard against manipulation (and, perhaps, other immoral ends). To be adequately responsive to another’s emotional state, I must lower my walls, soften my edges, so that I can be moved and moulded by their experience. This intensely vulnerable position, in which I suspend some degree of control over myself, leaves little room for manipulative, or even instrumental, action.
Empathy is an unreliable guide for moral decision-making, because the right thing to do often runs counter to what an individual wants to be done. If we were to inhabit the perspective of a violent criminal, we would want to evade punishment, too!
We often feel guilt or shame when we fail to empathize to the extent that the situation or social pressure demands. We may feel we have let others down, or that we are deficient in some moral capacity.
However, knowing when to empathize is just as important as knowing how to empathize. Sometimes, one simply cannot, or should not, attempt to inhabit or share another person’s experience. Misguided or misinformed empathy can feel extremely invalidating for the person to whom it is directed, and can also lead to faulty judgments about their situation. In some cases, it is better to simply listen.
Sometimes empathy is bad for the receiving party. For example, overly empathetic parents may be more likely to coddle their children, who may grow up to be less independent or resilient as a result.
One of the dangers of empathy is that it can make us overly charitable in our judgments of other people, and give undue weight to extenuating circumstances. Empathy, in short, may lead us to excuse where we ought to condemn.
However, this undue lenience may stem more from a shortage than from an excess of empathy. Perhaps true empathy requires appreciating both the wrongdoer’s extenuating circumstances and the extent of their agency—the fact that they had the capacity to do otherwise, and can therefore be held responsible for their wrongdoing. (Not to mention that holding other people accountable is part and parcel of treating them with respect.)
It is hard to empathize with others when we haven’t learned to empathize with ourselves. How can we inhabit other people’s experiences when we can’t even understand or appreciate our own?
The idea of self-empathy may seem puzzling, because insofar as empathy requires inhabiting a person’s experience of the world, we seem to have no choice but to empathize with ourselves. However, self-empathy is a valuable (and coherent) concept because we are often made to distrust or dismiss our own experiences (as when someone tells us, “You shouldn’t feel that way”). In such cases, self-empathy can put us back in touch with ourselves.
To what extent should considerations of empathy be accommodated in matters of policy or law—or, more broadly, in systemic moral decision-making? On the one hand, our courts, for example, can only do so much to account for the factors on which empathy is typically grounded. Giving full consideration to these factors would not only overwhelm the system, but may also lead to undesirable social consequences (we don’t allow a murderer to go free simply because we can empathize with the experiences that drove them to commit the crime). On the other hand, we wouldn’t want to live under a system in which empathy isn’t considered at all. To use a smaller-scale example: A student should generally hand in their homework on time, but there are also extenuating circumstances for handing it in late. How can we strike the right balance on a systemic level?
If you missed this café, I feel sorry for (with?) you. I hope you can make it to the next one: You can find more on that in the “Upcoming Events” section below. Finally, if you have any sympathy for what we are doing, please consider filling out our community survey. Your responses will be anonymous and will go a long way toward helping us improve our events. Thanks for reading.
Community Survey
For those who’ve attended our Curiosity Cafés, please consider taking our brief community survey. We are conducting this survey to gather feedback on our events, and it should only take a few minutes to complete. Your responses are completely anonymous and will be invaluable in helping us improve our offerings. Thank you in advance!
Upcoming Events
Curiosity Café: Bi-weekly on Tuesdays, tickets below!
About: For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to join our Curiosity Cafés and are wondering what they’re all about: Every two weeks, we invite members of our community (that includes you, dear reader!) to come out to the Madison Avenue Pub to engage in a collaborative exploration of our chosen topic. Through these events, we aim to build our community of people who like to think deeply about life’s big questions, and provide each other with some philosophical tools to dig deeper into whatever it is we are most curious about. After our scheduled programming, we encourage attendees to stay and mingle over food and drinks.
We will be hosting our next Curiosity Café on Tuesday, September 24th from 6:00 - 8:30 pm at the Madison Avenue Pub (14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON M5R 2S1). Come and hang out with us, grab food, and read through our handout from 6:00 - 6:30 pm. Our structured discussion will run from 6:30 - 8:30 pm with a 10 minute break in the middle!
Please get a ticket using the button below the event description. If tickets are sold out, please contact us, either on Instagram @beingnbecomingorg or over email at sophia@beingnbecoming.org, and we will let you know if we are able to accommodate you.
The topic of our next café is: What is Knowledge?
Knowledge is a cornerstone to everything we do, from scientific progress to interacting with others to understanding ourselves. Given the significance of knowledge, philosophers have dedicated an entire branch of the discipline to studying it (called epistemology). However, there remains no consensus on the nature of knowledge.
In the first half of our conversation, we will discuss the power of curiosity, how we can go about inspiring it in ourselves and in others, and the ways in which curiosity may lead one astray in the pursuit of knowledge. In the second half, we will narrow in on the nature of knowledge. We will look at a couple of views on what knowledge is and how we acquire it, as well as some concerns about each view—which may lead one to conclude that we cannot know anything! If we think that we can still acquire knowledge, despite these concerns, then how might one go about identifying good sources of knowledge? We’ll end our discussion exploring this question and more. Join us at the next Curiosity Café on September 24th, with guest moderator Eirini Martsoukaki, and our very own Marybel Menzies, to discuss knowledge, curiosity, and the limits of what we can know. As Einstein once said, “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.” Let us embrace the spirit of curiosity as we explore and push the boundaries of what we know!
Both the “Pay-What-You-Can” and “free” tickets serve as a ticket to our café! We ask that you consider making a donation by purchasing a “Pay-What-You-Can” ticket to help us make our work and growth as an organization possible. If you have accessibility-related concerns, please visit our Eventbrite Page—in the event description you will find some accessibility-related information about the venue and the event.
Toronto Events
Chris’s Toronto Event Calendar
If you want more opportunities to connect, inquire and mingle with like-minded people, check out Chris’s calendar on Notion. Chris curates this calendar with events happening in Toronto. Events include thought-provoking lectures, group discussions, and workshops.
makeworld’s Calendar of Toronto Events
makeworld’s curated list of recurrent events in Toronto, which include tech meetups, lectures, unconventional comedy shows, and discussion-based events (like ours!).
Readings & Resources
Marybel’s Recommendation:
“In Defense of the Moral Significance of Empathy“ by Aaron Simmons
In this article, Simmons argues that empathy is both necessary and sufficient to care for another’s well-being. From the abstract:
It is commonly suggested that empathy is a morally important quality to possess and that a failure to properly empathize with others is a kind of moral failure. This suggestion assumes that empathy involves caring for others’ well-being. Skeptics challenge the moral importance of empathy by arguing that empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient to care for others’ well-being. This challenge is misguided. Although some forms of empathy may not be morally important, empathy with another’s basic well-being concerns is both necessary and sufficient to care for another’s well-being, provided that one’s empathy is both cognitive and affective. I further defend the idea that empathy of this form is a moral virtue.
Zach’s Recommendation:
Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom
In Against Empathy, Bloom argues that empathy might not be the reliable guide to moral action that we think it is. Empathy, with its limitations, can often bias our attention and decision-making and lead to unintended consequences. Instead, Bloom argues that we should be guided by rational compassion—caring for others in a manner that is guided by reason—so that we don’t dismiss those left out of empathy’s spotlight. In making this argument, Bloom takes readers through a journey of investigating empathy and its relation to politics, action, intimacy, morality, and cruelty.
Sophia’s Recommendation:
From the Overthink website:
In this episode of Overthink, Ellie and David dive into the sensation of empathy! The dynamic duo discuss mirror neurons, whether animals can feel empathy, nice boy syndrome, why the phrase “I feel your pain” is so annoying, and more!
Featured Quote
We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
- Virginia Woolf
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