Effective altruism and effective empathy
Like with financial resources, (some) people have limited empathy. Better then to use it effectively.
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This is a rough draft of a research essay that never found a home. There is something about this paper worth exploring, but I cannot locate it. In any case, I’m positing it here as the first in the FORGOTTEN PAPERS SERIES. As always, comments welcome!
One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy […].
—Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons
1 | Introduction
Empathy can motivate compassion. It can misfire. This tension is the source of controversy around its moral value. Some hold there is an empathy deficit, and if people would only be more empathetic, the world would be morally improved. Empathy skeptics, though, hold that empathy is too often susceptible to bias whereby we favor individuals who resemble ourselves at the expense of others who are too dissimilar, and to spotlighting specific individuals, at the expense of others who are no less deserving of our empathy (Prinz 2011; Bloom 2016, 2017). Empathy can motivate genuine altruism, and morally misfire too.
The same applies to financial resources. They, too, can promote moral goodness if contributed to causes that effectively improve the well-being of individuals. They can also be used, despite being contributed to ineffective causes, to signal that our prosocial and trustworthy nature as individuals. Contributing to causes, without regard for their effectiveness, is common (Simler and Hanson 2018; Brokensha, Eriksson, and Ravenscroft 2016). These shortcomings are among what the practice of effective altruism aims to correct: using reason and empirical evidence to effectively improve the well-being of others. As William Macaskill explains:
[Effective] altruism has two parts, and we want to be clear on what each part means. As we use the term, altruism simply means improving the lives of others. Many people believe that altruism should denote sacrifice, but if you can do good while maintaining a comfortable life for yourself, that’s a bonus, and we are happy to call that altruism. The second part is effectiveness, by which we mean doing the most good with whatever resources you have. Importantly, effective altruism is not just about making a difference, or doing some amount of good. It’s about trying to make the most difference you can. Determining whether something is effective means recognizing that some ways of doing good are better than others (2015: 9—my emphasis).
Ordinary altruism can miss the moral mark and waste resources, so it must be beefed up using reason and empirical evidence to do the most good. Here we argue that those same lessons are applicable to ordinary empathy: though it can be biased and unfair, using insights from effective altruism, we can better employ empathy, as a finite resource, to do the most good. We do that in two parts: first, we explain how insights from effective altruism apply to empathy as a moral resource. Second, we argue that ignorance of others’ suffering has value if empathy would be causally impotent in that case but effective elsewhere. The paper thesis holds that:
Empathy is a valuable and finite resource for doing good that could be made more effective by applying insights from effective altruism—call the practice effective empathy. And we have similar reasons to adopt effective empathy as we do effective altruism.
There are two broad reasons to care about our thesis. First, empathy can be a finite resource: when in high demand, individuals can suffer empathetic fatigue because they overuse it. And second, empathy has social value by motivating altruism and enhancing cooperation, but like with financial resources, is subject to misuse. To the extent that reason and empirical evidence illuminate how to better use empathy, where possible, we can better employ empathy to be more effective in our altruistic and cooperative efforts.
Before advancing, we should say a bit about what we take empathy to be. Though there is debate as to what it is that empathy amounts to, we can appeal to a conception of empathy, as a robust moral emotion, which is plausible enough for our purposes. Empathy is a moral emotion with two major aspects (Shamay-Tsoory et. al., 2009; Westra and Carruthers 2017):
(A) Affective empathy is the capacity to respond to the mental states or situations of others, with an appropriate or fitting emotion, often involving compassion, distress, and anxiety.
(B) Cognitive empathy is the capacity of understand the perspective of others, often involving a sophisticated theory of mind: the ability to reliably ascribe mental states to others with the use of cognitive techniques like simulations and meta-beliefs.
To better understand the project of effective empathy, we need to get a handle on the project of effective altruism. We explore that next.
2 | The Effective Altruism Project
Effective altruism is the ethical project that aims to do the most good by relying on reason and empirical evidence to guide it. We can roughly cash this out by thinking of effective altruism as the project saving the most lives and improving the welfare of individuals by maximizing the efficient use of financial resources, time, and effort, where such moral improvements wouldn’t have happened without that effort (MacAskill 2015; MacAskill and Pummer 2020).
(2.1) The Basics of Effective Altruism
The primary aspects of effective altruism are cost-effectiveness assessments and impartiality of doing the most good: improving the welfare of individuals most effectively per dollar spent. Effective altruism is thus the project of:
Spending resources we aim to devote to individuals, where that spending is unlikely to benefit us directly, to maximize their aggregate well-being, to the extent we do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral or normative significance (Singer 2009; Bowen 2016).
There are, of course, complications with applying effective altruism. It isn’t always obvious how options compare with respect to increasing or maximizing aggregate well-being since it isn’t always clear what it is to not sacrifice anything of comparable moral or normative significance. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for the idea that if our aim is to engage in acts of altruism, then ceteris paribus, we should aim effectively. For the sake of the paper, we should leave aside whether we should be effective altruists and focus instead on the less contentious claim: if one aims to be altruistic, then they should be effective and efficient in that aim.
The focus on aggregate well-being is meant to resolve a tension between, on the one hand, helping the most people (spreading our altruistic efforts across the most individuals), and on the other hand, helping people the most (maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of the help provided each individual in need). Sometimes these aims are in tension: one policy may achieve the former, not the latter; another policy may do the reverse. The use of aggregate well-being, to the extent possible, aims to resolve such tensions. An effective altruist, then, favors policies that maximize aggregate well-being[1] (Bowen 2016; MacAskill 2015: 39-40).
The same holds of impartiality: effective altruism aims to encourage the aggregate well-being, effectively and efficiently, without regard to who specifically would benefit from it, in terms of qualities like nationality, race, sexuality, and the like. One obviously shouldn’t be punished, or have their well-being neglected, merely because of their immutable characteristics—it should be rather, ceteris paribus, the more they are in need, the more reason we have to improve their well-being. There is a fairness intuition operating here: it would be unfair to focus our altruistic efforts on folks who, for example, incidentally belong to the in-group at the expense of those who belong the out-group, even if they are equally deserving of altruism.
And given that altruistic efforts often can and do misfire, effective altruism is a worthy ethical project. To establish the latter claim, we should turn to how ordinary altruism can misfire, tie that into challenges to the value of empathy from empathy skeptics, and then use insights from effective altruism to illuminate the effective empathy project.
(2.2) Most Altruism is Ineffective
Most altruistic acts are ineffective. For example, though the majority of Americans (85 percent) claim to care about charity effectiveness, only about three percent compare the effectiveness of various charities before giving (Hope Consulting 2010). Most people are, instead, motivated to give by morally irrelevant factors such as feeling the warm-glow of donating to causes they identify with, and looking good to their peer group, those they find physically attractive, or because high-profile people, like celebrities, donate to a given cause (Simler and Hanson 2018; MacAskill 2018). The two main, but hardly only, confounds to effective altruism are the warm glow of donating and reputation boosts[2].
The warm glow of giving is the subjective feeling of satisfaction that many people derive from performing acts of altruism by making a personal sacrifice to help someone else (Crumpler and Grossman 2008; Simler and Hanson 2018). This impetus for giving is understandable, though still unfortunate, since the warm glow we feel from giving is often the result of giving on the basis of biases like proximity, similarity, and in-group preference such that our altruistic efforts, like donating or volunteering, aren’t nearly as effective and efficient as they could be had they been focused on doing the most good. Perhaps a partial explanation for these biases is that in small groups, these qualities would look more like valuable heuristics for doing the most good in that setting, since it isn’t always clear how to measure the effectiveness of aid—something still hotly debated by effective altruists (MacAskill 2018).
Second, people are especially good at cooperating—it is our evolutionary superpower. Unfortunately, though, since we must rely on cooperation with others for survival, there is the real chance we will be taken advantage of by free-riders, who take from the group without contributing their fair share. One solution to this problem is tracking the cooperative potential of others using their reputations: those with better reputations will, ceteris paribus, perform better in the cooperative market (Sperber and Baumard 2013; Vonasch et. al., 2018). We thus shouldn’t be surprised that when people donate to a charity, whether they give, and how much, often depends on factors like whether someone is watching when prompted to give, pressure from peers, family members, and high-status folks, when primed to think about sex, or asked by someone we find sexually attractive (Simler and Hanson 2018: 205-244; Brokensha, Eriksson, Ravenscroft 2016).
3 | Confronting Empathy Skepticism
Empathy is widely considered a valuable psychological ingredient for positive change. Former United States President, Barack Obama, famously stated ‘the biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit. We are in great need of people being able to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes’ (Conroy 2017). However, there are critics of empathy who hold, despite some good it produces, it is poorly suited as moral emotion for such purposes, and that there are moral emotions, like compassion, better suited for the role of motivating altruism and benevolence by moral agents. Empathy can be a force for good by motivating altruistic behaviors. What is often lost, though, on admirers of empathy are tradeoffs: there are benefits to empathy, but the costs may outweigh them. This is why looking at the value of empathy, through an economic lens, can dampen its appeal.
For our purposes, one qualifies as an empathy skeptic if they hold either that (a) empathy is poorly suited as a motivation for altruism given its biases and spotlighting, or (b) even though empathy properly motivates empathy, there are still moral emotions and cognitive states better suited to motivate altruism. Most empathy skeptics accept (a) and (b), but accepting at least one conjunct is enough to count as an empathy skeptic. We should examine two defects of ordinary empathy before we apply insights from effective altruism to address them.
(3.1) The Bias Defect
One of the major defects of empathy, highlighted by empathy skeptics, is that empathy tends to bias those who feel it toward individuals in distress like them or within their group, and less toward dissimilar and out-group individuals. As the psychologist, Paul Bloom, writes about the bias defect of ordinary empathy:
Empathy is also influenced by ingroup bias. One European study tested male soccer fans. The fan would receive a shock on the back of his hand and would then watch another man receive the same shock. When the other man was described as a fan of the subject's team, there was more of an empathic neural response – an overlap in self–other pain – than when he was described as a fan of the opposing team (Bloom 2017: 26; see too: Prinz 2011).
There is some sense to this bias, though not in a fashion that morally vindicates it: we are more prone to empathize with people who are like us perhaps because we have an easier time imagining what it would be like to ‘be in their shoes’. Since we are more similar to them, it would be easier to put ourselves in their position, predict what it would be like, and then use that to satisfy the cognitive and affective aspects of empathy. As already acknowledged, though, this isn’t a moral vindication of such bias, but perhaps explains, if only partially, why empathy can exhibit this defect (Shannon 2018; Westra 2019). The charge is, among other things, that empathy can misfire in a fashion that is unfair, and especially where our empathy is a zero-sum game, it would mean that some people unfairly benefit to the exclusion of others.
(3.2) The Spotlight Defect
Another defect of ordinary empathy is spotlighting: the tendency to focus more on individuals than on groups, even when the members of a group are equally deserving of empathy. When we empathize with someone, there is a risk we will only focus on one or few individuals who are in need and the focus of our attention, while ignoring the (morally comparable) needs of the many. As Prinz explains, empathy can cause us to ‘ignore the forest fire, while watering a smoldering tree’ (2011: 228). To the extent that the group we ignore, to focus on a few individuals, equally deserve empathy, empathy is a poor motivator for doing the most good. As the psychologist, Paul Bloom, argues:
One problem with empathy is illustrated in a classic experiment in which subjects were told about a 10-year-old girl named Sheri Summers who had a fatal disease and was low on the waiting list for a treatment that would relieve her pain. Subjects were then given the option of moving her to the front of the list, although this would mean that another child, perhaps more deserving, would not get the treatment. The majority said no. However, if they were first asked to feel what Sheri Summers felt […] their answers shifted and a majority chose to move her up (2017: 25).
And:
Many studies find that people are largely unmoved by the number of individuals who are suffering when asked how much they would give to help them. In some cases empathy can even guide us to favor the one over the many. People who are shown the name and picture of one child in need of a life-saving drug give more money than people who are merely told that there are eight children in need (ibid.).
The empathy skeptics conclude that, instead of relying on empathy to motivate helping others, we should put on ‘empathetic blinders’ before deciding helping (Prinz 2011: 228; Bloom 2016), and relying instead on sympathy and rational considerations, as these avenues to helping others do not appear to be susceptible to spotlighting like empathy.
(3.3) Effective Altruism and Effective Empathy
A critic looks well-placed, then, to argue that we shouldn’t expect that effective altruism would have much to contribute to managing our (limited) empathetic resources since empathy has a tendency toward partiality and inefficiency—focusing on in-group members at the expense of out-group members, and some individuals over other individuals equally deserving—exactly at odds with the central tenants of effective altruism. The issue, though, with this worry is that it is directed at ordinary empathy, practicing empathy without, when possible, first applying the lessons from effective altruism. Just as we shouldn’t dismiss altruism because ordinary altruism is typically motivated by reasons related to reputational concern rather than doing the most good. As MacAskill and Pummer explain, effective altruism is the project ‘of using evidence and reason to try to find out how to do the most good, and on this basis trying to do the most good’ (2020).
Effective altruists advise educating and focusing our altruistic impulse, instead of abandoning it. And here we are advocating for taking that same approach with respect to our empathy: even though it can misfire in several ways, it is a scarce resource that can motivate altruistic actions, and instead of dumping it, we should educate and focus it toward looking to do the most good. To the extent that we can apply these lessons to our empathetic endeavors, we should focus our empathetic resources on deserving individuals, where that would do the most good, instead of a deserving individual, at the expense of equally deserving others.
4 | Outlining Effective Empathy
The bias and spotlighting defects of ordinary empathy resemble the troubles besetting ordinary altruism: empathy can be prone to bias toward in-group members, just as ordinary altruism can do likewise. Empathy tends toward the spotlighting effect by focusing us on someone deserving of empathy at the expense of many equally (if not more) deserving individuals just like ordinary altruism is often directed at individuals or causes for reasons unrelated to alleviating the most (or perhaps any) suffering. Since effective altruism stresses, among other things, the importance of impartiality and doing the most good, contra ordinary altruism, we can apply those insights to empathy: using reason and empirical evidence, to assist in the better allocating of empathetic resources.
(4.1) Empathy as Scarce Resource
Most of us have ample empathy for everyday purposes. There are instances, though, where our empathetic resources can be taxed, both cognitively and emotionally. This is especially the case for individuals who regularly experience empathy in the course of their everyday lives or as a part of their professional lives, in that:
[Excessive] empathy has been associated with vulnerability to emotional disorders in health professionals and caregivers. These conditions have been described under different terms—empathetic distress, compassion fatigue or burnout, all of which were associated with an intense sharing of other’s negative emotions (Chikovani et. al., 2015: 340).
For example, Sarah has spent months caring for her widowed father, who was diagnosed with a severe form of dementia. She spends her days ensuring he takes his medications, eats properly, and doesn’t overtax himself. Sarah’s empathy for her father both motivates her to do her best to care for him, but is also a source of emotional distress and taxation. In the course of caring for him, and for a while after his death, Sarah finds it difficult to empathize with others, choosing to often avoid or ignore the suffering of others she encounters out of affective exhaustion.
In that respect, Sarah isn’t alone in her dislike of the cognitive and emotional costs of empathy. Even without pressure to help—where one won’t be told by others they have done anything wrong by not helping—researchers found that a majority of participants will choose to avoid tasks that require them to empathize with others, even in the absence of a financial incentive to help (Cameron et. al., 2019). It is plausible that empathetic fatigue would plague people across various social roles, not only in healthcare and caretaking, but schools where students are poor and underfed, religious figures like pastors and priests.
However, what is mostly ignored is that, to the degree one is empathetically moved to donate, it would be cognitively and emotionally taxing to go to such extremes to discharge our charitable duties. This isn’t to take a position on what we are morally required to do, but to highlight that relying on empathy to motivate charitable giving, to the degree that perhaps morality requires, could easily induce empathetic fatigue. However, it isn’t merely that empathy can be scarce, but that it is a resource too by motivating altruism and enhancing cooperation.
(4.2) Empathy as Altruistic Motivation
It is widely accepted that empathy motivates altruism. Even empathy skeptics accept this. And it isn’t that empathy is a necessary psychological ingredient to motivate altruism, since other emotions, like sympathy and compassion, could motivate altruism. However, empathy does an excellent job of not only putting us in the place of others but moving us to try to alleviate their suffering (Batson 1990; Eisenberg et. al., 1990). Specifically, empathy can soften fairness norms such that people are more generous toward someone who, though they failed to contribute their fair share to others due to misfortune, were shown generosity as an outgrowth of empathy. As some researchers note:
[Following] the empathy induction, participants were willing to give over 70% of their endowments to the suffering others and this increase was explained by an increase in empathic feelings. In other words, it was possible to overcome fairness norms with an empathy induction specifically linked to the suffering recipient. This finding extends the notion that situational empathy is a central motivator of altruism directed at helping others in need, pain, or distress to economic interactions (Klimecki et. al., 2016: 4).
Despite motivating altruism, though, we no doubt recall empathy tends to bias us toward those who resemble us, in-group members, and attractive individuals, when left to its own devices. Fortunately, however, it looks like when empathy is expanded upon, it can be used to overcome those biases, to a major degree, and extend to out-group individuals. A study on children ages 8 to 13 was conducted to see if, using empathetic understanding, they could overcome empathetic bias toward in-group members. The researchers found:
[Intergroup] bias can be overcome when children are stimulated to imagine how the peer in need of help feels. When emphatic understanding was induced, children intended to help outgroup peers … as much as in-group peers … [Although] almost half of the children were unable to correctly understand another peer’s social perspective, eliciting empathic understanding proved to be effective in overpowering peer group boundaries irrespective of social perspective-taking ability (Sierksma et. al., 2015; emphasis mine).
When employed properly, like with altruism, empathy can not only motivate altruism toward the focus of one’s empathetic resources, but can assist in undercutting bias. This appears, of course, to require reflecting on one’s empathic experiences, but this is not that different from focusing our altruistic efforts to do good better. The altruistic impulse, like with empathy, can be susceptible to morally irrelevant influences like whether one is being watched. However, we recognize channeling that altruism to more effective routes, just like with empathy.
(4.3) Empathy Enhances Cooperation
As we discussed earlier, humans are exceptionally good at cooperating, and not just with those who are related to them on a rigid number of tasks, like animals from bees to wolves, but with total strangers on tasks of nearly any kind; it is our evolutionary superpower (Henrich 2015). One of the downsides to relying on cooperation for our survival is that is makes us vulnerable to free-riders. One solution for tackling this is to track the reputations of potential cooperators (Sperber and Baumard 2012).
Free-riding, though, isn’t the only threat to cooperation: it can be threatened, too, by negative circumstantial noise, e.g., arriving to an appointment late, or the slip of the tongue, even if only by accident. Larry has become increasingly irritated by Anthony’s forgetfulness—even though Anthony is known to have a poor memory—and this irritation may undercut cooperation. It would be easy to dismiss the pronounced effect of these small errors, but their ubiquity alone can be an impediment to sustaining cooperation. Luckily, though, empathy can overcome these cooperation stifling effects:
The findings provide good support for our most important hypothesis, predicting that high levels of empathy help individuals to reduce or eliminate the detrimental effects of noise … [We] suggested that empathy might do so because it increases the positive weight associated with the interaction partner’s outcomes, which in turn is likely to bring about relatively high levels of cooperation, even when repeated incidents of noise challenge cooperative interaction. […] The present research examined a natural tendency for people to behave in a generous manner after the experience of empathy due to being informed about an unfortunate event that happened to a partner and imagining their reaction to the event (Rumble et. al., 2010: 864).
Asymmetric information—where one is better informed about their intentions than potential cooperation partners—often plagues cooperation. One approach to dealing with this epistemic imbalance is via costly signaling: where a highly costly action reliably signals moral qualities, like kindness and trustworthiness, which would otherwise be opaque to potential cooperation partners (Spence 1973; Simler and Hanson 2018; Licon 2021).
Another approach, though, is cultivating cooperation through empathy: to enhance my capacity as cooperation partner, it makes sense that we would need to appreciate our potential cooperation partners’ perspective, and the real hurdles they face. There will be social noise in cooperative enterprises, and empathy can enable understanding one’s cooperative partners better. Indeed, it is hard to see how one could be moved by concern for cooperative partners—something often conducive to cooperation—without empathy. And since the fruits of cooperation, especially in markets, can extend beyond immediate cooperators to the community, this is an example where the benefits from empathy can extend far beyond the original target. As we shall discuss next, empathy skeptics sometimes mistakenly conflate the target of empathy with the beneficiaries of it, like the profit motive that can unintentionally benefit many through self-interest.
(4.4) Unintended Consequences, Bad and Good
One of the defects of ordinary empathy is its tendency to focus on an individual, when we learn of their plight and identify with them personally, at the expense of others equally deserving of our help. This defect is taken to condemn empathy as an appropriate motivation for altruism—we should rely rather on moral emotions, like sympathy, without this defect. For example, Bloom argues that empathy can cause us to focus on a particular individual, to the detriment of a group deserving empathy, by guiding us ‘to favor the one over the many’ (2017: 25). This is clearly a bad unintended consequence of empathy. When we learn that Louisa is suffering, and needs an organ transplant, we empathize with her plight, and are motivated to move her to the front of the donor list, ahead of others equally in need and who have been on the list longer. Despite this example, there is a subtle mistake here—one that resembles a mistake identified by Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations:
[By] directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good (Chapter II: 488-489; original emphasis).
Smith makes the point that the shopkeeper and businessperson need not intend to do good for her to actually do good; it could easily be that in acting selfishly, she promotes social value as a by-product of an action not intended to accomplish it. And the same point holds of the spotlight worry about empathy: just because empathy spotlights an individual over a group, when doing good better would involve helping the group, not just an individual, fails to show that one must only save the individual as a consequences of empathy. Much depends, though, on how empathy is expressed behaviorally. And that isn’t conjecture: there is growing neurological evidence that ‘empathy is a flexible phenomenon, which is malleable by a number of motivational, situational, and dispositional factors’ (Lamm and Meltzoff 2009: 363).
Just like ordinary altruism done blindly without economic guidance and psychological insight can misfire, ordinary empathy can misfire too. The mistake those who push the spotlight defect make, though, is to assume that just because empathy begins as a kind of emotional spotlight on a particular individual, doesn’t mean such empathy can expand from one individual into concern for a group with a similar plight (Decety and Cowell 2014; Morris 2019: 514). Here concern for a child suffering from malaria could expand to concern broadly to individuals who suffer from malaria generally, motivating an effective donation to the cause—what began as a focus on a child suffering from malaria can expand to poor people susceptible to it. Empathy can shift ‘the way we see others, and those changes generalize to people similar to them, notably members of the same social group to which they belong’ (Decety and Cowell 2014: 530).
Whether the scope of someone’s empathy expands from an individual to a group of individuals equally deserving of empathy, in the service of doing good better, will depend on more than moral emotions, but whether the individual allows their emotions to guide them, or they focus those emotions effectively. Inducing empathy for a single individual would be a good starting place to motivate altruism, like donating to an effective cause, using that empathetic impetus to spur donating to a cause that would benefit more than just the specific individual who got the empathy ball rolling. So, though ordinary empathy can misfire, there is no reason to think that it must, or that we should jettison it, especially once we learn to focus our empathetic resources on causes where that impetus can motivate doing the most good.
5 | Valuable Ignorance and Causal Impotence
Near the start of the paper, we noted that the project of effective empathy suggests that there is value to certain kinds of ignorance. Empathy is a valuable, finite resource that can be triggered or relied upon to varying degrees of effectiveness. And since empathy can be triggered either by knowledge or true belief that others are suffering, we should be careful of the knowledge and true beliefs we take on, where possible. There will, of course, be plenty of cases where we have little to no control over acquiring knowledge or true belief that someone is suffering, but where we can do little to nothing to mitigate their suffering. And to the extent that our empathy isn’t in high demand, and couldn’t be better used elsewhere, this isn’t an issue. However, the value of ignorance comes into the picture when, first, there is suffering we could learn of, but cannot be mitigated, and our empathy could be more effective elsewhere. And as we will argue, ignorance is valuable to the extent it helps us conserve and better use our finite empathetic resources. We do not deny the value of ordinary empathy: empathizing with someone else’s pain, even when nothing can be done, can be a healthy and virtuous response. We are simply highlighting that, specifically with respect to the project of effective empathy, ignorance can be valuable.
(5.1) Different Kinds of Ignorance
The standard view of ignorance is the absence of knowledge: to be ignorant of something is just to lack knowledge of it (LeMorvan 2011; Zimmerman 2008). Some philosophers, however, have recently argued there is another form of ignorance: the lack of true belief (Peels 2010; Goldman and Olsson 2009). These are forms of propositional knowledge. There are other forms, though, like ability ignorance, lacking know-how to do something (Nottelmann 2016), and others that involve actively upheld falsehoods or poor epistemic practice (Kassar 2018).
Though there is clearly an affective aspect to empathy, in that one must feel a suitable or fitting emotion in reaction to someone’s mental state or unfortunate situation, we are focused entirely on the value of propositional ignorance of the fact that someone is in a situation where empathy would be appropriate. We may know what it is like to lose one’s husband at a young age to an unexpected car accident, but be ignorant of the fact that our neighbor, Jessica, recently lost her husband like that. And since empathy cannot be triggered when we are ignorant that others are suffering, ignorance can be valuable when it helps preserve our finite empathetic resources for use in situations where it can motivate effective acts of altruism.
(5.2) The Value of Ignorance
In some situations, we can avoid feeling empathy by avoiding the knowledge or true belief that someone is suffering in cases where our empathy is impotent, i.e., where we cannot effectively or efficiently improve the welfare of others. For example, while watching The Twilight Zone on television, a commercial for a charity starts. You know this charity is highly ineffective—or even have good reason to suspect it—at helping poor third-world children. Are you a bad person if you quickly flip the channel before learning too much about their plight? Probably not if you can do nothing to help, briefly putting aside that such images may inspire you to instead donate to an effective charity.
There may not be good reason, though, to avoid feeling empathy in cases where that empathy would be impotent given there isn’t an opportunity cost to feeling empathy that cannot result in improving the well-being of others—it may be, in some cases, one has a surplus of empathy such that feeling empathy, where one cannot do any good, doesn’t deprive us of the empathy we would need to effectively help others elsewhere. Often empathy, even when impotent, works as a signal to others of benevolence and altruism—something that facilitates cooperation (Sperber and Baumard 2012; Jordan et. al., 2016; Licon 2023).
Many of us aren’t in a position, regularly, to experience empathy fatigue. However, there are exceptions: Ann is a nurse who dropped everything to care for her mother, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, until her mother died. In-between her mother’s diagnosis and death, Ann becomes emotionally weary, unable to empathize with others beside her mom, and sometimes not even her (Cameron et. al., 2019; Chikovani et. al., 2015).
Second, people often don’t seek out chances to experience, and act on, empathy (Cameron et. al., 2019). This should be expected given that empathy has cognitive costs, and it isn’t rational to engage in actions if the costs exceed the benefits, e.g., rational people seek out knowledge to the extent that the costs of doing so are outweighed by the benefits (Caplan 2004; Brosseau-Liard 2014). One isn’t morally required to find such opportunities, but that to the extent one wants to help, they should use their empathy effectively, directed toward causes where their empathy can do the most good. Perhaps without empathy, one wouldn’t be motivated to donate to the most effective charity: The Against Malaria Foundation (GiveWell 2014). She would be better off ignorant of others’ suffering whom she cannot help, and instead focusing her empathy toward people with malaria—after identifying with someone suffering from it—to motivate (effective) donations to the cause. Feeling empathy toward effective charities, but not ineffective ones, can aid in discharging her charitable duties (Singer 2009; Macaskill 2015).
In any case, there is value to ignorance of others’ suffering, where there is nothing we could do to effectively alleviate it, or there are more effective uses of our empathy. Since knowledge or true belief of others’ suffering can psychologically trigger empathy, furnishing motivation to do something to alleviate it, even when we cannot do anything to help, remaining ignorant of the suffering of others, when we are casually impotent, biased, or ineffective, can conserve empathy to better do good elsewhere, and fulfill the project of effective empathy.
There is an objection here, though, since recent psychological evidence showing that although too much empathy can lead to fatigue in the short term, it can produce empathetic resilience in the long-term. While there are downsides to feeling too much empathy, in the long-term, this is an increasingly diminishing concern (Hansen et. al., 2018). This suggests there is value to empathy, even if it would exhaust our empathetic resources and we cannot help the subject of our empathy, because his empathetic exhaustion can, for some people, build up their empathetic resilience.
The mistake underlying this objection, though, is that even when feeling empathetic fatigue to build up our empathetic resilience, there are sometimes opportunity costs to feeling empathy where doing so would be impotent: there will be cases where we can both direct our empathy to do good, where our actions wouldn’t be impotent, and also build up empathy resilience at the same time. There won’t always be cases where our empathy can do the most good, or even any good, where there are such cases, feeling empathy to the point of exhaustion for someone we cannot help has major opportunity costs.
6 | Conclusion
Our thesis is that we can apply insights from the project of effective altruism to empathy, and that we have similar reasons to engage in effective empathy as we do effective altruism. This is because though empathy, as a moral emotion, can misfire—e.g., by motivating us to favor those that resemble us over equally deserving others who don’t—it has value in motivating us to act altruistically, can enhance cooperation, and is a finite resource susceptible to exhaustion. Effective altruism stresses that we should engage in altruism with the assistance from reason and empirical evidence to do the most good we can. Here we argued that empathy should be approached like other altruistic resources. And finally, we argue that ignorance of the suffering of others can be good when there is nothing we can do to help the person in need, when our empathetic resources are stressed, and our empathy could do good elsewhere—sometimes it is better not to know, to do good better.
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[1] For a discussion of determining aggregate well-being, using Well-Being-Adjusted Life Years (WALYs), see MacAskill (2015: 39-40).
[2] There are other confounds, too, of course, like skepticism over how to quantify charity effectiveness—since one cannot be sure their donations do any good, the thinking goes, it is better to keep it for oneself, rather than waste it on an ineffective charity (Caviola, Schubert, and Greene 2021).