[REPOST] Is Too Much Empathy Bad?
As a finite resource that can misfire, too much empathy can be bad
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
What is Empathy? Why Does It Matter?
Empathy is widely seen as a valuable psychological ingredient for positive change. Former United States President, Barack Obama, famously claimed,
[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.
And this sentiment is understandable: we think that among it’s many features, one of the most valuable is that empathy, in putting us in ‘other people’s shoes’, can motivate acts of altruism, kindness, and understanding. To the extent we rightly value those qualities in someone, and the fruits they bear, there is serious moral and social value to empathy.
It would help, though, to understand the rough nature of empathy. What are the components of feeling empathy for someone? For our purposes, I take empathy to have two broad aspects,
(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 reliability ascribe mental states to others, using techniques like mental simulations and beliefs about the beliefs and desires of others.
There is debate over whether this conception of empathy is too broad or too narrow. But this conception is plausible enough for us.
The first aspect of empathy is the felt aspect of it: you feel similarly, likely to less of a degree, as someone suffering, as a response to a (roughly) accurate understanding of their situation. For example, you feel some heartache knowing that you best friend of decades just lost his long-time and beloved wife to breast cancer. There’s a sense in which he ‘feels her pain’. And the second aspect involves the ability to ascribe the salient mental states, like beliefs and desires, to the person with a fair degree of accuracy which inform your understanding of how they feel. For example, you can understand that your best friend’s (mistaken) belief that there was something else he could have done to save his wife would make him feel bad, or they he would need you to say and do things to reassure him.
Given the nature and value of empathy, why would we think too much of it would be bad? There are broadly two reasons. First, empathy can misfire: it can be biased toward certain individuals, and against others; and it can focus on the suffering of a specific individual, to the exclusion of others who are suffering and equally deserving of the empathy and help of others. This is often the case pushed by empathy skeptics.
And second, empathetic exhaustion can affect people in situations where their empathetic resources are already overtaxed, e.g., in a caretaking role, such that it would be better for such individuals not to feel empathy toward others when there is nothing that can be done to help them. Here we find an example of the value of not knowing about the suffering of some folks, where empathy is needed elsewhere, and we can do little to no good for them.
Let’s start with the case against empathy made by the empathy skeptics.
Meeting the Empathy Skeptics
To count as an empathy skeptic is to either hold (a) empathy is poorly suited, as a motivation for altruism, given its biases and spotlighting, or (b) however well-suited empathy to motivate altruistic acts, there are moral emotions and cognitive states better suited to motivate altruism. Most empathy skeptics accept both (a) and (b), but, accepting at least one is sufficient to be an empathy skeptic.
The two most prominent empathy skeptics are the psychologist, Paul Bloom, and the philosopher, Jesse Prinz. We will mostly focus on the former aspect to illuminate why some psychologists and philosophers are skeptical of the moral value of empathy: the moral emotion has a biasing and spotlighting defects. We start with the former defect.
The Bias Defect
One of the major defects of empathy, highlighted by empathy skeptics, is empathy tends to bias those under its sway toward individuals in distress more similar to them or within their group, and less so toward dissimilar and out-group individuals. As the psychologist, Paul Bloom, writes discussing the biasing defect of 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.
The charge by the empathy skeptics 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, except where the differences between each group aren’t morally salient. And this would detract from the mora value of empathy since we want empathy, as a moral emotion, to be able to bridge (at least some) differences between those who are suffering and those who empathize with them. Clearly people more similarly to us aren’t, merely in virtue of that fact, more deserving of our empathy. However, that isn’t the only defect.
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The Spotlighting Defect
Another defect of 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 serious risk we will only focus on one or few individuals in need, while ignoring the morally interchangeable suffering of others who, despite equally deserving our help. And here is Paul Bloom, the psychologist and empathy skeptic, again:
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.
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.
In light of these serious defects, as a moral emotion, empathy looks like it has some serious problems. Perhaps, as some empathy skeptics suggest, we should instead rely on different moral emotions, e.g., compassion, as better motivators for altruism and kindness. (And that will, of course, depend on whether the other emotions aren’t equally, or even more, flawed as moral emotions, than empathy).
There is, though, another reason to think we can have too much empathy, even when we put aside the defects we canvassed above: in situations where our empathy, as a finite emotional resource is taxed for good reason, yet there is someone suffering, but where we can do little or nothing to help, it would be better not to know about the suffering such that we can focus our finite empathetic resources where they can do the most good. Though this may sound cold and heartless, on the surface, doing the most good in the world is highly morally laudable, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
Ignorance as Empathy Conservation
First we know that people can experience empathy fatigue. People who are most likely to experience something like empathy fatigue are often those in roles or professions where they are caretakers over a long period of time, e.g., the nurse who is caring for a sweet elderly man who cannot take care of himself and is slowing dying of pancreatic cancer. In such cases, people can experience difficulty, after a time, feeling empathy for others, and even vulnerability and emotional disorders—all of this is associated with the an intense sharing of other’s negative emotions.
So we have good evidence that empathy can be exhausted. Why think it is a resource? Despite the defects associated with empathy, it can has moral benefits like motivating altruism and enhancing cooperation. When used properly, and effectively, we don’t want to waste empathy when it can do moral good—even empathy skeptics don’t deny that we can derive moral benefits from empathy, at least in some cases.
However, we can also feel empathy in situations where there is little to nothing we can do to improve the situation of those who suffer, e.g., a TV commercial showing poor starving children run by a charity that is corrupt and largely ineffective. And since we know that empathy can be triggered by knowledge—learning of the horrible plight of someone else—there will be cases where ignorance has moral value. And these cases have the following features:
(A) Our empathetic resources are scarce such that devoting them to someone we could do little or nothing to help would deprive us from applying them to someone else; and,
(B) There are people who would be better helped by our empathy; where we could do more good for more people, or even some good for some people1.
For example, Molly would be better off to remain ignorant about the suffering of Sam, whom she can do little or nothing to help him—he is outside her sphere of influence—but instead to focus her empathy on causes where she can do the most good, like donating to the Against Malaria Foundation, or causes where she can do some good, like providing her sister, a single partner, with emotional support. There are moral benefits to ignorance in cases where they facilitate our doing the most good, or even doing some good, by allowing to better focus our empathy.
This is allusion to the ethical project known as Effective Altruism: the idea is that, roughly, we should aim to do the most (moral) good with the resources we have. As the philosopher, William MacAskill, explains,
[Effective] altruism has two parts, and I want to be clear on what each part means. As I 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 I’m happy to call that altruism. The second part is effectiveness, by which I 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.