(no subject)

[glorious_spoon]

There's another periodic debate on empathy and the lack thereof on my Tumblr dashboard, and it just makes me so Tired. And I was thinking about reblogging with a response, but hey! I have this shiny new DW account (or rather, this nine-year-old DW account that I haven't used since 2013, SAME DIFFERENCE), so why not post it here instead of picking another argument about it!

My thought on empathy, generally speaking, is that it's useful data but it doesn't (and shouldn't, and in fact can't) replace moral reasoning. They're two separate things. 'You cry, I cry' isn't the same as a moral choice. It's an emotional response, and it's an emotional response that some people don't have, or experience to degrees of intensity that vary hugely based on factors outside their own moral code. 

Morality is in actions, not in feelings. You can feel all the warm fuzzy things, or all the weepy sad things, or all of the outrage in the world, and that says nothing about your moral code. Your moral code is what you do about it.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

And thoughts like this are why I made sure I'd know where you were if Tumblr went down.

[glorious_spoon]

<3

[out_there]

Your moral code is what you do about it.

I like the logic of that. Feeling for someone but doing nothing about it doesn't make you a good person.

[glorious_spoon]

:D It might be a little nitpicky, but I think it's an important distinction.

[lookashiny]

I don't think empathy can replace moral reasoning, but I do think that the two often work together.

[glorious_spoon]

Oh, for sure! Empathy provides important data (ie, 'I can see that this person is suffering, and that makes me feel bad'). It can provide an emotional impetus to act, and those are both important. I'm just very suspicious of the argument that all compassion, justice, moral behavior, what have you, needs to stem from a visceral empathetic response.

[lookashiny]

I agree! As someone who has a lot (probably too much) of empathy, I can't say it's integral to my morality.

[doughtier]

One of the worst things is having to deal with an empathetic person who has no morals. People like that are terrifying.

[glorious_spoon]

Having dealt with a few of them, THIS.

[sholio]

The last time that whole debate went around, I was and still am utterly baffled by it (and I'm speaking as a highly empathic person here), because I'd always considered morality and empathy as completely separate things as well, and I was really astonished that people think they're the same thing.

I can tell that empathy, when I feel it, is a completely involuntary response, no more morally meaningful than being hungry. It gives you data that's useful sometimes - and it's a giant fucking liability at other times (for example, I now realize that the reason why my mom sucked at making us do necessary things like brush our teeth or go to bed when we were little kids is because she's a very high-empathy person and couldn't stand making her kids feel sad because it made her sad - this is why I had to spend my 20s getting my teeth expensively fixed).

There are times when morality and empathy conveniently line up, and times when they come crashing headlong into each other. Morality HAS to exist independent of empathy or what does having a moral code even mean?

[glorious_spoon]

YES THIS. I remember your post from earlier, and I agree--this is actually something that happened in my household somewhat recently. My MIL is also very high-empathy, and I came home after she'd been babysitting to find my daughter with a giant tick in her scalp because she hates having them removed and screams about it a lot and my MIL couldn't deal with it. Which is understandable! But the thing still needed to come out, you know?

Like any trait, I think it's immensely useful in some scenarios and not at all in others. It just depends on the context.

[buttonsbeadslace]

This is amazing, I came to your account just out of curiousity because you followed me, and the very first post on your page is my #1 soapbox opinion that I'm always telling people about. Equating *feeling* empathy with being a moral person is so messed up. People don't need to have the Correct Emotions in order to treat people well, and having an average-or-higher capacity for empathy in no way guarantees that people will behave morally.

[glorious_spoon]

:D Serendipity!

It's something I think about a lot, since I am... uh, bad at the Correct Emotions thing, so I need to get my moral code from somewhere else.

[buttonsbeadslace]

I'm a fairly empathetic person, I think, but you wouldn't know it from my (totally blank and calm) outward reaction to many things people expect me to show distress about, so I have a personal stake in getting people to stop being so dang picky about Correct Expressions of Emotion.

[sciatrix]

YES THIS. Also, empathy in the I-can-tell-what-you-are-feeling sense does not necessarily mean that I am inclined to act in your favor--I often use my own hard-won empathy-in-the-sensation-sense to work out how to most effectively achieve my preferred outcome in conflict, for example.

(Usually this is conflict I have some kind of moral opinion about, like "how to get my boss to be less sexist," or "how to soothe worried centrists into supporting me without removing literally all of the force from my demands to an authority to remove a harasser." Sometimes it's more like "how to minimize my time managing the emotions of my reactive, anxious colleague and still maintain a cordial relationship," though.)

Like... just because I can empathize with someone doesn't mean I am therefore going to agree with them! Fuck that, empathizing just gives me some insight into their motivations, which lets me communicate effectively with them and figure out how to behave to get the outcome I think is best.

[glorious_spoon]

I call that 'customer service empathy', lol. It's something I do a lot with angry patrons at my library; I'm really not a people person, but I'm very good at soothing angry people without giving them their way... honestly, in good part because while I can understand why they're reacting that way, their emotional state doesn't distress me the way it does some of my coworkers.

But yeah: understanding someone's emotional state definitely doesn't necessarily mean giving them their way!

[merelydovely]

Like most philosophical arguments, I think it sometimes comes down to definition of terms. "Empathy" gets used to mean either "the instinct to viscerally and vicariously experience the emotions of a suffering person" OR "the practice of recognizing, appreciating, and appropriately reacting to the suffering of others." People do sometimes distinguish between "affective empathy" and "cognitive empathy," which is good, but the current definition of cognitive empathy is mainly about intellectually understanding someone's perspective, not the way people often use "empathy" to mean "appropriately reacting to the suffering of others," i.e. moral reasoning.

[glorious_spoon]

True, and I think a lot of people end up talking past each other because they're using different definitions without even realizing it.

In this particular case, the OP was arguing that without affective empathy/emotional mirroring, compassion and moral reasoning becomes completely impossible. It kind of boiled down to 'if seeing someone in pain doesn't cause you pain, then what motivation do you have to stop it?' which is just... a really alien way of thinking, to my mind.

[franzeska]

I think there's an overwhelming incentive on tumblr to conflate empathy with morality precisely because tumblr culture involves conflating having a lot of feelings with 1. activism and 2. being a good person.

[glorious_spoon]

PRETTY MUCH.

My issues with Tumblr, let me show you them.