Shannon Spaulding (Oklahoma State University), "Motivating Empathy"
Forthcoming, Mind and Language (Early View 2023)
Empathy is like racism, according to Paul Bloom (2017, p. 48). We shouldn’t be racist or encourage racism because it harms people and is for that reason bad. Of course, some innovations and developments came from racist policies and actions – think of the Nazi’s inhumane scientific studies on Jewish concentration camp prisoners. These dim and scarce “advantages” are swamped by the overwhelming harms of racism. Racism is bad, and we should not be or encourage others to be racist. Same for empathy, says Bloom. Empathy is bad and we should not be or encourage others to be empathetic. Although we can point to a few positive, prosocial benefits of empathy – people who are more empathetic have more friends, better health, are happier and more altruistic – on the whole, the disadvantages of empathy swamp the benefits of empathy. Empathy makes conflicts worse off, is too fragile to be a good moral/social decision-making tool, is easily manipulated, and too focused on singular individuals who are usually near, similar, and special to us.
This is a bold argument. However, Bloom is not alone in thinking that empathy is problematic. Jesse Prinz (2011a, 2011b) and Fritz Breithaupt (2019) also argue that empathy is exhausting, easily manipulated, exacerbates rather than relieves conflict, and is too focused on individual experiences. Apparently, empathy not only fails to stop negative acts like sadism, bullying, and terrorism, it motivates and promotes such acts. These scholars argue that empathy will not save us from partisanship and division. In fact, it might make us worse off.
In “Motivating Empathy,” I argue that these critiques of empathy are not exactly wrong, but the diagnosis is myopic. Empathy exhibits bias in these ways because empathy is motivated (Zaki 2014). That is, our motivations drive us to avoid or approach engaging with others’ emotions in both subtle and overt ways. However, I argue, empathy is not unique in being driven by our personal cares and goals. Many psychological capacities are similarly motivated, for example, how we assess evidence, whom we trust, how we interpret others’ behavior. Empathy is motivated, in large part I shall argue, because the mental processes that drive empathy are motivated. These mental processes also underlie the critics’ proposed alternatives to empathy, rational compassion (Bloom) and moral emotions (Prinz).
Knowing that empathy is not simply idiosyncratic or uniquely biased but rather motivated, we can see that the treatment to this problem is not simply to discard empathy in favor of a better tool. All the tools will have the same problem. Rather, the prescription is to figure out how to intervene on our motivations to make empathy and the proposed alternatives better moral decision-making tools. In the paper, I consider some concrete ways to improve our empathetic practices.
Bloom, P. (2017). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. Random House.
Breithaupt, F. (2019). The dark sides of empathy. Cornell University Press.
Prinz, J. (2011a). Against empathy. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 49, pp. 214-233.
Prinz, J. (2011b). Is empathy necessary for morality. In P. Goldie & A. Coplan (Eds.) Empathy: Philosophical and psychological perspectives (pp. 211-229). Oxford University Press.
Zaki, J. (2014). Empathy: a motivated account. Psychological Bulletin, 140(6), pp. 1608-1647.
thanks