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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

This is an ongoing discussion I have with many people. There is a weird idea that empathy is something that makes you good. In reality what it is is neither good nor bad. It's the ability to put yourself in the emotional state of someone else to understand things not only from their rational point of view but from the point of view of them as humans with both irrational (emotional) and rational perspectives.

It can be used for good or bad not just good and it's doesn't mean that just because I can put myself in their position I agree with their pov (which many people will claim i.e. "you have no empathy")

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> There is a weird idea that empathy is something that makes you good.

It's a pretty heavy prerequisite. A lot of bad things can be traced to people not understanding other people, or refusing to understand them (dehumanization). It's sufficiently fundamental and a common problem that I'm not sure how big the cohort of emphatic-but-manipulative people is. It certainly exists, but there are other issues mixed in there, such as moral detachment (i.e., people who decided they're not interested in being good).

I believe pretty much all of your typical -isms (sexism, racism, homophobia) are rooted in lack of empathy towards groups that one is physically unable to be part of. Most people don't have active empathy ability (i.e., modeling people not like them), they just empathize with their own experience only. That's why your otherwise normal people can end up with very problematic beliefs.

Empathy also requires you to understand the world in a more complete way, which also tends to break down quite a range of rationalizations, and rationalizations can lead to a lot of evil, as well.

So while you're technically right that empathy is merely a tool, it's a very major tool, and I've found people with relationship problems who are telling me they have no empathy, don't know how to do it, don't want to do it, are pretty much a dead end.

If I had a button that could suddenly make lots of people more empathetic, I would absolutely press it and be convinced that it'd make the world a much, much better place.

The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way.

In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the right interpretation and can judge whether someone is racist, sexist etc.

It’s very easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. I think the thing which makes it hard to spot is that we normally treat questions as boolean yes-or-no things.

For example, a police department which is 10% more likely to let one race off with warnings than another race is racist (and that’s not a moral judgement: if warnings are effective everyone should get them), but it’s also an example deliberately chosen to be as far as possible from racially motivated genocide as I could manage without the risk of people denying it was racism.

It’s a spectrum. How much do you empathise with $person, not do you.

Its easy to define it but very hard to ascribe it.

> The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way.

I don't know about that. People face very real, easily definable dangers and risks from being in a marginalized group, which seems to imply there's more than just a few people involved. Is it really so outlandish to say that many parts of Russia are homophobic, for instance?

On the more obvious end of things, people who have participated in hate crimes or voted for laws that restrict marginalized groups are close enough to be deserving one of the -isms, and depending on the time period, they were not at all rare.

> In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the right interpretation and can judge whether someone is racist, sexist etc.

You're mixing quite a few things in here in a manner I find worrying.

> you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea

Please address this directly if you think I am doing so, because I'm pretty sure I am not. I've laid out my views on empathy and it's relationship to morality pretty clearly in the OP, I think.

> you have the right interpretation and can judge whether someone is racist, sexist etc.

I have to think that. It's my fundamental responsibility as a human to judge whether things are objectionable or not. If I do not do this, the default takes place, and the default is much worse than collective judgment errors.

If nobody had the right, like you say here, there would never be anyone to question the default, and I don't want to be anywhere near the kind of norms we used to have.

Being ill suited to the responsibility to judge good and evil, as we are, does not mean we get to shirk it. It does not make it better to wash your hands, say you don't know, and stay out, because the default does not wait. It will catch up with us, and I know for certain it's not on our side, and it is much worse.

The point is once you have to point your finger at someone and say you are racist or you are sexist. You will most likely be wrong in ways that matter and only in ways that doesn't really matter (we are all racist, sexist etc).

And yes it's outlandish to say that in any way that matters. Sure you can say that someone who might be deeply religious. But its much harder once you get into the normal modern westerners mindset. I have seen my share of people being accused of things they weren't. That's were it's really dangerous especially the way you continue to talk about it as if you know when it's sexism or racism etc.

Again hate crimes aren't that easy to ascribe to someone either. I am pretty sure you and I would disagree on many of these matters.

I am not mixing anything at all, what I am saying is that very few people are those things in any way that matter.

I am adressing it directly. You say that if more people have empathy button you would press it because that would make the world a better place. So yes you are indeed doing exactly that.

No one is saying we shouldn't do it just that the way you speak of it scares me because you sound so certain you can differentiate.

> Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way.

Then how would you explain, well, most of human history?

For example, look at this graph of approval of interracial marriage, which has increased quite steadily: http://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-w...

What changed, if not the level of racism?

Or look at the various declarations of secession of the southern states in the US Civil War, or the Cornerstone Speech; it's pretty obvious that people were willing to go to war to defend both personal racial bias and a system of racial discrimination.

The people who study racism professionally don't seem to have a hard time defining it. And I don't think most of US history can really be explained without it. It began with rule of, by, and for well-off white men. Even after Reconstruction we had the Nadir [1] and sundown towns [2] and Jim Crow [3] and redlining [4] and a whole lot else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-rac...

Because they are racist in obvious ways that's not really interesting to me. Historically sure but today its much harder.

You do realize that historically people like yourself said exactly the same thing at the time?

Read white "moderates" from the MLK era, for example. He was quite clear on how unhelpful they were: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/01/15...

Racism and sexism, being dominant paradigms in America, are mostly invisible to the people living them. 50 years from now, people will look back on what has changed and be dumbfounded that we thought we were living in an egalitarian paradise. Just like we look back on the people 50 years before.

No I don't realize that and I am pretty sure you can't find much that would back that up. People didn't even think in terms of racism it was just what was normal historically. Today we think like that but that also comes with it's own dangers of becoming another kind of opressor.

> There is a weird idea that empathy is something that makes you good.

By strict definition, the OP is correct. The __presumption__ is you will use that understanding for food. However, having that connection, and using it are two different things.

No preq. Just a baseline.

> "The __presumption__ is you will use that understanding for food. However, having that connection, and using it are two different things."

Typo: I think you meant "confection".

The thing is, once you put yourself in someone else's shoes it is that much harder to act in a way that is against that person's best interest. You would actually need to deliberately work against your emotions to harm someone once you have empathized with them. It's kind of forcing yourself to jump off a cliff. Sure, it's possible, but it doesn't come natural. So the two (empathize and doing good) aren't completely two different things.

Yes. To both possess empathy and then proceed to do harmful things requires you to actively convert to a negative moral philosophy (i.e., legitimately realize you are doing bad things and are OK with it).

Most people are not like this, and actively believe they are good people, so higher empathy does, in practice, makes them nicer people.

I think it might be too strong to say the things you are doing are bad just because they hurt other people. Thats what tradeoffs are, like firing people, for instance. I would write more but basically I think its too strong to say that most people are not like this or perhaps its too strong to say that its morally wrong to doing something harmful to someone.

>To both possess empathy and then proceed to do harmful things requires you to actively convert to a negative moral philosophy

Or taking a consequentialist moral philosophy quite seriously. You can both empathize with terrible people and believe that harming them the correct thing to do for the greater good.

If this sort of topic interests you, I'd highly recommend "Behave" by Robert Sapolsky. A lot of the book examines what is going on in the brains of people who have strongly held "us" vs "them" beliefs (i.e. sexists, racists, homophobes). The core thing with these people seems to be essentialist beliefs - believing there is something essentially different and/or wrong with the out group and being too cognitively lazy to view people as individuals or trying to find commonalities.

So some people can actually strongly empathize with their in-group and do terrible things to others in the out-group, so I'm not sure I'd say a lack of empathy is 100% the cause of some of humanities worst behavior. More so bad ideas and cognitive laziness. Another thing to mention is that empathy can actually hinder action if you happen to have strong feelings of empathy for someone who is suffering. The reason is because if you're feeling someone else's suffering, you're going to then be focused on how you can stop feeling the suffering yourself instead of how you can help the other person. It has been shown that the stronger you're feeling someone else's suffering, the less capable you will be to help them. Having more compassion is the answer to this problem and if everyone was more compassionate, the world would be immeasurably better.

Empathy is indeed powerful. And, if people understood each other better, I do think it would mostly be used for good. Conflict is rarely a constructive outcome, so even the self-interested would probably try to use it to broker peace.

The problem is that empathy isn't evenly applied. We can more easily gather empathy for people who are like us than for others. Asking people to be more empathetic may very well exacerbate the lopsidedness rather than reducing it. That uneven distribution of empathy makes it very difficult to make good, impartial decisions when their interests are in conflict.

My experience is that for some, dehumanization is a direct response to having their capacity for empathy overwhelmed. It's a defense mechanism. I've seen it play out in people who are confronted with the homelessness epidemic in San Francisco.

With that in mind, making the whole world more empathetic sounds like one of the most destructive - if obviously well-intentioned - ideas I can think of.

I think in general we take the "understanding" part in empathy too lightly. I would say we use "empathy" a lot when we are actually talking about compassion. Since the inner experience is never completely shareable, it's hard to talk about real understanding. Not trying to get philosophical here, we will probably agree that a reasonable level of understanding is both possible and sufficient. But I feel like too often there's way more "rationalization" than actual understanding, and we make the (in my opinion) mistake of calling that "empathy".

With this in mind, I would say empathy is always socially positive. If we were talking about compassion, I would share more your opinion, but I'd still say it's positive as long as we do not completely swap it for empathy.

This is a really good point. Empathy can be applied to judging moral crimes such as stealing food becuase you are starving. Although anctedotally I find that people who come from the exact background/situation tend to have less empathy even though they understand the context more.

Your experience seems to match the research. People who faced a challenge and succeeded in overcoming it tended to judge people who failed more harshly, but tended to judge people who succeeded more favourably.

https://hbr.org/2015/10/its-harder-to-empathize-with-people-...

That makes sense because of the "if I did it, you should be able to"-fallacy that fails to take into account that people are different, even coming from identical backgrounds.

I think when most people talk about empathy as a good attribute, what they really mean is the capacity for empathy.

I think what they real mean is to have empathy, and uae it for good.

I can put myself in your shoes...and then use that against you. Empathy doesn't promote nor prevent that.

I think in most people it would, though? Imagine if you were harming someone and you're imagining what they would feel like as you're doing the harming, you're going to feel badly. Not harming someone will help you avoid these negative feelings.

The difference is between empathy and compassion.

Just because I understand doesn't mean I care.

And the opposite is true; I can care without understanding.

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