Hacker News Reader

Comment by baked_ziti | Hacker News Reader

The word does seem to be taking on a different meaning as time goes on. People seem to intend for it to mean "care and consideration for the ingroup as I define it." Which is of course, not its actual meaning.

View on HN

Sure it is. Nothing about the definition of empathy suggests that it isn't selective. We are generally empathetic but still eat animals. Some cultures still eat dog - you don't think they can love their children?

I think that taking unironic pleasure at the misfortune of others, or wishing others harm, and the capacity to do so, is the literal opposite of empathy.

> Some cultures still eat dog - you don't think they can love their children?

This is a non-sequitur.

You're speaking about the 'sphere of compassion', I'd say there are two factors at play. There's 'how large' the in-group is (where we could say someone who cares for all animals is more compassionate than someone who cares for all human beings) and 'how intensely' people feel compassion for their in-group (which is harder to quantify, but still a real phenomenon).

edit: Compassion for one's in-group can be very real, even if the in-group is small. It's almost like a breadth-vs-depth question. I've even heard of some studies suggesting that having very intense feelings of compassion for one's in-group is predictive of callousness towards the out-group.

I actually don't believe it's possible to, in any meaningful way, perceive and vicariously experience the emotions of others and to continue to carry any deep hostility, or to do so and not feel some degree of compassion.

Sociopaths score low in empathy but are excellent at perceiving others' emotions.

I think it's pretty popular to hate Nazis right now, does that make one an umepathetic individual?

People can have conflicting emotions. It's possible to hate the ideology without hating the people attached to it.

"Hate the sin, not the sinner."

Hate and empathy are unrelated. To paraphrase it’s possible to hate the game not the player.

The WWI Christmas truce in 1914 shows this dynamic very clearly. It’s likely these people had great empathy for each other as they where in similar situations even sleeping in the same trenches as the front moved around. Yet, eventually they went back to killing each other. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

Those war victims didn't necessarily hate each other. They killed because they had to. Those who were subtle in their reluctance to kill were more likely to be killed in battle. Those who weren't subtle were court-martialed and executed.

I wouldn't consider hate and empathy mutually exclusive personally (e.g. you can empathise with somebody that was bullied by their parents, but still hate them because they bully their children), but I do think that somebody that derives pleasure from the suffering of someone that they hate is unempathetic.

>I think that taking unironic pleasure at the misfortune of others, or wishing others harm, and the capacity to do so, is the literal opposite of empathy.

Wishing others harm and being able to empathize are tangential concepts.

The ability to understand what it's like to have something terrible happen to you does not preclude you from wishing it upon your enemies.

I suspect that for a subset of people the ability to empathize with people who are suffering makes the suffering of their enemies all the better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com