Questions about empathy

 Like many others, I was deeply moved by the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I don’t know that I’d even heard of the guy before. If I’d ever encountered him online or in the media, I’d forgotten all about him. 

I didn’t see the video and I don’t intend to. What I saw was people I considered to be friends respond with visceral hatred towards the man. They were at best, not sad, and at worst, gleeful, to see him dead. They cared not one little bit about his wife or family.

I don’t dump friends rashly. I decided to give them an opportunity to explain themselves. Various things he was supposed to have said were given as to why this guy was so horrible. It’s interesting that only things he had said were mentioned. No one could mention a single action. And the things he had supposedly said all turned out to have the usual problems in that they were quotes taken out of context or altered to make them seem hateful.

The weirdest thing though was the empathy argument for hating him. People said they hated him and he deserved to be hated because he had said empathy was not morally valuable. Weird, first of all, because it’s perfectly reasonable to have doubts about empathy. Lots of good and reasonable people both on the left and the right have questioned the value of empathy. Second, it’s weird because the people advancing this argument were obviously incapable of feeling empathy for Charlie Kirk. They hated this man, whom they didn’t know, and they had no feelings for his wife and his children.

So, I’m going to do a bit of a deep dive into empathy over my next few posts. It strikes me that the term is not at all clear. Just for starters:

1. Is empathy an emotion or is it the capacity to feel an emotion?
2. The term has only been around about a century: how essential can this capacity be to live a moral life given that human beings managed to survive and live moral lives for centuries without needing to name it?
3. Why is empathy only used with the kinds of emotions we already associated with the term “sympathy”? Meaning, we speak of empathy in response to other people’s suffering. No one ever says they empathize with someone else’s rage or jealousy or hatred. Empathy seems to have been custom designed to replace sympathy. Sympathy, however, is an ancient word. Why would it need to be replaced or supplemented? 
4. What is the mechanism that makes empathy work? Usually, we have to figure out someone else’s emotions. We look at their expressions and consider the context and then determine whether this is pain or happiness or boredom or whatever. Like all such judgments, we can be wrong. People who use the term “empathy”, however, seem to imagine some sort of direct sense that involves no cognition. Some of them even use the term “superpower” to describe empathy. They do not consider or admit the possibility that someone could feel or not feel empathy based on judgments that turn out to be wrong. This smacks of magical thinking.