Against Empathy
Paul Bloom
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Most people see the benefits of empathy as akin to the evils of racism: too obvious to require justification. I think this is a mistake. I have argued elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.
In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside. Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life a neighbor, even if our emotions pull us in a different direction.
これは、ちょっと前、雑誌に取り上げられていたんだが、良き社会政策を立案するにせよ、道徳的に善を為すにせよ、共感能力というのが必須といわれているが、われわれの共感能力というのは、かっちょいい男とか、美人、あるいは、自分と同郷、同族の人をえこひいきしてしまうから、必要でないどころか、有害なこともあり、むしろ理性的な計算に基づいてしっかり政策決定すべきである、と。
これに対して、そもそも、理性的計算と共感に二分して対峙させるのが間違っている、という記事。
SUNDAY, NOV 9, 2014 07:30 AM +0900
The one thing that could save the world: Why we need empathy now more than ever
Critics say that empathy clouds our judgment and distracts us from true morality. Here's what they're missing
ROMAN KRZNARIC
共感、と言っても、「うーーー！」と苦しんでいると同じように「うーーーー！」と苦しむような、他人の感情を自分に写しだすような情緒的共感能力と、相手の立場に立って相手の視点を理解する知的共感能力があるんだ、と。
The anti-empathy brigade launch their attack with the claim that having too much empathy can lead to what Bloom calls “empathetic distress” or burnout.
But according to altruism expert Daniel Batson at the University of Kansas, there is no scientific evidence that those with high levels of affective empathy are less able to respond to other people’s needs: they are not paralyzed by their sensitivity – indeed many may be motivated by it. Moreover, people who need to keep a cool head when the emotional heat is rising – be they doctors, firefighters or social workers – know to draw, instead, on their capacity for cognitive empathy, an ability Bloom too easily sidelines.
If affective empathy is our mirror for reflecting others’ emotions, cognitive empathy is, by contrast, a pair of shoes that invites us to imagine the world from their viewpoint. So the smart doctor aims not to feel her patient’s anxiety, but to understand it, so that she can respond appropriately. Every good parent teaches cognitive empathy to their kids: ‘Imagine how you’d feel if someone did that to you,’ we tell them as a first step in their moral education. Trying to understand others’ perspectives is an essential part of our emotional intelligence toolkit, and it matters all the more if their lives and needs differ from our own. As George Bernard Shaw quipped, ‘Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you – they might have different tastes.’ Our cognitive empathy enables us to discover those different tastes.
A second charge against empathy is that it fails at a distance: we empathize more easily with people in our backyards, say the critics, so help our neighbors while ignoring earthquake victims overseas. This is muddled thinking. Proximity is clearly no guarantee of care: we can stroll past a homeless person on our street just as we can be stopped in our tracks by a news story about a woman in Japan left homeless by an earthquake. The real question is how to give people a human face, whether they are near or far, so we get beyond abstract statistics and stereotypes and can make an emotional connection with their lived reality. Without empathy, we could never explain the massive rise in humanitarian giving by individuals to developing countries since the end of World War II.
The strongest critique in the empathy wars is the risk of empathic bias: the concern that we are partial towards our in-group – people of a similar socioeconomic or cultural background to our own. Think of the judge who gives a more lenient sentence to a white-collar criminal whose educational background resembles his own. Empathic bias is real and it matters – but it means that we need to deepen, not discard, our empathy, by escaping the boundaries of our peer group.
Reason divorced from empathy was a speciality of the Nazis, who used reason to argue that Jews were subhuman and then codified it in the Nuremberg Laws. What made the Holocaust possible was the Nazis’ racial ideology that achieved one of the most successful erosions of societal empathy in political history.
democratic rights have been won when societies have extended their empathy to previously neglected social groups.
When the public became sensitized to the suffering of marginalized groups, it spurred legislative reform. And this story has been repeated in struggles throughout democratic history, from women’s suffrage to gay rights and disability rights.
そもそも、情緒的共感能力があるひとが、他人の必要性に対応できないという科学的証拠はないし、知的な共感能力があって初めて自分とは異なる人にその人に適合したことをしてあげられるのであって、相手の立場・視点を理解しなければ、自分がやってもらいたいことだけやって、かえって迷惑になる。共感だけだと、身近な人ばかり助けて遠くの人は見向きもしないじゃないか、という人もいるが、身近なホームレスは無視して、海外の災害の被害者には寄付するということもある。要するに、当事者の顔が見えて、その人たちと情緒的絆ができて、その人たちに共感できるか、どうかであって、物理的遠近は関係ない。さらに、身内には共感しやすいが、ソトモノには共感しにくい、というのは事実としてあるが、しかし、だからといって、共感を捨て去るべき、ということでなく、われわれと彼らの間の溝を超越して、より深い共感が必要である、ということにすぎない。
実際、民主主義というのは、その時代、その時代に、社会の片隅に見捨てられたようなソトモノに対して深い共感を拡げてきた歴史である。
また、ナチの政策は徹底的に合理的であったが、非情、非道であったことも銘記すべきで、理性的計算か、心情的共感か、ではなく、双方が手に手をとって能力を発揮すべきなのである、と。
