HL CHAPTER 4 Intimacy - CH 5 Empathy as the Foundation of Morality

CHAPTER 4 Intimacy
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What are you looking for in a romantic partner?
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(men cared more about youth; women about status),
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the number one factor
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It was kindness. For a lot of people, this means empathy.
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empathy might have evolved in our species to facilitate one-on-one relationships,
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I made a case for this: “Where empathy really does matter is in our personal relationships.
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Here as always it’s important to distinguish empathy from understanding.
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Simon Baron-Cohen.

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he mentions that there are studies on the risks of high empathy
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Vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz explore sex differences in the propensity for what they call “unmitigated communion
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“an excessive concern with others and placing others’ needs before one’s own.”
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“I can’t say no when someone asks me for help.”
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overly nurturant, intrusive, and self-sacrificing.”
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women’s greater propensity to anxiety and depression,
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empathy, because of its spotlight nature, is a poor moral guide.
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empathy can also have negative consequences for those who experience it.
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Buddhist texts distinguish between “sentimental compassion,” which corresponds to what we would call empathy, and “great compassion,” which is what we would simply call “compassion.”
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The first is to be avoided, as it “exhausts the bodhisattva.
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Great compassion is more distanced and reserved,
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Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki

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compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other,
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The neurological difference between the two was explored in a series of fMRI studies
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Empathy training led to increased activation in the insula and anterior cingulate cortex
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the medial orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum.
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When people were asked to empathize with those who were suffering, they found it unpleasant.
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Compassion training, in contrast, led to better feelings
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When experienced chronically, empathic distress most likely gives rise to negative health outcomes.
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David DeSteno

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meditation “reduces activation of the brain networks associated with simulating the feelings of people in distress,
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Marco Iacoboni claimed that “affective empathy is a precursor to compassion,”
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We can’t feel compassion without first feeling emotional empathy.

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Not only can compassion and kindness exist independently of empathy, they are sometimes opposed.
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There is a lot of concern about studies that find a decline in empathy in medical students.
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If, while listening to the grieving mother’s raw and unbearable description of her son’s body in the morgue, I were to imagine my own son in his place, I would be incapacitated.
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I have always felt that I am very empathetic, and that that has been both a blessing and a curse in my work. I have struggled with burn-out for years
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two medical students who had to shift to other specialties because of the stress of working with parents
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nursing students who were especially prone to empathy spent less time providing care to patients and more time seeking out help
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The risks of empathy are perhaps most obvious with therapists, who have to continually deal with people who are depressed, anxious, deluded, and often in severe emotional pain.
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Freud himself made a similar analogy: “I cannot advise my colleagues too urgently to model themselves
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My friend does get into her clients’ heads, of course—she would be useless if she couldn’t—but she doesn’t feel
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But what about those who are empathized with?
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get the most from doctors who didn’t feel as he did, who were calm when he was anxious, confident when he was uncertain.
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Leslie Jamison

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she also describes, with gratitude, another doctor who kept a reassuring distance and objectivity:
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Frank Jackson

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Mary, a brilliant scientist, who has spent her life stuck in a black-and-white room,
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Mary studies human perception and comes to know everything about the neuroscience of seeing color.
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Mary leaves the room for the first time and looks up to see a bright blue sky.
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some novel qualitative experience—qualia—
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strong metaphysical implications about the nature of the mind,
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you can learn some things through experience that cannot be appreciated in any other way.
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it can be comforting to talk to someone who knows just how you are feeling.
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There is a world of difference, after all, between understanding the misery of the person who is talking to you because you have felt misery in the past, even though now you are calm, and understanding the misery of the person who is talking to you because you are mirroring them and feeling their misery right now.
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What about our relationships with those we love?
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Most people, I assume, want to be loved and understood and cared about.
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more than they care about other people.
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But that isn’t because I want empathic mirroring.

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not because I’m vicariously experiencing her pleasure. Instead it’s because I love her and want her to do well.
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More generally, we just don’t like empathizing with the sad.
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Indeed, many scholars have argued that empathy itself has evolved for the purpose of parenting—
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An obvious starting point here is that good parents understand and love their children.
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parenting also requires an appreciation that the long-term goals of a child do not always correspond
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understanding and compassion, even love, are not all children want.
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Stephen Darwall

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we put ourselves in their hands,
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When people who are wronged describe their feelings toward those who harmed them,
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they want the wrongdoer to feel the same pain as the victim.
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Heidi Howkins Lockwood,

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ideally, the sexual harasser should feel what it’s like to be the victim of sexual harassment.
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The victim might believe both that a sincere apology requires the perpetrator understanding what he or she did wrong … and that truly understanding what one did wrong requires having the experience yourself.
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Then there is the wish to restore balance.
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Pamela Hieronymi

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Empathy allows for a perfect eye-for-an-eye correspondence,
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you can’t have both. Chomsky can’t both be intellectually robust and at the same time defend friends at all costs.
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Stephen Asma argues for the moral importance of kinship and loyalty,
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this clashes with justice and fairness:
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Against Fairness.

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repelled by Gandhi’s rejection of special relationships—of friends and family, of sexual and romantic love. Orwell describes this as “inhuman,”
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Dickens had an immense social conscience—but he would ridicule those who lacked special feelings for those close to them. His examples include Thomas Gradgrind, the extreme utilitarian,
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It is wrong, many people believe, to treat people differently
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Peter Singer, take this further and argue that it is wrong to favor members of our own species
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As Larissa MacFarquhar points out, Abraham was ready to sacrifice his beloved son;
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Buddha abandoned his family; Jesus was adamant that in order to become his disciple, one must “hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life.”
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It has effects that almost everyone will agree are wrong.
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Self + Close People + Strangers = 100% Now fill in the numbers.
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Even if we decide that certain individuals are worthy of special treatment, even here empathy lets us down, because empathy is driven by immediate considerations, making us too-permissive parents and too-clingy friends.
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Empathy as the Foundation of Morality
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Perhaps empathy is like milk. Adults don’t need milk; we do fine without it. But babies need milk to grow.
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empathy as the developmental core of morality.
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Adam Smith and David Hume.
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Martin Hoffman,

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As Michael Ghiselin put it: “Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed.”
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Thomas Hobbes

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Natural selection might be selfish (in a metaphorical sense), but if so, it’s selfish about genes, not individuals.
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confuses the goals of natural selection (again, metaphorically speaking) with the goals of the creatures
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Similarly, there is an obvious evolutionary motivation for sexual intercourse (it leads to children), but this is very different from the psychological motivations
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We are naturally kind because our ancestors who were kind to others outlived and outreproduced those who didn’t.
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many animals—and all mammals—care for their offspring,
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He finds that chimpanzees will rescue one another when they get in trouble, and sometimes act to increase others’ pleasure and decrease others’ pain.
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toddlers do seem to care about others.
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some theorists have argued that brain areas involved in empathy are the product of experience with the world, not what we start off with.
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if you stick out your tongue at a baby, the baby is likely to stick out his or her tongue back at you. This can plausibly be seen as reflecting an empathic connection
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This is controversial

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Even days after birth, babies get upset by hearing other babies cry
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All these anecdotes and experimental findings can be readily accounted for in terms of caring for others without any sort of empathic feeling.
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In one study, rats were trained to press a bar to stop other rats from receiving painful electric shocks.

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BAMBINI SCIMMIE E ANCHE RATTI

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But do these empathic reactions generate moral behavior?
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If I feel your pain but don’t know that it’s your pain—if I think that it’s my pain—then I’m not going to help you.
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when children help others, is it because they are feeling their pain?
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Paul Harris

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the evidence for this connection isn’t there.
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young children are capable of helping without showing any distress.
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you see the victim’s face contorted in anguish, but you don’t see anguish in the consolers,
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right now, as best we know, empathy is not like milk.
CONC E. NN È NÉ COND NECESSARIA NÉ SUFF X AIUTARE