There’s now over 100 comments on “My Empathy Is Rarely Kind”, and the consensus response is roughly “John, that’s not what empathy is”.
So, first things first: I agree. I was using the wrong words for the things I tried to describe, and this was a useful thing to realize, so thank you everyone for that!
As a result of using the wrong words, I think people mostly walked away with the impression that I don’t know how to do the-thing-usually-called-”empathy”. And while I don’t claim to be especially good at empathy, I think the post gave an inaccurate impression, due to using the wrong words.
I do, in fact, empathize with literal cats. I track what the cat is thinking and feeling, and part of that is vicariously feeling some of what the cat feels. I can empathize with humans in the same way I empathize with cats. That form of empathy involves keeping the “suspension of disbelief” in place.
But then… suspension of disbelief in what? If I am in fact empathizing (as the word is typically used), what disbelief have I suspended?
On reflection, I think I suspend disbelief in the subject’s moral agency. (This was a useful thing for me to realize, so again, thank you everyone!)
With cats, this is usually pretty easy. I don’t usually think of cats as the type of creature which it makes sense to hold responsible for anything. If working on a team with a cat, I wouldn’t treat it as another agent, I’d treat it as a tool or assistant. I wouldn’t particularly expect a cat to uphold its side of a contract, except insofar as that's a default outcome. I wouldn’t give a cat voting power. I do want cats to be happy, all else equal, but I don’t think of the cat as having any responsibility for its happiness. Or for anything else.
And that’s the sort of attitude I take toward other humans, when I suspend disbelief in their moral agency (which I do most of the time).
With that in mind, let’s go back to the opening of “My Empathy Is Rarely Kind”:
There’s a narrative I hear a lot: if I empathize more, put myself in other peoples’ shoes, try to feel what they’re feeling, see things from their perspective, etc, then I’ll feel kinder toward them. I’ll feel more sympathetic, be gentler, more compassionate or generous.
And man, that sure is not my experience with empathy.
People say they want to be “seen as a human”. And sometimes they mean that they want to be empathized with. Sometimes they mean they want to be treated as moral agents (i.e. treated as a grown-up, rather than a child or a cat). And I think I wrote an essay responding to the empathy one, when I should have written an essay responding to the moral agent one.
… but also, I think people jumble those things together a lot? Perhaps a more accurate takeaway from “My Empathy Is Rarely Kind” would be: I can empathize with people while suspending judgement, empathize while suspending disbelief in their moral agency, but that does not usually make me more sympathetic toward them when I do view them as a moral agent.
However, I think the part of empathy that people will say you're missing is that you're putting "yourself" in someone else's shoes, which is only half of it. Imagine you were Isekai'd away into someone else's life where you had a history of being ineffective, unaccomplished, and self-pitying, with problems that could be solved quickly with relatively little objective effort. You can probably easily imagine how you'd quickly take actions to at least fix most of the low-hanging fruit in this situation. Clean your room, get a job, do at least some exercise, remove the nail and all that.
But if you put yourself in the position of that person, including their internal mental state, possible brain chemistry issues, history of failure despite attempts to fix it, and possibly limited inherent capacities relative to yours, the situation they are in would probably seem a lot less fixable. If you put yourself exactly in their position, with the exact mental state and capacities, you would be doing the exact same things they are currently.
For the woman whose pain is "not about the nail" there has to be something going on in her own head, whether it's some history of trauma, history of repeatedly failing to address the problem to the point it becomes painful to address it, that is stopping her from addressing the problem. Otherwise she would just fix it, no? To empathize with her isn't then to imagine yourself if you were that woman and had a nail in your head, but to imagine what it's like to be her, including whatever it is that's preventing her to solve her own problem.
This sort of empathy might be more useful in understanding people, which can help you achieve your own goals better. There's always a need to make friends and influence people after all. Otherwise you're right in that putting yourself in other people's shoes (the ones who demand empathy are probably more likely to be pathetic), then seeing all the relatively easy things they could do to make their lives significantly better reasonably results in what you described with your first post.
There’s now over 100 comments on “My Empathy Is Rarely Kind”, and the consensus response is roughly “John, that’s not what empathy is”.
So, first things first: I agree. I was using the wrong words for the things I tried to describe, and this was a useful thing to realize, so thank you everyone for that!
As a result of using the wrong words, I think people mostly walked away with the impression that I don’t know how to do the-thing-usually-called-”empathy”. And while I don’t claim to be especially good at empathy, I think the post gave an inaccurate impression, due to using the wrong words.
I do, in fact, empathize with literal cats. I track what the cat is thinking and feeling, and part of that is vicariously feeling some of what the cat feels. I can empathize with humans in the same way I empathize with cats. That form of empathy involves keeping the “suspension of disbelief” in place.
But then… suspension of disbelief in what? If I am in fact empathizing (as the word is typically used), what disbelief have I suspended?
On reflection, I think I suspend disbelief in the subject’s moral agency. (This was a useful thing for me to realize, so again, thank you everyone!)
With cats, this is usually pretty easy. I don’t usually think of cats as the type of creature which it makes sense to hold responsible for anything. If working on a team with a cat, I wouldn’t treat it as another agent, I’d treat it as a tool or assistant. I wouldn’t particularly expect a cat to uphold its side of a contract, except insofar as that's a default outcome. I wouldn’t give a cat voting power. I do want cats to be happy, all else equal, but I don’t think of the cat as having any responsibility for its happiness. Or for anything else.
And that’s the sort of attitude I take toward other humans, when I suspend disbelief in their moral agency (which I do most of the time).
With that in mind, let’s go back to the opening of “My Empathy Is Rarely Kind”:
People say they want to be “seen as a human”. And sometimes they mean that they want to be empathized with. Sometimes they mean they want to be treated as moral agents (i.e. treated as a grown-up, rather than a child or a cat). And I think I wrote an essay responding to the empathy one, when I should have written an essay responding to the moral agent one.
… but also, I think people jumble those things together a lot? Perhaps a more accurate takeaway from “My Empathy Is Rarely Kind” would be: I can empathize with people while suspending judgement, empathize while suspending disbelief in their moral agency, but that does not usually make me more sympathetic toward them when I do view them as a moral agent.