Empathy and Moral Decision-Making

In the discussion thread of a recent post ( the one that picked apart the argument that allowing same-sex marriage is a slippery slope to bestiality), JD asked the following question: "Is the good and the right defined as 'whatever provokes a strong empathetic response'?"

My response in that discussion thread was a simple no.

In fact, the answer is obviously no. When my daughter hits her head and starts crying, I have a strong empathetic response. Does it follow that my daughter's hitting her head is good and right? Obviously not. So, it is quite obvious that the good and the right is not defined as whatever provokes a strong empathetic response.

But, of course, JD was guilty in this case of asking a very poorly formed question. What he should have asked is something more along the following lines: "Are the behaviors that I am inspired to perform based on a strong empathetic response always morally good and right?" Or maybe it should have been this: "Is 'morally good or right' to be defined simply as 'whatever I am immediately inspired to do when I have a strong empathetic response'?"

Again, the answer would be no. But the question would gesture towards a more interesting, open-ended question: "What is the relationship between moral empathy and moral decision-making?"

I think there is a very strong relationship between empathy and moral decision-making. In general, those with a poorly developed sense of empathy, or those in the habit of failing to attend to what their empathic feelings are telling them, routinely make worse moral decisions than those who cultivate their sense of empathy and pay close attention to what it has to say.

Empathy is about experiencing things through the perspective of another person. Such a capacity can be more or less finely-honed. That is, you can be bad at it even when you try. You imagine yourself into another person's shoes, but your imagining is pretty consistently dead wrong. As such, you can have a very strong empathetic response that is, at the same time, deeply out of tune with the experiences and feelings and needs of the person you are responding to.

So, even if one did want to draw a close theoretic connection between morality and empathy, the identification JD gestures towards--equating moral action with the action one's empathetic responses urge--would not do. Accuracy of empathetic response has to factor in to any empathy-based theory of morality.

And here's another important point: I might have a very strong and very accurate empathetic response to one person's situation, and be motivated by that response to do something that I would balk at doing were I to empathize with certain other people who are affected by the act. In addition to being more or less accurate, empathy can be more or less expansive in its scope. I can empathize with only white slave owners and have no empathy at all for their slaves, and thereby find myself forcefully defending slavery based on a strong and accurate empathetic connection to the former alone.

So, if you were going to develop a moral theory rooted in empathy, you'd want to understand morality not in terms of what a given person's empathetic feelings happen to urge them to do. You'd want to imagine someone in an ideal condition with respect to empathy--someone whose empathetic capacities are both  finely honed in terms of accuracy and widely expansive in terms of scope.

But even here we run into problems, since there is at least some reason to suppose that I ought to be more empatheticaly responsive to my children than I am to distant peoples, even if we concede that I should strive to have empathy for distant peoples as well. As soon as you begin to consider seriously the idea that some empathetic responses ought to play a larger role in moral decision-making than others, you have to begin to ask yourself on what basis this prioritization should be made. And while I can imagine a really creative moral philosopher coming up with a way for empathy to serve as that basis, the more natural approach is to suppose that there is some standard other than empathy which needs to be admitted into our moral deliberations.

Thus, while I think that empathy plays a huge role in morality, I do not think the best moral theory is one which defines morality as what empathy urges, or even what an ideally empathetic agent would feel an urge to do. I think empathy is a virtue that plays a profoundly important role in the decision-making of anyone who hopes to be truly moral. But I think there are other moral virtues that aren't reducible to empathy. A sense of fairness is going to interact with the urgings of empathy in interesting and important ways. Likewise for a sense of loyalty to those with whom one has established deep personal ties and commitments.

And when the urgings of empathy conflict with those of loyalty or fairness, how do you decide what to do? There are no easy answers here. Hence, even when I read JD's question charitably and try to get at what he meant to ask, the answer remains no.

But that said, empathy is important to moral decision-making in all sorts of ways.

Let me count them.

First, without empathy we make decisions based wholly on how things look from our own perspective. Empathy allows us to discern how things look from the perspectives of other people. The more widely we empathize, the more multifaceted our picture of things becomes. The truth about our world is best arrived at when we see things through multiple perspectives. And any kind of decision-making is benefited from a deeper insight into the truth.

Second, empathy gives us a better sense of how actions will affect others at the level of their feelings and their needs. And while I don't think morality can be reduced to making people feel good, there is no question that how actions affect people at the level of emotions and needs-fulfillment is crucial information for sound moral decision-making.

Third, I think morality is fundamentally connected with love. It's about loving our neighbors as ourselves.

As ourselves. One thing about my love for myself is this: I experience my emotions, my desires, my needs. They influence me because I feel them. Empathy takes me out of my head in such a way that I can relate to others in something like the same way that I relate to myself: Their needs and emotions come to have (at the ideal) the same kind of immediacy, the same kind of pull, that mine have for me. While empathy may not be all there is to loving my neighbor as myself, it is a huge piece of it.

Until I can experience the world through my neighbor's perspective, I cannot love my neighbor as I love myself. Until their perspective has a pull on my decision-making--the kind of pull that strong empathetic responses produce--I cannot love them as I love myself. Part of loving someone is experiencing their feelings and needs as something that matters for its own sake, as a reason to act--albeit not a decisive one, but a reason nonetheless, to be weighed against other reasons.

Until I care about the way that a decision will affect my neighbor in something like the way I care about the way it affects me, my decision-making is not shaped by love for my neighbor. And empathy is the chief pathway, if not the only pathway, to such care. Hence, if (as Christians certainly should) you think that moral decision-making must be loving, you can't engage in moral decision-making unless you empathize.