Just Because You Feel It Doesn't Mean It's There

Empathy and the Moral Life, Pt. 1

The first in a short series on the empathy’s role in the moral life.

The Rise of Narrative, The Rise of Empathy

The last century has been dominated by narrative readings of Scripture and theology, and for the record, it’s not bad. As opposed to seeing Scripture as a disaggregated set of propositions, I’ll take trying to understand Scripture as a narrative with different strands, different doglegs and subplots, all housed within an overarching commitment to the Triune God and what it means to be God’s people in time¹.

Central to reading Scripture narratively is entering into the world which is Scripture: that what we are is invited, body and soul, to participate in this ongoing story of God’s people. This involves, among other things, a resurgence of interest in lectio divina readings, in which a person imaginatively enters into Scriptural texts, or forms of identification with various stories.

Engaging the full range of our lives when we read Scripture is something which readers of Scripture have been doing for centuries: we can find preachers from nearly every century making use of commonplace images, or inviting hearers to connect the dots between their own experiences and the world of Scripture. A particular strand of theological interpretation looked to our affections as the primary way that God communicates to us, but you needn’t go that road to say that it’s not a bad thing for Scripture to engage the totality of our bodies.

As frequently occurs, theological trends and broader philosophical trends are not as far apart as we might imagine. A quick ngram search reveals that books about narrative readings of Scripture shoot up nearly in identical ways and in identical years as books about empathy. We have to be careful not to make too much of this connection: my basic point is that a mode of reading Scripture which encourages the reader to place themselves in the midst of the story, and a cultural concern for getting inside the shoes of another person are not far apart, and their prevalence in the literature tracks².

Empathy, like affective identification with Scripture, has its own long history as well. As a very quick definition, we’ll say that empathy is something like this:

Sympathy is understanding the pain of another. Empathy is feeling the pain of another, as one’s own.

To see the prevalence of it, consider two recent American presidents, both of whom emphasized “feeling another’s pain”, and “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes”. Or consider the role that trying to identify with the struggle or grief of another plays in racial justice movements. The basic idea here is that intellectually identifying with the logic of another’s reasons is one thing, but that we are truly moved to action when we can feel what another person has felt.

One of the findings of multiple psychological studies is the correlation between identifying with not just the idea of another, but with the emotional state of another, and an increased attention of resolving the problem. Consider, for example, what happens, if I tell you about the deaths of thousands of people in a distant country, or show you them: in the latter, you are invited to identify with the sufferings of another in a different way than having knowledge about their suffering³.

Empathy and The Moral Life

If emotional identification is how we are not just moved to act in a certain way, but that which give us a different kind of knowledge that drives our action, then empathy—the ability to emotionally identify with another—is super important. It’s at the root of the idea that our morals are basically after-the-fact justifications for our sentiments about things, that we have strongly rooted emotional states that we then provide reasons for⁴. The most recent proponents of the notion that morality is basically just feelings with legs is Jonathan Haidt, but the idea of this goes back to the 18th century, rooted in the work of Adam Smith and David Hume⁵.

The role that empathy plays, then, in the moral life may be huge. A lack of empathy provides a reason for why psychopaths are able to distance themselves so effectively from their victims, or why people are moved by singular stories instead of statistics, or why I can say no to supporting Girl Scouts as an idea but can’t turn away from the pitiful pleas of a particular Girl Scout hawking her cookies. It’s a powerful explanation for how we are moral beings.

It may also not be true at all.

As Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion puts it, a lot of the study of empathy suffers from muddy definition—feeling sad for someone else’s pain, calling sympathy empathy, or assuming that when people act compassionately that it’s because they’ve identified with the pain being expressed.

His case, in a nutshell, is that feeling the pain of another isn’t necessary for the moral life, and in fact, might lead us to be unjust in all kinds of ways. Not only is not possible, for example, to truly feel the pain of others—for pain is particularlized to a person’s own losses—but focusing on easing one particular kind of suffering, he says, causes us to spotlight particular things which may not actually require the care we give to it. Consider here, for example, Go Fund Me campaigns which raise tens of thousands of dollars more than the need, or the oceans of attention and resources given to forms of suffering which might be resolved by time or a few therapy sessions.

Over the next few weeks, I want to dig into the roots of this question, and see what pops up. Reading Bloom this week on the heels of last week’s post about the rise and decline of Jurgen Moltmann’s theology was interesting, because it seems not coincidental that empathy would have arisen in the same space as his theological influence. But first, a question:

Is it necessary to feel the pain of another in order to have a robust moral life? Why or why not?

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Of Note: One of Palestine’s only functioning hospitals is reaching the bottom of its supplies. The New York Times documented abortion travel to see what effect state-by-state restrictions had. The late Willie Mays’ curious approach during Civil Rights.

1. There have been powerful rejoinders to this motif. Francesca Murphy’s book God is Not a Story is powerful pushback to narrative sensibilities, and Brent Strawn, eminent Hebrew Bible scholar, has a book in the works he tentatively is calling the “anti-narrative narrative” take on Scripture. Narrative has had its day, and the tide is turning.

2. It would be totally worth teasing out the differences between, say, 17th century pietist readings of Scripture, which emphasized the cultivation of the affections in reading Scripture, and 21st century narrative readings which emphasize identifying with a character in the story. But now is not that time.

3. The question of whether, or how, emotions constitute a kind of intelligence is really interesting, and maybe one we’ll take up in the future. Empathy proposes that, if we “know” things by way of feeling, then there’s something longitudinal about emotions, as opposed to being short-term occurrences. This presumption is contrary to a lot of emotions research, which tend to view emotions as short-term states that we enter into but don’t stay in.

4. This goes by a couple of names, most frequently “intuitionism” or “sentimentalism”.

5. Yes, the “Wealth of Nations” Adam Smith, best known in his own lifetime for his Theory of Moral Sentiments.