Alice was everything Mary wasn’t. Young, intelligent, slim and not unattractive. Mary couldn’t stand her from the moment she took over as Alice’s boss. Alice had to go, somehow. Mary hired Henry, and nudged him to drive her out. When Henry didn’t, Mary piled work on him and got a feminist to make a false allegation—to depose him. As Mary went looking for a replacement for Henry, it became his job to cover up her incompetence, of the incompetents who replaced him, and of the twenty slackers who worked under her. Mary now lamented the death of civility at work. Henry’s rage. Alice’s outbursts. What could be worse? Mary soon grew tired of the incompetents she hired in place of Henry, and found another way to give Alice the boot. There was Susan, a single mother who was particularly bad at her job. She’d left a few days ago. Susan was vulnerable. Wren & Martin was her Bible. To her, Laureate was Nobel’s surname, and Berlin, possibly, an eminent economist. Mary brought her back, telling her bosses, “Susan is a single mother. She is a woman.” Mary rallied up everybody against Alice, and the slackers now came to work with a newfound enthusiasm. Susan was put to track everybody’s deadlines, especially that of Alice. Her bosses resisted the decision to fire Alice. A girl, then, accused Alice of stealing money from her wallet. There was nobody else in the room, she said. The rumor didn’t reach Alice, but she was fired two days later. Order was restored, more or less. Susan stayed on. A year later, during a mass layoff, Susan was called to an office in another city, and fired. Mary had given her an exceptionally bad rating, upbraiding her for not being confident enough, before she left her job to destroy people elsewhere. Everybody felt sorry for her, especially Mary who found meritocracy fraudulent. Well, how could they do this to a hardworking, single mother?
What has all this got to do with Paul Bloom’s views on empathy? An overlooked source of human conflict, Paul Bloom argues, is that people use empathy as a moral guide. Paul Bloom is not against cognitive empathy, that is, understanding how others feel, and identifying with their emotional states. By empathy, he means “emotional empathy”, which is feeling what others feel. He thinks there is too much of empathy in this world. Many critics claim he has emotional contagion in mind, and not empathy. When we empathize, they say, we don’t literally share their feelings, because that would be too strict, if possible at all. We more or less vividly imagine how they feel, and respond with an appropriate emotion. Suffice it to say that Paul Bloom’s definition is strict to the point of being meaningless. He is against what others call “sympathy”, or more technically, “affective empathy”, or “emotional empathy”. Empathy, sympathy and compassion are so closely linked to each other that it’s hard to disentangle them. If sympathy is the emotional reaction that results from empathy, it is hard to distinguish this from “emotional empathy”, unless you go by Paul Bloom’s strict definition. When you respond with an appropriate emotion to somebody in pain, you don’t literally share their feelings, but you may feel a little bit that way. When I say empathy, I mean emotional empathy, because that’s the sense in which Paul Bloom uses that term.
There is something to that, here, in this scapegoating story. People don’t feel as much empathy for a venture capitalist as for a single mother who walks the earth. Empathy can’t be the moral guide that makes them run the firm profitably. They empathized with Susan, Mary and her allies, and this was part of the problem. Mary and her allies sincerely felt Alice and Henry had no empathy. But this leaves a question open. Why was there no empathy for Alice or Henry? If it is empathy that misled them, it can’t be systematically biased. Their empathy for Mary and her allies would have been in a tug of war with their empathy for Alice and Henry. But they were actively hostile. There was something repulsive about their empathy for Susan, which didn’t seem heartfelt anyway. The source of the problem here can’t be that they felt too much empathy, or that they used empathy as a moral guide. It has to be something else. There is something really wrong with the way they think about morality.
Imagine how it’s like to work in this firm. You can’t trust anybody. Almost everybody empathizes with Susan. If anything, this makes them morally suspect, because their empathy acts as a cover for opportunism and scapegoating. And they may fire you to retain Susan, even if you’re twice as good. You can’t trust Susan, because she takes life too seriously. Life, to her, is a struggle for survival, and she “never paid much attention to petty politicking”. She wouldn’t want that to interfere with the beautiful story she tells herself about being a woman all alone in an unfair world. She would always put her child first. Henry can’t trust Mary and her slackers. If he doesn’t fall in line, his job will be taken by somebody who can’t even find his way back home. Alice can’t trust anybody. The game is rigged against her, and what she does won’t make much of a difference. She can’t take this up to the senior management. As the senior management sees things, firing her is the best thing to do. When the scapegoat is gone, order and stability may return. There is always the threat of war of all against all. It’s usually a lesser dose of violence that solves the problem of violence. This is no exaggeration, because coordination isn’t easy, and firms usually achieve a semblance of order by allowing stronger coalitions to take over. Scapegoating is usually tolerated, even encouraged. Intellectuals don’t make a big deal out of this, because they themselves engage in scapegoating, an unconscious process, and so don’t see scapegoating for what it is.
Now, what could be wrong with how they think about morality? They don’t think about doing wrong in “black and white” terms. All you need to do is to strongly believe it’s totally unacceptable to do wrong, even if you’re offended, even if it’s out of loyalty, even if it’s to save your own job, even if you’re going along to get along. The reason doesn’t matter. It’s completely unacceptable to do wrong, even if it’s to maximize profits, even if it’s to save more jobs, even if it’s to save the job of a single mother. You can’t get scapegoating off the ground, if everybody thinks about doing wrong in “black and white” terms. In such a world, people would be unconditionally trustworthy. They won’t even consider doing wrong. This sort of thing won’t even enter their minds. Genuine trust becomes possible. Alice wouldn’t have to worry about Mary and her allies, and Henry would be free to do what is right without worrying about reprisal. This is perhaps simplistic and utopian, as they are wont to say, but genuine trust can’t emerge in any other way. There are, indeed, people who won’t even consider doing what Mary and her allies did, rare as they maybe.
When people hear this story, the instinctive, if unspoken, response is “I feel sorry for whoever got screwed.” But horror becomes possible because people think about morality this way. When you empathize and sympathize with everybody who suffers, you don’t account for intentionality. Simon Baron-Cohen, the most well-known champion of empathy, disagrees. He thinks horror becomes possible when we turn off empathy, but he is only half-right, and we’ll come to that later. Simon Baron-Cohen would probably say if Mary and her allies were to ask, “What would it be like if I were persecuted this way?”, or, “What would it be like if I were Alice?”, they would have acted differently. “If we were all capable of deeply empathizing and sympathizing with one another, we wouldn’t have been so mean.” To many, this seems a nice view, and this is why empathy is seen as the fountainhead of kindness and virtue. But it is such seemingly nice views that make horror possible, and for a good reason.
To begin with, it is hard to empathize more with a venture capitalist than with Susan. For a single mother, being fired is a tragedy, but a venture capital firm suffers no perceptible harm when they retain an incompetent rank-and-file employee. Harm-based moral restrained isn’t enough. Paul Bloom is right that, in many situations, empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient to do the right thing. It should be something else that urges people to do the right thing. If we strongly empathize with one another, we would be overwhelmed by suffering, especially in larger groups, and this would backfire when you deal with enemies. Consider a mass layoff in which hundreds or thousands lose their livelihood, while the firm maximizes profits. The management has an obligation to fire them, because they’d promised to work in the best interests of the firm. Guilt is the price you pay for breaking a promise. Guilt does what empathy and sympathy doesn’t. The employees being laid off didn’t promise lifetime employment at a modest wage to the firm, and so they are not entitled to their jobs.
In a world where everybody feels extreme guilt when they break promises, Susan would be less vulnerable. She’d be fired for being incompetent, but it won’t be hard for her to find a job she could do. In the world we live in, it’s not so easy for her to find another job, because hiring aversion and firing aversion are deeply linked. Mary wouldn’t have fired her so easily, because Susan knew too much. She was a partner in crime. An employer would think twice before hiring her, because a laid off single mother is likely too incompetent, or a political liability. Bosses wouldn’t want someone who may rat them out. I think people sympathize with her partly because they rightly intuit she didn’t have much of a choice. She couldn’t have survived any other way. But she didn’t have a choice because almost everybody, including her, was opportunistic. In a world where people wouldn’t even consider doing wrong, her right to be moral wouldn’t be taken away from her.
Simon Baron-Cohen doesn’t deny guilt can be a powerful force. Empathy, he argues, gives rise to guilt, though it’s possible to feel guilt without feeling empathy. We feel guilt when we violate traffic rules, but not empathy. But he doesn’t make a big deal out of guilt. I wonder why, because this is a very serious omission, and psychologically revealing. Guilt wouldn’t have evolved if empathy and sympathy were sufficient. And guilt wouldn’t have evolved if it didn’t serve a different purpose. Otherwise stronger feelings of empathy and sympathy would have sufficed. So why would he say empathy gives rise to guilt and leave it at that?
Guilt accounts for intentionality, because you’re more likely to feel guilty about intentionally causing minor damage than about unintentionally causing serious damage. Intentionality and the strength of retaliation are directly linked. You aren’t likely to retaliate against a bus driver who unintentionally drives a bus into a gorge, killing your child. But you’ll probably bring him to book, if he slaps your child. It’s the fear of retaliation that gives rise to guilt. The purpose of guilt is to mediate opportunism, to protect us from retaliation. The inhibition of guilt makes it easier to deceive others, and deception is inevitable when you hypocritically extend your empathy to everybody. This is perhaps why pro-empathy crusaders don’t give guilt the attention it deserves.
Take the case of Matt Wage, the young man who went to Wall Street to earn well and donate his income to the starving poor. If he is a man with strong feelings of sympathy and empathy, but no guilt, he’s more likely to feel bad at not giving enough to charity than by engaging in opportunistic behavior at his Wall Street firm. Effective altruists like Matt Wage want to alleviate suffering, and make the world a better place in the most effective way. But it clearly seems to me they find alleviating suffering more important than not behaving opportunistically. My point is not that Matt behaves opportunistically at his Wall Street firm, or that he feels no guilt. And it’s important to have a consequentialist approach to positive moral actions. But effective altruists don’t bring up opportunism much, though a world where nobody behaves opportunistically would be far more prosperous than a world where everybody is an effective altruist. They prioritize doing most good over moral restraint, and this is a red flag. Many effective altruists, including Peter Singer and Paul Bloom, claim they aren’t driven by empathy. But they seem closer to the hypothetical man with strong feelings of empathy and sympathy, but no guilt. Effective altruists tend to think we have an obligation to alleviate suffering. But believing you’ve a duty to undertake positive moral actions undermines moral restraint.
Am I exaggerating? Peter Singer says most effective altruists are not saints. They don’t go about feeling guilty because they aren’t morally perfect, because there is no point in feeling guilty. They perhaps don’t see much point in people blaming either. Guilt is deeply linked to intentionality and opportunism, and this is probably why they don’t feel much point in feeling guilty. I think this is where the views of pro-empathy and anti-empathy crusaders meet. They have something against accounting for intentionality. They are not as different as they would like to believe.
Paul Bloom and Peter Singer bring up the case of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, who prattles about the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, as her son’s head was stuck through the railings. We’re rightly suspicious of such do-gooders. Empathy and sympathy are more genuine and heartfelt, when restricted to people closest to us. Guilt imposes moral restraint on ourselves in interactions with strangers. Guilt prevents us from behaving opportunistically, and makes it possible to feel more genuine, heartfelt empathy and sympathy for people closer to us. There is no conflict between deeply loving your child, and passionately believing in the right for an immigrant to come over. Both go together. Guilt is about us, not them. Paul Bloom thinks it is a flaw of empathy that it is a spotlight that focuses on certain people here and now. Emotional empathy is a spotlight, but rightly so. Guilt is so effective because it is a spotlight with an even narrower focus. It’s a spotlight that illuminates you and nobody else, and this is why it’s so effective.
Empathy is a burden which makes us cruel when we hypocritically extend its focus to the wider world. It’s shallow and dishonest, because it isn’t genuine or heartfelt. Peter Singer doesn’t mention immigration in his book, “The Life You Can Save”, though open borders can cure world poverty almost overnight without imposing huge sacrifices. Call me uncharitable, but Peter Singer seems closer to the hypothetical man with strong feelings of empathy and sympathy, but no guilt.
Paul Bloom thinks empathy and anger have a lot in common. Anger maybe a valuable psychological adaptation, he says, but it is biased, and leads us astray in the moment, and we’d be better off without it. Though he wouldn’t leave anger out if he genetically engineers a child, he speaks approvingly of Dalai Lama who says, ‘Yes, kill Hitler. But don’t be angry.’ It’s important, here, to note that the Mafia too prizes being calm, detached and businesslike while taking a life. Many white-collar crime researchers treat companies as deviant subcultures, just as gangs and religious groups are. This is almost certainly why calmness and detachment are prized in firms too. These are valuable traits that help you place group goals over ethical behavior. The antidote to tribalism isn’t what Paul Bloom thinks it is.
Now, what does anger and guilt have in common? A boss can’t count on his employee to retaliate against him, unless retaliation is rooted in emotions that supersede rationality. A rational employee is unlikely to retaliate, because her boss is more powerful. The payoff comes much later, if at all. But an employee who is likely to retaliate is less likely to be taken advantage of. Anger makes retaliation rational by “shifting the relevant future payoffs into the current moment.”An angry person gets a kick out of retaliation, and would retaliate to avoid going outraged. Anger, just as guilt, is deeply linked to intentionality. Anger, just as guilt, evolved because opportunism was rampant in our evolutionary past. Contra Paul Bloom, instead of leading us astray in the moment, anger may discipline us, and urge us to put an end to opportunistic behavior.
Intellectuals and common folk are so vicious, so persistent in their denunciation of anger, hatred and revenge. It’s hard to believe this is because these deadly sins may lead to cruelty and aggression. Abstract ideas led to some of the greatest horrors in human history, but we know this is not a reason to entirely dismiss abstract reasoning. We know that moral sensibilities based on abstract ideas are important for human flourishing. The importance of anger doesn’t get such a fair evaluation, not because it leads to aggression, but because it’s linked to intentionality and opportunism. Guilt isn’t denounced as viciously. But it’s hard to miss the tacit assumption that we can do away with guilt if we empathize and sympathize with one another strongly enough. The assumption that it would have been good if we could do away with anger and be guided entirely by “reason” isn’t tacit. It is out in the open, because it is socially acceptable, even encouraged.
These are seemingly well-intentioned views. “We shouldn’t hold on to anger. We should all care more for one another.” They say hell is paved with good intentions. But couldn’t this be because they are not willing to see the tacit assumptions, the bad intentions, behind such seemingly well-intentioned views? If you think the denunciation of anger isn’t motivated by bad intentions, don’t forget what Moses Farrow, Woody Allen’s adopted son wrote to his extremely abusive step-mother.
“You once said to me, “It’s not healthy to hold onto anger.” Yet here we are, 26 years later.” Note here that Mia Farrow adopted many, many children, toward whom she had no genuine, heartfelt empathy.
Paul Bloom thinks an angry person feeds off the suffering of others, and wants wrongdoers to suffer. People are more punitive, instead of judging appropriate punishment, after they’re made to watch films that rile them up. But this is precisely why anger is important, especially when detection is hard, and punishment is rare. We are hardwired to think proportionate punishment is fair and just, but this doesn’t offer much in the way of restraining opportunism. Proportionate punishment isn’t much of a deterrent, if you aren’t likely to be caught. Punishment should be disproportionate, to be effective. Paul Bloom plays the provocateur by warning us against the dangers of empathy. But there are limitations to what Rory Sutherland calls “approved conventional reasoning”, and this is why he failed so miserably. Paul Bloom is guilty of approved conventional reasoning.
In a Paris Review interview, Jonathan Rosen asked V.S. Naipaul, “Do you think anger works better than understanding for a writer?” V.S. Naipaul was an irascible man, but his answer was thoughtful, “I think it isn’t strictly anger alone. It is deep emotion. Without that deep emotion there is almost no writing—then you do journalism. When you are deeply churned up, you know that you cannot express this naked raw emotion; you have to come to some resolution about it. It is this refinement of emotion, what you call understanding, that really makes the writing. These two things are not opposed to one another—understanding derives from what you call anger. I would call it emotion, deep emotion. Emotion is necessary to writing.” Observe what is going on here. If you take him literally, the interviewer is obviously right. Who would deny understanding is better than anger? Jonathan Rosen, here, bought into a false dichotomy, just as Paul Bloom does. What if understanding comes from a refinement of naked emotions, one of those emotions being anger? Understanding maybe better than anger, but without the refinement of anger, there is no understanding. It’s like saying roasted cashewnuts are better than raw ones, and throwing away all the raw ones, hoping that roasted ones would come from somewhere. Approved, conventional reasoning can only take us so far.
We can’t be motivated by reason to do the right thing anymore than we can be motivated to sleep by the science of sleep. We sleep because we feel sleepy. Now, it’s true that the science of sleep may urge you to get better sleep, but even here it’s not the science, but the anxiety induced by facts that motivates you. We experience the world through emotions, and we are driven by emotions. There is no getting around this banal fact. It isn’t irrational to do the right thing out of overpowering emotions anymore than it’s irrational to sleep because you’re sleepy.
Guilt isn’t enough. Susan may feel guilty about building up evidence against Alice. But she may feel guiltier about not putting her child first. The bosses may feel guilty about firing Alice. But they may feel guiltier about lowering morale by not letting the scapegoat go. The only solution, here, is to never consider doing wrong, regardless of the “good” it would bring about. It’s important to never “trade off obedience of moral exhortations for the obedience of moral prohibitions, as economist David Rose argues”. Susan ought to think she would become immoral if she builds up evidence against Alice. This would be true regardless of what she does for her child to make up for this. The bosses ought to think they would become immoral if they fire Alice, regardless of the “good” they would bring about. Henry shouldn’t be considered more moral even if he donates all his income to children suffering from Malaria in Sudan, if that comes at the expense of Alice. He would become immoral if he does so. We should reject a consequentialist approach here, because that would make horror possible. The threat posed by the consequentialist mindset is at least as big as the threat posed by the limitations of empathy. David Rose calls this the “greater good rationalization problem.”
The cost-benefit approach to moral reasoning isn’t new. It’s not a solution to the excesses of empathy, or an antidote to tribalism. The cost-benefit approach isn’t in a tug of war against our hardwired moral intuitions. The cost-benefit approach, as David Rose says in one of the most insightful works of all times, is as common as it is old. Natural selection itself is consequentialist. In our ancestral past, in small groups, in the short run, for individual decision makers, this worked fine. For modern capitalism to flourish, it is this primitive approach to moral reasoning we should reject. We can’t trust anybody in a world where our hardwired consequentialism takes over. Cost-benefit analysis—instead of broadening the limits of our empathy—can suppress our natural empathy, and turn us cruel.
As David Rose points out, it is not even enough to reject trading off of obedience of moral prohibitions to obedience of moral exhortations. It’s important to not even consider doing so. A man with a strong distaste for cheating experiences strong feelings of involuntary guilt whenever he cheats. A man who risks his career to speak his mind probably has a strong taste for truthful self-expression. He doesn’t engage in truthful self-expression, after careful deliberation and rational thought. Truthful self-expression would come easily to him, because doesn’t know any other way to be. It’s rational for him to speak his mind, because the pain of keeping his thoughts to his mind is too painful. Moral tastes turn people unconditionally trustworthy, when these tastes structure their value system in a way they wouldn’t even consider doing wrong, even if it is to do greater good.
Simon Baron-Cohen, a sound observer despite himself, rightly points out people with Asperger’s Syndrome are the first to leap to the defense of victims of injustice. But he’s wrong to conclude that this is because they have created moral systems out of brute logic alone. People with Asperger’s Syndrome are intolerant to people who bend the rules, because they themselves won’t bend the rules. They have a strong distaste for that sort of thing. They experience powerful feelings of guilt, and doing wrong doesn’t cross their minds. It’s those feelings that commit them to behave morally, create sophisticated codes of morality, and see the world with more clarity than others imagine possible. Intellectuals make many huge, avoidable mistakes because their moral tastes don’t structure their value system in a way they wouldn’t even consider doing wrong. It’s a waste of cognitive resources to consider something you wouldn’t do. People with Asperger’s Syndrome tend to not waste cognitive resources that way, and it’s not surprising their moral codes are super developed.
We get autism backward. People with Asperger’s Syndrome are seen as cold and detached, because they have unusual moral tastes. Intellectuals take certain moral tastes for granted. So, they wrongly assume autistics set aside their feelings, and hence their moral restraint and sophisticated moral codes. But if your overpowering emotions commit you to not behaving opportunistically, there is no need to set aside your feelings. Paul Bloom thinks cognitive empathy, just as intelligence, is a tool that can be used to achieve ends, positive or negative. People with Asperger’s Syndrome are believed to have low cognitive empathy. But they find it difficult to read others because their moral tastes are so different from normal, that they find it hard to figure out what others are up to. The feeling is mutual.
Paul Bloom finds the existence of super moral autistics as a validation of his thesis, because they have low cognitive empathy and possibly low emotional empathy as well. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Paul Bloom’s beef is with emotional empathy. Autistics likely have deeper emotional empathy, and this invalidates, and not validates his point. The truth is that their “black-and-white” view of morality and propensity to feel guilt makes them uncompromising. They aren’t willing to suppress their natural empathy and gut feelings in the name of greater good. It’s not a lack of empathy, but their unwillingness to suppress their empathy that makes them moral. A complex interplay of emotions and reason makes them better at moral reasoning. People with Asperger’s Syndrome, contrary to popular myth, don’t treat people as machines or logical systems without minds or feelings. Their unusual moral tastes structure their moral values in a way it makes them unconditionally trustworthy. And this makes genuine trust and love possible. In a world where you can’t genuinely trust anybody, cynically using one another for instrumental goals is inevitable. Treating people as objects to be manipulated and controlled is the norm, not the exception. People with Asperger’s Syndrome, if anything, are deeply emotional. They feel too much. They are a perfect refutation of Paul Bloom’s thesis, just as psychopaths with diminished emotional sensitivity are.
The greatest problem the world faces is not global poverty, climate change or even political irrationality. There are not many among us who know how to think about morality. This is at the root of all other problems manmade. The empathy debate is an important one. Almost everybody sees empathy as the fountainhead of virtue and kindness. They are wrong, but anti-empathy crusaders are at least as wrong as the champions of empathy. Economist David Rose, from what I can see, never entered this debate. But he won the debate, by working out in detail how people who never behave opportunistically think about morality. It’s a clear and unambiguous victory. It would be opportunistic—and a colossal waste of cognitive resources—to not even acknowledge this.
Shanu Athiparambath is a writer who lives in the Himalayas. He is working on his debut novel. You can reach him at [email protected]