Empathy and Evil
Mar. 28th, 2011 02:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSimon Baron-Cohen in the Guardian talking about empathy. It's basically an ad for the book it only mentions at the end, 'Zero Degrees of Empathy: a New Theory of Human Cruelty by Simon Baron-Cohen'. It makes me very uncomfortable for sideways skittery reasons.
He suggests that 'evil' should be relabelled: "let's substitute the term "evil" with the term "empathy erosion".
He does this from his suggestion that nobody tries to understand evil they just use it as a word for inexplicable (not remotely true, come to think), and to lead up to his idea of fixing all evil by more empathy (I rather thought there was a lot of that suggestion around. only they call it compassion or charity or loving kindness, which come to think again is significantly different.)
I think this suggestion is a problem because of the way language works. You can't swap out one word for another once and for all, you just link the two together and make them interchangeable. So if he's saying that 'evil' is just another way of saying 'no empathy', he's unfortunately also making the connection 'no empathy' is 'evil'.
And why is this a problem? Well why I noticed it is in stuff the Guardian added to his words. His words in that article:
I know little if anything about those disorders. Alcohol, fatigue and depression are a bit known, but not the rest.
But what bothered me right off was the Guardian introduces him as "Autism expert Professor Simon Baron-Cohen" and before the article starts has a link to a test which says "How Empathic Are You?" and concludes with saying a score about is Asperger's or Autistic Spectrum. I got 18. And I disagree with their test, it isn't always asking things that are to do with empathy, sometimes it's asking things to do with Rules, which is a whole different category. I score well in Rules, once I know what they are.
So it starts with Autism, so when I paged down and found his article starting to talk about nazis, it made me feel sick. I don't know anything at all about those other conditions, but I don't think they have much to do with nazis either. So that's some nasty connection, there.
I do not think I want 'evil' connected up this way with 'lack of empathy' or with those conditions that include a lack of empathy.
And frankly I'm fuzzy on what empathy is supposed to be. It seems to be a bit of a grab bag. And I score poorly on empathy yet try to achieve ethical behaviour. If you can have bugger all empathy and still be ethical then they can't be linked the way he's saying, not so simple.
Other people are confusing and I do not predict them very well and sometimes I'm rude and get told so and other times I just spend a lot of worry on not knowing if I'm rude. (This may lead to me evaluating myself rather more negatively than necessary, but I wouldn't be the one to figure that out.) I often can't figure what other people are feeling, it's a mystery, and I guess that's low empathy. But I think a lot of these answers aren't getting what they think they're getting. I mean, a lot of neurotypicals think they're great at figuring out other people's feelings, but how do they know? There's entire genres of art based on the idea that people, on the whole, are sod all use at figuring out other people. There is a lot of misunderstanding in the world. And in stories at least people can have entire ongoing relationships with the construction of another person that they've built in their heads, without it having a whole hell of a lot to do with what that other person constructs about themselves. "You're not the man I married" sorts of thing, people that are physically present but imperfectly known. We all live in imaginary worlds built on fragmentary data.
This scarcity of data means our heads have one (1) real person in them, ourselves, plus a whole lot of shadow puppets. When we try and figure out what other people will do next we puppet our idea of them in our heads. Sometimes it matches, so it's a useful trick. It is important though to compare it with actual empirical data, and not just give up or get happy because the puppets said things. But that's about predicting reactions, emphasis ACTION, because you know only what is expressed, acted on. If you have branching plans for possible actions then it's more time consuming but you can manage without this one good trick. Makes it more difficult to pick the action that will lead to the world doing your bidding though. The rules for that are not obvious.
One of the empathy questions is about getting upset about people on the news, or getting emotionally involved with movies, and if you get a lot upset and involved then that's empathy.
But my studies of fiction and the media suggest that people can get lots of emotion going on about stories and then do bugger all about life, or that they get upset about people on the news but attribute fault in such a way they become part of what is upsetting to those people on the news. So how is empathy connected with being good to people?
I can see the rule 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you' and figure okay, I'd like people to tell me true things and act according to rule and pattern, I would not want people to hit me, I would want shiny interesting stuff. Is that empathy, to figure everyone wants that stuff? But observation and Cordelia Chase suggest that there's a rule about not saying true things, and it is called 'tact'. I don't see how that's any use. Is empathy figuring out when people want tact and when people want what I would want?
It seems like a lot of what gets called empathy involves assuming the inside of other people's heads works the same way as one's own, which is an assumption with a massive multiplicity of failure modes. Except when it coincidentally appears to work then it gets called empathy and gets gold star plus points.
It is possible to come up with a system of ethical behaviour based on pure logic. (I'm not going to say 'Vulcans do it' but the thought was there.) If you start out with noticing that all life, including one's own, is part of an interconnected system, that everyone needs things they can't provide for themselves, and then assume that continued life is A Good Thing, you can logic out ways of behaving that lead to more life and everyone getting what they need. Do you need empathy for that? Is it empathy to figure that everyone needs water? Or is it only empathy when you figure everyone needs happy? The thing is I can figure out how to get people water (vaguely, anyway, the specifics are provided by the charities that make new places have water). How everyone can have happy... first you have to define happy.
Or possibly just shrug and hope the Buddha figured it out real good and do like he said.
Rule following doesn't require empathy, rule building doesn't even require empathy, does it?
I still don't know what the dratted word is meant to mean. Looking it up doesn't help at all, the definitions get too long and turn into an argue.
It's all a bit abstract like this. But it seems to me people can have tons of empathy and still hurt people, and have scant empathy and still help people, so it's not interchangeable with the good/evil axis at all at all.
I keep on thinking of Torchwood and Gwen telling off Torchwood for, basically, not having enough empathy. When the girl in the cell is crying and Torchwood are having lunch and Gwen tells them off for being happy about lunch and not being miserable about the girl crying. That's Gwen being all 'feelings feelings feelings' at people, Gwen talking up the value of empathy, yesno? But then Jack asks what else they could be doing, since they are already doing all the practical useful things they can think of. Gwen comes up with something that is all about getting to know the girl, which turns out to be useful data, even if it weren't Gwen that made it useful. So knowing and understanding is useful in predicting the actions of others, empathy win. But trying to feel miserable because someone else is miserable would be a net increase in the misery of the world. Empathy fail? If Gwen was being 'feelings' about her team mates then getting them food and happy would be pretty important. If they were having a lunch break and not feeding hungry prisoners I could see her complaint. But leaving someone to cry instead of all going to be :-( with her... well she'd killed someone, do we really want to cheer her up? But phrased that way that's not empathy fail, that's ostracism, reject the badness. That done deliberately works as punishment because you know they're miserable and you leave them to it. That requires empathy, to know they're miserable, right? Doing things that make people miserable, doing it deliberately, that requires understanding their needs and feelings. Where's the bit in the empathy definition that says it's not empathy to know how to hurt? If it's there then they've bundled a couple of traits, understanding and wanting to be nice. What's the word just for understanding the emotions of others?
But the reason I keep thinking Torchwood is because it's not about feelings, it's about the expression of feelings and actions. You could say Jack doesn't care, but that wouldn't explain why he keeps dying to save people. Ianto does good practical things, gets people what they need when they need it, very useful. Yet he's one of the ones Gwen is telling off for not being all focused on the sad parts.
Maybe it's a muddle of empathy and sympathy, understanding feelings and feeling the same things. If Gwen is arguing for sympathy that's a different argue.
Also Gwen changes as she goes along, this version of her argue is a very early one.
I don't know. *big shrug* I think I wandered off from what the article's point was. He was writing about how people can treat other people as things. Use them, kill them. Turn them into literal things, objects. He reckons it's a lack of empathy. Empathy as defined by...? Something like accurately understanding the feelings of others, knowing they have the same interior life you do, can feel grief and fear and pain. I think he's saying if you don't understand other people have their own feelings then the bad things happen. But I don't see how that's true. You can understand the other guy is just like you - hell, in science fiction they can be you - and there's still a million reasons to screw them over. You can understand that everyone feels grief and fear and pain, but some people just decide today will be someone else's turn. I don't see how his argue is useful.
He suggests that 'evil' should be relabelled: "let's substitute the term "evil" with the term "empathy erosion".
He does this from his suggestion that nobody tries to understand evil they just use it as a word for inexplicable (not remotely true, come to think), and to lead up to his idea of fixing all evil by more empathy (I rather thought there was a lot of that suggestion around. only they call it compassion or charity or loving kindness, which come to think again is significantly different.)
I think this suggestion is a problem because of the way language works. You can't swap out one word for another once and for all, you just link the two together and make them interchangeable. So if he's saying that 'evil' is just another way of saying 'no empathy', he's unfortunately also making the connection 'no empathy' is 'evil'.
And why is this a problem? Well why I noticed it is in stuff the Guardian added to his words. His words in that article:
Zero degrees of empathy does not strike at random in the population. There are at least three well-defined routes to getting to this end-point: borderline, psychopathic, and borderline personality disorders. I group these as zero-negative because they have nothing positive to recommend them. They are unequivocally bad for the sufferer and for those around them. Of course these are not all the sub-types that exist. Indeed, alcohol, fatigue and depression are just a few examples of states that can temporarily reduce one's empathy, and schizophrenia is another example of a medical condition that can reduce one's empathy.
I know little if anything about those disorders. Alcohol, fatigue and depression are a bit known, but not the rest.
But what bothered me right off was the Guardian introduces him as "Autism expert Professor Simon Baron-Cohen" and before the article starts has a link to a test which says "How Empathic Are You?" and concludes with saying a score about is Asperger's or Autistic Spectrum. I got 18. And I disagree with their test, it isn't always asking things that are to do with empathy, sometimes it's asking things to do with Rules, which is a whole different category. I score well in Rules, once I know what they are.
So it starts with Autism, so when I paged down and found his article starting to talk about nazis, it made me feel sick. I don't know anything at all about those other conditions, but I don't think they have much to do with nazis either. So that's some nasty connection, there.
I do not think I want 'evil' connected up this way with 'lack of empathy' or with those conditions that include a lack of empathy.
And frankly I'm fuzzy on what empathy is supposed to be. It seems to be a bit of a grab bag. And I score poorly on empathy yet try to achieve ethical behaviour. If you can have bugger all empathy and still be ethical then they can't be linked the way he's saying, not so simple.
Other people are confusing and I do not predict them very well and sometimes I'm rude and get told so and other times I just spend a lot of worry on not knowing if I'm rude. (This may lead to me evaluating myself rather more negatively than necessary, but I wouldn't be the one to figure that out.) I often can't figure what other people are feeling, it's a mystery, and I guess that's low empathy. But I think a lot of these answers aren't getting what they think they're getting. I mean, a lot of neurotypicals think they're great at figuring out other people's feelings, but how do they know? There's entire genres of art based on the idea that people, on the whole, are sod all use at figuring out other people. There is a lot of misunderstanding in the world. And in stories at least people can have entire ongoing relationships with the construction of another person that they've built in their heads, without it having a whole hell of a lot to do with what that other person constructs about themselves. "You're not the man I married" sorts of thing, people that are physically present but imperfectly known. We all live in imaginary worlds built on fragmentary data.
This scarcity of data means our heads have one (1) real person in them, ourselves, plus a whole lot of shadow puppets. When we try and figure out what other people will do next we puppet our idea of them in our heads. Sometimes it matches, so it's a useful trick. It is important though to compare it with actual empirical data, and not just give up or get happy because the puppets said things. But that's about predicting reactions, emphasis ACTION, because you know only what is expressed, acted on. If you have branching plans for possible actions then it's more time consuming but you can manage without this one good trick. Makes it more difficult to pick the action that will lead to the world doing your bidding though. The rules for that are not obvious.
One of the empathy questions is about getting upset about people on the news, or getting emotionally involved with movies, and if you get a lot upset and involved then that's empathy.
But my studies of fiction and the media suggest that people can get lots of emotion going on about stories and then do bugger all about life, or that they get upset about people on the news but attribute fault in such a way they become part of what is upsetting to those people on the news. So how is empathy connected with being good to people?
I can see the rule 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you' and figure okay, I'd like people to tell me true things and act according to rule and pattern, I would not want people to hit me, I would want shiny interesting stuff. Is that empathy, to figure everyone wants that stuff? But observation and Cordelia Chase suggest that there's a rule about not saying true things, and it is called 'tact'. I don't see how that's any use. Is empathy figuring out when people want tact and when people want what I would want?
It seems like a lot of what gets called empathy involves assuming the inside of other people's heads works the same way as one's own, which is an assumption with a massive multiplicity of failure modes. Except when it coincidentally appears to work then it gets called empathy and gets gold star plus points.
It is possible to come up with a system of ethical behaviour based on pure logic. (I'm not going to say 'Vulcans do it' but the thought was there.) If you start out with noticing that all life, including one's own, is part of an interconnected system, that everyone needs things they can't provide for themselves, and then assume that continued life is A Good Thing, you can logic out ways of behaving that lead to more life and everyone getting what they need. Do you need empathy for that? Is it empathy to figure that everyone needs water? Or is it only empathy when you figure everyone needs happy? The thing is I can figure out how to get people water (vaguely, anyway, the specifics are provided by the charities that make new places have water). How everyone can have happy... first you have to define happy.
Or possibly just shrug and hope the Buddha figured it out real good and do like he said.
Rule following doesn't require empathy, rule building doesn't even require empathy, does it?
I still don't know what the dratted word is meant to mean. Looking it up doesn't help at all, the definitions get too long and turn into an argue.
It's all a bit abstract like this. But it seems to me people can have tons of empathy and still hurt people, and have scant empathy and still help people, so it's not interchangeable with the good/evil axis at all at all.
I keep on thinking of Torchwood and Gwen telling off Torchwood for, basically, not having enough empathy. When the girl in the cell is crying and Torchwood are having lunch and Gwen tells them off for being happy about lunch and not being miserable about the girl crying. That's Gwen being all 'feelings feelings feelings' at people, Gwen talking up the value of empathy, yesno? But then Jack asks what else they could be doing, since they are already doing all the practical useful things they can think of. Gwen comes up with something that is all about getting to know the girl, which turns out to be useful data, even if it weren't Gwen that made it useful. So knowing and understanding is useful in predicting the actions of others, empathy win. But trying to feel miserable because someone else is miserable would be a net increase in the misery of the world. Empathy fail? If Gwen was being 'feelings' about her team mates then getting them food and happy would be pretty important. If they were having a lunch break and not feeding hungry prisoners I could see her complaint. But leaving someone to cry instead of all going to be :-( with her... well she'd killed someone, do we really want to cheer her up? But phrased that way that's not empathy fail, that's ostracism, reject the badness. That done deliberately works as punishment because you know they're miserable and you leave them to it. That requires empathy, to know they're miserable, right? Doing things that make people miserable, doing it deliberately, that requires understanding their needs and feelings. Where's the bit in the empathy definition that says it's not empathy to know how to hurt? If it's there then they've bundled a couple of traits, understanding and wanting to be nice. What's the word just for understanding the emotions of others?
But the reason I keep thinking Torchwood is because it's not about feelings, it's about the expression of feelings and actions. You could say Jack doesn't care, but that wouldn't explain why he keeps dying to save people. Ianto does good practical things, gets people what they need when they need it, very useful. Yet he's one of the ones Gwen is telling off for not being all focused on the sad parts.
Maybe it's a muddle of empathy and sympathy, understanding feelings and feeling the same things. If Gwen is arguing for sympathy that's a different argue.
Also Gwen changes as she goes along, this version of her argue is a very early one.
I don't know. *big shrug* I think I wandered off from what the article's point was. He was writing about how people can treat other people as things. Use them, kill them. Turn them into literal things, objects. He reckons it's a lack of empathy. Empathy as defined by...? Something like accurately understanding the feelings of others, knowing they have the same interior life you do, can feel grief and fear and pain. I think he's saying if you don't understand other people have their own feelings then the bad things happen. But I don't see how that's true. You can understand the other guy is just like you - hell, in science fiction they can be you - and there's still a million reasons to screw them over. You can understand that everyone feels grief and fear and pain, but some people just decide today will be someone else's turn. I don't see how his argue is useful.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-28 07:41 am (UTC)He actually says:
So I don't think he is saying people use 'evil' as a synonym for 'inexplicable' but that most people consider evil to be inexplicable, which is not quite the same.
Again, no, he is saying no empathy is a necessary but not sufficient condition. That is a very important difference.
I think the empathy test at the top probably comes from another of his books Autism and Asperger Syndrome: the facts which mentions it has such a test and the style of the layout looks similar. So teh rules based questions are presumably because he is helping people rank for autism and Asperger not just empathy. I couldn't score myself because I frankly don't understand half the questions, a lot of which are very ambiguous.
I have no idea what empathy is or how to define it. I suppose one would have to read the book to find out.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-28 09:40 am (UTC)And I'm really not a fan of the "Minority Report" implications of "abused kids' brains are permanently warped and as a result this increases their likelihood of glassing people in pubs" takeaway from the extract the Observer chose to focus on.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-29 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-28 03:58 am (UTC)I'm thinking, also, from an American perspective where politicians who grew up poor have freely admitted that they don't think of their own situation or empathize with those in that situation now. This allows them to make laws which continue to fuck over the poor, minorities and animals because they can't picture themselves in their situations and how awful that must be.