Proper empathy

Empathy is usually understood as sharing in the feelings of others, and it is thought to be an important part of closer forms of human love.

I think there is a mistake here. Consider these cases, where Alice is a very close friend of Bob.

1. Alice knows that Bob’s wife has been cheating on him, but because of the confidentiality of the source of the information, she is unable to information Bob. She constantly sees Bob enjoying his marriage and delighting in thinking of his wife’s loyalty.

2. Last week, Bob has been informed he has a terminal disease, and is feeling the normal feelings of dread. Alice works in the medical office and has just discovered that that Bob’s file was mixed up with the file of another person of the same name, who indeed had a terminal disease and died of it two years ago, and Bob’s actual diagnosis was a clean bill of health. The office has yet to inform Bob of this.

3. Bob is a great fan of his local hockey team. He has just found out that the star player in a team that is to play against them has just broken a leg, and is delighted, and shares his delight with Alice.

4. Because Bob’s country used to be occupied by the Soviet Union, Bob has a visceral dislike of Russia. He has just learned that Russia won the Ice Hockey World Championship, and this makes him sad. He shares his sadness with Alice.

Cases 1 and 2 are cases where Bob is ignorant of the relevant facts, and cases 3 and 4 are ones where he is in the grip of a vice. But in none of the four cases is it appropriate for Alice to straightforwardly share in Bob’s feelings.

In case 1, Alice can be expected to feel badly for Bob, and her feeling badly is only accentuated by the fact that Bob doesn’t feel badly. In case 2, Alice would feel delighted for Bob, with the delight tempered by some a sadness that Bob is still feeling dread. But even that sadness would not take the form of dread. In case 3, Alice might share some of Bob’s joy that his preferred team will win, but she shouldn’t feel any delight at the player breaking a leg. Moreover, Alice should feel badly about her friend exhibiting a vicious joy. Finally, in case 4, Alice should feel badly, but not as a sharing in Bob’s sadness, but as a reaction to Bob’s ethnic prejudice. However, since she knows that the feelings are unpleasant ones for Bob, she might well have some sadness for his suffering, even if that suffering is vicious in nature.

These cases suggest to me that a good human friend:

• Has a first-order share in the feelings that the friend should have (i.e., would have if they were virtuous and well-informed).

• Has second-order feelings in reaction to the friend’s actual first-order feelings.

In many cases where the friend is virtuous and well-informed, the first-order sharing in the feelings the friend should have is also a first-order sharing in the feelings the friend does have.

This is a much more complex, and morally loaded, set of dispositions than empathy as usually defined. I don’t know that we have a good name for this complex set of dispositions. We might, of course, call it “proper empathy”, if we like.

A Christian argument against divine suffering

Some Christians think that God changes and is capable of changing emotions such as suffering. Now, if God is capable of suffering, then God feels empathetic suffering whenever an evil befalls us, and does so to the extent of how bad he understand the evil to be.

The worst evil that can happen to us is to sin. God knows how bad our sin is better than any human being can. Thus, if God can suffer, he suffers compassionately for our sins. He suffers this qua God and independently of any Incarnation, more intensely than any human being can.

But if so, that undercuts one of the central points of the Incarnation, which is to allow the Second Person of the Trinity to suffer for our sins.

A view on which God is capable of emotions such as suffering makes the Incarnation and Christ’s sacrifice of the Cross rather underwhelming: God’s divine suffering would be greater than Christ’s suffering on the Cross. This is theologically unacceptable.

Feeling bad about harms to our friends

Suppose something bad happens to my friend, and while I am properly motivated in the right degree to alleviate the bad, I just don’t feel bad about it (nor do I feel good about). Common sense says I am morally defective. But suppose, instead, something bad happens just to me, and I stoically (I am not making any claims about the Stoic movement by using this word, despite the etymology) bear up under it, without feeling bad, though being properly motivated to alleviate the harm. Common sense praises this rather than castigating it. Yet, aren’t friends supposed to be other selves?

So, we have a paradox generated by:

1. The attitudes we should have towards our friends are very much like those we should have towards ourselves.

2. It is wrong not to feel bad about harms to our friends even when we are properly motivated to fight those harms.

3. It is not wrong to feel bad about harms to ourselves when we are properly motivated to fight those harms.

As some terminological background, feeling bad about our friends’ losses is not exactly empathy. In empathy, we feel the other’s feelings as we see things from their point of view. So, feeling bad about harms to our friends will only be empathy if our friends are themselves feeling bad about these harms. There are at least two kinds of cases where we feel bad about harms to our friends when our friends themselves do not: (a) our friends are being stoical and (b) our friends are unaware of the harms (e.g., their reputation is being harmed by gossip we witness, or our friends are being harmed by acting viciously while thinking it’s virtuous). Moreover, even when our friends are feeling bad about the harms, our feeling bad about the harms will only be a case of empathy if we feel bad because they are feeling bad. If we feel bad because of the badness of the harms, that’s different.

In fact, we don’t actually have a good word in English for feeling bad on account of a friend’s being harmed. Sympathy is perhaps a bit closer than empathy, but it has connotations that aren’t quite right. Perhaps “compassion” in the OED’s obsolete sense 1 and sense 2a is close. The reason we don’t have a good word is that normally our friends themselves do feel bad about having been harmed, and our terminology fails to distinguish whether our feeling bad is an instance of sharing in their feeling or of emotionally sharing in the harm to them. (Think of how the “passion” in “compassion” could be either the other’s negative feeling or it could be the underlying harm.) And I think we also don’t have a word for feeling bad on account of our own being harmed, our “self compassion” (we do have “self pity”, but that’s generally seen as bad), though we do have thicker words for particular species of the phenomenon, such as shame or grief. So I’ll just stick to the clunky “feeling bad on account of harm”.

When we really are dealing with empathy, i.e., when we feel bad for our friend because our friend feels bad for it, the paradox is easier to resolve. We can add a disjunct to (1) and say:

4. The attitudes we should have towards our friends are very much like either those that we should have towards ourselves or those that our friends non-defectively have towards themselves.

This is a bit messy. I’m not happy with it. But it captures a lot of cases.

But what about the pure case of feeling bad for harms to a friend, not because the friend feels bad about it?—either because the friend doesn’t know about the harm, or the friend is being stoical, or our bad feeling is a direct reflection of the harms rather than indirectly via the other’s feeling of the harms. (Of course there will also be the special case where the feeling is the harm, as perhaps in the case of pains.) I am not sure.

I actually feel a pull to saying that especially when our friend doesn’t feel bad about the harm, we should, on their behalf. If our friend nobly does not feel the insult, we should feel it for them. And if our friend is being unjustly maligned, we should not only work to rescue their reputation, but we should feel bad.

But I am still given pause by the plausibility of (1) (even as modified to (4)) and (3). One solution would be to say that we should feel bad about harms to ourselves, that we should not be stoical about them. But I don’t want to say that the stoical attitude is always wrong. If our friends are being stoical about something, we don’t always want to criticize them for it, even mentally. Still there are cases where our friends are rightly criticizable for a stoical attitude. One case is where they should be grieving for the loss of someone they love. A more extreme case is where they should be feeling guilt for vicious action—in that case, we wouldn’t even use the fairly positive word “stoical”, but we would call their attitude “unfeeling” or something like that. In those cases, at least, it does seem like they should feel bad for the harm, and we should likewise feel bad on their behalf whether or not they do. (And, yes, this feeling may be in the neighborhood of a patronizing feeling in the case where they are not feeling the guilt they should—but the neighborhood of patronization has some places that sometimes need to be occupied.)

Still, I doubt that it is ever wrong not feel something. That would be like saying that it is wrong not to smell something. Emotions are perceptions of putative normative facts, I think. It can be defective not to smell an odor, either because one has lost one’s sense of smell or because one has failed to sniff when one should have. But the failure to smell an odor is not wrong, though it may be the consequence of doing something wrong, as when the repair person has neglected to sniff for a gas leak.

Instead, I think the thing to say is that there is a good in feeling bad about harms to a friend—or to ourselves. The good is the good of correct perception of the normative state of affairs. A good always generates reasons, and the good is to be pursued absent countervailing reasons. But there can be countervailing reasons. When I injure my shoulder, my pain is a correct perception of my body’s injured state. Nonetheless, because that pain is unpleasant (or fill in whatever the right story about why we rightly avoid pain), I take an ibuprofen. I have reason to feel the pain, namely because the pain is a correct way of seeing the world, but I also have reason not to feel the pain, namely because it hurts.

Similarly, if someone has insulted me, I have reason to feel bad, because feeling bad is a correct reflection of the normative state of affairs. But I also have reason not to feel bad, because feeling bad is unpleasant. So it can be reasonable not to feel bad. Loving my friend as myself does not require me to make greater sacrifices for my friend than I would make for myself, though it is sometimes supererogatory to do so (and sometimes foolish, as when the sacrifice is excessive given the goods gained). So if I don’t have an obligation to sacrifice my equanimity to in order to feel bad for the insult to me, it seems that I don’t have an obligation to sacrifice it in order to feel bad for the insult to my friend. But that sounds wrong, doesn’t it?

So where does the asymmetry come from? Here is a suggestion. In typical cases where our friend feels bad for the harm, our feeling does not actually match the intensity of our friend’s, and this is not a defect in friendship. So the unpleasantness of feeling bad for oneself is worse than in the case of feeling bad for one’s friend. Thus, more equanimity is sacrificed for the sake of our feelings correctly reflecting reality when it is our own case, and hence the argument that if I don’t have an obligation to make the sacrifice for myself, I don’t have an obligation to make the sacrifice for my friend is fallacious, as the sacrifices are not the same. Furthermore, to be honest, there is a pleasure in feeling bad for a friend. The OED entry for “compassion” cites this psychological insight from a sermon by Mozley (1876): “Compassion … gives the person who feels it pleasure even in the very act of ministering to and succouring pain.” I haven’t read the rest of the sermon, but I think this is not any perverse wallowing or the like. The “compassion” is an exercise of the virtue of friendship, and there is an Aristotelian pleasure in exercising a virtue. And this is much more present when it is one’s friend one is serving. Thus, once again, the sacrifice tends to be less when one feels bad for one’s friend than when one feels bad for oneself, and hence the reason that one has to feel bad for one’s friend is less often outbalanced by the reason not to than in one’s own case.

Nonetheless, the reason to feel bad for one’s friend can be outbalanced by reasons to the contrary. Correct perceptual reflection of reality is not the only good to be pursued—not even the only good in the friendship.

Marriage in heaven

Question 1: Are there marriages in heaven?

Answer: No. Jesus explicitly says that there is no marrying or giving in marriage in heaven (Luke 20:27-38). So no new marriages are entered into in heaven. That might seem to leave open the question whether existing marriages might not continue. But the context of the discussion is of a woman who was married to a sequence of brothers and the paradoxical consequences of that if these marriages continue in the afterlife. Jesus' answer only solves the paradox if we accept the implicature that there is no marriage in heaven. Moreover, it would be an odd view if existing marriages persisted in heaven but new ones couldn't be entered into. If marriage in heaven would be a good thing for us, this kind of a setup just wouldn't be fair to a loving couple who was murdered minutes before their wedding was to take place.

Question 2: Why are there no marriage in heaven?

Answer: It's good that way. Well, that's true, but not informative: it applies to everything about heavenly life. But we can think a bit about why it's good for it to be so.

One thought is that only marriage for eternity would be fitting for heavenly life. Divorce just doesn't seem the sort of thing that is fitting for heavenly life. But I think it would be problematic for humans to bind themselves to one another for an eternal heavenly life. Heavenly life is unimaginable to us now, radically transcending our current knowledge. Because of this, it would not be appropriate for us to commit ourselves now to be bound to another person for an infinite length of time in that utterly different life. Now one might think that once in heaven the problem disappears. But I suspect it does not. I suspect that the heavenly life is a life of eternal and non-asymptotic growth (hence my recent swollen head argument against Christian physicalism). I don't know if the beatific vision itself increases eternally, but I suspect that at least the finite goods of heavenly life do. So some of the reasons why it would not be fitting for us to bind ourselves now to one another for eternity would apply in heaven: in year ten of heavenly life, perhaps, one cannot imagine what year one billion will be like; in year one billion, one cannot imagine what year 10¹⁰⁰ will be like; and so on. Eternity is long.

A second thought is that there is something about the exclusivity of marriage that is not fitted for heavenly life. The advocates of free love had something right: there is something limiting about exclusivity. This limitation is entirely fitting given the nature of marriage and its innate links to reproduction and sexual union as one body. But nonetheless it seems plausible to me that an innately exclusive form of love is not fitted to heaven.

A third and most speculative thought: There is a link--worth exploring in much greater depth than I am going to do here--between the exclusivity of marriage and the appropriateness of according privacy to sexual activity. But I suspect that there is a great transparency in heavenly life. What is hidden is revealed. It is a life of truth rather than of withholding of information. In regard to the emotional life, those in heaven will have highly developed faculties of empathy. After all, my model is one of continued growth. People can grow immensely in empathy in this life--how much more will they likely grow in heaven! These faculties of empathy would enable people to have great empathetic insight into the sexual lives of others, to a point where that insight could make them empathetic participants in that life, in a way incompatible with the exclusivity of marriage and the privacy of sexuality.

Empathy and inappropriate suffering

Consider three cases of inappropriate pains:

1. The deep sorrow of a morally culpable racist at social progress in racial integration.
2. Someone's great pain at minor "first world problems" in their life.
3. The deep sorrow of a parent who has been misinformed that their child died.

All three cases are ones where something has gone wrong in the pain. The pain is not veridical. In the first case, the pain represents as bad something that is actually good. In the second, the pain represents as very bad something that is only somewhat bad. In the third, the pain represents as bad a state of affairs that didn't take place. There is a difference, however, between the first two cases and the third. In the third case, the value judgment embodied in the pain is entirely appropriate. In the first two cases, the value judgment is wrong--badly wrong in the first case and somewhat wrong in the second.

Let's say that full empathy involves feeling something similar to the pain that the person being empathized with feels. In the parent case, full empathy is the right reaction by a third party, even a third party who knows that the child had not died (but, say, is unable to communicate this to the parent). But in the racist and first-world-problem cases, full empathy is inappropriate. We should feel sorry for those who have the sorrows, but I think we don't need to "feel their pain", except in a remote way. Instead, what should be the object of our sorrow is the value system that give rise to the pain, something which the person does not take pain in.

I think that in appropriate empathy, one feels something analogous to what the person one empathizes with feels. But the kind of analogy that exists is going to depend on the kind of pain that is involved. In particular, I think the following three cases will all involve different analogies: morally appropriate psychological pain; morally inappropriate psychological pain; physical pain. I suspect that "full empathy", where the analogy involves significant similarity, should only occur in the first of the three cases.