The vast majority of us do not need to have empathy explained to us. Its emotional immediacy speaks for itself. It speaks of an otherness become personal, a tangible link across the physical gap of embodiment that allows us to experience the other as self. Empathy, along with its emotional kin, sympathy, pity, compassion, care, and love, is a direct expression of what it means to be human, and we rightly value it as a primary marker of who we are.
Of course, while empathy in its capacity to bond us through collapsing the physical boundaries between self and other is certainly a necessary condition for meaningful sociality, it is not, in itself, sufficient to explain the advanced level of organization manifest in human culture. For that, we need to appeal to our rational capacities and their expression through language, gestures, tools, and other intergenerationally accretable skills and affordances, capacities that, like empathy, bridge the individual and the social—though in a different way. That is, that allow knowledge to spread and sediment into culture, to become interwoven into narratives that bind groups. Given that culture is what allows for human subjectivity to flourish, for the interplay of biological and social forces that create and enable us, and that culture requires individuals with both empathy and rationality to enable it, we ought carefully examine the interdependencies between the two if we wish to understand ourselves and our responsibilities to each other.
Part of the process of doing this involves problematising the idea of empathy as it functions in contemporary societies, particularly in its relationship with technology and ideology. Empathy is conceptualized here as analogous to a young child that ought to be cherished, but that like a child is unpredictable and unstructured, and requires directed socialization to reach its full potential. And so the thesis of this essay is that while empathy is indispensable, it must be stewarded and developed if we are to aspire to more ethical cultural realities than those suggested by our current trajectory. In support of this thesis, we first look at the physiological and evolutionary basis of empathy; then we examine the ideas of several theorists who problematize and defend it as a basis for ethics; then we move on to the particular difficulties its expression faces in contemporary life; finally, we offer a synthesis of several strands of thought that points to potentials for integrating empathy into an educational context.
The Social Hormone
Empathy is closely associated with the hormone oxytocin, which, in facilitating emotional recognition, allows us to feel what others are feeling. Oxytocin tends to increase trust and decrease fear and anxiety and so aid social bonding. All of this makes evolutionary sense. Groups of individuals that understand and care about other members of their group—that are altruistic—are likely to cooperate better and so more efficiently combine and distribute their behaviours in ways that aid their survival. This, combined with the human capacity for learning, allows for the development of cultures with the skills and knowledge to extract not only the necessary resources for survival and reproduction from their environment, but, under the right conditions, excess resources that lead over time to civilizations.
So far, so good for empathy, but we do hit a snag. While it’s true that empathy facilitates intra-group cooperation, we ought ask what happens between groups when resources are limited, particularly under conditions of environmental stress? Consider empathic group A and unempathic group B in competition for survival resource X. All things being equal, group B, having fewer emotional obstacles to taking that resource entirely for themselves is likely to do so and benefit reproductively from it. If our empathy hormones promote altruism then their intra-group evolutionary advantage would seem to be offset by a severe inter-group disadvantage.
This puzzle is dissolved by the fact that our empathy hormones do not straightforwardly lead to altruism. Oxytocin, for example, is double-edged; while it promotes care for in-group members, it can simultaneously promote increased aggression against out-group members. Psychologically, this rings true, a side-effect of our intense care for our children, for example, is the intense rage we may feel against those who we perceive as a threat to them. Care and anger are not—at least hormonally—incompatible but are deeply intertwined. And the root of this can be traced to these intra and inter-group dynamics of our evolutionary past.
Further complicating this picture is the fact that we care not only for people, but for ideas, and our care for our own ideas—our identification with them as essential parts of our being and of those of our group—means we may, and often do, fight to protect them as if they were kin. Religion, nation, custom, politics can all act as opportunities for increased engagement and cooperation or flash points for conflict. And this widened view of empathy and its polarities cannot be ignored when we come to consider its place in ethical thinking.
Empathy Critiqued
What a physiological and evolutionary understanding presents us with then is a view of empathy not as inherently moral but as selectively moral. And a selective morality cannot in itself found a universalizable ethics. So, as seductive as the idea of a more empathic society may seem, we should not imagine that it would necessarily be a more ethical one. Paul Bloom, in “Against Empathy”, develops this critique, singling out empathy’s partiality and bias, and showing, for example, how empathy may lead us to show much more care for small local harms than for large distant ones [1]. We may be prompted into immediate curative action at the sight of a child injuring itself in front of us, while feeling little more than resignation at children being unjustly killed in a far off war, even if it is our forces that are doing the killing. Part of the issue of course is that we can only directly help the child present. But even if we couldn’t, the feeling and desire to help are likely to be far more intense in relation to the degree of harm purely on the basis of proximity. Of course, this makes sense evolutionarily; in a past where threats to survival were much more common, emotional immediacy was naturally highly prioritised. But non-immediate abstractions and universalisations are what make ethics ethical.
To address the shortcomings of empathy, Bloom proposes we should favour “rational compassion”, which involves cognitive understanding and sympathy guided by principles [1]. He promotes a form of detached caring reflected e.g. in the work of health professionals, who tend to function better if they can maintain some affective distance from their patients [1]. We find a similar idea in the “karuna” (care/compassion) of Buddhist ethics. Karuna, in this context, refers to a stable trained disposition [8]. The disciplined practice of rational compassion recognizes the danger of both misdirected action and empathy fatigue. Empathy will come and go in intensity, but our actions should be consistent in relation to their contexts and not mood dependent. When they become so, they stray from being ethical. Under Bloom’s analysis, we might say that if empathy at its worst is caring in order not to do right, rational compassion at its best is doing right in order to care.
Even strong supporters of empathy’s place in ethics, such as Martha Nussbaum, recognize these complexities. Nussbaum argues that emotions are forms of thought and that compassion—which encompasses both empathy (feeling another’s pain) and its logical implication (wanting to end that pain)—is a moral emotion that bridges the personal and universal [9]. In her view, compassion can be cultivated by expanding our imaginative understanding of others through art and literature [9]. The work of Charles Dickens, who railed against the unjust treatment of children in industrial England and was much lauded and respected for doing so, is one good example of ethically edifying literature. Yet Nusbaum also concedes that compassion ought to be directed and trained by reason [9].
Though empathy can be problematised, it should not be generally conceived of as a problem, and that is certainly not our goal here. The problem is that we often fail to recognize that moral feelings must be grounded in reason and positive action in order to reach their ethical potential. What is required is a harmonisation of the faculties along the lines suggested by, but not fully realized by empathy, until empathy can be anchored in reason and transformed in a way that both Bloom and Nussbaum would agree is positive. This brings us to the concept of duty.
Empathy Manipulated
Before we come to that though, we first ought to recognize what we are up against. Modern consumer culture presents serious obstacles to the proper development of empathy. We address first the manipulation of “faciality” in digital culture. The face, being the primary site of emotional expression, is intimately linked to our understanding and expression of empathy. But by “faciality” here, we refer not only to the human face as a recognizable signal of emotions but, in the terms put forward by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as a territory of symbolization that carries ideological weight [4]. The natural colour of a face, or size of nose or lips, for example, carries no inherent emotional signal, but may imbue cultural notions of power, trustworthiness, aggressiveness, or other socially desirable and undesirable traits [ibid]. And even when the face carries a clear emotional signal, how the face is situated is crucial in determining how this emotional signal functions, and its functioning in commercialized digital environments is what is focused on here.
Faces are opportunities for empathy, portals to others’ inner worlds, but are also opportunities for others to exploit our empathic reflexivity—empathy can be weaponized by faciality. And, in a digital attention economy, we are bombarded with images of faces, literal and symbolic (e.g. emojis), that trigger hormonal reactions due to their emotional salience. For example, we have likely all been exposed to YouTube thumbnails of faces expressing joy, anger, and surprise out of all proportion to the actual content of the video they advertise to us. Such emotionally charged faces presented to us by digital algorithms manipulate our own attention “algorithm” because emotional charge is something that naturally demands our attention. But excessive emotional demands on our attention, given our finite physiological resources, can lead to empathy dilution and fatigue. The danger is that our empathy tends towards a form of sustained performative expression absorbed into the information economy rather than channeled into ethical thought and behaviour.
Of course, it might be argued that the emotional salience of online faces may be considered an ethical plus when contextualized in documentaries or news stories about suffering. They may seem consistent, for example, with Nussbaum’s idea of promoting imaginative openness to others not directly present to us [9]. But in a highly emotionally charged attention economy where fact and fiction are blurred and where time for reflection is actively militated against in the war to capture and keep attention, ethical confusion, reflecting the unstructured hyper-stimulative environment from which such signals emanate, seems inevitable. That is, the digital environment, particularly considering the increasing dominance of visual stimuli therein, tends to background narrative depth and thoughtful engagement in favour of continuously stimulative content that relies on quick cuts, loud colours, zooms, noise, and particularly facial emotional cues. It does this because in the evolutionary arms race for attention—the more attention grabbing content wins and proliferates. It is not just that the medium is the message, as per McLuhan, but the system is the message. Online media is primarily a tool of consumerism and its producers are primarily commercially motivated. In such an environment, this naturally leads to faciality being harnessed to transform empathy into captured labour in a way clearly inconsistent with the type of holistic integration into our cognitive faculties that would raise it to the dignity of ethics. Empathic emotional responses are monetized through (primarily) advertising and processed for economic gain and, in this self-reinforcing system, the “winners” are forever finding new and better ways to win and the “losers”—those who refuse to play the game—can never gain traction.
Overall, this system of moral misallocation leads to desensitisation through a nihilistic pursuit of self-stimulation, where we, the consumer victims, are reduced to a hormonal self-manipulation that prevents self-development. We position our biological selves as mere instrumental tools of pleasure for our subjectivities rather than meaningfully integrating them. In this way, Deleuze and Guattari might argue, empathy and associated emotions are plugged into capital’s assemblages of control and serve thereby merely to reproduce the system [4]. Not only does our active participation in this process constitute an ethical failure, it also, at least to the degree such a system dominates our behaviour, represents our effacement as ethical subjects.
We have tried here to identify a base-level problem of getting empathy off the ground, so to speak, in an increasingly techno-capitalist context, while, of course, recognizing we are not entirely captured within that system and do still experience genuine empathy and the opportunity for its ethical expression. Which ethical expression brings us back to the idea of the deliberate structuring of empathy as a resource into a greater personal framework of duty where it provides the fuel and motivation to enact the logic of that framework. We might even say that empathy without such a structure of duty is blind, but also that a structure of duty without empathy is empty.
Empathy and Duty
That brings us to Kant who offers a framework of duty that explicitly precludes feelings such as empathy as a basis for ethical decision making [7], and so makes questionable demands on our physiologically and emotionally grounded motivational capacities. Kant’s theory allows for “good will” as a kind of minimal moral substrate [7]. Nevertheless, this “good will” can never interfere with the primacy of Kantian duty. Kant makes this clear in his reply to the famous “murderer at the door” critique of his system where he insists that the moral law is absolute and no exceptions are possible. Regardless of the context, telling a lie is the wrong thing to do.
The idea that allowing one’s loved ones to be murdered is morally preferable to lying when only a lie could save them raised enough eyebrows in Kant’s time. And in an age of nuclear weapons and consequent hypothetical scenarios where the fate of humanity could rely on contextual moral flexibility, Kantian deontology seems absurdly dogmatic. We can trace this problem, at least in part, to a tension at the heart of Kant’s theorizing, which is that it ultimately requires for its practice humans to override the empathy that enables cooperation and care. However, civilizations in which a formalized universal moral law could be proposed arose from precursors that required the active exercise of these human qualities. Groups in which the empathy half of the empathy / rationality equation was repressed or absent would not have been unable to foster the high level of social cohesion necessary to progress culturally. And so Kant’s project, in its original formulation at least, in its refusal to cede to our human feelings as the basis of our sociality and moral salience, undermines the very foundation of the question of morality.
Of course, Kant’s frozen, and ultimately incoherent, notion of duty is not our only option when it comes to structured ethical behaviour. The character of Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus’ the Plague, for example, presents a more balanced alternative [3]. “The Plague” tells the story of a small French colonial town where diseased rats start an epidemic which threatens to wipe out the inhabitants [3]. Dr. Rieux, an exemplar of sober compassion and common decency, works tirelessly to treat the afflicted, and does so not out of any explicit philosophical or religious commitments nor out of an outpouring of empathy [3]. His ethics is marked by feelings that are embedded and directed in action, an understated and lucid empathy structured by his education and a general respect for human life that transcends his sympathy with his individual patients. He intuits his duty from experience and is committed to it beyond the dictats of his immediate state.
Duty, of course, is something that manifests in a cognitive dialogue between the individual and the culture—it needs to be built into the social fabric in order to be widely accessed and enacted. But it seems that in our rush to rid ourselves of cultural artifacts of the past, we have also rid ourselves of much of our duty to anyone other than to ourselves and our economic imperatives. And so, though it is possible that individuals may build their own sense of duty like the doctor in Camus’ story, this is not something that is going to become culturally engrained without concomitant social change. And for such social change to be sustainable, it must involve public education, an idea which will be returned to in detail below.
Before any such major policy changes can take place, however, there needs to be a public conversation that recognizes our subjectivity as biologically and socially grounded. Habermas’s idea of ethics through open and inclusive discourse can help here. Freedom is enabled by our negotiation with this framework, and such negotiation both creates us as embedded subjects and allows us to productively process our intersubjective life in a way that enhances our subjectivity [6]. As Habermas might put it, our freedom only emerges within a context of our biological realities in negotiation with our social realities [ibid]. Emotions should not hijack thought (empathy alone as morality) nor should thought hijack emotions (duty to an abstract rule or law alone as morality). Inclusive, open, and free dialogue in the Habermasian spirit creates a space for socialized thought to harmonize with individual capacities for empathy and the teasing out of how these ought to be socially structured.
Of course, the difficulty lies in keeping open channels of positive communicative power in the public sphere when we suffer from what Habermas would call a “refeudalization” of the state [6]. That is, a situation whereby special interests misdirect opportunities for public debate on issues they would prefer to keep between themselves and the governmental decision makers they seek to influence. A technologically saturated economy offers clear opportunities for positive communication across boundaries of time and space. However, as we have seen with regard to “faciality” and as we will discuss more with regards to ideology in general below, the purveyors of technology as consumerism act on agendas that may complicate and hinder efforts towards rational public discourse. They do this not only directly through influencing public policy, but in the setting up of virtual spaces that encourage us to become the enemy of our own development.
Empathy and Ideology
Duty, in order to be scaffolded in a cultural context, requires shared narratives to enable the kind of culture of structured empathy we have been promoting. This is to suggest that ethical strength and resoluteness must become a form of habitus as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu [2]. It must develop into being a reflexive social norm that is internalized, generative, and durable [2]. And this can only happen if it is coherently recognized as an enabler of social capital—if it becomes desirable socially. As things stand, we do not have a clear, or clear enough, social understanding or value for structured empathy as social capital, but subsist in a confused field of empathic games that defy such a recognition.
Firstly, as described above, empathy as raw feeling is processed away—through the faciality effects of the media and news entertainment—into advertising revenue. Secondly, empathy is channeled through a series of exchanges of virtue that tend not to manifest as ethical behavior but to circulate as a closed series of signs, or “virtue signals”, that mark one with a desirable identity. As we have previously discussed, intense feelings of empathy for groups we identify with or identify as threatened may also intensify the feelings of aggression and hatred to those who we perceive as a threat to those groups. This combined with the aforementioned virtue signalling can lead to negative expressions of political correctness—a phenomenon that though it is generally born of a righteous desire to combat social injustice can also manifest as nasty dogmatizing, bullying, and unwarranted censorship. What is abdicated in the misdirected excess of empathy is our discursive duty to the other that disagrees or does not tow the line. And what we are left with is a kind of progressive tribalism that mirrors the reactionary tribalism of its traditional political foil. And in our hyper-stimulative digital media environments, these polarizing effects of mutual distancing naturally prevent constructive dialogue.
However, we should recognize that though this process is undesirable in its self-stroking performativity, empathy may still constitute its affective reality. It is not that the politically correct and the virtue signallers do not care, but that they often lack a better practical outlet for their care. With this in mind, we ought not to show contempt for empathy regardless of its form, but show empathy with empathy, if you will. We ought to understand its limits and potential for misdirection and seek to correct them in a way that does not do violence to their source.
We must recognize though that within a doxa of stimulation and performance, we define a game that systematically misattributes social capital in its relation to empathy. Here, Bourdieu’s notions of misrecognition and symbolic violence whereby diseased social relations are disguised and legitimized, become highly relevant [2]. Misdirected processing of empathy—both in introspection and in our mediated interrelationships with others, particularly groups with perceived contrary identities—involves a form of violence in which we submit our ethical potential to the dominant context of economic exchange. Our commodified feelings and our performance of this commodification through virtue signalling, clicktivism, and aestheticized empathy etc become ingrained and self-reinforcing.
As misdirected empathy is rewarded and validated by our in-group, we further obscure to ourselves the reality of what we are doing. Slavoj Zizek talks about our ability to separate our inner view of ourselves and our beliefs from our actions, about how we can believe we are a certain type of person and act in a way contrary to that without disturbing our belief in ourselves [11]. He ascribes this to an ideology of cynical distance from our environment that is internalized in terms of our relationship to ourselves [11]. Another way of putting this is that we are alienated from our identity because we are able to believe we are something that is not reflected in our actions even though these really are what defines us. For example, we are quite capable of viewing ourselves as good people because we have the right ideas (the ideas that tend to have social capital within our circles) but empathic behavior that actually reflects a rational ethics—in proportion both to the suffering we observe and the possibility we have to ameliorate it—is often quite beyond us. Empathy becomes a symbolic identity which does not require a behavioural ethic. There is little social pressure to act, but much pressure to perform. And so a chasm opens between self-image and action that allows perverse self-appraisals based on our shallow social sphere.s There is a deficit of ethical risk taking and an excess of actions aimed to keep things just as they are by satisfying emotions that ought to lead to action but are short circuited by the ideological system in which they are embedded. This all, of course, serves the interests of the system and those who dominate it and us.
We ought to remember that our capacity for empathy becomes a social responsibility due to our inherent freedom as individuals. However, the emphasis on individual freedom in modern globalized cultures has elided our sense of social duties. So, ironically, as spaces for individual freedom have opened up, we often find ourselves alienated from each other and the ethical responsibilities our freedoms potentialize. Our challenge lies in how to maintain individual freedoms while also building structures of duty into which empathy can be channeled. This is possible, but there is a concomitant economic trade-off whereby technocapitalism will somehow have to be limited or controlled in order that the space is opened up for a new sort of person who is free in a way that is not primarily directed towards economic activity in the exercise of that freedom. If we do not take the step of controlling commercial technological interests, it is hard to see how their control over our behaviour will not continue to increase to our detriment.
Solutions
If we are to recalibrate empathy towards social capital in action; that is, action that is affectively grounded, extended universally and meaningfully, and transformative; if empathy is to become a form of strength because it becomes integrated into our identity in a positive way that does not require excessive emotional affect and therefore is not easily redirected or misdirected—if empathy is to be integrated into a new social ethic that durably transforms culture and politics, then novel forms of education must be instituted. This amounts to a recognition of the need for a new ethical ecology where we redistribute symbolic capital towards educated empathy, make explicit the ideological capture of empathy, and focus on sustainably reproducing this awareness in educational institutions.
And so we call for a form of education resonant with critical pedagogies, most notably as theorized by Paulo Freire [5]. If we are to have a coherent social ethics, it cannot be built on market forces in a techno-capitalist culturally dominated milieu, where the development of the subject is bureaucratized [5]. Public education is our primary leverage of resistance here; and we ought to—to use Freire’s term— “conscientize” subjectivity (develop a critical consciousness of our social context) [5]. Diseased social forces outside education should not be the driving forces of educational policy. And by diseased social forces, we mean those based not on ethical considerations but on economic considerations that manipulate and process the biological ethical substrates of empathy. These cannot be given social primacy. The only way to revive ethical considerations as central to culture is to set education in some sense against the force of technocapitalism in order to foster the political will to control i so that we can reproduce better rather than worse societies. Economics is not ethics. We need to put ethics first in terms of reproducing culture as a whole. This, in Raymond WIlliam’s terms, could be seen as a “long revolution,” wherein cultural transformation is gradual, but education becomes a lever for turning emergent structures into dominant ones [10].
To sum up, we ought to:
1. Reposition empathy as a necessary element of a framework of duty and not an unproblematically ethical imperative in itself.
2. Recontextualize technology and market logic as subservient to the positive development of culture
3. Develop actively creative subjects through dialogically fostering self and cultural understanding in education.
4. In doing so, forge an understanding that political engagement is a natural and unavoidable part of social beings.
5. Work to redistribute social capital away from the cynical performance of ethics towards substantial action at the individual and state level.
Conclusion
We present here a view of empathy as a raw material of ethics, a moral concrete that calls for a rational architecture of duty and the cognitive masonry of educational practice to transform it into action and meaningful change. Our analysis is grounded in theory. With Bloom, we recognize that raw empathy is often dangerously misdirected, but rather than stand “against” it, we, with Nussbaum, recognize we must nurture it in its positive forms. With Bloom, Nussbaum, and Camus we seek an integration of empathy with common decency and lived duty. With Habermas, we recognize this potentiality should be discursively realized through an open culturally critical dialogue. With Bourdieu, we aim for structured empathy to become a form of habitus that is reinforced by its value as social capital. With Deleuze and Zizek, we recognize the difficulties of doing this as empathy is ideologically grounded in a technocapital milieu that splits and layers culture such that the commercial layer suppresses any positive change emerging from the layer beneath. And with Friere and critical pedagogy, we recognize that modern societies have disimagined the subject of self-creativity and sought to replace it with the bureaucratized mind. We understand that transformative education is the way out of this cultural contingency; by integrating the feelings and the knowledge of future generations, we can educate empathy and rebirth ethics
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