[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Who ever thought[.small-caps] that empathy would become a hot button issue? Not too long ago, it was taken for granted as a virtue – bedrock, mainstream, uncontroversial.[.article__paragraph--cap]

One might think that morality depends on empathy: Why else would you care about people other than yourself or those close to you? “The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens,” we read in Leviticus 19:34. “You shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt.” The basis of moral action here is empathy. You should understand what the stranger feels because you were in his position. 

So important is this idea in the Hebrew Bible that it appears again and again. From widows to orphans to the poor, we are instructed to put ourselves in their places. No fewer than thirty-six times does the Torah command us to act justly precisely because we were once ourselves strangers in Egypt. And that idea is a mainstay of the Passover Seder when Jews recite: “In every generation, each one of us must see ourselves as if we had gone out from Egypt.” Or, in the words of Princeton political philosopher Michael Walzer (as adapted in the Reform prayerbook), “wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt.”

Suffering moves us. Charitable organizations routinely include pictures of suffering vulnerable people, especially children, because they aim to evoke an empathic response. Empathy overcomes selfishness. If it didn’t, these appeals wouldn’t work.

Leaders of both US political parties would call upon it regularly. President George H. W. Bush’s lauded “a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good.” President Barack Obama urged proponents and opponents of gun control to “put [them]selves in the other person’s shoes.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is not the sort of rhetoric we hear from leadership today, from the president on down.

Upstream of our chaotic politics, there is a serious debate happening about whether empathy is a valid basis for morality. In recent years, increasing numbers of prominent individuals – on the left and right, politicians and philosophers, secular and religious – have argued that empathy often leads to actions that can be positively immoral. Empathy is one thing, they say, but compassion is quite another. If anything, we need less empathy or, perhaps, empathy “tethered” to other considerations.

Thus, we have had books with titles like Toxic Empathy, Leadership and the Sin of Empathy, and Against Empathy. Some authors draw on Christian morality, while others, as in the “effective altruism” movement, favor undiluted rationality.

All the same, we believe that without empathy we are likely to go badly astray. To be sure, while empathy is not sufficient – it doesn’t tell us how best to help the sufferer – it is nonetheless necessary. “There but for the grace of God go I”; “You were strangers in the land of Egypt”: without these ways of thinking and feeling, we are likely to commit or excuse horrendous actions.

Empathy entails more than feeling sorry for someone; it entails putting yourself in that person’s place. While sympathy shows you care, it may imply a sense of superiority or a sort of noblesse oblige. Empathy implies that we gain a real sense of someone unlike ourselves. We grasp what another person experiences, in much the same way that readers identify with a fictional character. When the heroine suffers, we wince; when another person grieves, we vicariously experience his or her grief. 

Empathy can be intellectual as well as emotional: if someone holds beliefs differing from our own, we understand what makes those beliefs convincing to that specific person. We realize: had I had that person’s experiences, I might well have drawn the same conclusions. Those who disagree with me may have reasons as good as mine, and may be as concerned with the suffering of others as I am. Even if that is not always the case, it is a good rule of thumb to hold onto, especially because we are too ready to credit ourselves with good motives and suspect the motives of others. And sometimes we blind ourselves and conceal our own vindictiveness by representing it as goodness. Today, empathy with the opinions of others is in especially short supply.

Have you ever heard someone say: “Yes, you only think of my position, why don’t you think of your own for a change”?

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]For many thinkers,[.small-caps] including the great realist novelists, empathy is a key source (if not the key source) of moral behavior. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch – often thought of as the greatest English novel and the perfect realization of the form – characters acquire wisdom when they learn to see and feel the world as others do. The book’s heroine, Dorothea, at first tries to help her husband as if he has the same needs as she does. The author comments:[.article__paragraph--cap]

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves. Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon … than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling – an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects – that he had an equivalent center of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. 

In empathy one does not just recognize that another person experiences the world differently, one also learns to feel that difference, a feeling as palpable as “the solidity of objects.” That, of course, is what Eliot’s readers learn to do with Dorothea, Mr. Casaubon, and other major characters. Indeed, one might define the term “major character of a novel” not as one who occupies many pages, but as one with whom the reader can identify. The realist novel developed techniques for readers to experience a character’s sequence of thoughts and feelings from within, something one cannot do directly in life, where one can only infer those thoughts and feelings. The moral lesson of such novels lies not only in what they say, but in offering practice in empathy, which, perhaps, we may carry over to our dealings with real people. If we were capable only of selfishness, the realist novel would lose its point or, indeed, be impossible. 

It is on this exact point that Paul Bloom thinks we go astray. In Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (2016), Bloom makes it clear that he isn’t opposed to empathy when the word is used as a synonym for kindness. What he decries is conflating compassion with entering into the feelings of others: “the act of feeling what you think others are feeling – whatever one chooses to call this – is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we’re better off without it.” Empathy can motivate us to good actions, he allows, but the problems it frequently causes outweigh the benefits. “The problems we face as a society and as individuals are rarely due to lack of empathy. Actually, they are often due to too much of it.” When we focus on a single sufferer who moves us, we may impulsively endorse policies that cause much more suffering to many others. We need to think rationally about what actually helps the most people. In much the same spirit, philosopher Peter Singer entitled his book calling for rational, “effective altruism” The Most Good You Can Do (2015).

Bloom argues that our emotional nature has been overvalued. If “the exercise of empathy makes the world worse, that it leads to more suffering and less thriving, more pain and less happiness, this would be a good reason to seek out alternatives.”

Empathy, Bloom argues, leads us to “spotlight” – focus on – people most close at hand, without considering those distant in space and time. Consider Bloom’s example of empathy motivating us to save one specific child right now at the expense of dozens we don’t know. One of us once discussed this very point with Paul Farmer, the brilliant medical anthropologist and physician. When asked whether it made sense to bankrupt an entire clinic to save a single child, Farmer said that morally he had no choice but to do so. Admirable words, but not necessarily prudent ones. Or perhaps he meant: as a doctor, his job was to treat the person in front of him, not to make policy?

Bloom also points out a truth dramatized in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels: empathy can be used for evil purposes, as it often is by con men. Torturers who are able to put themselves in the place of those whom they are abusing – say, because they were once tortured themselves – can use that knowledge to inflict even greater pain. 

A sobering example from the last few years that comes to our minds is how the architect of the October 7 massacre, Yahya Sinwar, credited his years in Israeli prisons – during which time he read Israeli newspapers, listened to radio broadcasts, and took university courses – with his ability to understand the psyche of its citizens. When he was released, he had gained fluency not only in the Hebrew language, but also familiarity with the ways Israelis live and think. He used it to inflict as much harm as possible. His insight – can it be called empathy? – into the minds and feelings of others helps explain why the October 7 attack and its aftermath were so profoundly terrifying physically and psychologically. In a conflict where morale is of supreme importance, he knew what would most damage it.

In short, Bloom rejects “empathy” not out of hard-heartedness but out of a desire for more effective compassion.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]So do recent conservative[.small-caps] Christian critiques of empathy-based policy. In Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (2024), Allie Beth Stuckey first makes clear that compassion and empathy lie at the heart of the Christian worldview to which she adheres. She references Hebrews 4:15, which, having likened Jesus to “a great high priest,” instructs: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet he did not sin.” What else are we to call God’s choice to become human and suffer all that people do if not the supreme act of empathy? Stuckey also quotes the line in Leviticus about helping the stranger because “you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” And she begins her book with a description of being moved (properly) by empathy.[.article__paragraph--cap]

All the same, she argues, empathy by itself should not dictate policy. It can be “a terrible guide”: “It may be part of what inspires us to do good” but is “highly susceptible to manipulation.” What’s more, it does not tell you what to do. Those who want to manipulate us presume that if you care about a sufferer, you must endorse their specific policy for relieving it – without asking whether the policy will actually work or whether some other policy might be better. To question, they insist, is to lack empathy.

First one must empathize, Stuckey explains, but then one must think. “As Christians,” she argues, “we simply cannot allow empathy to make us stupid.” What’s more, as the quotation from President Obama argues, there can be more than one person with whom to empathize. Focusing on one may entail cruelty to the other.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]While critics differ[.small-caps] on what a more considered empathy would look like, they agree that thoughtless empathy by itself can do more harm than good. The rationalists are especially likely to be led astray when they encourage people to override their natural tendencies to empathy.[.article__paragraph--cap]

We think that is a dangerous suggestion. We need only recall that eugenics was justified (by progressives!) as the most rational policy. Its proponents called on us to overcome our natural empathy and follow “science.” Still more horribly, Marxism-Leninism, which claimed to be the science of sciences, adopted effectiveness as the only moral criterion (“only the result counts”). One liquidated people not because they were guilty, but simply because it was helpful in producing the ideal socialist society. Communist leaders in the USSR, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere deemed that the needs of socialism outweighed the lives of millions, both scientifically and morally. This kind of calculus, taken there to its extreme, continues to resurface in more socially acceptable forms to this day.

Whenever a new image of the good dawns, “the blood of old people and children is always shed,” says one character in Life and Fate, a Soviet-era novel by the Jewish writer Vasily Grossman. Reflecting on the evil caused by rationalist theories of the good, Grossman believes that goodness is not to be found in the systems of philosophers. “And yet ordinary people bear love in their hearts, are naturally full of love and pity for every living thing,” he says.

Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital G, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old lady carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner … the private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness. A kindness outside of any system of social or religious good.

When basic decency and rationalist scheme conflict, particularly when the action of the scheme affects millions, it is safer, even if sometimes mistaken, to go with decency. Even if one does not do the most good, one avoids the worst evil. Nothing causes more suffering than attempts to abolish it once and for all.

Even when rationalist schemes are not so far-ranging, social reforms based on them entail a danger that Bloom and the effective altruists seem to overlook. It is all too easy to assume that what we regard as good simply is good, and not to appreciate that others may see things differently. If we do appreciate it, we may dismiss those people as unenlightened. People, especially highly educated ones, are prone to imagine they know better what is good for others than those others do, much as they are likely to equate their own beliefs with obvious, rational truth.

Return to Middlemarch: the point of Eliot’s comment is that while Dorothea was sincerely trying to help her husband, she was not able to because she could not see the world from his point of view. In other words, she had good will but lacked empathy. But for Dorothea, this meant redoubling her efforts, not abandoning them, to better understand and serve the needs of others.

Empathy is not all-sufficient. But it is still indispensable to our moral development – the beginning of the journey, not the end. Never forget that we were strangers in the land of Egypt.