Our Better Angels: Empathy, Sympathetic Reason, and Pragmatic Moral Progress

Introduction

Empathy is the ability to infer and share the feelings, intentions, and goals of other persons.¹ It provides the basis for our extraordinary capacity to help others, including strangers we may never meet, without interest in personal benefit. Its extent has been controversial, but recent studies in neuroscience, empirical psychology, and primatology support a highly empathic understanding of human nature. This view overturns the so-called “Darwinian” paradigm prevalent both in popular imagination and academic disciplines.² The “Darwinian” account—in quotes because distant from Darwin’s own express views³—holds that “man is a wolf to man” (homo homini lupus); that individuals are self-maximizing and manipulative, even when seemingly kind to others (a common joke among psychologists: “scratch an ‘altruist’ and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed”); and that “Mother Nature” rewards the strong and discards the weak (“the devil take the hindmost”).⁴ As Richard A. Posner writes, “Darwin’s picture of nature is bleak; it is dog eat dog in virtually a literal sense; the adaptionist process that produced us is genocidal.”⁵

But recent studies support a different picture, a kinder one, in which persons are naturally attuned to one another, cannot help feeling what others feel, and spontaneously reach out to others in need. In The Age of Empathy, Frans de Waal calls for “a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature.”⁶ The empathic paradigm is a “radical new view,” writes Jeremy Rifkin in The Empathic Civilization, “with radical implications for the way we understand and organize our economic, social and environmental relations in the centuries to come.”⁷ Both Rifkin (an economic and social theorist) and de Waal (a primatologist) look to empathy as an important source of moral progress. Rifkin argues that human empathy emerged over time, in conjunction with cultural developments (e.g., communications technology), and harbors vast potential. He defines “civilization” as “the detribalization of blood ties and the resocialization of distinct individuals based on associational ties,” and empathy is the psychological mechanism that makes this possible.⁸ Its growth on a global scale helps us set aside local ties and provincial loyalties, which often lead to violence and cruelty, in favor of wider association and shared consciousness of common fate.⁹

De Waal is similarly concerned. He claims that “[t]he greatest problem today, with so many different groups rubbing shoulders on a crowded planet, is excessive loyalty to one’s own nation, group, or religion.”¹⁰ Fully aware of the extraordinary violence of which humans (and other primates) are capable, he suggests that even a modest increase in empathy may help us avoid brutal acts against one another. Empathy is part of human nature, de Waal reminds us. Its basic and pervasive forms are far less complex than many think, and it provides a reservoir from which we may draw to cope with a conflicted social world.¹¹ “If I were God,” de Waal writes, “I’d work on the reach of empathy.”¹²

Maia Szalavitz (science journalist) and Bruce Perry (child psychiatrist) concur with de Waal and Rifkin, claiming we need “an empathy epidemic.”¹³ They insist “[e]mpathy underlies virtually everything that makes society work—like trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity. Failure to empathize is a key part of most social problems—crime, violence, war, racism, child abuse and inequity, to name just a few.”¹⁴ They believe that empathy, or the lack thereof, characterizes entire cultures and that we can deliberately cultivate this capacity.¹⁵ For support, they point to the “Roots of Empathy” school program, established by Mary Gordon, for solid evidence that we can enhance empathy, and they argue that developing this one capacity may foster enormous social change.¹⁶

Others, such as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom (both psychologists), disagree. Pinker writes brilliantly on the historical decline of violence in The Better Angels of Our Nature, but considers empathy too selective and arbitrary to be of much use. Studies show that empathy is mercurial: people respond differently depending on mood, recent experience, and whether they recognize the other person as familiar or foreign.¹⁷ Empathy...