Empathy Is Everything

It was good to see another article by Robert Wright in The Atlantic online recently. The essay, “Why Can't We All Just Get Along?,” is an extended review of two books: Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes and Paul Bloom's Just Babies, both exploring a biological basis for morality.¹ Wright discusses Greene's famous thought experiment, often referred to as the “trolley problem”:

An out-of-control trolley is headed for five people who will surely die unless you pull a lever

that diverts it onto a track where it will instead kill one person. Would you—should you—pull

the lever?

Now rewind the tape and suppose that you could avert the five deaths not by pulling a lever, but by pushing a very large man off a footbridge and onto the track, where his body would slow the train to a halt just in time to save everyone—except, of course, him. Would you do that? And, if you say yes the first time and no the second (as many people do), what’s your rationale? Isn’t it a one-for-five swap either way?

As Wright reveals, brain scans of people considering this problem have indicated that “people who refused to save five lives by pushing an innocent bystander to his death were swayed by emotional parts of their brains, whereas people who chose the more utilitarian solution—keep as many people alive as possible—showed more activity in parts of the brain associated with logical thought.” Logical thought is abstract thought (thinking in categories), while emotional thinking is tied to the physical body, which feels emotions physically, concretely. (Research has shown that people reading a novel and identifying empathetically with a character have the same parts of their brains light up on brain scans as when they are actually experiencing the same perceptions or emotions themselves.²)

When Wright asks, “what's your rationale? Isn't it a one-for-five swap either way?” he is thinking entirely abstractly, in categories and numbers. Further along in his essay, Wright concludes, “In a sense, then, people who obey their moral intuitions and refrain from pushing the man to his death are just choosing to cause five deaths they won’t be blamed for rather than one death they would be blamed for. Not a profile in moral courage!” I wonder about this judgment, as logical as it sounds. I think the choice (whether to allow five people to die remotely or to push one “very large man” to his death), along with the fact that most of us seem to be unwilling to do the latter even to prevent the former, brings into focus the reluctance of many of us to think only abstractly about moral questions. And I think that reluctance is not an evolutionary throwback but a neglected strength we need to nurture in order to survive our current head-long surrender into the abstractions of technology. Maybe we have to remember that there is an emotional logic as well as a rational logic—a logic that functions from empathy and not just from reason.

The reason for moral resistance against pushing a man off a bridge to his death in order to save five other people, at least for me, is two-fold. First, the man is “very large” and thus has a lot of blood and guts in him; there is a natural and understandable aversion in many people to slaughter a human body and see the results—because of our natural empathy. (I don't mean here that we empathize with the individual but that we empathize with the fragility and messiness of the human body. In that way we are no different from him, and we don't like to be reminded of that.) Also, this “very large man” is by definition larger than the great majority of people who might try to throw him off a bridge. What if he throws me off instead—would I make a large enough splat to at least slow down the trolley car? For that matter, what right do I have to murder this man rather than just throw myself off the bridge; wouldn't that be a more moral response to the situation? I feel I have the right to dispose of my own life but not the right to dispose of the life of an innocent man. (Maybe I'm carrying all this unwanted fat for a reason!) But it is the immediacy of blood and gore that deters most of us from killing anyone we dislike; it's much easier to kill people by flicking a switch, without having to deal with the mess. (Even the Nazis preferred to cram their victims into a shower room and poison them, a bloodless form of murder.) That makes mess a good thing, though most of us will go to great lengths to avoid it. Many of us no longer witness the messiness of birth and death or even sometimes of cruel disease—we usually leave those things to the institutions created to handle them. Thus we distance ourselves from the messiness; it becomes an abstraction; it doesn't disgust us or move us to empathy.

In a recent essay in the New York Times, Stanley Fish discusses a book by Martha Nussbaum titled Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice.³ In her book Nussbaum argues, “If distant people and abstract principles are to get a grip on our emotions … these emotions must somehow position them within our circle of concern, creating a sense of ‘our’ life in which these people … matter as parts of our ‘us’.” Here Nussbaum clarifies the antithesis between abstract thought and emotional relations and argues that emotions are definitely a part of the quest for justice and harmony among people. Fish sees that “political emotions, then, are the emotions evoked and provoked by the state’s effort to educate its citizens into a culture of enhanced empathy.” Emotional connection is necessary to the harmonious relations of peoples in a state. We have great problems with this in the United States right now, where many citizens are of very different cultural backgrounds, but the wealthy and the conservative often attend private schools or are home-schooled, thus not often having the opportunity to meet people different from themselves and come to know at a gut level that we really are all alike at a gut level—and beyond. As Daniel Goleman has put it, “The more powerful were [in studies] less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful. . . . Freud called this 'the narcissism of minor differences.'”⁴ Goleman also reveals that the less powerful are more compassionate toward others because they have to relate to many other different kinds of people in their everyday lives. Affluent and powerful people, however, can and often do create social and economic cocoons for themselves, within which they do not meet people significantly different from themselves with any regularity. Thus, compassion for others different from themselves often does not develop.

Did you see that photo of Pope Francis touching and kissing the disfigured head of the man afflicted with neurofibromatosis in St. Peter's Square?⁵ That's empathy; it's an acceptance that this man is not different from the rest of us, but very much like us and afflicted nonetheless. It occurs to me that churches might address the increasing loss of empathy in our world not just by preaching about abstract ideas like love and harmony, but by providing weekly opportunities to do something like Pope Francis did with that afflicted pilgrim. One of the rituals at Easter time is that the priest washes the feet of some of his parishioners. This makes a good symbol, but how much more valuable would the act be if it were performed by regular people—on the homeless, perhaps? What if church could become a place where those of us who rarely confront the physical fragility of our human lives anymore are actually encouraged not only to deal directly with that fragility in others but also to realize that this is potentially what we are also? How not to empathize then?—much harder, anyway. I know that churches bury their members and baptize their newborns and visit the sick and gather food for the hungry and money for the poor. These are all good efforts. But what if a church service consisted in part in people laying hands on some of their diseased and disfigured fellows (who were willing to participate in such a service)? What if the service took place not in a beautiful church but in the homes of some of the poorer people in the community or in the homes of families with very ill or disabled members living at home—or in the institutions where these people are often sent? What if the ill could be bathed and dressed, a dinner prepared for the poor in their own home, a dead body washed and laid out, as used to be done at home? What if physical acts of empathy like this were the essence of church-going, rather than listening to sermons on abstract ideas and handing over money so that others might take care of the the messy parts of life?

If you think of the human race as vulnerable as a whole to certain physical and mental weaknesses, then to feel empathy for those individuals who become the ones to bear these inherent human weaknesses is to embrace humanity for what it truly is. Using money or power to distance yourself from such weaknesses, while all too human a reaction, is to not accept one's own humanity, one's own part in the human experience; it is to seek to escape the human experience. Might religion someday work towards restoring us to our humanity by physically bringing together on a regular basis the fortunate and the unfortunate? Right now most people meet people very much like themselves in church. Might churches find a way to strengthen our empathy by moving us towards acknowledgment of the mess of human life, rather than away from it? That would be much more the church functioning as a “field hospital,” as Pope Francis has described it.⁶

1http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/why-we-fightand-can-we-stop/309525/

2See http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?pagewanted=all among many other articles.

3http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/fish-love-and-politics.html

4The article is titled “Rich People Just Care Less”:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/rich-people-just-care-less/

5http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/11/how-strong-is-pope-francis.html

6This post was written before another review of books on the trolley problem appeared: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/books/review/would-you-kill-the-fat-man-and-the-trolley-problem.html?emc=eta1

This review in the New York Times Book Review by Sarah Bakewell discusses David Edmonds' Would You Kill the Fat Man? and Thomas Cathcart's The Trolley Problem. The essay is largely uninformative and unreflective, though it is interesting that Bakewell cites two female philosophers as being the originators of versions of the trolley problem—Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson, unlike Wright's identification of Joshua Greene.