"Against Empathetic Distress" or "Against Excessive Empathy" would have been a more accurate titles. Based on the actual title, I was hoping for something more interesting/surprising :P

TLDR; Don't just mirror the feelings of those you love, understand their feelings and use that information in a truly helpful way.

A longer treatment is available in “Is Empathy Necessary For Morality?” http://subcortex.com/IsEmpathyNecessaryForMoralityPrinz.pdf (excerpts: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7xr/not_by_empathy_alone/ )

I think his point is relatively obvious: Empathy is not a substitute for analysis of moral consequences (societal consequences). Understanding how someone feels should not guide the way we evaluate their actions or decisions, the trite example being rather evil people in history genuinely believed what they were doing was good - if you just "looked from their shoes" you might altogether miss the evilness of what they were doing.

Many people claim that without empathy there would be moral chaos. They are equivalent to people who claim that without religion there would be moral chaos. Empathy is not the basis of morality.

The author offers a fair amount of utilitarian arguments, which can be debated ad infinitum. No matter your stance on this issue, I don't believe

> Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one

is valid. Who are we to make such decisions? I myself believe utilitarianism is a real good tool for assisting in these moral dilemmas, but not particularly useful here.

On a personal note, I don't believe in this "removal of empathy" idea that's been tossed around by a few psychologists. If psychopaths are effectively those people who lack empathy, then who shall we become if we throw it to the wayside?

I wish I didn't spend so much time reading this article. The rational is pretty basic and narrows the definition of empathy to make the argument more plausible.Despite the author's claim empathy can be defined as the general understanding of other people rather than a biased attitude towards good looking people. Also, empathy doesn't only apply to kindness. It can be argued that both Lincoln and Hitler had empathy, given their ability to understand and deal with other people. Decisions are rarely made based solely on empathy. The point of excluding it completely from the decision making process hasn't been explained very well by the author.

This is an opinion a piece, and I disagree with the opinion.

On the public policy side, I have begun to wonder if empathy-based theories of social change get in the way of the goals of social justice movements. That is, social justice movements are pining after something they cannot achieve through empathy, and are distracted from their goals as a result.

A rather pedestrian example, I was having a discussion about transit planning with a group of people. Despite the less than enthusiastic reception transit gets from typical middle class white people, there's still a sense that the system is biased towards them, and doesn't serve communities of color/etc as well. The modern urbanist sensibility here is to have community engagement, neighborhood meetings, etc. All very grassroots. But who shows up to these things? Older white educated people mostly, usually with negative opinions to share. In this discussion people were very concerned about how we could get more representation from other communities, how we could hold more of these meetings in relevant neighborhoods, at times when working people could attend, etc.

The underlying logic of this participatory model is basically empathetic. People individually express themselves so that they can influence each other and the decision makers. They do this through empathy. The decision makers are generally more white, more privileged, more educated (and we can't expect to recruit more uneducated urban planners!) These people will be more receptive to perspectives coming from people like them. The response is often to increase the participation, be more inclusive, broaden the perspective. But minorities will always lose out, increasing participation doesn't disrupt that empathy bias. You can have more meetings in neighborhoods with minorities, and the white people even in those neighborhoods will still out-influence the minorities.

Can we fix the empathy problem in policing by getting more minorities on the force? That has not seemed very effective. Can we create better services for minorities by listening to their needs and responding? Eh, the best I've seen is people feel listened to, which is too often the substitute for real change. So I wonder if instead we stop relying on empathy in these circumstances, as emotionally attached as we are on the idea of empathy.

Going back to the original example, if we want to design a decent transit system we need to ditch the community feedback and go to data. In that model everyone is counted the same. Hidden bias isn't enough to create a model where a black person as 3/5 of a white person. And of course people still select models based on feedback, and that feedback will be biased, but it's way better than what we have now. Instead of trying to fix bias in order to fix social injustice, I think we'd do better constructing systems that remove the effect of bias in those places – which is the opposite of what most social justice advocates intend when they suggest we address the "root" of the problem.

AGAINST AGAINST EMPATHY

This article is linkbait without real substance. It's smooth legerdemain to make a false statement become seemingly true, not by insight, but by guile. Yes empathy can be maladaptive in as much as emotion without reason can mislead and anything in excess can be harmful, but empathy is usually understood to mean nothing more than recognizing other people as individuals both separate from ourselves and joined with us in our shared humanity. Inasmuch as they are separate from us, they have a unique perspective, and inasmuch as they share our humanity, we can imagine what their subjective experience might be. When Obama exhorts us to practice empathy, he is asking us to humanize the human elements we too often objectify. He asks us to go beyond the boxes of politics, race, culture, class, and nationality we divide the world into, and to see the human experiences of others. And we all know that's what he's saying, and that's what others advocate when they extol empathy. Yes, empathy can go wrong, especially when you consider all of the different concepts that are tagged with that word. But if anything, the article reinforces the importance of empathy as commonly meant and understood by outlining the exceptions that prove the rule.

> In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside.

I think the problem is less that we relate more to the few than the many, and more that we don't really relate to the many at all. Junking caring as much about individuals will likely just result in us not caring enough about anyone.