Can Authentic Empathy Cause Harm?

Yes—not least because there is no such thing as authentic empathy.

I’ve been writing/thinking this week about some ways in which empathy isn’t always helpful or even kind. In pushing back, many people I’ve talked to argue that bad forms of empathy (empathizing with white women as a way to justify lynching in the South, for example) aren’t really empathy. Real empathy, in this framing, always means universal and perfect sympathy for the suffering of all. As such, true empathy cannot be a force for evil.

I’m skeptical of this argument for a couple of reasons. First, just logically it seems like a pretty obvious variation of no true Scotsman. How do you distinguish good empathy from bad empathy beyond just looking at the outcomes and saying, “well, I don’t like those results so that must be bad empathy”? Is the “that’s not really empathy” argument designed to help us move towards being better people? Or is it an argument designed to protect the concept of empathy, and thereby protect people who feel that being empathetic is central to their sense of themselves as good people?

I think it’s often the second. And I think that in part because the way this argument gets deployed reminds me of the way that Christians will insist that immoral uses of Christianity—in the Inquisition, in justifying slavery, in targeting queer people—are not real Christianity. Defending Christianity in those discussions becomes more important than condemning the acts that are pretty obviously linked to Christian community/witness/practice.

The parallels suggest to me that a lot of people view or experience empathy as a kind of religion. Feeling with others and for others functions as a mystical/moral catharsis, analogous to spiritual experience. To connect with someone’s suffering or trauma or joy—by watching a film, by reading a news story, by simply imagining yourself in their place—is profound and transformative. People are loath to think about the ways that this satisfying, powerful experience might in certain circumstances contribute to harm, just as Christians are reluctant to think about the ways in which a relationship with Christ might lead to cruelty and violence.

Which brings me to the second reason why I think we should avoid the “no true empathy” argument. One reason empathy can go awry is because it feels right and authentic. When you watch Halloween, for example, you feel Laurie’s terror and (later) her triumph. When you hear about someone experiencing injustice, you are angry, sad, and pained on their behalf. It feels like you are feeling what they feel; there is an authentic connection.

But of course the connection is not authentic. Laurie Strode is a fictional character; she doesn’t feel anything, so you’re not really feeling with her. When you imagine yourself as someone else experiencing injustice, you’re just imagining yourself as that person; you’re not really them. There is no authentic empathy in the sense of an empathy that allows you actual direct access to someone else’s life experiences. Empathy is always an act of imagination.

One way empathy can become dangerous is through forgetting the inauthenticity at its core. It’s when you start to tell yourself that you truly know what someone else is feeling that you may be tempted to speak for them or over them. If you are certain that you are truly, directly experiencing the trauma of a small collection of fetal cells, you can justify a range of horrific violence against those who argue (accurately) that the cells aren’t actually feeling anything. If you know for sure that you understand how a sex worker feels about her job, you can dismiss any sex workers who tell you differently as debased privileged liars. If you are certain that you know how it feels to be disabled, you may advocate for mass euthanasia, even when disabled people tell you that in fact their lives are not unrelieved misery and they would like you to stop advocating for their deaths.

And so forth. Empathy becomes dangerous not when it is not really empathy, but precisely when it is taken as real. Empathy can be a useful way to identify injustice. It can help you figure out how to treat people with kindness. But it needs to be understood as a flawed and limited tool—an imaginative intellectual kludge, which should be abandoned when you encounter evidence that it’s doing more harm than good.

Since putting too much faith in empathy is one way that empathy frequently goes awry, it seems counterproductive to define all empathy as necessarily good or virtuous. Empathy works best when it’s humble, cautious, and aware of its own limits. When we start to see it as a religion, or as a thing that can only be used for good, we help to ensure it will be used for evil.

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