this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
516 points (87.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43376 readers
1371 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Could you explain what you mean re: empathy? Maybe it's the worst if the end goal is maximizing one's own well being with no regard for others. But if your moral theory says the neighbor's well-being is just as important as your own, then empathy plays a large part in helping choose correctly.
No it doesn't. Being able to know how my neighbor feels, which is what empathy is, is good for relating to my neighbor, and useful in more emotional situations to avoid hurting them, but in general thinking about the actual outcome of actions is better than gauging other's emotional response to them.
The other's emotional response to an action is part of the actual outcome of that action...
ya and it's better to consider it than not but it shouldn't be the most important thing. A lot of people are scared of conflict because they're too empathetic.
Maybe your definition is more specific to having an intuitive grasp of social situations.
In my view, empathy is a superpower that makes it easy to understand how much others may suffer or feel good given any decision. Whether it concerns a neighbor crying about a breakup or a child starving across the globe. It provides a huge dose of motivation to actually do something when others are suffering. It doesn't replace logical thought, it adds to it.
Show me an emotionally charged video of animals being beaten, and I'm much more likely to want to help, as opposed to only seeing some cold facts on a page about numbers of animals mistreated.
and this is my point. You aren't critically evaluating the situation, as the same thing happens in each case.
I'm saying without empathy you might see some cold data and ignore it. With empathy, you have a visceral understanding of the issue, and are motivated to go to the same cold data and make a rational choice for how to help. You're acting like you have to ignore rationality to feel empathy. They can coexist and compliment each other.
Psychopathy is characterized by a lack of empathy. They may be very good at making decisions that benefit themselves, but aren't likely to do things to increase others' well being at their own expense, even if it's a net positive.