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Empathy is a totally subjective and even narcissistic basis for morality. The idea is that you should care about someone because you also can understand and feel their pain, not because they just are a person with equal rights and dignity.

― treeship 2, Friday, December 29, 2017 8:29 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry but this is so fucking dumb i can't even

or maybe you just need a dictionary

wow that's extremely harsh that someone has a slightly different opinion from your superficial ad hoc social media mediated opinions on life

like he's just arguing deontology there over intimate affective association but i guess he needs a dictionary bc clearly he's a moron

Conflating sympathy with empathy is sloppy.

Wanting others not to suffer is part of basic decency and kindness. Feeling concerned or sad about another's suffering is sympathy (feeling for, as opposed to feeling with).

Empathy means to suffer along with them, to literally feel their pain.

i'm seeing a guy about my deontology next week, gotta get a cavity filled

pause

I share treeship’s discomfort with the notion of teaching empathy. Not because it’s not valuable but because I’m not sure it can be taught. The move in education toward teaching it seems ill-grounded to me.

I don’t know any teachers who believe it is important to teach empathy who idly speculate that their disruptive students are sociopaths. I don’t think I recognize the kind of teacher you’re talking about there, treeship.

imo one way people learn empathy is through art

wow that's extremely harsh that someone has a slightly different opinion from your superficial ad hoc social media mediated opinions on life

― Mordy, Friday, December 29, 2017 11:49 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're talking to treeship2 here, right?

and duh it was meant to be extremely harsh

lol @ social media mediated, though, not sure what that's about

i don't know what deontology means, i mean obviously i'm completely full of crap here dude c'mon now..

empathy is a key part of restorative justice

if you believe in restorative justice as an educational practice you need to train kids to have empathy

in twelve years of teaching i have had literally hundreds of conversations that go like this

“Tell me what you did” / “how do you think that made your classmate feel”

“Do you want to make other people feel like that?” / “how can you make it better” / “what will you do differently going forward”

maybe i don't know what empathy is. i guess i don't see a meaningful distinct between acknowledging that others experience pain vs. acknowledged/accepting that certain kind of pain exist. treeship seems to be saying that empathy is subjective or something.. i don't know. fuck everybody.

i don't know what it means either

In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, "obligation, duty") is the normative ethical position that judges the morality of an action based on rules. It is sometimes described as "duty-" or "obligation-" or "rule-" based ethics, because rules "bind you to your duty".

Empathy means to suffer along with them, to literally feel their pain.

no...

People often confuse the words empathy and sympathy. Empathy means ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’ (as in both authors have the skill to make you feel empathy with their heroines), whereas sympathy means ‘feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune’ (as in they had great sympathy for the flood victims)

who the fuck cares, please kill me, etc

i think BUS UNCLE described the spirit of empathy perfectly, seriously

Empathy is a totally subjective and even narcissistic basis for morality. The idea is that you should care about someone because you also can understand and feel their pain, not because they just are a person with equal rights and dignity.

empathy is narcissistic is a v good challop

is 'i would delight in this person's suffering, but *sigh* they are a person with equal rights and dignity' really less narcissitic than 'do unto others'? seems harder to teach kids, for sure. what even is the basis for 'equal rights and dignity' if not some form of empathy?

Late great is totally right. Empathy is teachable both in the pro-social practices described above, and as “perspective taking” which is an essential component of humanities education. Challop, I’d imagine, but part of the reason I think there are so many greedy MBA jerkwads is because they have shorted the liberal arts / humanities component of their education.

paul bloom's "Against Empathy" is worth reading; here's a short version: http://bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy

flopson is correct imo, I think what treeship was trying to express is that human beings deserve to be treated fairly by us whether or not we empathize with them; the problem is, it's hard to imagine getting people to agree to do this without appealing to empathy on some level

contra the definition given above, btw, here is m-w's definition of empathy:

: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this

I am not familiar with the pedagogical research on this topic, but if it is true that the field is moving toward "teaching" empathy I would imagine there is some evidence that suggests it is effective. it also seems like there is little downside to this

xp i like the distinction between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. i guess i try to teach the former rather than the latter.

i could see a radical left argument against empathy; that you really do have to hate your oppressors, and not feel a lick of empathy for them. class solidarity as the basis for morality rather than empathy. but tbh that's the fashy side of leftism that has always creeped me out

there's some interesting stuff brought up in that bloom article...

Being a good person likely is more related to distanced feelings of compassion and kindness, along with intelligence, self-control, and a sense of justice. Being a bad person has more to do with a lack of regard for others and an inability to control one’s appetites.

...but this seems v neatly wrongheaded: focus on personal virtue; failure to question 'morality' even at all after laborious and not v fruitful breakdown of empathy; seeming to shoot himself in the foot by primarily equating badness with a lack of 'regard for others'

I wasn’t trying to make an argument like that. I wasn’t even making a case against empathy itself but the discourse around the word, where it is used synonymously with morality, like the basis of being moral is being able to assmiliate someone else’s pain into your own subjective experience. And then my whole experience in education/restorative justice where it wasn’t enough to have the kids learn what the rules were, they had to internalize our value system, or at least parrot it back to us. (They couldn’t leave the “restoration room” until they explained how their actions hurt the learning community. They couldn’t just do thw time, they had to feel bad.) How abiur don’t throw scissors because it’s outrageously dangerous; don’t disrupt the class because, whether or not you agree, it’s better for everyone if the class is able to complete the learning activity the teacher planned.

Xp flopson. Didn’t read the bloom article yet. Seems promising

This specific school was a mess though. Restorative justice is no doubt practiced more effectively elsewhere. Here it just opened the door to constant bargaining and arguing, as the kids would spend so much time being made to reflect on menial nonsense rather than academics. I really think the way we did it was worse than the old fashioned “you don’t have to agree with my rules but you have to follow them.” At least there’s transparency in that case.

oh ya i wasn't attributing that argument to you, just spitballing what an argument Against Empathy could be. i like the pt you make about how focus on empathy enables "teachers who idly speculate that disruptive students are sociopaths"

when i act charitably towards another it is rarely because of empathy and when it is primarily because of generated emotional affiliation i tend to resent it (what feels like emotional manipulation). i do it because i know what the right thing to do is (because i was taught that charitable acts are good) and because i have enough self-discipline to force myself to do it. moral knowledge (what is good to do) and discipline (forcing yourself to do the good thing) seem much more important to me than empathy. nb i'm not saying there's no room for empathy in helping to produce moral outcomes (if you do something good, even if you resent it, it's still good).

in general i'm v skeptical of this project of elevating our global consciousness and thereby perfecting the world. i think instead of inculcating empathy we're generating neuroticism. ppl need positive (not just reactive) visions of how to act in the world as a good person that aren't merely ideology/politics. iow ppl who preach empathy but act shitty towards ppl are a feature of the project, not a bug.

does it bother you at all that someone cld do/justify horrific things with that approach?

with which approach? teaching children what is good to do and helping them develop the discipline to do it? what's the alternative? just relying on every individual's subjective experience + instinct to guide what is good?

I wonder if there are empathetic arguments always underpinning deontological ethics tho - the Golden Rule for example is explicitly empathetic?

xp the combo of moral certainty/confidence and self-discipline doesn't have too hot a history

how do you mean “teaching what is good”

you mean telling, or something else?

there's a difference between what we believe about the best method for inculcating morality and what we believe is the basis of morality

well put!

anyway i would argue that moral knowledge and empathy are inextricably tied

children are really bad at two things, among others

1) projecting their actions into the future
2) putting themselves in someone else’s shoes

imo teaching these two things is a good thing to do, and critical for helping give kids a moral compass (as well as helping them have discipline)

btw i would argue these two learning experiences are much more important than academics

if a kid can’t project possible outcome “i might hit a kid I. the eye” then throwing scissors will always be just a funny gag. if they can’t feel sympathy for someone hit by flying scissors in the eye then it’s a lot harder to keep them from throwing those scissors when there is no authority figure around

just relying on every individual's subjective experience + instinct to guide what is good?

let me tell you about something called constructivism ...

i do it because i know what the right thing to do is (because i was taught that charitable acts are good)

how do you know that what you were taught was right? you could compress this into 'i do it because i was taught to do it'. dubious to call it 'moral knowledge' if it's just what you were taught

children are really bad at two things, among others

1) projecting their actions into the future
2) putting themselves in someone else’s shoes

imo teaching these two things is a good thing to do, and critical for helping give kids a moral compass (as well as helping them have discipline)

btw i would argue these two learning experiences are much more important than academics

― the late great, Friday, December 29, 2017 6:16 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my man

Here it just opened the door to constant bargaining and arguing, as the kids would spend so much time being made to reflect on menial nonsense

um but you’re on ilx all day every day and besides how much else is to functioning as an adult in society

is there to, not is to