The definition of empathy: “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation”
Yes. By definition, if you are able to feel empathy - I.e., if you can put yourself in another person’s shoes - you wouldn’t behave like any sycophant in the world, from Trump and his hateful MAGA’s, to Putin, to Netanyahu, to Musk, and each and every single agent of chaos and unchecked greed attempting to mess around with mankind as if they were self-proclaimed messiahs and not the representation of humanity’s own cancer cells.
His observations were correct and can be applied to many situations and places worldwide. We are held back by hate and lack of empathy. We are unable to learn from the mistakes of our ancestors.
Empathy is a verb like “gardening” is though, we don’t make a rational abrupt decision to empathize with a group one day because our empathy rings a bell and we bark in response obediently.
No, we nurture empathy the same way one nurtures a garden and hopefully if we do it right empathy erupts from the soil and fills our vision with new colors we could never have imagined before. Empathy dawns on us like consciousness does to a sleeping mind waking up peacefully.
Empathy is a practice in the same way genuinely religious people may describe their spirituality as a “practice” not a possession.
I have previously characterised conservatism as primarily a lack of empathy. This quote does not bode well for America.
Psychopaths are physically incapable of it since birth though, not through any fault of their own, yet most are completely normal everyday people that don’t commit atrocities 🤷♂️
You see this with zionists and in Israel
As a corollary:
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
- Edmund Burke
This seems to have been bastardized by history into the following much more well known, but never actually directly stated:
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Wow, this is so true. Keep in mind there’s technically no such thing as cold. Or dark. What we call that is simply the measure of the absence of warmth or light. I think the same thing applies to empathy…
What were the words of Elmo musk again? That there is too much empathy in the world? Fo figure
But if I’m right and they’re wrong then it’s ok.
/S
No, evil is simply flawed logic. In other words, stupid people.
Many of the Nazis convicted at Nuremberg were undeniably smart in the sense that they could perform abstract reasoning better than most people. Some of them had top 1% IQs and none of them had below average IQs (yes, IQ is an imperfect measure of intelligence, but at the same time, anyone who gets a 130 on an IQ test is smart… They just might not be smarter than someone with a 120 or a 110 from a different background).
I’ve had a long (25 years so far) and successful career in computational science/engineering. Everyone I have worked with in the last 25 year, with only 2 exceptions I can think of, was smarter than most people. I have heard some truly awful things come out of coworkers mouths. Particularly in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. People who could write software that accurately predicted airflow through jet engines who did not care that the people of Iraq were not the same people who attacked the WTC. They knew, but did not care! They simply wanted to lash out at brown people in the middle east.
No, empathy is the distinguishing characteristic.
Smart doesn’t mean logical/rational. Logic doesn’t require much intelligence.
Empathy doesn’t reliably prevent people from doing wrong: injustices are often defended with irrational appeals to emotion, partiality, & selective reasoning.
I don’t think you understand what empathy is. Why are you bringing up irrational appeals to emotion?
I don’t think you understand what empathy is.
Maybe your empathy is failing.
People can feel how others feel. That doesn’t mean they’ll morally reason well, have the integrity to defend it, or not use those feelings to justify irrational injustices even if they mean well. People are susceptible to biases that empathy alone won’t defend against.
The comment you link to does do a better job of explaining what you’re getting at, but I would still argue that those behaviors also require a partitioning of empathy, and that is a behavior most humans are susceptible to… Those who have empathy can often be made to shut it down or partition it so that it only applies to certain people.
I stand by my original comment modulo the part that asserts that it is empathy. It is not a lack of intelligence being the point.
Yeah, stupid people who lack empathy only get to run for the Republican ticket!
There’s a whole camp of folks on Lemmy that appear to disagree with the verdicts of Nuremburg, which is something I never expected. When it comes to Julius Striecher, a couple people feel injustice.
Like I get strict death penalty abolitionism, but damn if that’s the example to hold onto. A hell of a test case.
They should have hung half of the fuckers they saved with Operation Paperclip too.
At least the Saturn 5 wasn’t built with slave labor. Can’t say that about the prototypes.
recently it was discussed that autistic people also struggle with empathy.
Autistic people do not struggle with empathy.
They struggle with being perceived as expressing empathy, and they struggle with others not being empathetic toward them, instead just feigning it or using it as a manipulation tactic, which autists are much more likely to recognize as such.
People tend to sympathize, not empathize, with autists.
These are not the same thing.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” –Elon Musk
INB4 “vegans bad” but I think this is also reflected in how we treat animals. I know I couldn’t kill an a cow, a chicken or a pig. I see in them the same will to live in peace as I see in my fellow humans and empathy makes it so that I would see it as cruel to rob them of it.
To take this line if thought to the extreme, I see the same will to live in peace in a carrot.
I do understand OP. But the wording can be taken to many extremes.
Another extreme would be that if someone loses the will to live, it is fair game.
Guess that makes me vegan friendly meat.
Then you should go see a doctor. Plants don’t have “a will”. You need sentience and a subjective experience of existence for that.
We used to think that most animals lacked those things as well.
Plants very well may have some kind of consciousness or will, it’s just one that is so different from our own as to be unrecognizable with our current understanding.
Personally, I acknowledge that predation is a part of the ecosystem, and that it is not morally wrong to be a predator (Nobody thinks that falcons or bobcats are immoral for existing in the ecosystem the way that they do. I don’t think that should be different for humans). I do believe it is morally wrong to treat an animal poorly in advance of its demise though, so my policy on food is that I will eat animals and animal products if I believe that the animal that provided said food lived/is living a life that is as good as or better than it’s wild relatives, provided the practice is environmentally sustainable. So I eat a mostly vegan diet, but I also sometimes eat eggs from people’s well treated pet poultry or pasture raised chickens, and I eat seafood that the monterey bay aquarium says is sustainable. On rare occasions I will eat pasture raised poultry or hunted meat. I don’t do any dairy or farmed red meat because of the greenhouse gasses associated with their production.
I think it’s important for us to hunt deer in most of north america because we eliminated their primary natural predator from the ecosystem and they overpopulate to the point of being harmful to the environment without wolves in their ecosystem.
Yeah, domestication was reciprocal. You see a creature into the world, care and provide for it and, eventually, see it out of the world.
You can frame it in spiritual terms, or as a symbiotic relationship that evolved over time. But however you put it, factory farming is a violation of that pact.
Empathy is what you feel; not what the object of your empathy feels
Where did I claim that this is not the case?
Nowhere, not necessarily. But you did invalidate another person’s feelings of empathy by telling them to “go to the doctor” for it, which is pretty shitty behavior
Please read again.
Let’s not pretend that person really cares for carrots or has empathy for them. And if you feel that inanimate objects do have a will, then you should see a doctor, as I imagine that is highly debilitating. Not an insult, but sad that genuine is seen that way.
You should try having some empathy.
Plants don’t have “a will”.
Says you. They certainly have a will to reproduce, get sunlight, get water.
You need sentience and a subjective experience of existence for that.
Ok. So anything that doesn’t have a subjective experience of existence is morally fine to eat.
Under your rules we can morally eat people in comas.
Under your rules we can morally eat people in comas.
Ah, I agree! If fruits and vegetables deserve moral consideration because they “want to live,” then coma patients, clearly not demonstrating any ambition, are demonstrably and ethically fair game. I mean, they’re just lying there, right? No subjective experiences, taking up valuable hospital space and depleting emotional energy while not contributing anything… a head of cabbage with a Medicare plan.
Waste not, want not.
I will not debate plant sentience. If you erroneously believe in and care about plant sentience, you should go vegan, by eating them directly far fewer plants are murdered.
Ok. So anything that doesn’t have a subjective experience of existence is morally fine to eat.
Nope. Didn’t say that either. You were the one hallucinating a carrots will.
If people bring up vegetarianism in an empathy debate then no-one can stop me empathising with the carrot.
Yes, but the point about minimizing plant deaths by eating plants instead of feeding more plants to animals and then eating the animals is a valid one…
100% correct.
There is something very weary in people of “high status” or “power”. I have never met them, but just seeing pictures of people like Trump make me so uncomfortable. There is something so weird to them. I am an atheist, but there is this intuition/feeling inside of me telling me that they are some sort of devil or a dangerous person. An all around “fakeness” to them.
I have noticed this with people high in the hierarchy ladder. It could just be because I am an anarchist, I despise hierarchies and I have distrust for authority and therefore, I despise them. But ya, I feel so uncomfortable near them. It is like looking at a fake item that everyone is admiring and I am screaming internally: “Do you not see how fake it is???”.
Some statistics suggest that ~20% of corporate leaders exhibit sociopathic/psychopathic traits. The trump family was and is full of abuse, and that shapes sociopathic traits.
You’re probably getting some of that sociopath vibe from trump and other leaders. Trump being exceptionally terrible thanks to his NPD as well.
Exactly like my words. One of our politicians publicly stated that empathy is not belonging to the politics and I think why don’t people see and understand what she really said. She’s pure evil without any doubt.
It’s a bit of a reduction that construes offenders as alien to the rest of humanity (they’re incapable of empathy), promoting a dangerous sense of immunity to the problem (I have empathy, so I’m not capable of these offenses). Better social psychologists have come along, performed revealing studies, and identified general susceptibilities in humanity to conformity, authority, diffusion of responsibility, & moral disengagement that show the problem is more relatable to humanity in general. Historical record consistently shows people’s capacity for cruelty & inhumanity isn’t exceptional.
The truth is we may be far more similar to people who commit atrocities than we’d like to think. It’s hard to predict how someone will do unless they’ve actually been tested.
Emotions can & often are bent to irrational, unjust ends: empathy alone won’t reliably save us from succumbing to irrationality & far worse. People also need reason & integrity to withstand challenges. These may be more important than empathy: I’ve seen far more emotional, irrational people being unjust than people with reason & integrity on their side.
