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Empathy makes us less, not more, biased ("contrary to recent arguments")

#1
C C Offline
https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2022/...i-l-maibom

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). Today we begin with an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Friday.

EXCERPT: . . . The book works up to addressing the moral value of empathy, regarding which there has been endless debate, particularly during the last couple of decades. Since my focus is less on the affective side of empathy and more on the understanding it yields, it is this that is central in my account of its moral relevance. Empathy, I argue, is essential to impartiality, and it is therefore also essential to morality to the extent impartiality is central to morality. Why? As Nietzsche points out in a quote with which the book begins:

"There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a ‘knowing’ from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘idea’ of that thing, our ‘objectivity.’" (The Genealogy of Morals, III, 12).


In the early parts of the book, I am at pains to explain why the way we see the world can be understood on the model of the visual metaphor of ‘perspective.’ Such a perspective, we know, is always partial.

Good visual representations, therefore, require integrating information from different visual perspectives. The situation is no different, in its essentials, when it comes to psychological perspectives.

To understand the world more objectively or impartially, we must adopt more perspectives on it. And so it turns out that empathy makes us less, not more, biased, contrary to recent arguments.

It follows from this position that if the moral point of view is an impartial view, it is thereby an empathic point of view. Of course, it is not a point of view at all, but an amalgam of many points of view.

Instead of relying on the view of an Impartial Spectator, as another proponent of the moral value of empathy did, namely Adam Smith, we must instead rely on the combination of many different points of view for the very simple reason that the idea of an Impartial Spectator, namely one that has access to all relevant information, for instance, is an impossibility. There can be no such all-encompassing point of view, and even if there were, we would be unable to take it... (MORE - missing details)
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#2
Magical Realist Online
I can vouch for this. I have always had an anxious sensitivity to pain. To me it is an all consuming and maddening state to be in. And likewise, I literally cringe when I see someone else in pain. My capacity for possible pain bleeds over into the possible pain of others. I could never be a nurse or a doctor or an EMT. I would be too occupied with the pain that patients were experiencing.
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