Episode 07 - What’s the Deal With Empathy?

Transcript

Ellie: 0:07

Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:09

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:12

The podcast where two friends,

David: 0:14

who who are also professors,

Ellie: 0:16

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

David: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. Hi, Ellie.

Ellie: 0:29

Hey, what's up?

David: 0:30

Ah, you know, just hanging out after the elections.

Ellie: 0:33

We have a new president, although the old one hasn't recognized that publicly yet.

David: 0:38

Or privately. Denial is a powerful drug.

Ellie: 0:41

I'm laughing, but I'm crying on the inside.

David: 0:44

So now we are facing a new future with Biden as our president come January, 2021. And a number of people have already contrasted Biden's possible approach to domestic and international policy to the Trump administration's on the basis of his emotional profile. So he is an empathic person. He's relatable. He's like the grandpa that everybody loves to hang around with. You know, many times he brings in aspects of his own lived experience and of his own traumatic past, like his son Beau's very tragic passing, as a way of connecting with voters. Some people are beginning to talk about empathy as Biden's super power and to speculate about the ways in which it might change the future of the United States.

Ellie: 1:32

Yeah. I had a really weird experience when I was watching his acceptance speech. You know, Kamala Harris went on before Biden and I'm sure you and I both have a lot of thoughts about Kamala Harris's historic vice presidency, um, at the same time, as we might have some critiques of her role in the prison-industrial complex, especially in the persecution of black men, but I found myself, like, crying so much while she was speaking. And then Joe came on and I didn't have as much of an emotional reaction. I wasn't tearing up. But, something about his presence just like gave me extreme warm fuzzies. I am ashamed to say this, as somebody who perhaps as like much more leftist views than Biden, but I just found myself like really connecting with them.

David: 2:17

And it worked, uh, but at a time in which people are looking for any kind of emotional bond with their president, other than just disdain or-

Ellie: 2:27

Yes. Anger.

David: 2:29

Yeah, you know, Biden just comes across as this empathic oracle that's just going to allow us to flourish into the versions of ourselves that we wanted to be, but that we were not allowed to become under Trump.

Ellie: 2:43

Yeah. And I think that in a way, this is a hearkening back to Obama because Obama was also known as a very empathic president. I'm remembering the speech Obama gave in 2006, so, you know, a full two years before he became president, where he said that the biggest deficit we have in our society is an empathy deficit. And he advocated for standing in another person's shoes and seeing through their eyes. There's something very liberal about the recourse to empathy. I hear it all the time from my boomer parents. Hi mom!

David: 3:11

Hi, Ellie's mom. Today, the episode is for you. We're talking about empathy. On the one hand empathy seems like a self-evident moral good, being able to understand other people, to feel their pain, seems like something that makes you a better person. On the other hand, empathy has been accused of cementing in-group out-group divisions and of being not only morally ineffective, but maybe even problematic.

Ellie: 3:36

In today's episode, we'll first discuss the controversy around empathy as a moral emotion, then we'll discuss what empathy is. Where does the concept come from? How does perception shape empathy? Finally, we'll talk about whether animals-- dogs, cats, and the like-- might also experience empathy.

David: 3:53

Woof. Meow. So Ellie, I know you've worked a lot on empathy and about how it relates to morality. So what's the debate?

Ellie: 4:05

Yeah. So I worked a lot on empathy, but if you search Ellie Anderson empathy, you're unlikely to find very much online because I haven't published any of it. And the reason I haven't published any of it, just given it a few conference talks on it here and there, is that I realized that the debates are so, so vast that I had nothing to contribute. Everything interesting has already been said about empathy.

David: 4:26

I think you're right that over the last 15 years, there has been this sea of publications about empathy.

Ellie: 4:32

So there has been something called the Empathy Renaissance since the 1990s, when neuroscientists discovered mirror neurons, which some take to be the biological basis of empathy. Some people will say that the issues in our society boil down to a failure of empathy, right? You hear this in liberal's recent claims that, well, maybe we should just have a little empathy for Trump supporters or, you know, in the case of somebody experiencing homelessness, like you just need to have empathy for them. If I'm walking down the street, and I see a person who's experiencing homelessness, asking for money, I may be more likely to give them money if I am able to recognize a bit of myself in them. On the other hand, and my choice of a person experiencing homelessness is not by accident, empathy trades on tons of implicit bias. We're less likely to empathize with people outside of our in-group. So there's a lot of racial bias, there's gender bias, and there's also a huge disgust factor where people that we think are disgusting, tend to not trigger empathy and thus not trigger moral behavior.

David: 5:31

Yeah. So there's this question about who becomes an empathy recipient and who isn't, according to social norms, having to do with variables like race, gender, class status. And as somebody who lives in San Francisco, where homelessness is a major social factor, it's clear that in our relationships to the homeless, you see a lot of these factors play out. I don't know if you've seen some of that research that shows that people are significantly more likely to give money to homeless women rather than homeless men, but only if those women are by themselves. And so like we want- we only empathize with women that we think are by themselves, alone, possibly as a result of a domestic abuse situation. And so whenever women are with other friends, or with men, they don't get any money. And so often they choose to separate.

Ellie: 6:26

In fact, a lot of empirical research shows that empathy does not make you treat people better. Not to mention, even if it did, how does empathy function? How do we assume we can put ourselves in the shoes of another person, right? If I'm faced with a person who has experienced a totally different upbringing than I have, geographically, racially, in terms of gender, et cetera, and certainly in terms of class, socioeconomic status, isn't it some sort of hubris to think that I could put myself in their position?

David: 6:53

And I mean this is one of the dangers that you often run into in some corners of the activist community, especially when dealing with intersectional dynamics, where people try to relate to the members of different communities by making an appeal to empathy, when that appeal is fundamentally inappropriate. It's a well-known tension that for example, there are cases where somebody will say, "Oh, in my experience," let's say, "as a black man, this has been true of the world," and then somebody else will say, "Oh yeah, I totally relate to that because as an upper class, white gay man, I totally feel the same way, and I've had the same experiences." And so, you see the sense in which there is an attempt to bond that goes wrong because the empathy, it's not that it's misdirected, it's just that it is the problem. It's not that it's poorly done-

Ellie: 7:47

Yes.

David: 7:47

It's that it ought not happen in that case.

Ellie: 7:49

Yeah, absolutely. And you might think about the fact that there's nothing worse than when you're going through a hard time and somebody says, "I feel your pain." I'm like, "No, you don't feel my pain. I feel my pain." And so recognizing the difference between self and other is really crucial and that sometimes gets lost, at least in the way that empathy gets uptake when we think about it as the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes. One thing I find really suspicious is the ease with which empathy is deployed by the liberal establishment in American society. Empathy is like a Karen emotion, in my view. It's always the Karens who are emphasizing empathy and then like going out and calling the cops on black men who are just like living their lives, you know?

David: 8:33

That's exactly one of my problems with the racialized politics that undergird this discourse about empathy and why I really recoil when people demand empathy, especially for, let's say, Trump supporters after losing the election, or for cops that have been convicted of targeting black men.

Ellie: 8:55

Sexual assaulters perhaps.

David: 8:57

Sexual assaulters, et cetera. And this is something that James Baldwin has captured very well. He says in order for a white person to empathize with a black person, because of the very nature of empathy, the white person has to identify with the black person, which is precisely what is impossible under conditions of systematic racial oppression and white privilege. And so given that we live under those conditions, empathy will always have a racialized overtone that the people who profess it don't recognize. And so, I do really think that empathy is reserved for less people than-

Ellie: 9:43

Yeah.

David: 9:44

The people who promote it realize-

Ellie: 9:45

Well, yeah, but I-

David: 9:46

or are willing to admit.

Ellie: 9:48

Yes, I agree. But I even think, you know, like marginalized folks are often precisely the ones who are most attuned to the dangers of empathy, even in describing their own experiences, and in relating those experiences to others, because it takes a degree of privilege to be able to imagine that you can inhabit the position of another person, right? I can just kind of like float between perspectives. The reason I say it's a very Karen move is because it does require this sort of a whiteness, right, or this ability to feel like you have access to other people's perspectives.

David: 10:19

And the assumption that you can entirely contain the totality of that experience in your own, subjective space, right? So a person of color tells you, " I feel like the system is rigged," and you're like, "Hmm, I got it. Yeah, I, yeah, totally got it." And that's strikes me as not only a violent act in and of itself, but also as a decoy or a deviation, because it means that once you work with the assumption that you can contain the totality of another person's lived experience, that means that there is no need for you to educate yourself about the claim that they're making about the world that you share in-

Ellie: 10:57

Oh, yes, this is so validating David, because I'm thinking back to things that happened, you know, this past summer with the sort of racial reckoning, especially among fellow white women and this idea that like, "Oh, let's just, you know, we're all together. Let's feel each other's pain." But interestingly, there was also this big presence on social media of claims like, "I know that I will never know," or, "I understand that I will never understand." So there was this lip service being paid to the failures of empathy and the fact that it wasn't really going to be helpful in terms of understanding white privilege. And yet, I think that there still was this kind of thing like, "I know that I don't understand, but like I kind of think I do, or I kinda think I can, after I read one book."

David: 11:35

Yeah. And I think part of this is a disavowal of the need to do very serious, affective, emotional, political labor on oneself, right? Because if you take either extreme that, "Oh, I got it. I feel just like you, I know what you're going through," it just closes the door on that possibility of change. But similarly, when you hear claims, like "I will never understand," again, it's a disavowal of the need to do the work that's needed to change one's own relationship to a world from which one draws tremendous unmerited privilege. Well, some people think about the distinction between empathy, which is about feeling somebody else's pain or identifying with their mental or emotional state, and sympathy, which is more about feeling with the other person without necessarily taking on that additional identificatory step of saying, I feel like you.

Ellie: 12:35

Yeah. I mean, we think about that etymology of empathy. it has origins in the Greek root em, which means in, within, into, and pathos, which is feeling. And so empathy means feeling into. Now the funny thing is, and this is actually a pretty similar to our discussion of nostalgia, in that episode, empathy is not an ancient Greek word. It's coined in the early 20th century by the psychologist named Edward Titchener. And he's using it as a translation of this German word Einfhlung, which literally means feeling into. And I'll never forget- I was giving a job talk, um, which, for those non-academics out there, is this 45 minute research talk you have to give when you're on a multi-day job interview. It is super intense. And there was like, this older, white male professor who basically mansplained to me after my talk, which was about empathy, and he was like, "I just don't understand why you're talking about 20th century German conceptions of empathy. You really should've gone back to the ancient Greek descriptions of empathy." I'm like, "Dude, empathy did not exist in ancient Greece." It's like, bye.

David: 13:45

There is nothing better than mansplaining in an anachronistic way.

Ellie: 13:50

I know, the worst part was I was so stressed out and exhausted and wanting to be respectful that I actually didn't even say that in the moment, I was just like, "Oh no, I'm just talking about 20th century German philosophy, okay." And then after, when I was like, NOO! I should have said- I could have like, schooled him. And I just missed that opportunity.

David: 14:10

It's like, you know, those experiences, which I'm sure you've had, of when you like miss the opportunity to respond correctly, and then you just rehearse it, like in the shower while talking to like, the shampoo bottle for like two hours. Not that I do that, I've just heard that some people will do that.

Ellie: 14:25

No, I've had that incredible clap back response in my imagination so many times and never, you know, I didn't actually say it in the moment. Uh, um-

David: 14:34

But in terms of empathy, let's take a couple of steps here, um, back, because you've worked on it, you know, haven't published, my parish because of it. And you mentioned that it's a Greek root, but it's not really a Greek concept. It's taken from the German, um, what was the word? Feeling into. And so there is the sense in which empathy means taking somebody else's lived experience and reflecting it at the level of the first person pronoun, at the the I. And, um, there is a really wonderful Sesame Street little video, that captures

Empathy Sesame Street: 15:15

"Let's say I'm walking along and I stubbed my toe. Oh, that hurts." "Oh you poor thing! I can imagine exactly how you feel!" "That's it. That's empathy. Empathy. You could imagine exactly how I feel. You could understand just how it felt. That's empathy."

Ellie: 15:36

So in this clip, we hear that empathy is being defined by Mark Ruffalo as the ability to imagine another's pain. I think this note about imagination is really interesting because it gets at some of the philosophical debates about empathy. Empathy is not always defined as the ability to feel another's pain. It is sometimes defined as the ability to imagine another's pain. And you see this in a debate that comes up in philosophy between what's known as simulation theory and theory theory. According to simulation theory, we use our imaginations to empathetically put ourselves in the position of the other person. So if you stub your toe, I might imagine what it feels like when I stub my toe. That's the simulation that I construct in my imagination that leads to empathy. But there's also a school of philosophers called theory theorists, which is just like a hilarious name, this name theory. They're called theory theorists because they emphasize theory of mind, which is the idea that I have to be able to reason that "Oh, you are a consciousness like me." And so I'm not using my imagination to put myself in the position of the other person. I'm rather reasoning and speculating about what the other person might be experiencing based on their behavioral cues, their verbal suggestions, their lived body. And so, I'm wondering here, you know, to what extent does empathy actually involve imagination? Or can we think about empathy as something that you're able to speculate or reason about? And if so, does that help preserve a distinction between self and other better?

David: 17:14

One of the things that I find quite fascinating about the experience of empathy, and so thinking about this clip that we just listened to, right? What's his name? The Muppet? Ruffalo? Roofalo?

Ellie: 17:25

Mark Ruffalo is the guy. He's like the Hollywood star.

David: 17:32

Okay. So this an effect of me being an immigrant and not really knowing my cultural, pop-culture reference.

Ellie: 17:45

You thought the muppet was named Mark Ruffalo!

David: 17:45

This episode brought to you by Mark Ruffalo. Is it so long?

Ellie: 17:49

Murray. Yeah, the Muppet's name is Murray.

David: 17:52

Okay. So one of the things that I find quite fascinating, is that the experience of empathy comes to you from below the threshold of rationality or at least this is the interpretation that I favor, because when you try to explain to somebody what your experience of something is, that rational reconstruction, that attempt to capture things in language with the use of concepts, only goes so far when it comes to lived experience, right? Like concepts cannot capture the richness, the vividness, the force of an experience like stubbing your toe. And so what Mark Ruffalo does in this clip is he says, "I'm going to show it to you, by doing it. Like I'm walking down the street, and then I stubbed my toe." And in that moment, the Muppet doesn't reason, he doesn't take time to imagine even, he just, on a gut level, feels the pain of the other person. And so there are some ways in which I think we might want to think about empathy at a- at a level slightly lower than the imaginative and rational one that is presupposed both by simulation theory and by theory theory.

Ellie: 19:02

It's so funny you say that, David, because that is precisely where my view ,is and that's, you know, something I've talked about in a couple of papers that I've given on this. I think that empathy does not need to involve either imagination nor reason. And so this impasse between simulation theory and theory theory is a kind of false binary. This is where I would head into the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. So let's do that in the next section. How can we conceptualize empathy on a more fundamental embodied, and frankly, in my view, much more interesting level than the impasse between imagination and reason?

David: 19:37

And so I'm just curious, Ellie, are you pro or are you anti-empathy?

Ellie: 19:41

I mean, it depends on what we're talking about. I am anti-empathy if we're taking empathy to be the basis of morality, because I'm very convinced by these claims that empathy trades on implicit bias and it entrenches in-group out-group norms. So I do not think empathy is a useful basis for morality. How about you?

David: 19:56

So I don't like the concept of empathy, because I do believe that the concept of empathy is effectively made to do a lot of work that it cannot do, and because I think the pitfalls associated with grounding our moral theories and our moral frameworks on any one emotion really is always going to be problematic. And as you know, I work on animals and we will be talking about animals and that's one place where I find myself being drawn to the concept of empathy. I find it fascinating that research in the animal cognitive and behavioral sciences is showing that many animals are capable of this emotion that has historically been used to ground moral behavior and therefore to police the boundary between humans, on the one hand, we're the only ones that have empathy, and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Ellie: 20:45

Yeah. So we've talked about why some people praise empathy and others critique it. Let's think here about how empathy happens on what philosophers would call a pre-reflective level.

David: 20:56

And there are two ways to think about that pre-reflective dimension of experience. One of it is to go to neuroscience, and think about the neural correlates that are at work, the neural circuits and the pathways that are getting activated, when we experience empathy.

Ellie: 21:13

Offering a third person perspective, right?

David: 21:15

Exactly. So this is sort of a scientific approach to thinking about empathy, where you talk about people's empathy on the basis of observation of neural activity. But we can also think about it in terms of the first person perspective, uh, how empathy feels, in the flesh, for the subject who is undergoing it. And that's an approach that's rooted primarily in philosophy, in a school of thought known as phenomenology.

Ellie: 21:40

Excellent. So let's talk first about mirror neurons, neuroscience, and then we will talk about phenomenology.

David: 21:47

Great. Uh, in the 1990s, a group of Italian scientists discovered what we now call mirror neurons, largely by accident, it turns out. And they are a specialized set of cells in the nervous system, uh, in the brain, that were discovered while doing research on macaque monkeys. And so interestingly, this specialized kind of neuron that is now thought to be, uh, what houses empathy at the level of neural activity, it was first discovered in non-human animals. And so they made the monkeys do various kinds of things, like reach for things, move around, raise their arms, and they were tracking neural activity in various brain regions.

Ellie: 22:32

Cute little monkeys!

David: 22:34

Yeah, cute until you realize that they're in a laboratory and are being experimented on, at that point, not so cute, yes. Um, but the interesting thing is that the researchers realized that when monkeys do a particular action, let's say, reaching out for an object, a particular set of cells in the brain will light up. And so a very specialized set of cells in the premotor cortex, and in the somatosensory cortex, which are areas that essentially track movement and proprioception, so they have to do with the animal's body image, so the cells will light up when the macaque reaches for the object. That's not surprising in itself. What is surprising is that when the monkey watches somebody else do the same action, like reaching out for an apple or reaching out for a toy? I don't-

Ellie: 23:30

Always grapes in these studies.

David: 23:32

Yeah, maybe it was a grape, who knows? Um, they then realized that those same neurons start firing when the monkey observes another monkey or another human do the same act. So the exact same set of cells will get activated when the monkey reaches, let's say, for an apple and when the human researcher reaches for an apple, and that's where the term mirror neuron comes from, because when the monkey observes another person do the action, its brain mirrors it and experiences that as if it were itself making that same action.

Ellie: 24:16

Yeah. And then subsequent studies have shown that mirror neurons in humans activate. For instance, when I see another person in pain, poor David you've stubbed your toe, and I'm like, ouch, right? That's my mirror neurons activating. Researchers have jumped from the discovery of mirror neurons to talking about them as the brain's correlates of the feeling of empathy. And so, you know, any time like cells in the brain are discovered, that seem to vaguely map onto something in our moral categories, neuroscientists and the public are like, "Oh my God. Yes, we figured it out. We discovered it. End of story." Right?

David: 24:49

Yes. And, uh, you know, I work, to some degree, on the philosophy of neuroscience and I teach about the structure of the nervous system to my students. And I always warn them against this tendency of assuming that because a specific part of the brain is associated with a particular kind of behavior or capacity, it doesn't mean that it's the key to the behavior or the capacity in question. That's a leap.

Ellie: 25:14

Yeah. And there have been so many leaps related to mirror neurons and empathy. I mean, for one, one thing that I hear a lot, when people are talking about mirror neurons, is just a basic misunderstanding of the difference between self and other. And I'm not talking about neuroscientists here, I'm talking about people I talk about this with, you know, at like a party or, uh, you know, something like that. Um, I think a lot of times people are like, "See, there's no fundamental difference between self and other." And I'm like, "No, if mirror neurons show anything, there is a difference between self and other, because I have mirror neurons and you have mirror neurons and they're different." And also, I mean, just because my mirror neurons in the regions associated for pain light up when I see another person in pain, that doesn't mean that I'm feeling their pain, right? I'm experiencing my own mirror neuron response to their pain.

David: 25:59

Exactly. And one thing that we need to be very clear about is that even in cases where we see somebody else, let's say, stub their toe and feel pain, we don't actually feel pain in our toe in the same way that we would if we had actually stubbed our toe, so I want to move away from the assumption that neuroscientific explanations get us to a full equality of experience, cause that's just phenomenologically unfounded.

Ellie: 26:26

Well, yeah, and I think this is precisely where we can turn to the tradition of phenomenology in thinking about empathy. So phenomenology is a school of philosophy that first originates in the early 20th century with the work of somebody named Edmund Husserl, good old German philosopher Husserl, but one of Husserl's students, Edith Stein, wrote a 1917 dissertation on empathy that has become a really important work in the philosophy of empathy. What I find so interesting about Stein's view is that she defines empathy as the experience of foreign consciousness. That's all it is. Empathy here is really broad and it's really basic. It does not involve me putting myself in the shoes of another. It doesn't involve me sort of imagining that they have a mind and then, you know, simulating their position. It rather just has to do with the fact that I'm in the physical presence of another person. And I feel that they are another person. I don't actually even have to know what you're feeling. I don't have to know whether you're feeling pain, joy, et cetera, to feel empathy. I experience the other person's consciousness, but in the second person. And that involves holding onto a distinction between myself and others.

David: 27:36

And some people have put Edith Stein's definition of empathy, which I do love, this description of empathy simply as, uh, how did you put it, feeling a co-, the experience of foreign consciousness, great. And so some people have put this in dialogue with the approach to consciousness that we get out of Wittgenstein because Wittgenstein develops a specific interpretation of theory of mind, of how we know whether other people are conscious, just like us, right? He says, "You know, we don't need very sophisticated cognitive capacities of rational construction, or inference to know whether another person is conscious like me. I sort of just feel it." It's a preconceptual, uh, again, prelinguistic, mundane experience, where essentially the proof is in the pudding, right? When you see another consciousness, you sort of grasp their consciousness directly, without having to think about it.

Ellie: 28:34

Exactly or you grasp the outline, the contours of it. And part of that grasping involves the fact that you can't grasp it from their perspective. And philosophers are sometimes like, "Well, how do I know another person is a person and not a robot?" And there were some interesting features of that discussion. Maybe we can get into that in another episode, but oftentimes those discussions fail to notice the fact that when I am embodied and when my perception is embodied, which means it's enactive, right? There's no sort of fundamental distinction between mind and body that would make the experience of foreign consciousness a mystery. It's just another person who's in front of me feeling stuff. And I experience that from my own perspective.

David: 29:13

Yeah and the way Wittgenstein puts this, he says, "The problem of other minds really is just a problem for philosophers." And it becomes a problem because you build a host of problematic assumptions that turn it into a problem. But for the average person on the street, right, we don't walk around wondering like, "Oh, is the person selling me groceries a robot, or a zombie?" It just like never appears. And so it's a second order problem. It's a constructed problem that only really appears once you step away from your immersion in life, really.

Ellie: 29:49

Yeah. And so what we're hearing here is that basically empathy can happen on a very fundamental pre-reflective level. It's just a sort of feature of our everyday existence. So it's nothing special, right? It's neither moral nor immoral from a phenomenological perspective. It just is what it is. And I think it's interesting here too, to think back on the origin of the term, which we talked about a bit ago, this idea that empathy is feeling into, coming from the German word Einfhlung, because the guy who coined the term Einfhlung, a philosopher named Theodor Lipps, coined that term as a description of how we experience works of art. When I face a work of art-

David: 30:27

Oh, interesting. I didn't know that.

Ellie: 30:29

Yeah, isn't that cool. So when I'm facing a work of art, I'm not seeing a bunch of different paint colors on a canvas. I'm seeing a holistic entity and the same is true when I experience another person. I'm not like they're telling me one thing, but then I see their eyes and they're moving this other way, and then their hands are moving this other way. I experienced them as a whole entity, a whole being.

David: 30:50

From now on, whenever people ask me what my philosophy of art is, I'm just going to say I'm an empath. I just feel my way into the painting.

Ellie: 30:59

The- the word empath, when people say I am an empath, like, I'm sorry, I just can't. I can't. Like, it's always these New Age-y creeps who have like borderline sexual assault vibes, you know, it's like, it's always-

David: 31:13

They're not even borderline.

Ellie: 31:14

I know, it's like other people who call themselves empaths are always those soft boys, you know, who are like sec- closet misogynists but front like they aren't.

David: 31:23

Yeah.The ones who have would I call, um, Nice Boy Syndrome. Like they usually say things like "Women don't love me because I'm nice to them." Like-

Ellie: 31:35

Exactly. So we've concluded that empaths are made up of soft boys and Karens, oopsie.

David: 31:42

And then that's certainly an overkill, because I do believe that there is a role for empathy in thinking about morality. And one of the things that we've just been describing is the fact that maybe for empathy, the bar has been placed too high, historically, right? With setting the bar at imagination, at language, at reason. But once you lower the bar and realize that an embodied, it's an affective, process, then the door is open to thinking about other animals as possibly having empathy.

Ellie: 32:17

Okay. Let's hear about it.

David: 32:23

Enjoying Overthink? Please take a minute and rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast. One of the benefits of thinking about empathy as something that happens below the level of language and rationality and imagination is that it really opens the door for thinking about whether other animals might be capable of experiencing empathy, which historically, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists have almost universally denied, and so I wonder, Ellie, whether you've seen anything in your research about the animal question.

Ellie: 33:04

Yeah, I'm not the person to ask about this because I just, I will confess to our listeners that for better or for worse, I am like a sort of default humanist, maybe it's training in existentialism and phenomenology, although I've spent a lot of time in those post-structuralists domains too, but yeah, I- I tend to just like follow traditions that reserve it for humans. What do you think, David? Can animals experience empathy?

David: 33:29

Well, I think it really depends on how you define empathy, but certainly one thing is clear over the last 15, 20, maybe 30 years, in the field of animal studies, and that is that a lot of the emotions, capacities, that have been used to really delineate between humans and non-human animals are sort of eroding.

Ellie: 33:52

Hmm.

David: 33:53

Empathy certainly is one of them, as we learn more about the emotions of animals and potentially their ability to engage in moral behavior, And even if animal behavior is very difficult to interpret. It's clear that many animals are capable of engaging in empathic behavior.

Ellie: 34:13

Which animals, what kind of empathy are we talking about?

David: 34:15

Great. So the easiest and the clearest candidates for empathy in the animal kingdom are certainly non-human primates. So we're talking about bonobos, we're talking about chimpanzees, and that's just because we are so similar to them. So you and I went to Emory, uh, that's where we met, that's where we got our degree. And there is a very well known primatologist at Emory, Frans de Waal. He wrote a little book called The Age of Empathy, in which he makes precisely this case in relation to non-human primates.

Ellie: 34:46

I think I've read that book, but I can't remember anything about it.

David: 34:50

So he argues that empathy really has two, uh, conditions that have to be met in order for it to arise. One of them is that you have to have a sense of self, right? Like you cannot imagine or relate to, or even just reflect, on an embodied level, somebody else's pain or experience, if you don't have a sense of self ahead of time. So there has to be a self-other distinction. That's the first one. And the second one is that you do have to project, uh, in some way, uh, onto the other person. And he says chimpanzees and bonobos, and all the great apes do this very well. And so it's no surprise, and he points this out, that we discovered mirror neurons in macaques first and foremost. So we really discovered them in animals, not in humans. Um, and beyond non-human primates, you really do find a lot of animals who engage in behavior that suggests that they care for other people- I'm sorry, for other animals, uh, you know, animals are people maybe, maybe not, um, And so, for example, just to give two very concrete illustrate in the field of marine biology, they have, uh, noted that when a dolphin is attacked, let's say by a shark, and its fins are damaged and it starts sinking. Of course, that's a major problem for the dolphin because they need to come out for air. They have to breathe. And so other dolphins will look at the damaged dolphin and they will understand that the animal is in trouble and they will swim under its fins. Two of them, of its friends, he has like, like, like, like crunches, like, like marine crutches, and they will prop up the dolphin to bring it up so that it can breathe. Now, in order for the dolphins to do this, again, two things have to be in place and they're the two conditions of empathy. They have to have a sense of themselves,

Ellie: 36:50

Because of their ability to bring up the-

David: 36:53

Yes. And so this is the mirroring relationship. But they also have to have a sense of the other.

Ellie: 36:57

To say like, "Oh, the other dolphin isn't breathing, but they're like a consciousness. And so we need to help them." They're not just like a log, you know?

David: 37:07

Yeah. And to grasp the-

Ellie: 37:08

A log in the ocean.

David: 37:10

in the ocean! And so they have to, in some way, understand, This other creature is kind of like me," enough to know that it needs to breathe and that it cannot, because its fin is harmed. So there has to be a mirroring relationship between, "Oh, I'm a dolphin. And I used my fin to swim and this other dolphin also can't do that right now."

Ellie: 37:35

Yeah, that's so interesting. And I would say there that that doesn't prove that empathy is a moral emotion, but rather it proves that empathy is a precondition for moral behavior.

David: 37:47

Of course, because the dolphin, in theory, you know, if you have a sociopathic dolphin, um, in theory, a dolphin could be like, "Oh, this person is struggling. I get it. And I'm just not going to help." So it doesn't necessarily translate into moral behavior, but typically it does.

Ellie: 38:04

Cause there is some empirical research among humans that empathy is present in people who have sociopathic tendencies.

David: 38:10

Yes. And in fact sociopaths are pretty good at reading other people's emotions, which is why they can take advantage of them.

Ellie: 38:17

Exactly. Yeah. I find other people so opaque. I'm just like, "I don't know. Can you say that a little bit more clearly?" And I'm like the opposite. I'm such a bad manipulator. Cause I just like don't understand people.

David: 38:31

Yeah, but you know, this is exactly where you see that amoral dimension of empathy, even though historically, it's been presented as the linchpin of morality. Um, but again, the interesting thing is that this kind of mirroring relationship, of understanding another person as another person that is kind of like me also happens in nature, and it's not just within the same species and this is something that I really find, uh, quite charming and, uh, um, just adorable really, is that it can happen across species lines. So you have all these cases of animals of different species, um, and trying to get an understanding of what they need, and helping them solve the problem that's in front of them.

Ellie: 39:18

Totally. So, yeah, I think that's really sweet. I will make a confession, which is that among my loved ones, I am known as not being an animal person. It's sometimes called my toxic trait. It doesn't mean that I dislike animals. My sister is very protective of me about that. She's like, " It's not that Ellie doesn't like animals, it's just that she doesn't really love them," which also sounds like absolutely horrible and is maybe not true, but I just don't connect with them so much, but I do love stories of other people when they're like, "Oh, you know, my cat, when I'm so sad at the end of the day comes over, helps me out. It makes me feel better." Um, I don't really experience that so much myself, but-

David: 39:56

I mean, this is something that goes back to what we discussed before about the limits of empathy. And this is something that experts in critical animal studies and animal ethics will point out. Uh, they will say, you know, how is it that our empathy doesn't extend often to animals? Why doesn't it? And when it does, why only to some animals, but not others?

Ellie: 40:20

Does it have anything to do with how similar other animals look to us, like ones that have similar facial structures or anything like that?

David: 40:26

So there's been some research that's been done on the face and in particular, the eyes, like the, the eye effect, where we think that we connect more with animals that have cute eyes, but that doesn't actually track, uh, lived experience or the realities of our society, because of course, um, the animals that we love and the animals that we eat, you know, the distinction is- is kind of hyper-arbitrary. Um, you know, so some people eat bunnies, some people don't. Um, why do we love and pet dogs, but slaughter pigs? Uh, they also have big, cute eyes. So it- it doesn't actually seem to track that-

Ellie: 41:08

I don't know. Would we say- would we say a pigs eyes are cute?

David: 41:12

Oh, I think pigs are adorable. Um, I mean, just in terms of the definition of the big eye effect, uh, right? They have big, round, protruding eyes, so they should in theory, trigger our empathic response if you believe that that's the key to empathy.

Ellie: 41:28

Yeah. I think of pigs as having kind of like weird beady eyes that are a little bit creepy.

David: 41:33

If you think about creepy eyes, I mean, I'm not a cat person and yet, I mean, they have creepy eyes too, but they're not excluded from the realm of moral considerations. So anyways, there's this whole debate about to which animals we extend empathy and to which we do not, and this comes out in the psychologist Hal Herzog's 2011 book Some We Eat, Some We Hate, Some We Love, which is just about this arbitrary line that we draw in the sand about which animals get to be in our moral universe and which ones don't.

Ellie: 42:05

Ah, and does he have any hypotheses about why these lines are drawn or you said they're just arbitrary.

David: 42:13

I mean, there- there is no objective basis for eating some animals versus, uh, turning others into companions, uh, versus turning other ones into research subjects in our laboratories. And so the whole point here is that at least the animal case really highlights this problem that we alluded to earlier about the arbitrariness of the extension of empathy to some, but not to others.

Ellie: 42:38

And there also seem to be some related worries around anthropomorphism that we could put into dialogue here too. I remember reading a study a while back about how we assume that dogs love hugs, because we love hugs, but dogs actually just sort of like suffer through hugs with their owners.

David: 42:55

Yes. And there's, I mean, anthropomorphism, which is projecting, uh, human emotions and feelings onto animals when it's not appropriate, sometimes called the Disney effect, um, yeah. You know, it's like, "Oh, like a duck who is a capitalist and has a ton of money."

Ellie: 43:11

I have so much empathy for that capitalist Doug. duck.

David: 43:14

One other example, you know, you mentioned the dogs with the, hugs another very clear example of anthropomorphizing animals is also with dolphins. One of the reasons why they're held captive is because children love them because they're always smiling. They're always happy, the dolphins. Turns out it's just the way their face looks. It's just their musculature. So they're not smiling. So they suffer from the opposite of like resting bitch face. It's like the animals that are like pursuing to be happy. And anyway, yes, they exactly, they have resting joy face, and paradoxically that's why they are, held captive in places-

Ellie: 43:58

God.

David: 43:59

or in aquaria.

Ellie: 44:01

Suffering because of your smile. sounds a little analogous to the situation of women.

David: 44:05

Oh my God.

Ellie: 44:06

In American society.

David: 44:07

Like nice animals finish last. Um, but anyway, so in the field of animal studies, there are these two dimensions to the debate. One, which we just talked about, is, uh, which animals are recipients of human empathy, which is an arbitrary, culturally variable decision. But then the other one that I also mentioned is which animals are themselves capable of empathy. And, uh, the research right now suggests that, of course, all primates are capable of empathy. Um, but now that category has been expanded to all mammals, uh, because all mammals have a limbic system, the part of the brain that is associated with the processing of emotions and self-other relations. So it might be that all mammals are capable of some form of empathy, and that would include, you know, mice, it would include rabbits, it would include orangutans, a large number of creatures. Ratatouille is- is stepping into your shoes. Ratatouille! And so there- there's something here that's quite interesting to me, in terms of the value of this concept of empathy for upsetting our assumptions about where morality starts, where it ends, who is included, who is not included.

Ellie: 45:30

So it's time to wrap up now. We've talked about what empathy is. We've described debates about whether or not empathy is moral. And we've also talked about how we can define empathy in terms of imagination or reason, but it's perhaps much more interesting, at least from our perspective, to define it in terms of our basic embodied perception.

David: 45:49

We also talked about some of the ways in which empathy can get in the way of justice and moral perception, depending on how it's carried out in particular circumstances. And we considered whether it is an exclusively human emotion or whether maybe other animals are capable of empathy as well.

Ellie: 46:09

Thanks and see you next time. Let's go look at cute pictures of otters holding hands and anthropomorphize them.

David: 46:17

And dolphins suffering from resting joy phase.

Ellie: 46:20

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

David: 46:28

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at DearOverthink@gmail.com.

Ellie: 46:36

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

David: 46:49

Thanks so much for joining us today!