Why do you think the author (me?) is deriding empathy? On SimplexAI-m’s view, empathy is a form of cognition that is helpful, though not sufficient, for morality; knowing what others are feeling doesn’t automatically imply treating them well (consider that predators tend to know what their prey are feeling); there’s an additional component that has to do with respecting moral symmetries, e.g. not stealing from them if you wouldn’t want them to steal from you.
There is a difference between theory-of-mind and empathy. We can should either of them into our worlding structures: morality/religion/art/law/lore/fiction. One’s gets shoulded as legalistic and divisive balancing acts, focusing on culpability and blame, and the hindsight of logic, and the other… there-is-a-gap… ---to where responsibility blurs (all) this into credit we can mirror-neuron our way into empathy and thinking of the children, everyone as children. Moral agency is more than Kant in good form, and is more about bettering than the good. About bettering that which does not exist. The world.
Why do you think the author (me?) is deriding empathy? On SimplexAI-m’s view, empathy is a form of cognition that is helpful, though not sufficient, for morality; knowing what others are feeling doesn’t automatically imply treating them well (consider that predators tend to know what their prey are feeling); there’s an additional component that has to do with respecting moral symmetries, e.g. not stealing from them if you wouldn’t want them to steal from you.
There is a difference between theory-of-mind and empathy. We can should either of them into our worlding structures: morality/religion/art/law/lore/fiction. One’s gets shoulded as legalistic and divisive balancing acts, focusing on culpability and blame, and the hindsight of logic, and the other… there-is-a-gap… ---to where responsibility blurs (all) this into credit we can mirror-neuron our way into empathy and thinking of the children, everyone as children. Moral agency is more than Kant in good form, and is more about bettering than the good. About bettering that which does not exist. The world.