(I can’t imagine I would be able to accurately assess utility for a masochist just by trying to employ my empathy!)
I think that might be a better strike against empathetic ethics than anything the OP presents, actually. Empathy’s effectiveness as a moral guide is strictly limited by its ability to model others’ hedonic responses, an ability constrained both by the breadth of hedonic variation in the environment and by the modeler’s imagination. That doesn’t even work too well for heterogenous, multicultural societies like most of the First World—you need to take a meta-ethical approach to keep it from breaking down over sexual and religious points, for example—so I’d expect it to be completely inadequate for problems involving nonhuman or transhuman agents. Which needn’t be speculative; animal rights would qualify, as would corporate ethics.
The semantics are important in understanding the debate. Perhaps that is obvious to the rationalists here, but it seems to me this was essentially a semantic debate (the last few comments between gwern and byrnema), with which I tend to agree with byrnema. Perhaps it could be helpful to clearly define the expected denotation of “empathy”? Wikipedia states “Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being” whereas dictionary dot com defines it quite a bit more broadly as “1.
the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
2.
the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self. ”
I guess my point is I have always thought of the term in the broader sense, and I don’t think anyone can have any understanding whatsoever without the broader form of “Empathy”. Perhaps my own connotations are filtering in there too.
I think that might be a better strike against empathetic ethics than anything the OP presents, actually. Empathy’s effectiveness as a moral guide is strictly limited by its ability to model others’ hedonic responses, an ability constrained both by the breadth of hedonic variation in the environment and by the modeler’s imagination. That doesn’t even work too well for heterogenous, multicultural societies like most of the First World—you need to take a meta-ethical approach to keep it from breaking down over sexual and religious points, for example—so I’d expect it to be completely inadequate for problems involving nonhuman or transhuman agents. Which needn’t be speculative; animal rights would qualify, as would corporate ethics.
Beware of other-optimizing, essentially.
Those are good points.
Yes, but just to iterate: it’s a failure to empathize not a failure of empathy.
The semantics are important in understanding the debate. Perhaps that is obvious to the rationalists here, but it seems to me this was essentially a semantic debate (the last few comments between gwern and byrnema), with which I tend to agree with byrnema. Perhaps it could be helpful to clearly define the expected denotation of “empathy”? Wikipedia states “Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being” whereas dictionary dot com defines it quite a bit more broadly as “1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. 2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self. ”
I guess my point is I have always thought of the term in the broader sense, and I don’t think anyone can have any understanding whatsoever without the broader form of “Empathy”. Perhaps my own connotations are filtering in there too.
Yes, exactly.