So this image has been going around various Pagan websites/facebook pages. There’s a big thing amongs Pagans that despite the fact that we do practice religions and are religious…that religion is still a “bad thing” and that spirituality and empathy are the higher/better things.
The problem is, when you get right down to it…empathy is a horrible way to determine morality. That’s why, weirdly enough, we develop our morality from our religions, rather than our empathy.
See, empathy is being able to understand and relate to your fellow human beings. On the surface, this is a good thing, because it allows humans to form emotional attachments to each other. But these emotional attachments can also lead us to do horrible things to other human beings.
And there’s the issue of there’s issues of morality that have little to do with empathy. Theft is a wonderful example of this. Many a thief can or will have a very sad story for why the steal something. If we were to base our morality on empathy, we would feel sorry for the thief an allow him on his way, feeling that he has less than the person he stole from, therefore needs it more than the original owner.
Let’s take murder, should we allow our empathy for either the victim or the killer to sway us in what is right and noble, much less what is legal and just? Is the killing of a person we find hateful supposed to be more acceptable because we can like their killer, and connect with them empathically, better than the person killed?
Morality has to come from something higher than mere, base empathy. Empathy can be toyed with, played with, shaped my fair words and foul thoughts. It was empathy, not divine morality, that led to people forming lynch mobs. Go watch To Kill A Mockingbird. The entire verdict was based was based on empathy for the victim…regardless of the law or innocence of the accused. Or take a more recent event with Rolling Stone and their false rape story. Everyone was so empathicly pulled by the victims story, that they pretty much disbanded an entire student organization and treated its members as if they were all rapists…despite the fact that the minimum of fact checking revealed that the “Victim” lied about the entire thing.
Empathy violated every essence of what good morality should be. It made victims of the innocence, and made someone guilty of lies and malice into the victim people were to feel sorry for, to empathize with. Empathy made evil into good, and good into evil.
Law, morality, these things were drawn from religion, they were taught to us by the Gods, because the Gods know things deeper than we do, they understand the cost of allowing emotions to rule, rather than reason or righteousness. Because sometimes doing the right thing violates empathy, if violates taking into other people’s feelings, because somethings are wrong no matter how people feel about them. Sometimes doing the right thing means hurting people, because if you don’t even more people will be hurt.
Son of Hel 
I recommend some of the Classical works regarding ethics instead of this trite meme about empathy. There are some excellent works from the 17th and 18th centuries as well that attempt to anchor codes of honor and ethical behavior in what are usually referred to as inherent human senses of right and wrong. They’re not perfect and personally I prefer the behavioral guidelines I have found along my pagan path but they do exist.
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Uh,
Without Empathy, then WHAT is there to help guide one’s actions, thoughts, etc. if one does not “walk a mile in the others’ shoes”? THAT is what Empathy is about: Putting yourself in the receiver’s position BEFORE you act on whatever you were intending to do.
“Ethics” can and DO differ from one to another. All ethics are, are one’s “standards” of behavior and how he/she thinks and believes of one’s own conduct towards others AS WELL AS how one expects to be treated by others. – In other words, “ethics”, “morals”, and the like are SUBJECTIVE and often differ greatly from person to person on what is “right” and what is “wrong”. Again, without the guidance of empathy (and understanding the perceptions and experiences of the other [receiver of your actions]), you end up without “compass” to determine the morality and ethics of any inter-person situation.
I believe the article’s author did well in hitting the issue head-on, and with a pretty powerful “diagnosis” of much of our societal ills as a result.
– Rev. Dragon’s Eye
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If I understand Svartwulf correctly, that’s precisely the problem. Empathy has no place in the ideal justice system because empathy interferes with our ability to mete out punishment. I am very aware of how harsh that statement is so let me be clear: I’d rather not live in a system that allows for perfect justice. I don’t like justice. I like vengeance and I like mercy but since I am myself no saint I really don’t like justice. If we were honest with ourselves then I think most would agree. So I want a system involving empathy, right? Actually, that’s not the motivator I want people using. Empathy, while powerful (indeed, too powerful oftentimes) is unpredictable. Law, especially law set down by others, is more predictable and again, more likely to serve justice. It also has loopholes to exploit and trip people up in and makes one helluva weapon for the people who understand its weaknesses.
Just because I agreed with Svartwulf’s argument doesn’t mean I’d like to live that way myself. I much prefer to be my own law.
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You live in a world I wish nothing to do with then. When “vengeance” and another’s dictatorial “law” are what define that society, then that society is nothing better than ALL of the world’s empires, past and now: Very temporary, and crumbling to dust. Such, is the testament of man.
Empathy, if truly regarded as important in society by its people, would be as effective a means of PREVENTING many such crimes in the first place. Just look at all of the world’s current examples today!
Again, you paint a world that I wish nothing of, because under such conditions and governance – we truly become NO BETTER than any other beast.
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Reblogged this on Moon of the Wolf and commented:
This.
I do have to admit, sometimes I have to catch myself because I have a tendency to base decisions on my emotions.
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Thank you for posting this – it was definitely food for thought! In the end, though, while I think you bring up good points (hardly the ‘trite meme’ suggested in the above comment), I have to disagree with your conclusions.
Religion in the common sense is also subject to manipulation, as are people at the hands of religious leaders. Worse, when religion is manipulated or exploited, it is usually done so at the hands of people who have a political or financial agenda of some sort – from such people, I prefer not to learn the ethics and morals that I live and govern myself by. This is why I take a more unconventional tack to this topic: I keep politics entirely out of my religious perspective. I seek my own relationship with the gods, and am careful to keep these relationships separate from the relationships I seek with other people.
Empathy is an instinctive understanding on our behalf for the thoughts and feelings of others. As such, it’s a natural cornerstone of any system that seeks to govern our interactions with others around us, such as morality or ethics, or the legal systems that are typically built around them. What you describe as a situation in which empathy is bad, because of situations where one’s empathy might face a conflict or be exploited, I see something else: I see that the situation is ‘bad,’ or undesired, not the empathy itself. The logic you use here, if applied to something like love or trust, would indicate that these things must also be undesirable due to their vulnerability to manipulation. Your Rolling Stone article example can be seen the same way: the problem was not the empathy, it was the (likely) political and financial pressures that led the journalist and publication to run a poorly-researched story in the first place. In the end, it is empathy that will enable many of us to understand the members of the student organization who were unfairly judged as a result of the failings of others.
In many cases, it is the setting aside of empathy that leads to unnecessary pain and suffering in our societies. The militants in the Middle East, for example, have set aside their empathy to serve a religious perspective that has been twisted by people with political and antisocial agendas. We can look further back in history, at the forced christianization of Heathens, starting with Charlemagne, for further examples illustrating this sort of thing. This might actually suggest that keeping religion out of the legal system might not be such a bad idea, and keeping the laws based on our understanding of mutual and harmonious benefit for all involved, namely empathy, might be the better way to go.
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Reblogged this on Through The Eyes of A Dragon and commented:
Damn!
You knocked that out of the park. THAT is exactly what needs to be said, louder and more often. So sad that so many of the “churches” always proclaim “love” and “compassion” and “morals”, yet do very little to constrain their own zeal for acting in opposition to these values. Hmmm! Don’t suppose it has something to do with “control” again, does it???
* * SAID RHETORICALLY AND SARCASTICALLY * *
Anyway,
Seems that many of the previous cultures there conquered by the “church”, were by far – MORE loving, compassionate, and just than their conquerors were.
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