Empathy: The Ground of Moral Behavior (April 2009)

Major spreads in our local newspapers have detailed the tragedy of losing 21 polo ponies to incompetent or perhaps illegal pharmaceutical compounding. I have been struck by pictures of grieving owners, and have myself empathized with their pain, and felt the craziness of such an unnecessary loss. It seems that pain caused unnecessarily to animals draws out our feelings of compassion and empathy.

Similarly, our Girl Scout troop visited the local animal shelter to do a service project this week, and the girls found themselves drawn to adopt the "poor puppies and kitties" who had been mistreated and needed homes. The girls came home and very effectively persuaded moms (myself included) to visit and to adopt. I felt the pain of the little four pound puppy who had been in the shelter for three weeks recovering from illness and mistreatment. Why would anyone mistreat or harm these helpless little beings?


While I don't want to diminish any feelings we may have toward these animals, I do want to pose questions about our empathy failures with human beings. And I want to do so, not from a feeling of superiority, but from an acknowledgement that I need to be more empathic with the people I care about, and even with those whom I probably should care more about.

Empathy is "feeling with" people, the ability to get inside another's skin and know what they are experiencing. It is touted as essential to our ethical or moral development and as what motivates us to behave morally or ethically. Empathy is the internal feeling that urges us to behave well toward others. It is the internal response to the question, "How would you feel if someone else did that (something of questionable moral character) to you?"

And yet, how often do we leave our empathy behind? When we are angry at the boss or an employee, do we remember to consider what their feelings are likely to be in response to our anger, or do we focus only on our own? When a family member or colleague fails to take care of their responsibilities, do we start yelling? Or do we take time to consider whether our chastisement is warranted, or whether they have a good reason for the failure, reasons that need to be considered and discussed as part of the effort to get the responsibilities taken care of?

I have complained to my daughter's elementary school principal about the amount of yelling that goes on at her school, and have even transferred my daughter out of a classroom in which the teacher regularly yelled at children. Yelling isn't what is taught as a classroom management strategy in teacher education programs, and what is taught works very effectively. Although I understand that teachers may become frustrated at times, I wonder if the yellers are taking the time to anticipate what the children on the receiving end of the yelling will feel. After all, as adults, shouldn't we be able to put our children's or students' needs and feelings before our own, even if we are angry or upset?

I made a Lenten promise to my daughter to stop being as irritable or harsh with her when she misbehaves. As a former family therapist, I know that harshness is not a recommended parenting or change creation strategy. And I find that all it takes to put my harshness aside is empathizing with her feelings - thinking ahead about how she will feel if I "blast" her. Should we be any less concerned about the feelings of our neighbors, our coworkers, our boss, our church members, or our employees?

If our answer is "No, of course not," then I would challenge you to take the questions a step further - What about people we don't know? People at a distance? What about the homeless person on your street corner, or the illegal immigrant who mows your lawn? What about the neighbor who lost her job, or the single parent struggling to care for three children? What about that friend who has become largely housebound due to a disability? What about the professional family who has become homeless because dad lost his job, the mortgage payments went sky high, and there are no other family members to step up and help?

Or might we consider a lack of empathy to have played a part in our current crisis? Was Bernie Madoff considering the feelings of the people whose money he took? Were the mortgage brokers who provided loans for people who were going to find it really hard to stay solvent thinking about the long term feelings or experiences of the people who wanted to borrow money? Were the lenders and realtors and financial mavens thinking about the long term risks of what they were doing, the risks that people would lose their homes, their retirement, their life savings, their jobs?

I am reminded of Robert Fulghum's book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (2004), in which he reminds us of Kindergarten's rules - Share Everything, Don't Hit Other People, Play Fair, Clean Up Your Own Mess, Don't Take Things That Aren't Yours. If we asked people why they follow these rules, wouldn't they remind us that we would want others to behave this way toward us? Wouldn't putting ourselves in another's place, and thus empathizing with her or him, keep us from doing wrong? Aren't we encouraged to do the right thing by our empathy with others? How much better might our relationships be if we started from a place of empathy rather than our "rights?" If we can empathize even with the horses or the shelter animals, can't we do the same for other human beings? Can we encourage ourselves to extend our empathy just a little further each week? Let's hear a rousing chorus of our nation's current positive attitude: "Yes, we can!"