What the fuck is empathy?

People talk about 'speaking for the powerless, for we could have been them.' Interpreting this as 1. it is a matter of luck that we are not them; 2. at any point of our life we could become them. 1 has little appeal to the Chinese people as we resist counterfactuals by training: everything that is must have been, and everything that is could not have been without. 2 is egoistic which sounds attractive, but it also leaves room for the more hardcore egoist to claim that it's simply better to get into power and make sure you never lose it. I'm sure many will find the hardcore egoist's position to be more attractive, for the same reason that gambling is more attractive than earning honest money.

Episode 114514 on why Kant was right: the argument that 'you should care because you may become them one day' is fatally flawed. You should care because it's the right thing to do. End of the story.

This is not to criticise people who uphold 2. 2 is sadly fucking progressive in our context. 1 is not Kantian either, it's just inviting people to check their privileges and hope they feel guilty about it. More importantly, neither 1 nor 2 looks like proper empathy: you are not imagining the suffering of others, you are imagining the counterfactual or hypothetical suffering of yourself.

You may object that this is the best we can do: surely you can't feel the pain without actually experiencing it, and when you do it's no longer other people's pain. Asking people to suffer from counterfactual pain sounds as much like a strech as from any other nonexistent or external ('external' as in 'not your own') pain.

But there is a difference. It's not that you can't feel counterfactual, hypothetical or external pain. Well you can't - you may feel pain (and various other emotional responses) as a result of knowing them - but whether you can really feel those pain is irrelevant. The real problem with 1 and 2 is that even in your imagination, the person subjected to those painful mental states is not someone else, but yourself.

For all intents and purposes, should this not be enough? As long as people are moved by imaginative pain and take action (which would be meaningfully altruistic), whether it's their own or someone else's pain is surely a matter of little moral insignificance?

Maybe. I mean, I would be happy enough if people start pretending to care, let alone taking actions. What scares me more than incoherence is the absense of any moral impetus whatsoever. Nevertheless, empathy as the morally significant notion we take it to be must point towards the suffering of others right now. Not our own suffering at some other points, but their suffering right now. 'Their' and 'right now' in italics.

I'm not too bothered about the empirical question as to how different kinds of empathy work as matters of psychological (or neurological) fact. I'm just thinking about the kind of empathy that might be worth defending. Surely some form of that has to exist?

Recent developments in Hong Kong revealed many Chinese emigrants' (defined as people with overseas experience) inability to emphasise with the people whose stakes cannot be made more clear. I'm referring to those people who claim to not understand why anyone would care to defend 勇武派, often disguising their criticism as a matter of strategic disagreement. Maybe they are genuinely clueless. Maybe they are living a bit too comfortably. I'm strongly against the idea of making people miserable so they can know better (as schools and parents want us to believe), but this also means that it is up to those people (and honestly every one of us) to reflect on what's wrong with those views. We can perhaps start by realising that our moral instincts are quite oftenly wrong.

I don't know how far reason can help us. I really don't want to believe that the only way to make people sensitive about others' suffering is through the suffering of their own. But if that's ultimately proven true, at least we know we deserve it.