I first encountered the suggestion that empathy is, or should be, the basis of morality in a tiny little discussion group many years ago. It struck me as a rather odd idea, and I dismissed it glibly as lacking any principle. And that, in summary, is what this note is about.
The concept that empathy is important has filtered through to news production and I see it in commentary on social issues and decision-making. For example, this article about American social support:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-wheres-the-empathy.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article&_r=0
This is a moving piece about a man whose life fell apart and eventually ended early from entirely preventable causes, despite him living in a supposedly civilised society. But its call, its title, is 'where is the empathy?', and its final comment is asking you to have empathy for people like the man. In this article, which is merely the most recent in a line of reports, news items and commentaries, the link between empathy and morality isn't so explicit. But I still think that calling for empathy is a pernicious and ultimately counter-productive act.

First of all, it's worth mentioning that empathy is a widely-accepted basis for morality. Moral philosophers long ago realised that arbitrary codes of conduct supposedly vouchsafed by God(s) are difficult to justify or compare on that basis alone, and have sought other bases for moral systems. The typical approach is a wonderful example of a circular argument (begging the question): a moral philosopher has an intuition that something is wrong, creates a moral rule that declares that this thing is wrong in order to meet his intuition, and thereby claims to have reached his intuition as a conclusion when actually it was a premise.
Of course, if the moral rules all cohere then there is indeed a system of morality that can be used, but there are innumerable systems that are internally consistent. What most of modern philosophy does, as far as I can tell, is to use an entirely arbitrary method of deciding which rules to support and propose. One's own intuitions are barely better than divine fiat, especially given that divine fiat is basically someone else's own intuitions with some extra stories built around them.
So I'm not in any mood to accept arguments from the supposed authority of the academic field of moral philosophy.

On the other hand, what I'm complaining about isn't academic; it's in popular media. I do understand the attitude that thinks that 'if only someone understood the situation better, that person would be more generous'. I dispute the implicit assertion that empathy is the key to understanding, or necessary for treating someone well, or fairly. I don't want to get into an argument about other possibilities for the complete basis and structure of morality, so I hope to show here that using empathy as the intuitively sensible basis leads to some counter-intuitive results that make it internally inconsistent. It's incoherent nonsense, and I want to demonstrate that with some examples.

Next, let's define empathy. According to Wikipedia, it's the capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from within the other person's frame of reference: i.e the capacity to place oneself in another's shoes. But I think it's popularly used to include vicariously experiencing another's feelings. Empathy is feeling what another feels; sympathy is understanding intellectually what another feels, or feeling sad about the bad experiences of another person.
This contrast is informative: people are arguing that it is emotion and not rational thought that gives us morality. I accept that engaging people's empathy is often an effective way to encourage good behaviour, but I don't think that the empathy itself either justifies the behaviour or defines what is good. It's simply a motivating force that offers no insight into how good or bad an action is. The simple fact is that our emotions can deceive us, just as our intuitions and instincts can be wrong.
I should have noted all the examples over the last few years, but here are some:
Spock, in the updated Star Trek franchise, is not the main character he once was. Whereas in the original series he was an aspirational character, with a delicate balance struck between his powerful intellect and Kirk's supposed leadership, creativity and ability to bluff, in the updated film franchise we are explicitly shown that emotions trump reason; that pure intellect is not what makes us human. I can understand why: society has moved on, and we no longer feel as close to the barbaric past, with a need to distinguish ourselves from it by looking to a rationalist future. For centuries humans defined themselves by what they could do and animals couldn't. Now we convince ourselves of superiority by trumpeting the greatness of what we can do and our machines can't. Further, emotions are universal: everyone experiences them, and in that respect everyone is equal to others, whereas we do rank people by intellect. Basing humanity on emotionality is a very democratic basis for defining ourselves. No-one will feel inferior when we decide that emotions are all that are required, and are superior to other aspects of humanity. Instead of a barbaric past, people feel the need to reject a cold, unforgiving present run by systems and machines. I would hazard a guess that it's possible to have a warm, friendly society that nonetheless uses reason and intellect to make decisions, but that possibility isn't in people's minds.
So we claim that emotions are the defining feature of humanity. And it's blatantly untrue. We named ourselves 'homo sapiens' because we are distinct from our ancestors and other animals because we can think. We have the most powerful minds on the planet. Other animals quite clearly experience emotions and instincts, but no species has proven that it can think abstractly in the way we can. If morality, which is a different set of rules from the state of nature, can be based on one human attribute, it must be the one attribute that distinguishes us from the rest of nature, not one we share with other animals.

Of course, one film doesn't necessarily represent popular culture. What else is there? Well, we recently had an outcry over the footballer Ched Evans who was found guilty of rape, served his sentence and was due to return to football. Amongst all the fuss about bad role models (this role model fuss is mostly a waste of time; I prefer to encourage people to plough their own furrow, or not get stuck in a rut at all, rather than imitate someone else) I saw someone advocating empathy for the victim(s). In particular, many commentators were angry that he continued to protest his innocence and thought that he should not be allowed to get away with it. We were told to think of how the victim felt that her attacker could return to the high life with no approbation.
See the BBC summary here:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30699017
I haven't examined the details of what happened myself, but I will for the moment assume that the courts were right, and that he did indeed rape her. The courts found him guilty of a crime and gave him a punishment as mandated in English law. What exactly is the problem? The assumption is that he's a nasty man, hard to empathise with, whereas the woman was an innocent victim. But he has served his time, as mandated by law. Do we really want to argue that criminals should never become part of society after an offence? That's not very fair to all the reformed drug addicts, childhood criminals or passionate people who genuinely regret their crimes and want to escape their past.
Of course, a major problem seemed to be that he protests his innocence. Are we going to make people's beliefs a crime now? I fully understand the incredible frustration of self-righteous people who are utterly wrong. I spent a great deal of my life with a father at home, and bullies at school, who firmly believed (and probably believe still) that they were the saintly heroes of the world, and their occasional experiences of justice or sense were unfair. But our laws don't allow for thoughtcrime. There might be some room in sentencing and parole decisions for whether a prisoner shows genuine regret and contrition, but Mr Evans has served his time. People who want to punish him want to break the law in a specific case because they have heard about it, and they want to punish someone who seems unpleasant to them. They hate the idea that he can go back to a high-paying job and earn more than his victim. I agree that it seems unjust that he should earn so much. But the same applies to vast numbers of sportsmen (sportswomen don't tend to get paid much); these are people who often demonstrate severe character flaws and show little virtue beyond the narrow ability at sport.

Perhaps we should change the law, or sentencing guidelines, so that rapists such as he get more severe punishment. Perhaps we should somehow prevent footballers, or anyone, earning thousands of times as much as an average person. But we should not treat one man differently from all others. That is, intuitively, unfair and unjust.

What other examples are there? One that has come up quite regularly is debate about cancer drugs. Cancer drugs are invariably expensive, and new ones don't necessarily offer much. The pharmaceutical industry has run out of ideas and has already done all the easy things to find chemicals with major health benefits, and so it is making small changes or finding slight variations of chemical composition in already-established drugs to get small improvements. And it charges a lot more money for these 'new' drugs. Given concerns about publication bias or even biased research it's not clear that even these small improvements in effectiveness exist, but let's assume that they do.
We regularly see news stories about an unfortunate individual with cancer who wants some new drug but has had it refused because it is too expensive. The NHS has a limited amount of money and must judge cost-effectiveness. Some drugs achieve a level of effectiveness where NICE, the organisation that makes these decisions, hasn't decreed that the drug should never be used and allows local hospitals to decide for themselves. So sometimes we see stories about the postcode lottery that means that this cancer patient will suffer and/or die but others won't.
This hyperbole is stupid, as most of these drugs merely offer a tiny extra chance of surviving or just an extra month of life. But empathy makes people upset at the injustice of this person missing out on life when there are more opportunities to save the person. Empathy doesn't make us think of all the people whose lives would be lost or who would suffer if we took the money from their treatment in order to fund cancer care. Because we don't see the stories of other suffering people we don't think about how cancer drug money might alleviate their suffering, whatever form it might take.

We also regularly see a story about a dead or murdered child. I saw a story recently about a runaway truck that killed a four-year-old girl and two men and injured the girl's grandmother. The headlines and main photos were about the young girl; the men got little captions elsewhere. One of the man had just got married; the other had a family depending on him. But the tragedy was apparently the death of a child barely old enough to think clearly, with no lasting friendships, no dependents and little effort invested in her. People die every day, but I suppose maybe one story has to be the story to publish. So if this was the story, and all the other deaths just happened not to be involved, why were the adults less important? Are we sure that some human lives are more valuable than others?
My guess, although I might be wrong, is that everyone can empathise with the idea of a life cut short. Everyone can imagine their own life cut short back when they were young, and the things that they've already experienced that would not have happened. It's harder to empathise with someone who has taken a different path in life.

Of course, someone might say that we simply need more empathy; we need to learn to have empathy for everyone, including those who aren't currently in our thoughts. My examples are of empathy based on anecdote, not on full data, but if we could be aware of all the information, empathy would work properly. If my examples are simply cases of misplaced or insufficient empathy, why is some people's empathy misdirected or insufficient? If empathy needs enhancement through careful consideration, is it not the rational consideration that is the key to moral action, not the empathy that directed people the wrong way? If empathy isn't working properly but is the basis for morality, how did we define what 'working properly' is?
We defined morality first, then saw that empathy wasn't getting there, so we saw the flaw in relying on empathy as it currently is. That must mean that empathy isn't the basis for morality, or it couldn't possibly give a different result.

Not convinced yet? Let's try a different tack. Is a dog worth more than a human life? Is a teddy bear? We can form bonds not only with other people, but with pets and inanimate objects. Most children have a toy or blanket that means a lot to them, and most of us have experienced the anthropomorphisation of something, when we ascribe it a character and feelings. We don't want to hurt the feelings of our toy!
Some people form a bond with an invisible friend, their home, their country or an AI on the computer. But although we feel empathy for these things, we are deceived, because they don't experience the emotions that we feel on their behalf. A teddy bear has no emotions, and nor does a country. If empathy is the basis for morality, then we must value these things as if they had emotions that they do not, simply because empathy tells us to. Of course, if empathy needs to be tempered with thought, then, as before, we've defined morality first, and then seen that empathy leads us to the wrong conclusions. Yet again, it's clear that empathy does not define morality at all; it is morality that defines what empathy we ought to be acting on, and what we ought to feel empathy for.

Of course, philosophers haven't got it entirely wrong. Empathy often leads us to what seem like good actions. That's because we often define 'good' by reference to the effects on other people, and empathy makes us value other people's experiences. However, empathy is a blunt tool and misses some people out, and includes some things that aren't people. In the terms of Daniel Kahneman, empathy is 'thinking fast'; it's an evolutionary shortcut that is often right but which sane and rational humans should aim to replace with precise and well-defined rules.
Empathy is a shortcut for thinking about others. Empathy is feeling about others, and it comes naturally without any effort. That helps ensure that people actually do it, but doesn't make it more likely to find the truth. The amount of effort involved has no effect on being right (which is why I didn't like the idea of having a lot of best effort prizes at school and one actual prize). What people ought to say when touting empathy as the key to good behaviour is courtesy, thoughtfulness or politeness. These all involve thinking about other people. It takes effort to think about other people, whether it's the possibility of someone behind you on a narrow path wanting to get past or a married man who was run over by a truck. It takes effort to be a good person, to function in society with other people.
That's a hard message. People want to imagine that they can breeze through life doing their own thing, and people hate being expected to think about more things. A few extra things to consider all the time costs a lot of effort, and I understand that. The stress of balancing all sorts of considerations is not proportionate to the amount of time it takes to act on those considerations. And in crowded societies with millions of people, there are a lot of other people to consider. It's a lot easier to cut people up on the road because as a road-user you have the right to be using it. It's easy to scan a news story and feel sad about another small child... and easy to support a campaign to increase child protection as a consequence. It's easy to bully the person who doesn't tug on your heartstrings if it makes people laugh who you do want to impress.
It's hard to be courteous all the time, even to faceless strangers who have no hold on us. It's hard to grasp that perhaps children are harmed no more often than previously, or than adults. It's hard to do cost=benefit analyses and actively try to think of what else child protection money might be spent on. But maybe that money will come from child healthcare or education and isn't necessary.

I do understand all this. But 'easy' isn't 'right'. And every time a well-meaning person invokes empathy, he's telling everyone to value feeling over thought, and he's telling people that being right is easy; it's merely a question of listening to your instincts. I think that choosing to be thoughtless despite our abilities is positively wrong. Do you think?