(RNS) — There’s a new sin on the block, and its name is Empathy.
Actually, people are painting it both as a sin and a threat.
As a sin: Joe Rigney’s new book, “The Sin of Empathy,” released late last month, tells us that empathy “often leads to cowardice” and “frequently leads to brazen malice and cruelty.” Rigney is a Fellow of Theology at New St. Andrews College and an associate pastor under Doug Wilson at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. (Both Wilson and Christ Church have been in the news for, among other things, their advocacy of Christian nationalism.)
As a threat: In a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, Elon Musk described empathy as the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization” and (like Rigney) expressed concern about “weaponized empathy” or, as he also describes it, “the empathy exploit.”
This is hardly the first appearance of the idea that empathy might be sinful. Rigney himself began writing on it in 2019, with an article called “The Enticing Sin of Empathy.” But I first encountered the idea, albeit not exactly under this description, in the 1990s, when I read Hannah Arendt’s famous book “Eichmann in Jerusalem.”
Adolf Eichmann was a key official in the Nazi party who played an important role in organizing Adolf Hitler’s “final solution.” Arendt’s book recounts Eichmann’s trial in Nuremburg and dwells at some length on his sense of duty. Like most people, Eichmann was susceptible to humane feelings toward his victims; but he suppressed those for the sake of “duty.” He, too, seems to have been worried that empathy might be sinful. Arendt talks about how he felt “uncomfortable” about two occasions when he made exceptions for Jews to whom he had personal connections. She also talks about how, in his regard for the Nuremburg judges who went out of their way to try to understand him and to treat him with consideration, Eichmann mistook their “humanity for softness.”
In Rigney’s book, weaponizers of empathy include persecuted LGBTQ people who are looking for compassion and support, people who accuse church leaders or their spouses of abuse and people who claim to be victims of racism. In one of many illustrations, he writes:
“Why is untethered empathy so destructive? [Earlier] we noted the way that weaponized empathy can be used to manipulate others. At the extreme end we can think of the way that the transgender movement uses the prospect of suicide to manipulate parents into ‘affirming’ their child’s ‘gender identity’. ‘Would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?’ This is a hostage situation filled with manipulation.”
Although Rigney does not invoke duty per se, he goes on to argue that the path of virtue is to resist such manipulative ploys, ensuring that one’s feeling for others remains tethered to the shore of truth and reality.
Rigney is careful to say that it is not compassion he opposes, just empathy — and, indeed, just one kind of empathy. He identifies a morally neutral form of empathy, which he describes as emotion-sharing — feeling the feelings of another. The vicious form is what he characterizes as “an excess of compassion, when our identification with and sharing of the emotions of others overwhelms our minds and sweeps us off our feet.” (This is what he calls “untethered” empathy. If this definition strikes you as unusual, you’re not alone, as Daniel Kleven points out in his paper “Empathy is not a Sin, Part 2: The Troubling Fruit.”)
In connecting empathy with cruelty, Rigney focuses on the way in which empathy can be selective, privileging those with whom we empathize over others who may have just as much claim on us and our resources but, for whatever reason, have not garnered our empathy. This is a point that many have made in writing against empathy and related emotions. In addition to citing psychologist Paul Bloom’s well-known book, “Against Empathy,” Rigney also cites Arendt’s “On Revolution,” albeit selectively and missing her bigger picture. The money quote from Arendt, striking when taken out of context, is: “Pity … possesses a greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself.”
Bloom’s point, as well as Arendt’s, is founded on the idea that empathy (or pity) involves significant feeling-sharing which nobody does, or even can, manage to show toward everyone who might deserve it, and which some are inclined to indulge and amplify simply for its own sake. Given their characterizations of empathy and pity, these are sensible points. If what it is for a field medic to empathize with a soldier who has just lost a leg to a grenade is to share his feelings — writhing in agony, feeling overwhelmed by the pain, and so on — then please let us have field medics who lack empathy. But, at the same time, I doubt that anybody outside the anti-empathy crowd really thinks of empathy in quite this way.
Rigney’s arguments notwithstanding, I think it is just obvious that the fact that empathy can be weaponized and can lead to “cowardice” or even cruelty in the ways he describes doesn’t make it sinful. It makes it risky. But a lot of good things are risky. Love is risky, and in precisely the same ways.
The “hostage situation” that Rigney describes could easily be reframed in terms of love rather than empathy. In fact it is reframed that way in a Gospel Coalition article by Justin Taylor that Rigney quotes immediately after the “hostage situation” bit.
Likewise for the point about unfairness: Love can lead us to treat people unfairly, privileging those we love over those we don’t, and it can certainly be overindulged simply for its own sake. One hopes Rigney is not preparing a follow-up book called “The Sin of Love.”
At best, Rigney’s arguments establish a modest conclusion, one most carefully expressed as something like “untethered feeling-sharing is risky in some ways.” Repackaging this under the flashy title “The Sin of Empathy” might sell books, but it is irresponsible and pernicious.
Normally when people talk about empathy, they don’t have Rigney’s “untethered feeling-sharing” in mind. Rather, they have in mind something like putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and doing your best to attend to and identify with their feelings, their interests and their desires as they themselves understand them. Call this “common-sense” empathy.
Now return to Rigney’s illustration of the weaponization of empathy. His choice of case is telling. Whatever else might be going on when parents are being given suicide statistics in an effort to encourage them to empathize with and support their trans kids, untethered feeling-sharing is not what’s at issue. It’s not even on the horizon.
The typical situation where once-loving parents are rejecting, or considering rejecting, their trans kid (or doing worse) is one where feeling-sharing is largely absent, as well as common-sense empathy, compassion and even sympathy. They are not in danger of being overly immersed in their trans kid’s feelings. Typically, and understandably, given that they are not themselves trans, they can barely even relate to those feelings. What they are in danger of is hardness of heart.
By describing this situation in the terms that he does — a hostage situation, emotional blackmail, a case where empathy is being weaponized — Rigney is discouraging any movement whatsoever from the status quo toward feeling-sharing, putting oneself in the other’s shoes, even simple compassion or sympathy.
Rigney would likely insist that he is only advocating that empathy be tethered to truth and reality. But relying on “truth and reality” as one’s only anchors is itself risky. How risky depends on the clarity of one’s vision. Eichmann might well have said that his discomfort on the two occasions when he spared Jews from being murdered was a result of allowing empathy to come untethered from truth and reality. To avoid harming others we need all the tools God has given us — our capacity to discern truth and reality, for sure, but also our capacity for empathy.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge Nazi analogies are overused and polarizing; but Arendt’s study of Eichmann was a study in common humanity — the banality of evil and the potential for it in all of us. And part of what she showed us is that mistaking humanity for softness is dangerous.
Musk is right about one thing: Empathy is an exploit (in the computer hacker’s sense of the term). It’s a back door through which people we have become hardened against might actually get through to us. Suppressing it makes it easier for us to remain hardened — to persist in taking advantage of them, abusing them, oppressing them.
Empathy suppression is what helped Eichmann and others to steel themselves in the face of other people’s suffering to carry out their military duties. It’s what Rigney pretty explicitly wants people to do when confronted with the demands of the people he describes as “weaponizers”: persecuted LGBTQ people who are looking for compassion and support, people who accuse church leaders or their spouses of abuse and people who claim to be victims of racism.
He wants us not to cave in to the “ideology of victimhood,” but in pressing this case in the way that he does, he only risks encouraging us to victimize others further.
(Michael C. Rea is the Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and co-director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion. He is an honorary professor at the School of Divinity at University of St. Andrews. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)