I suspect it comes from the brain, which like every other part of the person comes to be through the evolutionary process. By definition, if caring offered no survival advantage, we wouldn't care about others. — Hanover

The evolutionary goal of any particular organism is not simply survival, but the maintenance of a normatively stable way of interacting with the environment in the face of changing circumstances. Evolutionary constraints are not a one-way direction from environment to organism, but a reciprocal shaping in which the direction of functioning of an organism co-defines what constitutes an evolutionary pressure on it. In other words , what matters to the functioning of a creature, what it cares about , what is relevant to it, belongs to the very core of the the nature of evolutionary pressure , rather than caring being a potentially dispensable product of it.

All living things are sense-makers. Rocks merely survive, living systems maintain ongoing patterns of actions. For humans, this is not a static pattern of behavior but one which is continually evolving.

The one who actually treat that killer - assuming he's eligible for therapy rather than the needle - may have to identify (very likely at some risk to his own mental health). The ones who study the etiology of the illness - if indeed, it's considered an illness rather than evildoing or heroism in the particular society, who study, describe and classify the behaviour need no more emotional bridges with their subject than those who study, describe and classify the pathogens that cause epidemics. — Vera Mont

If one believes that the model of medical illness is adequate to understand the behavior of serial killers, sociopaths, etc, then one has already succumbed to the kind of thinking that splits off emotion from cognition they you seem to buy into. It’s not that you can’t come up with useful results by taking a reductionistic , objectively casual stance, but applying models derived from the hard sciences is woefully inadequate to make sense of how people think and feel. Having said that, it isn’t as though such researchers haven’t first done their damnest to emphatically figure out the people they slap these labels on. It’s that their objectivist stance covers over the valuable insights that could be gained by finding a way to integrate thought and feeling, cognition and emotion, fact and value, motive and cause. As a result, an ‘emotional bridge’ between psychologist and research subject is treated as a hinderance to scientific objectivity.

And if normal people cannot identify with pathologically destructive people? I doubt pathologically or calculatedly destructive people identify with their victims either. Some bridges cannot be built.

Evaluation is intellectual — Vera Mont

Empathy is used to understand information. Evaluation can only be done out of information. You can't evaluate without anything to evaluate and draw conclusions from and you can't evaluate if you don't understand the information.

What's the standard against which you evaluate another person's behaviour? Your own, or the norm accepted by society. — Vera Mont

How do you arrive at moral behavior? For yourself and society? You keep returning to some "standard" or "norm", but how are these defined? How do you evaluate these if you aren't open to understanding behavior fully through empathic understanding?

Emotions may cause him to act a certain way, but he's not evaluated by society on his feelings, only on his actions. Behaviour, is judged on legal considerations of prevention, correction or punishment. No empathy required. — Vera Mont

This is plain wrong. Courts evaluate the reasons for a crime all the time. The lust-filled smiling murderer get life in prison and the person struck with passionate revenge get a lower sentence. An action is always evaluated out of what caused the actions.

But empathy is not about justice, it's about understanding any action and behavior. Through empathy we can understand others in society doing good or bad, it's how we function socially, it's why the mirror-neurons are an important part; they're key to humans even being social animals.

And if we speak of crime preventions, how do you think we can prevent crimes without empathically understand the drive behind certain crimes? It's only through proper empathy that we can understand why certain crimes happen and be able to prevent it in the future.

Not to evaluate. Only to understand and figure out how to deal with the destructive ones. — Vera Mont

And how do we figure out how to deal with destructive ones without fully understanding their emotions?

That judgment is made from the outside: What did the person do? Does our collective moral framework condone that act? (Morality is not a given; it varies by culture, circumstance and time.) Should we allow him to keep doing it? If not, how do we stop him? (More often by incarceration than fellow feeling.) — Vera Mont

And how does this collective and individual moral framework form in the first place? Through time and culture, how do you think morality evolves? How does it change?

You're referring to this abstract "outside" which informs our morality, but what is this "outside" but the thing we formed by our empathic understanding of the human condition? Of each other and everyone's struggles? If we didn't use empathy to discern morality, then we would chop off the hands of the thief who stole some bread, regardless of that act being to save their child from dying of hunger. We don't do that, because we mold morality out of our empathic understanding of other's acts.

Who says it needs to be quantifiable? Humans do torture one another as well as other animals and not necessarily for their own pleasure: sometimes it's just business. — Vera Mont

I talked about how to evaluate the complexity of human thoughts and acts, which aren't able to easily be evaluated through mere data collection about the physical chemistry of the being.

I do not believe that every executioner feels the fear of his charges, that every pain researcher shares the distress of his lab specimens, that the members of a lynch-mob identify with their victims. Conversely, I don't believe that it is necessary for a surgeon to experience the suffering of his patients or a psychotherapist to identify with the glee of a serial killer. — Vera Mont

Empathy isn't a one-note thing. It's not either on or off. As I mentioned, people who are unable to handle empathy can end up in a cognitive dissonance. Some train themselves to utilize empathy for research, others to evaluate complex societal issues.

An executioner doesn't have to understand the person they execute. A lab researcher doesn't have to understand their subject if that's not vital to the study, a lynch-mob wouldn't exist without their failure to empathize. A surgeon might not need empathy when doing surgery, but sure does so when evaluating their well-being afterwards and before. And a psychotherapist absolutely require empathy to be able to understand their subjects, how would they otherwise discern the emotional dimension of their subject and form a proper explanation for their behavior and actions?

What you're describing isn't what empathy is about. Empathy is an ability to help understand another person through a deep emotional understanding of their feelings. It has nothing to do with sympathizing with other people's morality, their actions or anything like that. And that's my point; people constantly mix things up believing that if someone through empathy, show understanding of an immoral person, then they also agree with them.

It's this that prevents society to fully function and fully deal with morality's complexity, because people judge each others ability to evaluate morality based on a misconceived idea about how we form understanding about individual's actions. And this concept of some overarching morality that is guided by society, leaders, god or whatever, is what existentialists throughout the 1900s tackled because how society, especially Nazi Germany in the 30s and 40s proved that such faith in institutional morality is plain bullshit and corruptible to the point an entire society becomes immoral.

This is why empathy needs to stop be seen as sympathizing. Our mirror-neurons, which are the most important part of empathy, does not have any part in how we judge other people. This function works regardless of morality, but being aware of our empathy helps tremendously to form judgements and morality that is just and fair; and much better than faith in institution's corruptible definitions of morality.

Empathy is used to understand information. Evaluation can only be done out of information. You can't evaluate without anything to evaluate and draw conclusions from and you can't evaluate if you don't understand the information. — Christoffer

I see that evaluation - whatever you mean that in regard to human behaviour - is very important to you. I don't quite understand why.

How do you arrive at moral behavior? For yourself and society? You keep returning to some "standard" or "norm", but how are these defined? — Christoffer

In order to 'evaluate' anything, you first need a standard against which to measure it and some unit of measurement. How such standards and norms are defined is according to the precepts and world-view of the culture: what a society expects, accepts and tolerates from its members. Moral and legal systems differ, as do human attitudes from one historical period to another. That is why I find your demand to evaluate behaviours and their motives so perplexing.

And how do we figure out how to deal with destructive ones without fully understanding their emotions? — Christoffer

We don't. Every society sets up a system of laws to regulate its members' behaviour, and every society fails to prevent crime, interpersonal conflict, injustice and abuse.

You're referring to this abstract "outside" which informs our morality, but what is this "outside" but the thing we formed by our empathic understanding of the human condition? — Christoffer

Inside and outside are hardly abstract concepts. (and I didn't say appearances inform our moralities; that's far more complicated than everyday assessment of another person's actions). We see what other people look like, what they do, hear what they say and judge them accordingly. We can imagine how they feel if it's similar to how we might feel in their place.
In general, human do not treat one another as if all that understanding and bridge-making were very effective.

Anyway, whatever empathy is, you won't find it in a computer chip.

I see that evaluation - whatever you mean that in regard to human behaviour - is very important to you. I don't quite understand why. — Vera Mont

I'm not sure what you mean? I'm following in the direction you're taking the discussion by choosing to answer on certain parts of what I wrote.

In order to 'evaluate' anything, you first need a standard against which to measure it and some unit of measurement. — Vera Mont

But morality is fluid, changing between cultures and through time. How can you have a standard with such a fluid foundation?

And why is it fluid? Because we evaluate and dissect our morality in every generation. And that is impossible without the ability to empathically understand other people's point of view.

How such standards and norms are defined is according to the precepts and world-view of the culture: what a society expects, accepts and tolerates from its members. Moral and legal systems differ, as do human attitudes from one historical period to another. That is why I find your demand to evaluate behaviours and their motives so perplexing. — Vera Mont

Culture, world-views and society change massively over time. It isn't static.

How can you find a stable moral ground while society is changing without careful evaluation and dissection of the moral values that are changing?

What is perplexing is that you point out that morality is different between cultures and through time, but then state that it is at the same time a standard world-view that should define the norms. How can you both have a constantly changing morality and at the same time letting it be a standard norm? It becomes a paradox in which society should always adhere to the societal standards and norms of morality, but at the same time these norms and standards are constantly changing.

Isn't it then true that since morality constantly change and this morality is informing the societal norms and standards, that in order for it to change in a rational and thoughtful way, people need to carefully evaluate societal morals in order for them to change over time in a thoughtful and responsible way?

That cannot be done without fully understanding the emotional realm of morality, which requires an empathic understanding of all people.

We don't. Every society sets up a system of laws to regulate its members' behaviour, and every society fails to prevent crime, interpersonal conflict, injustice and abuse. — Vera Mont

It fails because it still operates on mob mentality. A problem with democracies has been that crime and punishment becomes voting issues, and so we have outsourced an academically sound topic to that of the mob screaming for solutions and politicians promising solutions that are satisfying for the crowd/mob, not those that are effective in preventing crime.

Laws are only able to guide those already law-abiding, and only able to invoke justice after a crime, not prevent them. As plenty academic studies have shown, laws mean nothing to those who do crimes, because that's not how the human psyche and emotions work.

Crime prevention requires understanding the situations and emotions which leads up to crime, and adjusting society to prevent those paths taken. But this is not emotionally satisfying for the mob/crowd, who operates on the bloodlust of revenge, which in turn informs political decisions that supposedly are there to deal with crime.

The mob and public is not intellectually and emotionally mature enough to stand behind actual solutions. This has been proven over and over. There are so many researchers who comment on bad political decisions for crime prevention over and over that it's become satire. The public is immature in this area.

Inside and outside are hardly abstract concepts. (and I didn't say appearances inform our moralities; that's far more complicated than everyday assessment of another person's actions). We see what other people look like, what they do, hear what they say and judge them accordingly. We can imagine how they feel if it's similar to how we might feel in their place.
In general, human do not treat one another as if all that understanding and bridge-making were very effective. — Vera Mont

It is abstract because you refer to it as some standard within a system that is constantly changing. What is a standard and norm within something that is constantly changing? A person within this system might adhere to the norms and standards around them, but a citizen in Nazi Germany did so too. It's not enough to just conclude morality to come from this illusive "standard" because that standard is constantly shifting. In order to find good morals when living in Nazi Germany, only those with functioning empathy were able to see through the indoctrination narrative that skewed the morality of the public. As I mentioned, the public is generally stupid and emotionally immature; that's true for both Nazi Germany and modern times.

Only through empathic understanding can we truly evaluate and arrive at good moral standards that consist through time rather than change by doctrines.

↪Joshs
And if normal people cannot identify with pathologically destructive people? I doubt pathologically or calculatedly destructive people identify with their victims either. Some bridges cannot be built — Vera Mont

You can’t build a bridge where you have already defined the terrain as unbridgeable. Construing people via dichotomies like normal vs pathologically destructive pre-decides the outcome. Why not go back and re-phrase the issue as ‘ I cannot identity with people whose motives and thinking are alien to me’. That will open up alternatives to the conclusion that they are objectively ‘pathologically destructive.’ You can always retreat to that position if no other workable ways of construing the other come to you.

But morality is fluid, changing between cultures and through time. How can you have a standard with such a fluid foundation? — Christoffer

All societies do have standards and norms, moral precepts and laws, at any given time, for whatever length of time. This was never a mystery. It's not a 'fluid foundation'; it's social evolution, which is more rapid than biological evolution, but takes a similar pattern of punctuated equilibrium: centuries-long stasis, interspersed with years- or decades-long bursts of change after major upheavals.

Culture, world-views and society change massively over time. It isn't static. — Christoffer

That's why you have to take your standard from where you happen to be in geography and history, rather than demand a constant universal one.

How can you find a stable moral ground while society is changing without careful evaluation and dissection of the moral values that are changing? — Christoffer

By being the philosopher, revolutionary, inventor or prophet who causes the change. Everybody else just goes along, willingly or not, with the status quo of their time and place.

A problem with democracies has been that crime and punishment becomes voting issues, and so we have outsourced an academically sound topic to that of the mob screaming for solutions and politicians promising solutions that are satisfying for the crowd/mob, not those that are effective in preventing crime. — Christoffer

Outsourced? From what previous condition? Prelates and kings. They were not able to prevent crime, either, they just dealt with it more harshly. Who, exactly, are those who have effectively prevented crime?

Isn't it then true that since morality constantly change and this morality is informing the societal norms and standards, that in order for it to change in a rational and thoughtful way, people need to carefully evaluate societal morals in order for them to change over time in a thoughtful and responsible way? — Christoffer

Which people need to carefully evaluate societal morals in order for them to change over time in a thoughtful and responsible way? If not the democratic mob, then - the self-appointed emperor, the military dictator, the high priest or the omnipotent professor? All but the last have been in charge, without affecting any real change in the human condition. How do you propose to elevate the academic to philosopher-king?

It [outside] is abstract because you refer to it as some standard within a system that is constantly changing. — Christoffer

No, I didn't. I said people can't see inside of other people's minds to know what the other is thinking or feeling. We may guess at their motivations and intentions, may sympathize with their situation, but we judge them, according to the norms of our society, by their words and actions.

A person within this system might adhere to the norms and standards around them, but a citizen in Nazi Germany did so too. — Christoffer

Exactly. From the perspective of our own culture, we can disapprove of the norms of other cultures, just as they can disapprove of ours. Your own social environment is what's available to teach you a primary mode of thought, which you may modify later in life, but most people don't. That's what makes it so hard for immigrants to adjust to a different culture, and for that culture to adjust to them.

Only through empathic understanding can we truly evaluate and arrive at good moral standards that consist through time rather than change by doctrines. — Christoffer

I support your effort to do so.

Why not go back and re-phrase the issue as ‘ I cannot identity with people whose motives and thinking are alien to me’. That will open up alternatives to the conclusion that they are objectively ‘pathologically destructive.’ — Joshs

Because an alien mode of thought is one thing to consider - been there, done that - a lot. A trail of broken bodies in shallow graves is quite another, and I will not attempt any kind of connection with the mind that took pleasure in their pain.
But that is a personal bridge which I refuse to build. I asked a quite different question here:
"And if normal people cannot identify with pathologically destructive people? I doubt pathologically or calculatedly destructive people identify with their victims either."
That was not about me, it was about the behaviour of the majority of law-abiding, generally honest, generally compassionate people viz-a-viz home-invaders, rapists and terrorists. I myself, might begin to fathom the actions of those people, but their victims probably can't, any more than a hazardous waste dumper can empathize with the people who well get cancer from the water. I don't get to define all psychological terrains; I can only describe the ones I've seen.

I don't think I have anything left to say on this subject, except to repeat: No, an empathy chip won't work.

Agree with you. Also notice the original poster has been notably absent from the discussion.

In a world becoming unliveable because of conflict, inequality, social unrest and environmental degradation, technology may hold the key to a profound solution: an empathy chip. Imagine a small neural implant that enhances human empathy, allowing people to understand deeply and care about the feelings of others. Such a breakthrough could revolutionise human interaction, reshape societies, fix inequality and potentially save the planet from its greatest threat, which is us human beings. — Rob J Kennedy

In imagining such an implant it would seem to me that we'd be able to do much more than create an empathy implant -- we could also create implants which transform people into the perfect soldier (feel fulfilment in killing the enemy), or the perfect worker (only desires to make any boss happy), etc.

That is, the science will be neutral as to how it's used.

To use the excellent example here:

I wonder if you've ever read the novel "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, or perhaps seen the film. The story explores exactly what's wrong with the idea of conditioning people to be good (or empathetic). — J

What could happen is that we could install extreme empathy chips in criminals so that the rest of us can then punish them for their crimes by triggering their empathy for others -- the empathy chip itself could be put to horrible uses.

And, given human nature, I generally think that's what will happen.

Unfortunately, given human nature, if it's possible I'm sure we'll figure it out some day.

What could happen is that we could install extreme empathy chips in criminals so that the rest of us can then punish them for their crimes by triggering their empathy for others -- the empathy chip itself could be put to horrible uses. — Moliere

Yes. But even if the chip is only put to a "good" use, Burgess' novel asks, "What have we done to a human being if we remove the choice to be good -- freedom, in other words?"

Yes. But even if the chip is only put to a "good" use, Burgess' novel asks, "What have we done to a human being if we remove the choice to be good -- freedom, in other words?" — J

I would love to see how that would play out in reality. Thinking it through rigorously is more likely to expose the errors in the assumptions underlying the coherence of the idea of externally manipulating another’s ability to choose the good.

Well, the whole thing is a fantasy. Kind of a "what if?" story. But the novel helps us think about other forms of conditioning that are all too real. See Foucault.

I think when we look at the 21st chapter of Clockwork Orange it demonstrates that even if we remove the power to "be good" through what amounts to very effective operant conditioning -- Alex still grows up and starts to want to do good out of his own volition, rather than because he feels sickness at what he has been forced to learn as evil.

I've got the original British edition, which evidently organizes the chapters differently (and includes a final section omitted from most U.S. editions, I believe). Does your Chap 21 start the same way my Part 3, Chap 7 does?: "What's it going to be then, eh?" And does it end with: "Amen. And all that cal." ?

I would love to see how that would play out in reality. Thinking it through rigorously is more likely to expose the errors in the assumptions underlying the coherence of the idea of externally manipulating another’s ability to choose the good. — Joshs

I don't think it would work quite as effectively as the story says -- I'd imagine some analogues to current pharmacological methods -- it's not like the environment and history suddenly isn't important because the neurons dance differently. (soldiers can be made more effective through pharmacology today, so my imagined scenario isn't quite so imagined

Yup!

Then yes, with this as the final chapter, I agree with what you say about Alex's redemption. Here's the interesting story about that chapter's history:

The 21st chapter was omitted from the editions published in the United States prior to 1986. In the introduction to the updated American text (these newer editions include the missing 21st chapter), Burgess explains that when he first brought the book to an American publisher, he was told that US audiences would never go for the final chapter, in which Alex sees the error of his ways, decides he has lost his taste for violence and resolves to turn his life around. At the American publisher's insistence, Burgess allowed its editors to cut the redeeming final chapter from the US version, so that the tale would end on a darker note, with Alex becoming his old, ultraviolent self again – an ending which the publisher insisted would be "more realistic" and appealing to a US audience. — A Clockwork Orange, Wikipedia

This same darker ending was the one used in Kubrick's film.

heh, yup! :D

By the time I got around to the book it had already gone through its pop culture phase, the movie was old, and I had seen it and was interested in the book because of all the made up words in it. I say what I say because I read that essay :)

Yes, definitely falls along those lines. I think being honest is probably hte crux. With yourself. Stop arguing about things you don't even believe. If people did that, we'd be able to remove teh trash around our feet and notice we stand on the same ground.