"Radical Empathy"
In Rutger Bregman's book Humankind, he writes about an experiment in which psychologists told volunteers a sad story about a 10-year-old girl who was suffering from a deadly disease. She is, according to the story, on a waiting list for a life-saving treatment, but time is of the essence. The volunteers are told that they can move her up on the list, but they are instructed to be objective in their decision. Most people, understanding that all the children on the list were in dire straits, opted to not give this specific girl an advantage over the others. A second group of volunteers, however, was given the same set up, but this time they were asked to imagine how this specific girl must be feeling, to dwell on her pain, suffering, and fear. In this case, the majority chose to allow her to jump the line.
As Bregman points out, this is, at best a shaky moral choice. After all, giving this girl, who the second group of volunteers now "know" through their empathy, an advantage, they are in fact disadvantaging all the other kids, violating the principles of what most of us would consider even-handed fairness. Those other children have stories as well, but because the volunteers spent time empathizing with this one specific girl, they favored her. Bregman sees this as an example of how empathy can blind us:
(Empathy) is something we feel for people who are close to us; for people we can smell, hear and touch. For family and friends, for fans of our favorite band, and maybe for the homeless guy on our own street CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: "Radical Empathy"
