I received a Christmas card adorned with ornaments each inscribed with different words: “Kindness. Equality. Justice.” I paused to reflect on the meanings of these words and the role of empathy in our lives. To live a good life, it’s important to show kindness and empathy to those around you, whether to a close friend or a stranger struggling with a flat tire. It’s right and true and just. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
But those that place these words on a Christmas card are not just advocating on a personal level. They want these empathetic values to be translated into universally applicable policies. And here the concepts become much more problematic. Empathy, kindness and the related bucket of feel-good values sit on a structure of emotion. They work well for interpersonal needs but make for poor policy. In fact, I’d argue the entire purpose of policy is to be dispasssionate and devoid of emotion to provide generalized guidance regardless of individual circumstances.
Here’s an example: someone I know is currently going through a surrogate pregnancy. They’ve struggled tremendously with fertility and pregnancy will be very dangerous and so after trying with every embryo they had from IVF, they settled on having a surrogate carry their child to term.
The whole process of surrogacy is still pretty new and it’s the first time I’ve ever really been confronted with the idea inside of my life. This is a great couple who I care for and I’m immediately emotionally invested in it. There’s no other valid reaction except to support and love and care for them. They’ll be fantastic parents and I can’t wait to meet their child. This is completely correct. And empathetic.
At the same time, I have more general questions about surrogacy and IVF. How should it work as a financial transaction? How does it affect the surrogate who carried the baby? What about the rest of the embryos, how do we think of them? And what happens in a future where technology makes artificial wombs possible? Should women still carry their babies or will most opt to have their children grown to birth in an artifical womb? And what if something is wrong genetically? Should they be able to pick the traits of their children?
That’s more than enough questions for a lifetime and I don’t know the answers to any of them. But it should be plain to see that any personal experience I have - people in my life that I’m emotionally connected to - should not provide any framework for evaluating any of these rather dense questions. It’s entirely morally appropriate - required even - to be able to separate the anecdotal from the general. Our culture has forgotten how to do that.
One of the biggest tensions in the public sphere is between negative laws and positive rights. Positive laws require prescribing action. They enforce another party to take action. This can be appropriate, for example requiring the State to provide an attorney for defense. It’s reasonable to describe a lot of progressive policymaking today as the drive towards more and more positive rights. Healthcare is a right and the state must provide it. So is housing. So are pronouns - it’s not enough that I have them, you must use them too.
As the scope of governance expands, emphasis should shift more towards negative policies. At a local level positive actions will be easier to see as appropriate, especially because the polity will likely be more homogeneous in all sorts of ways. But as the size of the polities grow and we look at the federal level, it becomes more important to focus on negative rights.
One key lesson of the 20th century is this: empathy doesn’t scale. Communism is arguably the most empathetic of public policies. And yet no political framework has led to more suffering and death than communism. When you try to scale up the things you do naturally in your life and force everyone to do the same you end up with 100 million people dead and untold suffering.
This lesson is more far reaching than we care to admit, and just 20 years on from the 1900s we seem to have forgotten most of it. In an interview recently, Peter Thiel compared the Christianity of Mother Teresa and Constantine and concluded that these days we need a little more Constantine and a little less Mother Teresa. My interpretation of Thiel is that Mother Teresa represents the empathetic and Constantine the ambitious and strategic, and I quite agree.
I prefer thinking of St. Therese of Lisieux’s “little way”. St. Therese emphasized doing small acts with great love. Most importantly, St. Therese was perfectly satisfied with her little way being little. It did not need to scale up. In fact, it’s power was that it retained a focus on small actions that could transform the self.
Nassim Taleb has proposed replacing the Golden Rule with the Silver Rule: “Do NOT treat others the way you would NOT like them to treat you.” This via negativa focus, similar to negative rights, helps take empathy out of the equation. Most of our politicans today rely on emotional rhetoric and examples to pull on our heartstrings. They declare the other side evil and rely on in-group signalling to move the goalposts. But this is the exact opposite of what we elect them for. We need to develop the frameworks and legal structures dispassionately. Public policy should never be based on emotion and empathy. Taleb has another well known quip that frames this for policy making:
“I am, at the Federal level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, socialist.
If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.”