Appeals To Empathy

By necessity, anyone who believes a particular thing is good or evil—or that good and evil exist at all—due to a subjective sense of morality has an irrational moral philosophy.  Oftentimes, people who regard conscience in this manner conflate it with empathy and prize their emotional identification with others as if it is some grand logical proof of moral right and wrong.  I used to default to this for the foundation of my moral stances before I became a rationalist and consequently a moral skeptic half a year afterward—which does not exclude my probabilistic commitment to living like moral realism is true because of evidence for Christianity.  Appeals to empathy are nothing more than appeals to emotion—which is irrelevant to logical truth and to whether anything is truly good or evil, as well as what specifically is good or evil if such things do exist.  Perhaps good and evil align with what a given person would emotionally perceive to be good or evil, and perhaps not.  Empathy is not even necessarily experienced in persistent ways, leading its slaves to believe in or practice hypocritical things they situationally condemn.

Some people might feel empathy for female victims of sexual assault but not male victims, or they might only feel empathy for people they personally know.  If human rights exist, they do not depend on feelings, but they would apply to all of humanity or else they would not be human rights, thus contradicting this sort of emotionalistic worldview.  Selective experience of empathy, where only certain people or certain situations evoke what I again emphasize is nothing more than a mere feeling one way or another, does not mean that a person will believe or act inconsistently with reason, but such a person often does.  Of course, empathy is meaningless even when consistently felt, and it is impossible for this subjective feeling to make someone rational or righteous.  It might make some people feel good about themselves, which they then conflate with proof that they are a morally upright person as they assume both that there is morality and that morality is in accordance with their perceptions, preferences, or behaviors.

I have no concern for other people that is not rooted in either objective philosophical truths, such as that it is logically possible for human rights to exist or how there is evidence short of logical proof that Biblical morality is true, or personal preference.  No one will persuade me to believe that a particular moral system is true as opposed to logically possible or evidentially probable/improbable because that is all I can know!  In fact, though there are certain actions I have no interest in doing even if there is no such thing as morality—I do not mean social norms, conscience (though I no longer have one), or emotional or emotionalistic preferences, but objective morality—I go absolutely right up to any Biblical line whenever I wish in dealing with other people as it is.  In some cases, I have mishandled this by Biblical standards by crossing that line, but there could not be anything wrong with going right up to any genuine moral line by nature of not having actually done anything wrong!

Any irrationalistic objections of other people to my actions will only entertain or infuriate me because they have no basis other than assumptions, feelings, or wishes.  There is no baseline moral belief I fall back onto or that it would be rational for anyone to fall back onto.  I know thanks to the necessity of reason that if morality exists, it must be consistent with logical axioms so that, for instance, contradictory things could not be righteous and that any obligation that has nothing to do with literal anatomical differences would have to be the same for men and women.  I also do not pretend like there is any way I, with my human epistemological limitations, can possibly know if good and evil exist or which of the many logically possibilities is true if they do.

Rather, with time, I came to embrace this wholeheartedly because all that I have articulated is logically true.  If morality exists, appeals to empathy should fall on deaf ears, because we should be concerned with truth, including the truth about morality, rather than our feelings or those of anyone else.  This does not mean it is irrational or immoral to involuntarily feel empathy (involuntary experiences cannot make a person succumb to any error) or to deeply appreciate how the feeling can help compel a person to act in accordance with what is probably righteous.  No, it means that we should not do what is right with empathy as the motivation.  To be righteous, we must do what is right because it is right and not because we feel a certain arbitrary, malleable way about it.  It is simply irrelevant!  To be rational, whether morality exists or not, we must not believe that empathy is good because it is irrelevant to the concept of morality itself one way or another.

Only deluded fools too pathetic or frightened to look to pure reason instead of social approval or subjective emotion or intuition would ever reject any of this.