When Empathy Isn’t Enough
Why following your emotions may not be the best guide to giving this holiday season
When I was fresh out of university, I got a fundraising internship at a non-profit. One of the first things I learned is that people want stories. They want to know the people who their money is going to help. They want to have their heart strings tugged so they can feel a warm glow of satisfaction when they make a donation.
It’s the reason why animal welfare charities will encourage you to “adopt a whale” or homelessness charities will include a photo of someone who has turned their life around after living on the streets. Fundraising relies on finding a way to activate your empathy, and using that empathy to make you pull out your wallet and set up a donation, preferably a monthly recurring one.
I don’t necessarily fault fundraisers or non-profits for these tactics: these are people working incredibly hard for causes that are deeply important. But if you are a person who is interested in doing good in the world, I have a question for you:
Can you really trust your empathy to make the right decision about who deserves your money, and who doesn’t?
How our empathy can lead us astray
I know, I get it. I’m writing in Age of Empathy. Isn’t empathy our superpower? Isn’t our sensitivity and heart a much-needed balm in a hard world?
Yes — but also no.
Our empathy is a limited guide.
This time of year is centered around giving. Following Thanksgiving in the US, many charities trumpet #GivingTuesday to counter the excesses of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Charitable giving is a big part of the holiday season for many.
It was around this time last year that I first read The Life You Can Save, by Peter Singer.
At the very start of the book, Singer confronts the reader with a thought experiment. He asks you to imagine that you’re walking to work wearing a new pair of expensive shoes. As you walk, you pass a river — and this day, you notice that a child is in the river, in distress. There is no-one else around. You are a strong swimmer. If you act now — without delay — you can save the child.
Would you choose not to save the child, just to save that pair of brand new, expensive shoes?
The answer is, of course, no. None of us would prioritize shoes over the life of a child.
And yet, Singer says, this is what many of us choose to do every day when we spend our discretionary income on shoes, books, clothes, anything we don’t need to survive, while elsewhere in the world children are dying of hunger or easily preventable disease.
It hits hard, doesn’t it? The Life You Can Save is a bracing book, one that challenged me deeply. Perhaps most challenging for me was how it shone a light on how limited my empathy can make my decision making.
We save the child right in front of us because we feel that human connection, that tug of empathy.
We donate to the charity with the picture of the wide-eyed children for the same reason.
But what if the charity that actually could save hundreds, thousands of children’s lives was actually one that distributed mosquito bedding nets? Or what if you knew addressing iodine deficiency could have wide-ranging impacts on large groups of people whose name you’ll never know, whose photo you’ll never see?
What if our need to feel that empathetic connection is stopping our money from doing the most good it possibly can?
Widening the scope of our empathy
I once had a debate/argument with my partner about whether humans are ever capable of true altruism. I believed yes: people can do good things without the need for external rewards or praise, simply because they want to do the right thing.
Aha, he said. But then they are getting a reward — that little internal glow of feeling like they’ve done good. They’re still getting something out of it, even if their motives are 99% selfless.
I realized he had a point.
Knowing this is strangely liberating. Because once I realized that I’m always going to be seeking that glow of satisfaction, I’ll always be looking for that empathetic buzz of knowing my money is helping I knew to pay more attention. I knew to slow down and not let my emotions drive my charitable giving, but to look for the evidence, too.
Let’s take it as a given that as an imperfect human being I’ll likely always be seeking that dopamine hit of feeling as though I’ve done something good. If I can expand the range of my empathy — if I can extend my empathy to encompass people in the abstract, humanity as a whole — is it possible for me to continue to get my donation high while supporting causes that will create more measurable change for the people in the world who need it most?
Give more, give better
Since reading Singer’s work and learning about the effective altruism movement, I’ve been consciously increasing the amount of money I give to charitable causes and also spending more time researching the impact the charities that I give to have. I know I will never really know the impact of my dollars being spent in this way; I’ll never receive photos of rescued donkeys living happily on a farm or receive a letter from a community telling me about the new school that was just built.
But with my extended sense of empathy, I can imagine hundreds, thousands of people whose lives are just as important as mine.
Who are deeply loved, and valued. Who have so much to offer to this world. And who are suffering needlessly.
I am lucky enough to live in a wealthy country. I have access to free healthcare. I have a safe place to live. I have been extensively educated. I have access to more than enough food. I am so so lucky.
I am aware of how much of this is not true, for most of the world’s population. And so it is important to me to support ethical and effective charities who are doing what they can to end suffering, reduce inequality, and save lives.
The Takeaway
Perhaps you feel uncomfortable reading this article. Perhaps you feel angry. It’s okay if you do: I felt pretty pissed off for a lot of the time while I was reading Singer’s book. I don’t agree with everything I read in his book: I think investing in our own communities, healing inequality at home is also important, whereas Singer asserts that our sole focus should be on the massive wealth inequalities between the richest countries in the world, and the poorest.
But if you’re feeling that resistance (as I did) I encourage you to slow down and question. Where is this resistance coming from? What is it trying to tell you? What is making you defensive?
For me it was that feeling of being told I was doing something wrong. That my empathy was making me selfish. That I wasn’t as pure of heart as I thought I ought to be. These truths are a bitter pill to swallow.
But on the other side of my anger and shame was knowledge. This really isn’t about me. As much as I can, I need to remove my feelings and desire to feel good from the equation. And while I can’t totally switch off my selfish monkey brain, I can try and apply my higher reasoning. I can strive to do better.
Empathy isn’t always enough. But empathy combined with reason? When we use all the gifts we have been given, there is so much more we can get done.
