On Empathy

Mother Church stresses the idea of a well-formed conscience. You find this all over the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in OCIA material, in encyclicals and apostolic exhortations, and in nearly every sort of catechetical material you come across.

The Church puts great weight on mastering oneself as a disciple and developing the moral capacities necessary to live out the faith individually. The entire language of virtue ethics assumes this. Human faculties and appetites are not generally evil things waiting to be suppressed. They are things to be ordered. Appetite can be ordered by temperance or disordered into gluttony. Anger can be ordered toward justice or become wrath. Even reason can be used to rationalize evil.

This requires something more difficult than learning which things are good and which things are bad. It requires becoming the sort of person capable of discerning the good.

Society around us in America does not interact with human morality with this sort of maturity very often. This is true in evangelical Christian culture and increasingly in culture-war-focused Catholic and, of course, in political culture. Complexity is consistently flattened to satiate a hunger for rules. Ironically, this sort of rule-following is something like the caricature commonly assigned to Catholicism, despite the sophistication of its actual moral tradition.

The rules aren't necessarily formal rules. More often they are shallow cultural markers. This word is ours. That concern is theirs. This sort of person is suspect. That sort of person is safe. They establish who is inside and outside the tribe without requiring us to do the difficult work of encountering people as individuals.

A particularly shallow example is the obsession with "wokeism." The utterance of the term is usually a good signal that what follows will be neither particularly serious nor particularly intellectual. "Woke" is useful precisely because it can mean almost anything. It turns a large collection of people, motivations, ideas, virtues, vices, excesses, and legitimate concerns into a single thing which can then be safely dismissed.

Recently this has extended to empathy. Right-wing influencers have begun warning about "extreme" or "toxic" empathy, with more media-focused Catholic figures joining the conversation as part of the broader hunt for a vague woke boogeyman.

But empathy is simply a human capacity. It is not a moral system.

Empathy can participate in compassion when it helps us perceive another person's suffering and moves us toward his good. It can also participate in manipulation when understanding another person's fears or desires gives us the means to exploit them. A demagogue requires a rather sophisticated kind of empathy. He has to know what his audience fears before he can tell them whom to fear.

The problem in either case is not empathy. The problem is what it is ordered toward.

And Catholicism already has an answer for this. It has had one for a very long time.

Form the conscience. Cultivate virtue. Exercise prudence. Will the good of the other. Master the appetites rather than pretending we can produce holiness by sorting ordinary human capacities into approved and prohibited categories.

This is also why I find it difficult to have a serious religious conversation about empathy in the setting of contemporary politics. The political framing almost necessarily begins in the wrong place. The interesting question isn't whether someone has "too much empathy." It is whether our concern for another person is ordered toward his actual good, a question of conscience that cannot simply be read from outward behavior.

It can be a difficult question. Sometimes compassion requires comforting someone. Sometimes it requires telling someone something they do not want to hear. Sometimes our perception of another person's suffering is itself mistaken.

This is what prudence is for.

A well-formed conscience does not give us a rule for how much empathy is too much. It gives us the moral capacity to encounter particular circumstances and make judgments about them.

Those judgments will not always look alike. Prudence is not an algorithm, and Christian maturity does not produce identical intuitions in everyone. Two people seriously attempting to act with charity and justice can understand the same circumstance differently. Formation does not eliminate judgment; it makes judgment possible.

This is precisely why turning empathy into another culture-war marker is so unhelpful. It allows us to work backward from someone's behavior to a judgment about his conscience. He showed concern for the wrong person, or in the wrong way, or beyond the amount our tribe considers sensible, and therefore his empathy must be disordered.

But that is exactly the sort of moral shortcut that a serious account of conscience should make us suspicious of.

And, importantly, the well-formed Christian should be very hesitant to work backward from another person's act of compassion and pronounce what is happening in his heart. We do not have access to it. Reducing every public act of mercy we dislike to "woke empathy" is itself a refusal to deal with the dignity and moral agency of the person in front of us.

There is something especially unfortunate about seeing this sort of thinking imported into the Church. Catholic moral theology has spent centuries thinking carefully about virtue, appetite, reason, conscience, intention, circumstance, prudence, justice, and charity. We possess a remarkably rich vocabulary for talking about why human beings do good and evil.

We should probably use it.

The constant urge to turn every new culture-war anxiety into another marker of Christian faithfulness (ironically, perhaps itself a misuse of empathy) makes the Church look silly to reasonable people. Worse, it teaches Christians to outsource the formation of conscience to the political tribe.

Christianity asks considerably more of us than that.