Our power to pollute and destroy the present, the past, and the future is incomparably greater than our feeble moral imagination. It can be painful for the one who expresses it, but assuaging for the one who is sympathized with. It brings with it an often ritualized assurance of support, or at the very least of common humanity. Empathy is trickier.
They can also pick up on non-verbal cues. Simon Baron-Cohen, confronting the problem of evil, has argued that empathy can be quantitatively captured by neuroscientists. Empathy is usually evoked in contexts involving pity and sympathy, not rejoicing. What Aristotle says about pity in his Rhetoric remains both relevant and interesting: that the evil was undeserved was a precondition for pity.
He noted that we feel more of it for those like us and less for those who are farther away from us, and that it is easier to pity our contemporaries than the denizens of a distant past. But reenactments and relics can still trigger pity. Empathy can help one to make more universal moral decisions in order to spare distant unknowns who could be imperiled by the Mandarin Paradox.
If I offered you 20, pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spend? Technology changed that: first radio, then television still limited , but now the internet is ubiquitous β and addictive. Local Germans were forced by the Allies to view the liberated concentration camps. As punishment of course, but above all because autopsy is a remedy against denial and conspiracy theories.
They would then have to acknowledge the reality of the Holocaust. Contrast our times: now, as we can see after the events of 7 October , the pornography of violence is instrumentalized from all sides, while also being faked. Our online hell is simultaneously a hall of mirrors. But one can also imagine how excessive empathy could lead to a sort of emotional burnout. In such a state of confusion they may simply be distressed rather than empathic.
