"Basic human empathy" has become the go-to line for people on the progressive side, and for a lot of atheists, when someone asks them to defend what they believe. I think it's a cop-out. It gets used by people who can't actually cite and defend their positions. Either deep down they realize those positions don't hold up when you look at them through the lens of morality, or they don't understand what empathy actually means and they overvalue their own morals.
I've explained this to plenty of people who use the phrase. Now I want to lay it out properly.
The assumptions behind it
"Basic human empathy" leans on a lot of things, but mostly it leans on assumptions. When you break it down, people who use it usually mean one of three things:
- Everyone shares the same morality. Every human on Earth has the same moral system, so "empathy" means the same thing to everyone. We all know that isn't true.
- Humans evolved empathy through cooperation. We're wired to work together, so empathy is just part of being human.
- Take it at face value. "I have these beliefs because I'm an empathetic person. I feel for my fellow man."
I'll go through all three.
Morality isn't universal (unless you are a theist)
Let me be clear about where I stand. I believe there is one correct morality, and that it comes from something divine. But whether you ever get the chance to live by it depends a lot on how you behave and act.
Here's a hypothetical. Say you grow up in the middle of the Congo with no churches anywhere near you, surrounded by Muslim extremists. You won't be raised with Christian morality. You'll be raised with extremist morality, which is not a good moral framework. This is why forgiveness is a cornerstone of Christian belief! It gives people outside of the framework the chance to correct themselves.
From everything I've experienced and been around, I've chosen Catholicism. My morality is built on Catholic teaching: care and mercy for the weak, charity, love your neighbor, and so on. That's Christian morality, the morality the West was founded on, however much people want to argue about it.
I've covered this in a previous blog, where I talked about secular humanists. That's the term I use for the kind of atheist I'm talking about here. "Atheist" is a very broad term, so I mean specifically secular humanists. These are very often people on the progressive and leftist side of the compass. They don't believe in God or in any kind of divinity. To them it's a purposeless universe: we're on a floating rock, and we're all balls of carbon that somehow learned how to think one day.
You're allowed to believe that. But if you do, you have to concede a few things, because your own worldview works against you.
Borrowed morals
You absolutely can believe in mercy for the weak and in charity as a secular humanist. You can hold every value Christianity brought to the West, however much you want to deny where they came from. What you can't do is claim those values as your own while harassing Christians for holding theirs.
By your own logic, humanity is just a ball of matter. If there's no divinity, nothing to appeal to beyond yourself, and no greater meaning than the cosmos being the cosmos, then why are your morals the right ones? If morality is just whatever you were raised with, and the universe has no reason to recognize your moral code, what makes yours correct?
Think of it like taking your grandma's ring to a pawn shop. They'll tell you it's worth about $40. To you it's priceless. Value depends on who's looking at it, and that's exactly where morality ends up once you remove anything above us. If you believe morality is subjective and comes from how you were raised, you can't moral-grandstand and condemn people who break your moral code. You've already admitted your code isn't the final word. The cosmos doesn't give it a higher justification than anyone else's.
"Basic human empathy" does not exist if you are a secular humanist.
Cooperation isn't empathy
So what about the claim that we evolved morality through cooperation? My rebuttal is the Assyrian Empire.
Humans did evolve to cooperate. That's true. But cooperation has no built-in moral value. It isn't empathy, and it isn't caring for the weak. Cooperation just means working toward a shared goal.
The Assyrians had some of the earliest cooperation on the scale of an empire. They had armies, science, medicine, huge cities. You can look it up. They also beheaded their enemies, flayed them alive, tortured them for days before killing them, and took their land. They did plenty more I can't get into here without getting banned. It rhymes with grape.
These aren't stories their enemies told about them. The Assyrians bragged about it and wrote it all down themselves. And they weren't godless. They worshipped gods. They just didn't share Christian morality. Their system said: we'll all work together, as long as you're Assyrian. And they did work together, very well, toward the goal of hurting people.
Nazi Germany cooperated very well to wipe out entire groups of people. The Soviet Union cooperated very well to invade Poland. Hyenas cooperate. Wolves cooperate. It's just how you survive. Cooperation evolved, but that gives it no moral value, and it doesn't protect members of your species you don't already like.
Why morality has to come from somewhere higher
This is why religious people tend to be much more gung-ho about their morals, and it's one of the reasons I think morality has to come from divinity. I believe human rights come from divinity. I believe morals come from divinity. If you don't believe in any greater purpose or any moral framework above yourself, then you have no reason to do anything except serve your own self-interest. If you aren't serving your self-interest, then you aren't really living out secular humanism. You're not a consistent atheist. You're a theist who only wants the parts that benefit you.
Nietzsche saw this. While most atheists of his time were too scared to stare into the void and face what atheism actually leads to, he did it. He stayed an atheist, but he admitted that the values secular people hold are inherited from Christianity, and that dropping God while keeping Christian morals doesn't hold together. He literally described the european upper-class of the time this way. God-less people who still want to benefit from the framework God instituted.
I'd take it a step further: secular humanists get to live as secular humanists because Christians built a society around freedom and freedom of belief. That came from two thousand years of the Western world sharing one religion. Atheism didn't show up one day and hand everyone human rights. The rights you have today were put in place by theists, built on Christian morality.
What makes genocide bad in a world without objective morality?
A lot of atheists are scared to admit that without a higher being, their morals are subjective. So, follow that all the way through: what makes genocide bad?
"You're killing people." Why is that bad?
"Because people are suffering, and I don't want people to suffer." Good!
That's a fine belief to have! It just isn't an atheistic one. Believing humans are special, a level of consciousness above everything around us, is a divine belief. The idea that a human is different from the wall in your room, or above the animals that prowl our forests, is divine.
In secular terms, there's nothing special about us. We just evolved one step further. So what? We're still the same cosmic matter, the same star stuff, the same carbon. We all crawled out of the same ocean. On those terms, there's no reason to protect your fellow man any more than you'd protect a wolf. I bring up Assyria again because they're the trailblazers of this belief! If you're on my side, great! If you're not, we kill you.
The only reason you put your fellow man above every other living thing on this planet is that you have a divine morality inside you.
"I'm just an empathetic person"
That brings me to the third argument: take it at face value. The people who say this are just deeply empathetic, and it hurts them to support anything that could lead to people getting hurt, even in theory.
I think that's hysterical. It assumes way too much about yourself. It's egotistical, almost self-absorbed.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share what someone else is feeling, to put yourself in their position and let that shape your decisions. And that's exactly why I call bullshit. If someone were truly empathetic, they wouldn't use this phrase in the first place, because they'd understand the other side. They'd see why backing a political position purely because "I have empathy" is a bad idea: it ignores the bigger picture.
If you back a politician, and the only reason is basic human empathy, then you don't actually have it. If you did, you wouldn't be backing them on that basis alone. I'm not saying one specific side is evil. I'm saying that getting into political power usually means sacrificing your own moral beliefs somewhere along the way. We saw that with the Epstein files. I'm Catholic, and I fucking hate politics and politicians. I have my own views, and I vote based on them, but I'll be dead honest: I don't believe anyone sitting in the White House is getting into heaven. Actually, I know they're not.
Empathy you pick and choose isn't empathy
If you actually had basic human empathy, you couldn't insult anyone either. Real empathy doesn't switch off for people you disagree with. If you only feel it for people on your side, for the people who believe in "le basic human rights o algo", that isn't empathy. That's just loyalty to your own team. It's ironic because most of those "basic human rights" were instituted by THEIST MORALITY! You are defending religion! LMAO
So, if you've ever insulted someone, you don't have basic human empathy, and the whole phrase falls apart. And if you decide you'll never insult anyone again, fine, but what about your actions? It's a cop-out, and it's far too broad a thing to claim about yourself.
Empathy isn't "basic"
Here's the bigger problem: empathy isn't basic. People may be born with the capacity for it, but who you extend it to is learned. It comes from your upbringing. It isn't something every human automatically has.
Do you think the Assyrians had basic human empathy? Hitler? Mussolini? If it were basic, every human would have it. They clearly didn't, because "basic human empathy" isn't a real thing. It's a self-disproving term because implying the opposing party doesn't have it to make them look bad makes the term itself false. "Basic human empathy" can't exist if you're accusing the other party of not having it... lmfao
What they're actually describing is Christian morality
Here's what I think is really going on. The beliefs that come with "I have basic human empathy" are just Christian morality. And Christian morality is the most successful moral framework on the planet, because secular humanism has too many flaws and too many hypocrisies built into it.
Secular humanism also assigns no value to the human. Under it, you as a person have no inherent worth, and that's why I'll never stand behind it. Never. I believe you have inherent value as a human, given to you by God.
That's the same idea this country was founded on. The Declaration of Independence says we are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Your rights don't come from the government. The Constitution doesn't grant them. It protects rights that were given to you by something higher.
Slacktivism
As I've seen this phrase get really popular lately, I just love the whole "basic human empathy o algo" joke people are using to push back on it.
There's a word for this kind of activism: slacktivism. I didn't invent it, but it fits perfectly. You're too lazy to actually defend your point, and you care more about looking good to your peers than about representing what you believe, because you don't even know what you believe. You're just repeating what you've heard. You're a robot.
The same people hate hypotheticals
These are also the same people who get on your ass for hypotheticals. "Why would you even think about that?" Because it's a hypothetical. That's the whole point. A hypothetical lets you think through things you can't test in real life so you can reach the truth, or at least a conclusion.
If you come from a traditional moral framework and won't entertain certain hypotheticals because they're about bad things, fine. But if you're a secular humanist, hypotheticals should be right up your alley. With no higher authority to lean on, thinking through hard scenarios is the only way you have to figure out morality and understand what people think.
Rant over
I wanted to write about this because I keep seeing people use this line to defend their politics, and it's lazy. The only people who say it are people who don't know what they believe or why they believe it. They got it from social media, from family, from the news. They never learned it for themselves. It was just around them, so they agreed with it without ever thinking it through.
Comments
Displaying 0 of 0 comments ( View all | Add Comment )