Reaction to 'morality and empathy' vs 'empathy and morality'
Our words are both the sediment and the bones.
Reading “Morality and empathy vs empathy and morality A quest for the source of goodness in phylogenetic and ontogenetic contexts.” Chapter 4, by Augusta Gaspar, in Sara Graça da Silva, ed. Morality and Emotion: (Un)Conscious Journey into Being. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. [https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315651040-10][Chapter also available at academia.edu]This chapter has just appeared on my radar. Interesting to me because its published date of 2016 is about the same time I wrote the original essay why we should after which this blog is an extension.
From the end of the opening page offered at academia.edu: “Assuming that morality stems from emotional reactions that are common to the human brain across the entire geographical distribution of humans means that one has to accept that human morals cannot be arbitrary caprices of cultures. That moral behaviour originates in emotion, and thus in biology, is a view shared by many authors, from legendary ethologists such as Frans de Waal and Mark Bekoff,[...]”
Basically at this time I was in the same place, reading the same authors, but had not broadened out into any other reading.
I notice, looking over this first page again, that I cut to the quick a bit earlier now, while still allowing room for a soft ‘Human Universal’ (Brown, 1991 cited in Augusta Gaspar 2016) in an universalist-ish kind of way. We ‘all’ feel the urge to should, but I feel now the list of ‘universals’ (re-phrased as):
respect for worlding-figures/ancestors (later colonised by ‘leaders’)
care for one’s family/group (later colonised by ‘identity’)
not taking the life of a community member (later colonised by ‘law’)
maintaining the story of how that all works/arises (go to 1.) (later colonized by polities which meld and mix 1-4 into religion, empire and badly-policed narcissism)
misses the evolution for the more recent [forest of trees] we cultivate, or course, in cultural evolution this is what it is all about, thus my interest in taphonomy.
Our words are both the sediment and the bones.
Gaspar then talks about prosociality and cultural evolution (but do we discuss inter-group competition?)
The prosociality discussion is particularly useful for me, I lack an education in that area. Prosociality is the framing for the title’s bifurcations and un/blur I guess: Morality and empathy vs empathy and morality and “goodness”. What is particularly useful is “the underpinnings of prosocial acts that are likely to be convergent end products of different mental processes and distinct remote evolutionary causes” as I crap on about outcomes all the time, with raised fists, if not handwaving.
We then get a baseline of historical inquiry into developmental child psychology (heteronomy/autonomy), pets, and current efforts on modelling behaviour (parental and from reading literature) and empathy. Thus nurture is presented.
This is hazed by Batson’s Moral Hypocrisy, (which I’ll have to check out) and the disjunct between the cost/effort of morality and appearances. And it is broadened with some anthropological horizons on the convention/moral distinctions available for young children. This underlined the ‘universals’ as well as the greater variety of detail.
Then we notice a difference between emotional empathy and sympathy and a cognitive version available to sociopaths etc.
“Emotional empathy is largely hardwired and nested on evolutionary processes”(Castro et al., 2010). For example, a link was established between certain neural networks and the proneness to sympathetic prosocial behaviour and moraljudgement (Decety and Michalska, 2010).”
[Question as I read this: possible strongly enforced conventional codes may drive narcissism underground into covert narcissism, or indeed any highly enforced process which can overcome the fearlessness which here then red flags low empathy…. The baboon hierarchy, every dog has his day, which hill should you die on?….]“To sum up, evidence seems to confirm that empathy, more than moral codes, predicts the development of prosocial behaviour, and that parental behaviour plays a major role in shaping prosociality. Morality itself seems to stem from empathy. Frans de Waal, a paladin of the intrinsic goodness of the human (and non-human) primate, stresses the need to overcome the good-evil dualism and relativize the goodness: an approach that is neither supportive of the ‘good savage’ nor of the ‘selfish child’, whereby developing children are not struggling against genetic predisposition of any kind but being ‘nice enough’ to accommodate genetic tendencies to become prosocial beings (de Waal, 2001).”
Lots on animal empathy etc. I am more familiar with this stuff than the psychology.
“Like de Waal and Pinker, I take an optimistic view. We have enough information, as of now, to clearly establish that despite surface appearance, moral codes and the processes that generate them are not arbitrary.”
And ending with:
“While growing up, children can be exposed to empathy boosting interactions, resulting in the kinds of prosocial conduct advocated by cross- cultural moral norms. Strategies to ferment prosociality are currently under scrutiny in psychological and educational sciences, revealing an unprecedented concern with the morality of future societies.”
About the same where I was in 2016, except I had no prosociality vocabulary, which is what you study in the world, when not wondering about the world you live in, (which is where I started) as you live it, and how it all just sort of happens around you. Living it is different to studying it, even if you are studying (children) who live to learn it.
References
“Morality and empathy vs empathy and morality A quest for the source of goodness in phylogenetic and ontogenetic contexts.” Chapter 4, by Augusta Gaspar, in Sara Graça da Silva, ed. Morality and Emotion: (Un)Conscious Journey into Being. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. [https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315651040-10][Chapter also available at academia.edu]
Those cited in Gaspar 2016 mentioned above:
Batson D. C., Thompson, E. R. and Chen, H. (2002). Moral Hypocrisy: Addressing Some Alternatives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83( 2): 330–339.
Brown, D. E. (1991). Human Universals. Boston, MA: MacGraw-Hill.
Castro, R., Gaspar, A. and Vicente, L. (2010). The Evolving Empathy: Hardwired bases of Human and Non-human Primate Empathy, Psicologia, 24(2): 131–152.
Decety, J. and Michalska, K. J. (2010). Neurodevelopmental Changes in the Circuits Underlying Empathy and Sympathy from Childhood to Adulthood. Developmental Science, 13(6): 886–899.
de Waal, F. B. M. (2001). The Ape and the Sushi Master. New York: Basic Books.
Thank you for this rich and thought-provoking reflection. I deeply appreciate your careful engagement with Gaspar’s chapter and your openness to exploring the emotional underpinnings of morality. That said, I would like to offer a friendly but fundamental point of divergence.
The view that morality emerges from biologically rooted empathy — shared across individuals and cultures — is, in my reading, a well-intentioned but ultimately ideological construction. It assumes that emotional universals are the foundation of moral codes, when in fact what we observe — both in ethology and cultural history — suggests something quite different: morality is not the result of shared emotions, but of structural codes that regulate inclusion and exclusion.
A few examples may help. As you probably know, lions, rats, and chimpanzees show intense hostility toward outsiders of their own species — especially when those outsiders belong to a different group. Even highly social mammals do not exhibit empathy toward out-group members. Likewise, experiments cited by Amy Chua (in Political Tribes) show how preschool children, arbitrarily divided into teams by t-shirt color (green vs. blue), begin to form in-group biases almost immediately, showing preference and exclusion even in the absence of any meaningful difference.
These examples reveal that empathy, when it exists, is structurally selective, not universal. It is bound to the logic of group boundaries, not to species-wide identification. In this light, the idea of "hardwired empathy" becomes less a scientific insight than a liberal fantasy — one that replaces institutional structure with emotional comfort, and functional codes with affective legitimacy.
I say this not to dismiss the emotional dimension of human life, which is real and complex, but to insist that structural coherence, not emotional spontaneity, is what sustains functional morality — especially in the political domain. If we lose sight of this, we risk falling into the very cognitive blackout that our sentimental ideologies were meant to prevent.
Warm regards,
The Postliberal Cyborg
So I've been thinking even more about this. 1) structures do not disappear but can be invaginated as time processes.
2) I been reading 'Battling the gods: atheism in the ancient world’ by Tim Whitmarsh, 2015, Knopf 978-0-307-95833-4, and after our conversation I've been struck by an analogy between the gods of the polis, versus the gods of the philosophers and various types of structuralism, dogmatic or not.
As a neo-Pyrrhonist I will maintain a certain discernment in suspension on the matter.