Ethics

Can empathy cause people to be immoral? Like if you empathize with a criminals motives will that lead you to excusing them?

Comments

It seems that while "empathy" and "sympathy" come from the term for "feeling with" and so might simply refer to your being able to understand affectively what another person is going through, we sometimes do use the terms to indicate more than a shared understanding. So, when someone says they empathize with why someone committed a crime, it seems they are claiming that the action was intelligible or it made some kind of sense. Read in this more supportive fashion, I suppose you are right or, putting things differently, you may want to be careful of your own property if you know someone who empathizes with people who love to steal all the time.

But stepping away from this supportive sense of 'empathize,' we have good reason to think that ideal moral reflection would include some degree of affective understanding of all the parties involved. So, a judge who is determining what sort of penalty to give for a thief need not positively empathize with the robber, but we would expect the judge to have some kind of affective awareness of what it is like to steal, to have one's own property taken, and what it is like to be in jail.

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