I’ve been on the rampage about lousy arguments—arguments that get used and abused without any reflection on the validity of the argument. A friend at church on Sunday reminded me about another particularly heinous example that is employed all too regularly: the ‘you don’t know my pain’ defence.
Interestingly, it comes to exactly the same conclusion as the ‘get that log out of your own eye’ argument by following the opposite line of reasoning. Whereas having a log in your eye makes us so alike that you cannot objectively judge me, the ‘you don’t know my pain’ argument relies on the opposite truth. You are so different from me that you have no authority to tell me what to do.
In our society, it works in all sorts of ways. Men shouldn’t say too much about abortion. Straight people don’t have the right to talk about gay issues. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant males shouldn’t open their mouths—about anything.
As with all of these arguments, there is a smidgen of truth to it. I’ve seen enough action movies to realize that emotionless sociopaths are capable of greater evil than anyone else in the history of the human race. God has made us in such a way that loving and hating are part of our creation as moral beings. The ability to experience empathy and compassion are part of acting well in God’s world.
But that said, it’s still a lousy argument—largely because it isn’t an argument at all. The fact that someone is emotionally stunted doesn’t automatically invalidate their reasoning. Does their lack of experience of your pain automatically render their reasoning deficient? Indeed, if the fact that you have not experienced what I have experienced is enough of a reason to disbar any contribution you might make to the conversation, then nobody anywhere can ever say anything that would apply to me. Who has experienced exactly what I have experienced in exactly the same way? We all know deep down that most people have enough imagination that they can understand something of what I feel, even if they haven’t experienced the exact circumstances I’m currently suffering through.
But not only does the ‘you don’t know my pain’ argument make no sense, it also fails to ask a crucial question. Is it the person who is calling on you to do something you don’t want to do emotionally deficient, or is it you? Is it possible that you’re using your emotional state as an excuse to avoid doing what is right? ‘You don’t understand my pain’ is not an argument; it is a way of avoiding moral reasoning.
Why does the argument work? Because utilitarianism is the only moral framework our world believes in. Utilitarianism gives rise to the ‘you don’t know my pain’ argument because it makes the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people our ultimate goal. If you think I should do something that would increase my pain, then clearly you aren’t playing on the right playing field. They have a word to describe people like you: sadist!
But in God’s world, good moral decision-making is all about accepting the pain that comes with acting righteously. Jesus’ great example to his people was that he entrusted himself to the just judge and did what was right rather than avoiding his own pain (1 Pet 2:21-25). Praise God that he did. May we have the grace to acknowledge that what is right in God’s eyes may sometimes involve creating pain rather than relieving it.
Hi Grimmo,
This is a bit off topic, but living in a country in the developing world I am constantly amused by Sydney people writing criticisms of the trains / mobile phone service / internet providers etc using the phrase ‘3rd world service’.
As one letter writer to the Herald recently said, it used to be that the first person to use the name ‘Hitler’ lost the argument. Perhaps now it is the first person to suggest the service in Sydney is third world?
But then again, what would I know – being a white protestant male and all!
Hey Paul,
I am not really sure what does give you “authority” to “judge” another person, whether or not this argument is valid!
It is interesting though, I agree with you on one level, but then I cannot help think of two things.
1 – A part of love is the ability to feel empathy. Sometimes people raise the “you don’t know what I am experiencing” argument because there is NO empathy from the “authority” that is “judging” them.
2 – Also, for me one of the great things about jesus is the fact that he DOES know what I am going through and the struggles I have. Jesus, as it happens was not a white protestant male! He got more than his hands dirty on the cross! It so happens that Jesus also has empathy.
Perhaps it is not a complete argument, but I wonder if “lousy” is a bit strong!
Is it a given that humans are both thinking beings and feeling beings?
* I cannot speak for the entirety of humanity, but I it certainly seems that most people have had that, “a-ha!” moment; when you feel you can empathise with someone else. That’s why we gravitate towards movies, music, novels, poetry, comics, dare I say even computer games, because we see something that we resonate with. The classic proponent of “you don’t understand me”, the rebellious adolescent, hasn’t realised that all that punk/metal/grunge/emo music they listen to, is in fact proof that you can understand them.
I particularly like the, 1) “What would you know about raising kids, yours haven’t given you the pain ours have” and the 2) “What would you know about dodgy faithhealers, you’ve never had cancer” varieties of the you don’t know my pain.
Sometimes it is the person outside the situation without the emotional burden that can more clearly see what is right.
Do we really encourage the depressed to act on their present feelings, or do we attempt to stabilise them with some of our longer term perspective.
When we are burdened and pained we really should listen to the person who is not (and vice versa)
Michael Hutton
Hi All,
Thanks for your comments & observations.
@Dave, I agree with you completely. Because often those in authority who lack empathy regularly make terrible judgements. But the opposite is also true, sometimes it is possible to have too much empathy to be able to judge well.
That’s partly why I want to hold on to my lousy argument argument. For if someone, who doesn’t empathize with you, offers you an opinion or a judgement, that judgement or opinion needs to be understood on its merits. The person who offered the opinion may have offered the wrong one because of their lack of empathy. But their opinion isn’t automatically right or wrong because of the empathy or otherwise of the person offering.
I know very empathetic people who are often unwise and people with almost no empathy who are often wise. The wisdom or lack thereof is not automatically related to the other person’s empathetic ability. Because of that, the “you don’t understand my pain argument” is the wrong basis for deciding on whether or not the opinion or judgement offered you is correct or not.
Just like God did when He became human to bear our griefs and carry our transgressions rather than judging us well?
God didn’t judge us-he did feel our pain and spared us judgement. If we are going to be followers of Christ-WE should be prepared to bear the cost of doing what is right. BUT we should be extremely circumspect before we start a crusade to make sure that our neighbours suffer for our morality.
Hi Melinda,
Can you explain a bit more about what you mean by our neighbours suffering for our morality?
Thanks,
Paul G.
Paul,
Moral reasoning without empathy is flawed and leads to rules based approaches that are Pharisaical and unloving. To take a simple example;
Imagine 2 people living in a community that has too little food. I have just enough to keep me alive for today but my neighbour has nothing.
If I followed your argument, I would tell my neighbour to bear the cost of doing the right thing and to die of starvation because to steal a loaf of bread is wrong. Better still, with my lack of empathy I could make sure I did what was right and tip off the police to make sure the theft attempt is unsuccseful and the person is justly punished.
Frankly I think I should shut up rather than use my moral reasoning to tell my neighbour he must die. If I really want to follow Christ’s example then I would prevent theft by giving my neighbour my food and die of starvation myself. Then I would be bearing the cost of doing the right thing, rather than forcing my neighbour to suffer for my morality.
Hi Melinda,
Thanks, that clarifies for me what you are thinking. And that means that I probably need to clear something up.
I agree completely that empathy is necessary for moral reasoning. That’s why I included the fourth paragraph (and on reflection I would remove the word ‘smidgen’). I am not arguing for empathy-less moral reasoning. But I am suggesting that empathy is not the only ground, or even the primary ground that is required for good moral thinking.
As an example of where I think you can be too empathetic, I would say that the euthanasia debate heads in this direction. According to the argument, I (currently being of sound mind and little body) cannot possibly make a decision about whether or not it is good for somebody else to choose to end their life rather than suffering pain.
On this argument, the only right moral thing to do is to feel their pain and agree to their requests to end it all. My problem is that, no matter how deeply I feel their pain, I don’t believe that the Scriptures allow me to end up with their solution to the problem.
I firmly believe that following my empathy (I know, bad sentence) would lead to me dishonoring God. I guess it is possible that we would disagree about this? But even so, my point is that I am not sure that empathy always leads us to the best moral decisions.
Am I making sense?
Thanks,
Paul G.
Hi Melinda,
Me again. I also thought I should respond to your hypothetical situation. I don’t think that anything in my original post would stop me from doing what you suggested, i.e.
In fact, that is exactly what I (hope) I would do.
Hi Paul,
You’re making sense but you’re not being consistent.
On the one hand you’re saying that
“‘You don’t understand my pain’ is not an argument; it is a way of avoiding moral reasoning…For if someone, who doesn’t empathize with you, offers you an opinion or a judgement, that judgement or opinion needs to be understood on its merits”
then “I agree completely that empathy is necessary for moral reasoning”
So which is it? If empathy is necessary for moral reasoning then any opinion or judgement offered without empathy is flawed.
My view is that empathy IS the primary but not the only consideration in moral reasoning. Jesus commanded me to love my neighbour as myself/do unto others as I would have done unto me. That is a call to empathy above all else.
Now applying that empathy can be difficult and there are competing demands on our empathy eg does my empathy for the pregnant rape victim who wants a termination overide my empathy for the unborn foetus?
Moral reasoning is difficult and complex. Teachers and those in authority do themselves, GOd and those to whom they minister a disservice when they attempt to provide “pat answers”.
Hi Melinda,
Thanks for continuing the discussion. I’m sorry if my thinking seems ‘pat’. I can’t really do anything except try and assure you that I take my position as a preacher and communicator of the Bible very seriously. I don’t like ‘pat’ answers either and so I try and work hard at working out what I think and why.
So I think the best way forward is to try and pinpoint where the source of our disagreement lies. Let me try and put my finger on it and then you can contribute your thoughts.
Firstly, I think I am reading you rightly in suggesting that you think of love and empathy as almost synonymous? Correct me if I’m wrong.
In my thinking, there is a big difference between love and empathy. Empathy is something like “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” while love is “the commitment to the good of the other”.
On this foundation, the big question that love asks is always – “what is for the good of the other?”
How do you answer that question? I would suggest that we don’t answer the question – “what would be good for the other?” by understanding and sharing their emotions. Rather, we need to keep looking into God’s word to understand what is good for each other. Or to put this another way, what is good is an objective rather than subjective truth.
What does this look like in practice? I think it means that I can love someone without necessarily always having empathy with them. This doesn’t mean that love is devoid of emotional content by the way. I can love someone, care deeply for them and long for what is best for them, even if I don’t feel what they are feeling at this point in time (i.e. I don’t have empathy).
Let me give a concrete example. Say I have a friend who has committed adultery on several occasions and his wife has found out and she’s separated from him and he’s now drinking heavily because he feels like she has been unfair in dumping him. In some ways I will not experience much empathy – I won’t be feeling what he is feeling. I am not feeling like his wife has been unfair. I am not feeling like he has been cheated by life.
But I can still love him and long for what is best for him. And because I love him and long for what is best him, I will encourage him to repent and go to his wife and apologize but not in any way that demands she respond in a certain way.
I think that my advice would be loving and other-person centered but devoid of empathy (and sympathy for that matter, which is a slightly different thing). He might reject my advice because he doesn’t think that I feel appropriately sorry for him, or because I have never been in his position. But his rejection wouldn’t make my advice any less morally wise or good.
I think this is getting long, so I’ll go onto a second post. Back in a minute.
Part II:
This doesn’t mean that for human beings empathy is irrelevant to moral formation. It is, in fact, vitally important. People who experience no feelings and who never share the feelings of others do not, in my experience, make wise moral judgements. They tend to act in selfish and self-centred ways. God has made us capable of empathy because it is part of what help us to act as moral beings. That’s why I said that “empathy is necessary for moral reasoning”.
But I would also want to say that in any given situation, how much I share another person’s feelings is not the thing that determines whether I will give good or wise moral advice. This is because good moral advice is objectively true because of who God is and what his world is like.
So in my example with my friend above, I am not particularly interested in sharing his feelings, but I might give wise and good moral advice.
But I would go further than that. I take it that it is possible, because of the nature of morality, for someone who doesn’t feel for me at all to give me some wise moral advice. So I might have an enemy who sees me suffering from cancer and who says to me, “make sure that you don’t end your own life”. His desire is to make sure that I endure maximum pain, but his advice might still be morally true and correct.
So it is possible for advice to be good and true and morally wise, even though the giver of the advice has no empathy for my situation at all. At that point, for me to argue that their wise moral advice is invalid because of their motives in offering it were evil is to confuse the categories.
That is just one example of why I would say:
“‘You don’t understand my pain’ is not an argument; it is a way of avoiding moral reasoning…For if someone, who doesn’t empathize with you, offers you an opinion or a judgement, that judgement or opinion needs to be understood on its merits”.
To summarize: I think that God made us to be people who learn to empathize and that those who never do on the whole don’t make good moral decisions. But because love is a commitment to the objective good, I may love someone and offer wise advice without empathy.
I suspect that much of our difference may stem from the way that we are both using the word empathy. But I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I’ll look forward to hearing your response.
Thanks,
Paul G.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for your considered response-lots of issues there so I’ll try to respond to the main ones.
I don’t think that whether love and empathy are synonymous is the key issue. We’ve been talking about moral reasoning. I believe moral reasoning is impossible without appreciating the pain of the person/s involved. That doesn’t mean I have to share their emotions, but to achieve a moral outcome one needs to understand the pain of the ethical dilemma being considered.
WHilst you assert sometimes that empathy is necessary for moral reasoning so much else of what you say contradicts this. In your last 2 posts you talk about being able to arrive at a “correct” answer regardless of the process you use to get there.
I think your example re your enemy with cancer is actually confusing empathy with motivation. I’d suggest the enemy actually understands your pain very well. It is out of malevolance not lack of empathy that he advises you to not end your life. His reasoning is totally immoral. IT cannot be good or wise.
<quote>.This is because good moral advice is objectively true because of who God is and what his world is like…
Rather, we need to keep looking into God’s word to understand what is good for each other. Or to put this another way, what is good is an objective rather than subjective truth..</quote>.
I think God, in His ultimate wisdom knows the objective moral truth but it can be difficult for humans to discern that objective truth. For example, how do you discern the objective truth on capital punishment? Is it ever ok? If so under what circumstances?
Because the objective moral truth isn’t written in the sky in fluorescent texta, tHe process by which we reason out our moral advice is important. THat’s what takes me back to the notion that understanding the pain in a moral dilemma is necessary in order to offer good and wise moral advice.
Melinda,
If I could chime in.
I would say moral reasoning needs to be more independent of empathy than you would, but it needs empathy in its application.
Let me take the starving thief example that this started with.
Even if you are starving, it is still stealing. If empathy changes moral reasoning then we are soon tempted to say, “It’s not stealing because he was starving” In fact some poeple do reason this way.
No, it is stealing, but we should take that into consideration when judging or sentencing, but we should still judge. We might let the young offender with the starving family off with a warning, we might also set him up with a welfare agency that can find him a job.
To extend your illustration. In a neighbourhood with two families and one crust. We can sympathise and empathise with the thief, but let’s not forget that there is something selfish and evil in the person who is happy to starve the neighbours for his own family’s sake. There are plenty of faithful folk who got through hard times and hunger without having to steal.
Also, Jesus himself is the judge of the world, and John says it is because he is the Son of Man (John 5:27) The incarnation leads to salvation but also to judgement. So maybe empathy cuts both ways, to forgiveness and to judgement.
Hi Micheal,
The starving thief was a HYPOTHETICAL illustration in response to Paul’s request to explain what I meant by “our neighbours suffering for our morality.”
There are only two alternatives for the starving person-to die or to steal-in this hypothetical world there are no aid agencies or other alternatives.
I was assuming a rich “other” out there who would not be damaged by the theft. I should have made that clearer. THe moral issue would be quite different if the thief was causing the death of others.
“I” as moral advisor have 3 alternatives
1. I can expect my neighbour to pay the price of MY morality and thwart his attempt to get food to live.
2. I can empathise with his position and, as I said “shut-up” with the judgement and both he and I will live.
3. I can give him my only food and I will die as a result. This would be to emulate Christ.