Empathy as a Second-Person Standpoint

In November 2016, a WeChat article titled “Luo Yixiao, Stop Right There” spread rapidly across Chinese social media. Written by the father of a young girl with leukemia, it was meant to move readers emotionally, and it did. Hundreds of thousands of people responded with sympathy. I did too. Although I had no personal connection to the family, I was caught up in the emotional force of the piece and donated a small amount of money through the tipping function. Later, however, the story turned sharply. Luo Yixiao’s father, Luo Er, was accused of using online publicity and emotional marketing for improper gain. The money raised had already exceeded 2.6 million yuan, and some people claimed that the family’s financial situation was not as desperate as the article had implied. In a short time, Luo Er was recast in public opinion from a tragic father “selling his writing to save his daughter” into a manipulative fraud. Once public trust collapsed, his later explanations no longer carried much weight.

What interested me most was a different question: why Luo Yixiao? Why did this child, rather than so many other children with leukemia who also needed help, become the object of collective concern? My answer is that empathy was shaped, intensified, and focused in a particular way. Here David Hume gives us a useful starting point. Hume argues that our feelings do not attach themselves to “humanity in general” in the abstract; they attach themselves to particular people, particular qualities, and particular relations to us.[1] Even when we think we are responding to “human suffering,” what usually moves us is some concrete and perceptible person.

That is not hard to understand. Even Hegel, the philosopher of abstraction, described Napoleon entering Berlin as “the world spirit on horseback.” He gave one of the most abstract concepts in philosophy a strikingly concrete image. Human beings often understand things by personifying them or making them vivid. That kind of apprehension is first-personal and, in an important sense, subjective. Luo Er made use of exactly this mechanism. His writing made readers, myself included, feel the loveliness and vulnerability of Luo Yixiao and then, through her, feel pity for a father afraid of losing his daughter. Social media amplified that response to an astonishing degree, and the result was a clear imbalance in public attention.[1]

On Hume’s view, sympathy does not extend indefinitely. If the same thing had happened not to a child but to an Asian elephant in Thailand, the response from Chinese readers would probably have been much weaker. Most people encounter elephants only rarely, in zoos or on television, and so they are less likely to form a strong emotional identification with one. Sympathy that depends on vividness is shaped by the circles within which we live. Those circles may be organised by race, nationality, profession, gender, or political belief. Jeremy Rifkin makes a related point in The Empathic Civilization: the concepts through which we form a sense of self also define our sense of belonging. Those structures of belonging become the social basis of both compassion and empathy. It follows that our empathic intensity is usually weaker toward those outside our own circles.

Not everyone accepts this picture. Peter Singer’s ideal of effective altruism seems not to require this kind of emotional empathy at all. On his account, empathy often amounts only to empathic concern or personal distress triggered by another person’s situation. Those emotions are not, in themselves, morally authoritative. They may even distract us from actions that would produce the greatest good for the greatest number. In that sense, effective altruists can look like “cold-blooded” utilitarians. They do not revise their principles simply because a story is emotionally powerful. The same sum of money, for example, might be used either to help Luo Er or to save five equally desperate people in Africa. Even if a donor feels less emotional identification with the latter, the money may still go there because that choice produces greater altruistic effect. Some experiments suggest that utilitarians, and effective altruists in similar situations, show lower levels of affective empathy in certain scenarios. If so, then human beings may indeed be able to regulate empathy and keep it within the boundaries set by reason.[2] [3]

Does this mean that ethical action no longer needs empathy? Only if we define empathy narrowly as emotional sympathy. If empathy also means the ability to think from another person’s point of view, or to treat another person’s response as information that should reshape one’s own decision, then effective altruists still depend on empathy, though no longer in a purely affective form. Empathy becomes a rational capacity for taking others seriously. The intensity of my feeling is no longer the only measure; another person’s need and response can become part of the objective parameters of judgment.

That is why I argue for a both-and concept of empathy. We should acknowledge the emotional side of empathy while also treating empathy as part of rational decision-making. On the one hand, empathy is limited, uneven, and easily guided or manipulated. On the other hand, it can be improved through education, behavioural science, and self-reflection. A better form of empathy is therefore worth pursuing. What I reject is the idea that we should change empathic capacity through biological enhancement, whether by drugs or surgery. Numan’s work on maternal caregiving and Mascaro’s study of fathers both suggest that care is tied to evolved neurobiological systems involving oxytocin and dopamine.[4] [5] Emotional empathy is not an accidental extra; it is part of our inheritance. If we are not prepared to redesign human beings biologically, then any realistic programme must begin from that fact.

Effective altruism also faces a more familiar problem in normative ethics. It is too easy to treat a conclusion that has not really been derived under ideal conditions as if it were a universally valid norm. We cannot be sure that any effective altruist has truly achieved perfect impartiality. In my view, that ideal is both extremely difficult to realise and too easy to overstate.

For that reason, a more plausible concept of empathy is one that tries to hold both sides together. First, empathy is limited and shaped by circumstance, but it can still be educated, corrected, and refined. That is why empathy education matters. At present it may be the only realistic way to improve the human empathic condition without turning to biological manipulation. Second, we should not expect to derive a universally binding moral responsibility from a purely third-person standpoint. Different cultural communities will always carry different moral contents through which empathy is expressed. The question that troubles moral philosophers - how broad consensus is possible - therefore troubles us as well. I do not expect, and do not recommend, that we try to impose a single strong moral consensus that holds everywhere. What matters instead is learning how different empathic communities can enter into relations of mutual understanding, however fragile those relations may initially be.

This, I think, is where life-care education should begin. It is not simply a matter of teaching rules or transmitting moral propositions. It is a practical form of education aimed at helping people build those relations of mutual intelligibility. The motive force behind that project is what I call second-person empathy.

By “second person” I mean a way of approaching human mental and moral life through interactive relations between persons. Theory of mind research is useful here. Some theorists explain our understanding of others through simulation: we model another person’s mental state by projecting from our own. Others emphasise theory-building: we develop hypotheses about other minds and revise them in light of experience. Contemporary work often combines both approaches. My own idea of second-person empathy does the same. A provisional definition would be this: second-person empathy develops through a process in which self-to-other simulation provides the raw material for conjectures about other minds, while those conjectures are continuously revised and refined through interaction.

This matters especially in education. Young people often begin by understanding others through themselves. Because they do not yet possess a sufficiently rich and mature stock of theories about other people, their empathy can easily remain egocentric. They may not yet know how far their own feelings or interpretations are generalisable, or how much their personal standpoint differs from the more complex patterns of understanding shared by broader communities. A philosophy of care education grounded in second-person empathy should therefore help adolescents acquire a more stable and recognisably normal capacity for empathy. Once they develop that capacity, their value system will naturally be shaped by the community to which they belong. But which empathic cultures they ultimately inhabit is not something educators can fully control. Second-person empathy has no final state. Still, a person who is developing in a relatively healthy way through this process will not easily detach from the empathic culture of their community, and will also remain open to unfamiliar people and new forms of life.

From an objective point of view, second-person empathy amounts to a limited consensus. It rejects the fantasy of permanent agreement on one fixed mental content or moral law, but it also rejects excessive insistence on merely private feeling or will. Social customs and common sense tell us both that mutual understanding is possible and that disagreement is inevitable. Constructive empathy should help social life keep disagreement within a range that is safe and beneficial, even though no individual can determine exactly where that range lies. No one can guarantee, simply through private effort, that another person will respond as one hopes. Yet human beings are not helpless here. At least three intellectual resources can help us move toward this limited but productive consensus: rational practices of communication and thought, philosophical reflection that preserves conceptual flexibility, and positive action. The first two belong broadly to critical thinking; the third connects to positive psychology. In the next section I turn to the meaning and scope of care itself.