Civility Watchdog: Blow Says Right-Wing Has No Empathy
Or They're Immune to It, at Least
Columnist Charles Blow offers his summer predictions:
"This may be the summer that we see more clearly ... that right-wing politicians have developed an unshakeable immunity to empathy".
Blow is not a fan of Republicans or conservatives, and is resorting to name-calling by saying that they lack empathy.
This is one of the usual ways of caricaturing and demonizing an opponent: Say that they are evil somehow, that they don't care about doing the right thing, that they lack basic traits of human decency. Attributing "an unshakeable immunity to empathy" to Republicans is a paradigm example of just this sort of caricature.
Underlying such caricatures is the idea that it's obvious what the right thing to do is. It's obvious what morality requires us to do, and what direction empathy prompts us to take. Therefore, the only reason somebody -- say, a right-wing politician -- wouldn't do the right thing is because they're immoral and don't want to do the right thing. They lack empathy, so they just don't care enough about others to do what's decent.
This kind of thinking rules out the possibility that there could be reasonable disagreement regarding what the best moral course is, or what empathy requires of us. It pretends that we don't face uncertainty when it comes to competing moral goals, or uncertainty when it comes to figuring out which policy will do the best job of accomplishing those goals.
But we do. The world is complicated. Blow wouldn't like his own political views to be derided like this, so he shouldn't feel comfortable doing it to others.
"This may be the summer that we see more clearly ... that right-wing politicians have developed an unshakeable immunity to empathy".
Blow is not a fan of Republicans or conservatives, and is resorting to name-calling by saying that they lack empathy.
This is one of the usual ways of caricaturing and demonizing an opponent: Say that they are evil somehow, that they don't care about doing the right thing, that they lack basic traits of human decency. Attributing "an unshakeable immunity to empathy" to Republicans is a paradigm example of just this sort of caricature.
Underlying such caricatures is the idea that it's obvious what the right thing to do is. It's obvious what morality requires us to do, and what direction empathy prompts us to take. Therefore, the only reason somebody -- say, a right-wing politician -- wouldn't do the right thing is because they're immoral and don't want to do the right thing. They lack empathy, so they just don't care enough about others to do what's decent.
This kind of thinking rules out the possibility that there could be reasonable disagreement regarding what the best moral course is, or what empathy requires of us. It pretends that we don't face uncertainty when it comes to competing moral goals, or uncertainty when it comes to figuring out which policy will do the best job of accomplishing those goals.
But we do. The world is complicated. Blow wouldn't like his own political views to be derided like this, so he shouldn't feel comfortable doing it to others.
Published by Thales
Focusing on politics, and frequently addressing civility, civil debate and civil discourse (see "Civility Watchdog" articles, which highlight instances of name-calling, demonizing, distortion and derisive ca... View profile
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