Response to the idea that evil is the lack of empathy

The idea that evil is simply the lack of empathy was brought up by a group in class. They used Halloween as an example of this. I have not seen the movie, but from what I know about it, Michael is portrayed as a psychotic murder that escapes from a psychiatric hospital and tracks down women in his home town and kills them.  In addition, he doesn’t care about the effects of his action. I think this also goes for the movie The Strangers that was shown in class.  In this movie the two tormenters even say that the only reason they were doing this is “because you (they) were home.” They don’t care at all about how tormented the James and Kristen, the main characters, were. They were just bored. To further understand what it would mean if the lack of empathy was evil, I looked into where we can see empathy, such as in just humans or is it also shown by animals, and where empathy would have come from, and if the origin of empathy affects what it means for evil to be the lack of empathy. 

I think we can all agree that humans do show empathy, but what about animals. It was brought up in class that animals show empathy. I researched the concept of animals showing empathy a little bit and was able to find an article about this in AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) called Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats¹(I was able to get the full article by using the NMT library online journal database). In this article the authors describe an experiment where there is one rat trapped in a cage and another one is free to roam about. The cage door is set so that if the rat really tries, it can pull the cage door open. They found that the free rat would communicate with the trapped rat through holes in the cage and would try to free the rat. After a week or so, the rats learned how to open the cage and free the caged rat. At this point, one might ask themself where does empathy come from? And what would it mean if it is not solely a human quality?

After determining that both animals and humans can show empathy, I looked into how empathy would have developed in animals and humans. The first concept I considered was Darwin’s theory of Evolution. In our book, Problems from Philosophy², it states that Darwin Essentially said

“there will be a ‘struggle for existence’ to determine which individuals live and which die. What determines the outcome of this struggle? What determines which individuals live and which die? There are two possibilities: It could be the result of random causes, or it could be related to the differences between individuals.”

It then goes on and eventually says that an organism might have a certain trait or characteristic that is beneficial to their survival, and therefore, that animal will outlive other organisms or even species that do not have this beneficial trait/characteristic, barring some sort of random incident. Following this argument, empathy must be a beneficial trait that will help an organism to survive, but does it really help an organism survive? First let us think of this trap as something the rat fell into out in nature, instead of simply a cage in a laboratory. Then, Empathy made a rat stay behind and risk falling into the trap themselves, for they could not know for sure how that rat became trapped or if it was something that could happen to them to. It would have been safer for the rat to simply get as far away from there as possible and leave the other rat in the trap. Assume that the trap was one were there was a chance of the empathetic rate being trapped while attempting to help the other one. We know from human experiences that empathy can put you in dangerous. An example of this in a movie would be Ladder 49. Morrison, the fireman in the movie, cared about other people and tried to save them, but it is dangerous to go in and save those people. From an evolution stand point, it would be smarter to not go in. It would force humans to learn to be careful with fire or at least know quick ways out of a fire. Instead Morrison, and fireman in general, have empathy and run in to help. Going back to the rat example, over millions of years, the rats that were empathetic and helped out their fellow mice would eventually die off.  This would leave only apathetic rats. For this reason, empathy coming from evolution seems unlikely

Since evolution is the unlikely starter of empathy, intelligent design is the next explanation for empathy. The idea of intelligent design is that there is a God who is guiding the evolution process². If [i]this God is a loving and all good God, it would stand to reason that the God must be empathetic.  For if love is the opposite of evil, and the absence empathy is evil, than love must also be empathy.  An all good God will also want his creations to be good, and therefore he would make sure that empathy existed in his creations. Furthermore, this means that evil is the lack of God, who is love and therefore empathy, and that good is the presence of God. This concept would mean that for us to do good, and not evil, we must be like God ourselves and what separates us from the animals, is that we have the choice, also known as free will, to not be empathetic and instead go against God.

In conclusion, a lack of empathy, as shown in The Strangers, Halloween, and many other slasher movies, is evil.  In addition, since empathy is not a trait that will increase our likelihood to survive, it is not a result of evolution, but instead is a source of intelligent design.  As a result, evil is the lack of God.

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1 Rachels, James, and Stuart Rachels. Problems from Philosophy. New York: McGraw Hill, 2012. Print.

² Mason, Peggy, Jean Decety, and Inbal B. Bartal. "Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats." Science 334 (2011):                      1427-430. Print.