this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
537 points (87.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43857 readers
2204 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's gonna be a what from me dawg. I agree that people's empathy is often coopted to let the people actively doing harm get away with it, but holistically speaking shooting a Nazi for example is an act of kindness and empathy.
It is not that necessarily. If the person does it for those reasons it is, but if I shoot a nazis because of anger it is not an action of empathy. Empathy is a motivation, it cannot be brought into an action after the fact.
Empathy is just the ability to see how someone else feels. It's better to take actions based upon their materials outcomes rather than just an imagined emotional response to it. This isn't even self-centered, using compassion, which is not wanting to hurt others, is good way to make choices. but solely thinking about how others would feel or have felt is not great.