“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”
— Edith Stein
A reflection on empathy, evil, the moral cost of looking away, and how hope begins by seeing the other
Somewhere between August 1942 and May 1943, human beings were lowered into vats of freezing water at the Dachau concentration camp. They were not soldiers. They were not volunteers. They were prisoners—Russian, Jewish, political dissidents—stripped of their names and submerged into ice as part of a so-called scientific study on hypothermia.
Some were conscious, some anaesthetised. Others were not. Promises were made — of lighter sentences, of survival. Most were broken. Many did not live to speak again. All were expendable.
The goal? To determine how long a human body could survive in the North Sea, so that German pilots might be saved.
It was, allegedly, about efficiency.
We often imagine evil in the shape of monsters. Men frothing with hatred, eyes ablaze with ideology. But the truth is more terrifying. The men who conducted these experiments were scientists. Doctors. Professionals. Educated. Bureaucrats. Ordinary.
Hannah Arendt, reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem, described him not as a monster, but as terrifyingly ordinary — the embodiment of what she called “the banality of evil.”
She was struck not by his savagery, but by his emptiness. Eichmann, one of the chief organisers of the Holocaust, had overseen the transport of millions of Jews to their deaths in the German-occupied East. And yet, he spoke in clichés. He filed papers. He followed orders. Nothing more.
He was, Arendt wrote, not a diabolical villain, but a functionary who had simply ceased to think — and perhaps more crucially, to feel.
Not hate, but absence. Not violence, but vacancy.
Empathy did not fail all at once. It was dismantled, quietly, piece by piece.
This is perhaps more terrifying.
The Disappearing Face
But what’s empathy anyway? The Cambridge Dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.” But empathy is more than imagination. It is presence. It is the act of seeing another person not as an object or a task — but as a world. With their fears, hopes, pain.
Philosopher Edith Stein, born into a German Jewish family, later became a Carmelite nun and was murdered in Auschwitz. In her 1917 dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy, she argued that empathy is not a theory or an act of imagination, but a distinct mode of experience — a way of knowing another’s emotional life while preserving their otherness. For Stein, empathy is a direct encounter with the presence of the other — not as reflection, but as a life that is not ours. It was, she believed, how we remain human in the presence of one another.
That presence is fragile.
Neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen, in his book Zero Degrees of Empathy (2011), argues that when you treat someone as an object, your empathy has turned off. He has explored empathy through a more clinical lens. He defines two types: cognitive empathy, the ability to imagine another’s perspective, and affective empathy, the capacity to care. People with psychopathy often possess the first but lack the second. They know what you feel. They just don’t care.
Baron-Cohen also argues that thoughtless and cruel behaviour always stems from people dehumanising others and turning them into objects.
For instance, infamous Ted Bundy, who volunteered on a suicide prevention helpline while secretly murdering dozens of women, almost certainly had high cognitive empathy. It was how he manipulated his victims. What he lacked was affective empathy — the moral brake that makes exploitation unbearable.
Others, like individuals on the autism spectrum, may struggle with cognitive empathy but often feel deep affective resonance. When someone else is suffering, they are distressed too.
Empathy, then, is not a single trait, but a delicate ecology — one shaped by biology, experience, trauma, and context.
And it can be undone.
When Empathy Fades: Three Paths to Its Erosion
Empathy does not disappear in a single moment. It unravels — sometimes silently — through a series of shifts in perception, context, and language. Here, I want to reflect on three such pathways through which empathy erodes: authority, environment, and rhetoric.
1. Obedience to Authority: The Comfort of Orders
At the Nuremberg Trials, many Nazi officials offered a strikingly consistent defence: “We were just following orders.” The words were chilling not because they were novel, but because they were so ordinary. Responsibility was outsourced, conscience suspended. The moral compass handed over, piece by piece, to uniform and protocol.
Nearly two decades later, in 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted his now-infamous experiment at Yale. He showed how ordinary people, under the pressure of authority, were willing to deliver what they believed were fatal electric shocks to strangers. Instructed by a man in a white lab coat, they increased the voltage step by step. The recipient — an actor — screamed, protested, then fell silent. Still many continued. Not out of hatred. Visibly distressed, but obedient. They were not sadists. They were, as Milgram concluded, disturbingly normal.
Empathy, in such settings, doesn’t vanish — it is overridden. Submerged under a tide of external validation. The presence of authority offers psychological shelter from the unbearable recognition: “I am responsible.”
2. Situational Forces: The Mask of the Role
In 1971, Philip Zimbardo built a simulated prison in the basement of Stanford University. Ordinary young men were randomly assigned to play guards or prisoners. The experiment was scheduled to last two weeks. It was terminated after six days.
What unfolded was deeply unsettling. The guards, absorbed into their roles, became increasingly cruel. The prisoners, stripped of autonomy, began to internalise their subjugation.
Zimbardo demonstrated that environment and expectation do not merely influence behaviour — they script it.
We conform not only to what is asked of us, but to what we believe is expected of us.
In such settings, empathy does not vanish. It is misdirected — buried beneath costume, context, and performance. We cease to see the other as a person, and begin to play a role in which their suffering becomes part of the scene.
3. Dehumanising Language: Words That Kill
Empathy dies not just through violence, but through language, which is never neutral. It is a lens, a frame — and sometimes, a weapon. Before every genocide, there is a shift in language. There is a rhetoric. Subtle at first. Then unmistakable.
Jews were described by the Nazis as “parasitic vermin.” During the Rwandan genocide, the Tutsi were labelled “cockroaches.” Stalin’s regime referred to the kulaks as “lice.” These words are not accidental. They are preparatory. They remove the burden of empathy by erasing the face of the other.
To refer to someone as vermin is to place them below moral regard. It is to enter what Martin Buber called the “I–It” (“Ich-Es”) relationship — where the other is not a person, but an object to be managed, removed, exterminated. The other becomes a thing. This kind of language does not merely reflect cruelty. It prepares it. It makes it thinkable.
And once it is thinkable, it becomes possible.
This erosion is not limited to history. We hear it today — in politics, in media, in conflict zones where dehumanisation precedes drone strikes. Each time we reduce a person to a label, a threat, a category, we peel away their face. And when there is no face, there is no fellow-feeling. There is no accountability.
Only efficiency. Only objectives.
Empathy is eroded not only by systems and slogans, but also by the emotional architecture of our early lives — and the biology that quietly shapes it. In some cases, the capacity to care is compromised not by ideology or obedience — but by the deep interaction between trauma and temperament.
In a longitudinal study published in Science (2002), psychologist Avshalom Caspi found that children who had experienced severe abuse and neglect were more likely to develop antisocial behaviour — especially if they carried a low-activity version of the MAO-A gene, which is involved in impulse control and emotional regulation.
But crucially, the gene alone didn’t predict cruelty. It was the interaction between biology and early harm — the wound paired with the wiring — that shaped behaviour. Those with the same gene, but without early trauma, were not significantly at risk.
Caspi’s work reminds us that empathy isn’t purely chosen or taught — it can also be weakened before we are even aware of it. And yet, even here, there is no inevitability. Not every child who is hurt becomes one who hurts. Biology may tilt the scale, but it does not fix its direction.
Can Empathy Be Restored?
A French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry Emmanuel Levinas, spent the war in a German POW camp, confined to a barrack for Jewish prisoners. Though spared the death camps, the experience shaped his thinking and what some might call his paradoxical belief: that ethics begins not with rules, but with the face of the Other. To see a face, truly, is to be called into responsibility.
Levinas calls this the fundamental ethical event: the face that interrupts us, that calls us out of ourselves, that says, you must not kill me. Not as a rule, not as a doctrine, but as a presence. It is a quiet imperative — not issued by ideology or theology, but awakened in the moment we truly see the other as other. o see that face is to recognise a life beyond our frameworks, our needs, our narratives — and to respond not with control, but with care.
This is not an abstract idea. It is profoundly practical.
Karl Jaspers, psychiatrist and one of the most important existential philosophers, writes that true empathy is not blind sentimentality, but a love that struggles to engage, that demands, that challenges. He speaks of the “Einfühlen” (literally ‘feeling into’) – a process of participation in the other person’s experience. This is not passive pity but active recognition. To see someone not as object, not even as reflection of ourselves, but as radically, mysteriously other—and yet worthy of regard.
This is not easy. Empathy is not always pleasant. Sometimes it wounds us. But perhaps that is its point.
Toward a Politics of Empathy
History shows us how easy it is to descend into thoughtlessness. But history also offers glimmers of hope.
In 1978, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, guided by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, met at Camp David. After thirteen days of tense negotiation, they emerged with the framework for peace — an agreement that ended decades of war. What enabled that shift? Beyond diplomacy and realpolitik, something less tangible but equally decisive moved: empathy. A willingness, however fragile, to imagine the other’s suffering.
Perhaps empathy is not only a private virtue, but a political one.
It is essential to democracy — to the very possibility of dialogue. It allows us to hear perspectives we don’t share, to see pain we don’t cause, to care even when there is nothing to gain.
The Responsibility to Feel
We often use the word evil as if it were an answer. But it is not an answer—it is a door slammed shut. What does it mean to call someone evil, except to say that they have ceased to be like us? It offers no explanation, no accountability, and crucially, no prevention. The existential tradition urges us to ask deeper questions. Not who is evil, but how evil becomes possible.
Most of us are not evil. But all of us are capable of thoughtlessness. Of objectifying. Of looking away. The challenge is not to declare our goodness, but to remain awake — to the face in front of us, to the life that is not ours, to the story we have not lived.
Empathy is not soft, not sentimental. It is rigorous. Demanding. It stretches us toward the difficult, the unfamiliar, the painful.
But when it is present — truly present — it changes everything.
Because when we stop seeing the face in front of us, cruelty becomes possible.
When we learn to see the face of the Other again, empathy begins its return. Healing follows. So does the possibility of dialogue.
Further Reading
Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Books.
Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty. Allen Lane.
Baron-Cohen, S., & Wheelwright, S. (2004). The Empathy Quotient: An Investigation of Adults with Asperger Syndrome or High Functioning Autism, and Normal Sex Differences. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34, 163-175.
https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JADD.0000022607.19833.00
Buber, M. (1923) I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufmann, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1970.
Caspi, A., McClay, J., Moffitt, T. E., Mill, J., Martin, J., Craig, I. W., … & Poulton, R. (2002). Role of genotype in the cycle of violence in maltreated children. Science, 297(5582), 851–854. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1072290
Christie, D.J., Morrison, D.M. (2021). Empathy and Peace. In: Standish, K., Devere, H., Suazo, A., Rafferty, R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Positive Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3877-3_50-1
Jaspers, K. (1951) The Way to Wisdom, trans. R. Marsheim, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row.
Stein, E. (1989). On the Problem of Empathy (W. Stein, Trans.). ICS Publications. (Original work published 1917)
Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House.
