Here are the top empathy trends for 2026. This is a long read (a half an hour), and the recommendation is to engage with one or two trends a session. Spend the entire first quarter of 2026 with it. In addition, it is a top ten list, but not a “count down.” Therefore, the most important trends—in the sense of new, disruptive, innovative, or provocative—are towards the top. 

(Image credit: Kids with colander-based “gizmos” as “thinking caps,” www.EmpathyLab.uk—see trend (9) below.)

(1) Automating Empathy and large language models (LLMs): The idea is that you, the client, are going to get empathy from a software bot, app, empathy platform solution, that is able to have a conversation thanks to a so-called a large language model (LLM). 

The trend of bringing large language models to empathy and empathic relatedness is a game changer. The question is not whether the generative AI can be empathic, but the extent to which the designers are able to distinguish responsiveness from “stroking one’s ego,” sycophancy (servile flattery), and the extent to which prospective clients decide to engage (both open questions at this date (Q1 2026)). 

Thus, the prognosis is mixed. Is automating empathy a silver bullet—or even a good enough lead bullet—to expand empathy for the individual and community and to do so at scale. Key term: “at scale,” which means the service can be “scaled up” to accommodate thousands of people, who are currently “wait listed” for therapy with limited prospects of ever getting off the list. Can the automation address Henry David Thoreau’s “modern mass of men [persons] leading lives of quiet desperation”? Or is the “empathy bot” the cyber age equivalent of a blow-up sex doll for the socially awkward person playing small and resistant to getting out of the person’s comfort zone?

The year ahead promises a proliferation of applications, bots, and services that offer automated conflict resolution, talk therapy, empathy consulting, and companionship. For example: mendful (https://www.mendful.world), empathy.com (bereavement support—that a demo is being offered suggests an app plus services), Google’s conflict resolution app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tuinfoapps.conflict&pli=1). (This list is far from complete.) 

An important question to ask is about an automated empathy bot or app: How readily is an authentic, qualified human being available to engage in an initial or follow-up conversation? At the risk of ending on a cynical note, given the sorry state of human relations as demonstrated in the news of the day, maybe, just maybe, any form of expanded empathy, whether fake or authentic, if properly managed to mitigate harm, is a useful contribution. (Further on empathy and toxic flattery:  https://wapo.st/4sndC9O . Also see my blog post from earlier 2025: https://empathylessons.com/2025/11/04/automating-empathy-issues-and-answers/ 

(2) Suicidal Empathy: This is definitely trending after a certain billionaire provocatively asserted that empathy was a defect of western civilization, even if he did try to take back the assertion. The short version of suicidal empathy is as follows. We are in a lifeboat which is filled to the maximum after our ship sank. You read right—our ship sank. In the water, treading water, surrounding the lifeboat are additional survivors and additional leaky lifeboats at high risk of sinking, leaving the survivors treading water. If the survivors in our still afloat lifeboat are “empathic” and take in the other survivors, then our lifeboat will be swamped, and we will all drown. The conclusion is that in such extreme situations, which are more common than one might imagine, empathy needs to be turned off—or at least dialed down significantly—lest we all perish. This position has been advocated from time-to-time by Elon Musk, Garrett Hardin (1974), and anti-immigration Nativists in one form or another. 

Yet even in the face of lifeboat ethics, empathy remains indispensable. How so? If one is in a life-boat, then one is by definition a survivor. Your ship sank! That is a necessary part of the definition of a lifeboat and being in a lifeboat. You were cast into the vast, seemingly boundless sea. Never underestimate the importance of empathy for those in extremis, but even more than empathy, the occupants of the lifeboat need rescue. To be in a lifeboat and not need rescue is a contradiction in terms. If one recognizes the need for rescue, then the whole scenario of lifeboat ethics gets sent back to the drawing board. 

The idea of our entire planet (Earth) as a lifeboat is a thought experiment. An imaginary narrative (scenario) designed to generate ideas and intuitions (nod here to the philosopher Daniel Dennett). In this case, the trick is to constrain agency using scarcity of resources (seats in the lifeboat) and see what happens. This exposes the entire lifeboat scenario mechanism for constraining, compromising, and denying agency to the participants in the dilemma. Key term: agency.

The approach of lifeboat ethics is based on a fallacy that the situation of scarcity is an unavoidable one—an inevitable continency. On the contrary, scarcity is being manufactured by bad actors, bad politics, and out-and-out human aggression. As such, the scarcity can and should be undone by actors with better (including empathic) motives in order to restore the community to a benchmark standard human functioning. This is consistent with natural disasters creating local calamities that cause scarcity. It is also consistent with disagreements about what constitutes an emergency. The point is to send in emergency services and (for example) the national guard to deliver or air drop palettes of drinkable water, canvas for tents, and provisions, not to shoot the survivors as a burden to the community (the latter following the logic of the lifeboat to its absurd conclusion). 

Returning to the basic metaphor, empathy is no more to blame for overloading the lifeboat than carpentry is to blame for the fact that Roman soldiers used hammer and nails to execute condemned criminal and political enemies by crucifying them. Without practice, empathy can go astray as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and communications lost in translation. 

Being generous to a fault or has never been a requirement for empathy. Altruistic suicide (the soldier falling on the hand grenade to save his comrades) has never been a requirement for empathy. Never. With practice, a rigorous and critical empathy sets boundaries, establishes limits, and creates a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. 

A rigorous and critical empathy belongs to a short list of things such as dignity, respect, compassion, neighborliness, and forms of spiritual love, and are not quantifiable as zero-sum phenomena. This is an important idea: more empathy for you does not mean less empathy for me. 

For example, if I give you a slice of my chocolate cake, I have less cake. However, if I give you empathy, by giving you a good listening, we both have expanded empathy. Empathy is non-additive—and so empathy is also a non-subtractive, humanizing encounter in which my own humanity is enriched in contributing to another person. A rigorous and critical empathy is not quantifiable like chocolate cake. Granted that our topic is difficult and significant, we can enjoy lighter moment—there is enough food to go around, but definitely not enough chocolate cake! Like food, there is enough empathy to go around, but it does not seem that way, because we have not been effective in driving out the obstacles to empathy such as aggression, hostility, bullying, using food as a weapon, and politics in the negative, pejorative sense. Also see my blog post from earlier 2025:

[https://empathylessons.com/2025/05/22/suicidal-empathy/ ]

(3) Rhetorical empathy: The paradigm, ideal case for rhetorical empathy is exemplified by Malcolm-X’s statement to his colleagues at the founding of the organization of African American Unity, “We are not the pilgrims […] We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us [loud laughter and applause]”  (https://youtu.be/3Aq2Z0i8D6A?si=dkYo6QKCrgK2fWXL). 

In rhetorical empathy, the speaker’s words address the listening of the audience or other person (“Other”) in such a way as to leave the Other with the experience of having been heard. This must seem counter-intuitive since it is the Other that is doing the listening. The hidden variable is that the speaker knows the Other in the sense that she or he has walked a mile in their shoes (after having taken off her/his own) and can articulate the experience the audience is implicitly harboring in their hearts yet have been unable to express.  

For more details on rhetorical empathy, see the separate blog post:  post: https://empathylessons.com/2023/04/09/rhetorical-empathy-a-primer/

Also see the peer-reviewed academic article: “Rhetorical empathy in the context of ontology,” Turning Toward Being: The Journal of Ontological Inquiry in Education: (2024) Vol. 2: Issue 1, Article 5. Available at: https://rdw.rowan.edu/joie/vol2/iss1/5

(4) Empathy and autism: Alternative facts, dangerous half-truths, damn lies—and empathy

How shall I express it delicately? The inmates are now in charge of the asylum over at the US Health and Human Services (HHS). Having a worm in one’s brain deservers our empathy; having a worm in one’s thinking does not—see below regarding critical thinking. 

Autism is often considered a disorder of empathy—at the risk of oversimplifying, the autistic person is not able to shift perspectives and take the other person’s point of view or do so as readily as neuro-typical persons. Never dismiss empathy. Nor the value in expanding empathy. Never. Yet the matter is a lot more complicated than that. 

Public debate about autism and empathy has been scrambled by misinformation about how vaccines may influence the disorder. It is distressing to see what passes for political leadership send children and families down yet another over-simplified and near delusional detour. In a more promising approach using Big Data, scientists at the Flatiron Institute and Princeton have presented evidence that autism presents in four distinct ways or subtypes. Quoting from the Washington Post summary (https://wapo.st/44V7lZb):

• Broadly affected: The smallest group — about 10 percent of participants — faced the steepest challenges, marked by developmental delays, difficulties with communication and social interaction, and repetitive behaviors that touched nearly every part of life.
• Mixed autism with developmental delay: Roughly 19 percent showed early developmental delays but few signs of anxiety, depression or disruptive behavior. Researchers call this group “mixed” because its members vary widely in how strongly they display social or repetitive behaviors.
• Moderate challenges: About a third of participants fell into this group, showing the hallmark traits of autism — social and communication differences and repetitive habits — but in subtler ways and without developmental delays.
• Social and/or behavioral: The largest group, around 37 percent, met early developmental milestones on time yet often grappled with other conditions later on, including ADHD, anxiety, depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

For the peer-reviewed paper, which is dense and heavy with computational biology see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02224-z . 

These different subtypes suggest a source of much of the confusion in diagnosis and treatment. Parents, medical professionals, and educators and talking past one another because they are addressing the different subtypes. 

Naturally, everyone would like a quick fix: Give ‘em vitamin B9—problem solved! Wouldn’t it be nice? (Nor is there anything wrong with vitamin B9—but it ain’t gonna cure autism.) While expanded understanding and diagnostic possibilities point to enhanced treatment interventions, what is less good news is that treatments remain complex, multi-modal, time and labor intensive, and, therefore, expensive. Behavioral interventions are demonstrably effective in improving recognizing social clues and expanding social skills. Selective, limited use of psychopharmacology is effective in addressing attention deficit and hyperactivity, though one must always be concerned in medicating young brains. Working from the inside out, e.g., play therapy is effective in dealing with anxiety and depression. In every case, creating an empathic environment of toleration, limit setting, and meeting the children (and parents) where they are struggling is on the critical path to success. 

(4) Empathy versus cruelty and unelected puppet masters in politics: Presumably a statement that “empathy is a weakness” (see above (2)) would be a justification of the unempathic “slash and burn” methods of the “unelected puppet masters” at the US Depart of Doge [pronounce: “dog”], the so-called US Department of Government of Efficiency, showing up at the US IRS and Social Security offices and so on and demanding to see confidential citizen data and/or seemingly randomly sending employees home (“firing” them). While a “controlled burn” of the bureaucratic growth of the federal government forest underbrush might indeed be the empathic thing to do—or at least needed “tough love,” shutting down entire departments and mass layoffs is not an example of it. This is the “uncontrolled burn” (shout out to Garrett Smith for the term).

What Stephen Miller (Deputy White House Chief of Staff) and Russell Vought (Office of Management and Budget / Project 2025) do not point out is that empathy does not work with bullies or abusers, who will take whatever vulnerability you may exhibit and use it against you. This is also the case with anti-social personality disorder, psychopaths, and individuals with an undeveloped or defective conscience, who struggle to tell right from wrong. I hasten to add that without interviewing the individual, one has no way of knowing the individual’s mental status, whether the individual is in integrity or out of it. 

Another possibility is that the individual is projecting the individual’s own unreliable, defective empathy onto the community as an empathic defect. Many of those who lack empathy are hungry for it. If ever there was a disqualifying statement by a would-be administrator or leader, Elon Musk’s soundbite about empathy being a defect of civilization would be it. Even if he took it back, I assert that it shows his “true colors”. However, a further agenda lurks nearby.

In the face of bullying, a critical and rigorous empathy sets limits, speaks truth to power, establishes boundaries, pushes back against attempts to control, dominate, and manipulate. One must not overlook the power of top down, cognitive empathy in thinking like one’s opponent in order to overcome him. “Top down,” cognitive empathy is detailed in Mikah Zenko’s Red Team! (Basic Books 2015) according to which taking a walk in the other’s shoes (the folk definition of empathy) provides advantages in relationships, business, politics, and building communities that are thrive on cooperation, communication, coordination, and inclusiveness. Short review: Think like one’s opponents, to come out on top. 

If one were looking for a short disqualifying reason to sideline unelected puppet masters such as Musk and fellow traveler Stephen Miller (see more on the latter on the South Poverty Law Project’s report on racism and anti-immigration hate groups), this is it. I leave it to the reader to figure out who is the puppet.

(5) Empathy and immigration and murder most foul: more alternative facts, dangerous half-truths and total nonsense: That these United States of America are a federated nation of immigrants is a cold fact. Most of the people living here would not be here if their parents, grandparents, or great grandparents had not arrived from some land across the sea. To be sure, there are exceptions—and it is an also a fact that if one reads the treaties that the US government made with Native Americans, that Oklahoma really does belong to the Native Americans. Likewise, as Malcolm-X said to a crowd in Harlem to responses of “Amen!” and boisterous laughter, “You did not land on Plymouth rock; Plymouth rock landed on you!” (See (2) above.) Still, residents already living here are not interested in changing the devil they know for the devil they don’t know. 

The following quote is not from the “take over” of Venezuela (ongoing), but the action of the border patrol and ICE in Chicago’s Hispanic neighborhood: 

“[…] [I]t’s been a parade of nightmares — armed men in balaclavas on the streets, migrants sent to a torture prison in El Salvador, corruption on a scale undreamed of by even the gaudiest third-world dictators and the shocking capitulation by many leaders in business, law, media and academia. Trying to wrap one’s mind around the scale of civic destruction wrought in just 11 months stretches the limits of the imagination, like conceptualizing light-years or black holes.” [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/opinion/trump-weaker-resistance-stronger.html?unlocked_article_code=1._k8.NEnL.4kvmeqa-xzC4&smid=url-share

It is a breakdown of empathy that a nation of immigrants is flat out persecuting, oppressing, and hounding mostly, but not exclusively, Hispanics and people with brown skin. Demoralizing. Disgraceful. Criminal?

Everyone wants to deport undocumented murderers, rapists, gang members, and bad actors. Everyone. Yet that is not what we saw from ICE/BP actions in Chicago where Hispanic-appearing bus boys in restaurants, day laborers in Home Deport parking lots, nannies at preschools (?!), street vendors selling tacos, block party gatherings in Latino neighborhoods were targeted and where tear gas, flash bang grenades, shots to the head with high-speed paint balls (aimed at peacefully protesting pastors), and other chemicals agents were used without warning. This just in: mother of three shot, killed by ICE/BP: Are you getting the message? Murder most foul![https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/opinion/renee-good-minnesota-shooting-ice.html?unlocked_article_code=1.DlA.y2Fb.N6f9Vobf-Vmv&smid=url-share]

The administration’s narrative (Secretary of Homeland Insecurity Noem, etc) has NEVER matched the actions on the ground in the community neighborhoods. According to the Chicago Tribute—of 624 arrests reported by ICE/BP to the court some 16 persons had criminal records (“worst of the worst”). That is 2.5 percent. Underwhelming, demoralizing, appalling. 

Only 2.6% on list of 614 ‘Operation Midway Blitz’ arrestees had criminal histories, DOJ records show

The call to action employs empathy to network and build community. Get a whistle and use it. Two short tweets for ICE Spotted—one long one for someone being detained. Build local networks of citizen observers. Urge local law enforcement to arrest anyone who breaks the law, including federal officers acting illegally. No one said this was going to be easy. We Americans have options and resources that were not available to the residents of Weimar Germany in 1933, who were noticeably lacking in whistles. Okay, not funny. 

(Update 01/28/2026: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/is-trump-derangement-syndrome-real-a603e4a1?st=AnbPxi&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink)

(6) Radical empathy and trauma: Cathy Caruth (1996) concisely defines trauma in terms of an experience that is registered but not experienced, a truth or reality that is not available to the survivor as a standard experience. The person (for example) was factually, objectively present when the head on collision occurred, but, even if the person has memories, and would acknowledge the event, paradoxically, the person does not presently experience it as something the person experienced in a way that a person standardly experienced the past event. 

The survivor experiences dissociated, repetitive nightmares, flashbacks, and depersonalization. Strictly speaking, the challenge is not only that the would-be empathizer was not with the surviving Other when the survivor experienced the life-threatening trauma, but the survivor was physically present yet did not have the experience in such a way as to experience it. That may sound strange that the survivor did not experience the experience. Once again, one searches for words to capture an experience one did not experience. That is Caruth’s (1996) definition of “unclaimed” experience.

Moral trauma adds a challenging twist to what is traumatic about trauma. What is little recognized is that many survivors are also perpetrators (and vice versa). The survivor may also unwittingly (or even intentionally) become a perpetrator. The incarcerated prisoner of conscience steals a piece of bread from another prisoner, or to save his own life, falsely accuses another. One wants to say: This is tragic in the strict sense. The characters in ancient Greek tragic theater, including Oedipus, Phaedra, Medea, practically the whole House of Atrius, are all both survivors and perpetrators. 

Moral trauma is defined as the distressing emotional, behavioral, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of exposure to (including participation in) events in which a person’s moral boundaries are violated and in which individuals or groups are gravely injured, killed, or credible threat thereof is enacted (i.e., individuals are physically traumatized). Examples of moral trauma include such things as being put in a situation where “I will kill you if you do not kill this person.” 

Generalizing on the latter example, the list includes morally fraught instances of double binds, valid military orders that result in unintentional harm to innocent people, situations in which survivors become perpetrators (and vice versa), soul murder (defined as killing the possibility of empathy and/or killing the possibility of possibility), and the Trolley Car Dilemma (Anonymous Wikipedia Content 2012, Foot 1967, Thomson 1976). In moral trauma people become both perpetrators and survivors, and such an outcome is characteristic of many (though not all) moral traumas. 

Here radical empathy comes into its own. A person is asked to make a decision that no one should have to make. A person is asked to make a decision that no one is able to make—and yet the person makes the decision anyway, even if the person does nothing, because doing nothing is making a decision. A person is asked to make a decision that no one is entitled to make, which include most decisions about who should live or die (or be gravely injured). The result is moral trauma—the person is both a perpetrator and a survivor. Now empathize with that. No one said it would be easy. 

Hence, the need for radical empathy. Extreme situations—that threaten death or dismemberment—call forth radical empathy. Standard empathy is challenged by extreme situations out of remote, hard-to-grasp experiences to become radical empathy. Radical empathy remains committed to empathizing with the Other in the face of the breakdown of standard empathy as empathic distress. (For further on radical empathy, see the separate blog post: https://empathylessons.com/2025/08/22/a-concise-talk-on-trauma-and-radical-empathy/and see also the Reference Agosta 2025 below.) The treatment or therapy consists of the survivor re-experiencing the trauma vicariously from a place of safety, an empathic space of acceptance and tolerance. In doing so the trauma starts losing its power and when it returns, it does so with less force, eventually becoming a distant unhappy and painful but not overwhelming memory.

(7) Empathy and art: Heinz Kohut, MD, (1971) pointed out that one result of depth psychological therapy with a strong orientation on empathy was an expansion of the individual’s appreciation or art, humor, and practical wisdom. What is the converse were also the case? Engaging with art and music, the Humanities and literature, theatre, rhetoric and languages, opens up areas of the brain that map directly to empathy and powerfully activate empathy. 

Relating to the work of art, including literary fiction such as the novel, aesthetically and relating to the Other empathically is an intersection that has been noted by one of the innovators of personality theory, Gordon Allport (1897–1967), He was one of the pioneers of personality theory with his Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Holt 1937), in which he writes: 

It has often been said by the advocates of empathy that the “understanding of a personality is like the understanding of a work of art” (1937:  531). 

These advocates of empathy were not anonymous Others but Allport’s teacher, Herbert Langfeld (1879–1958), also a psychologist and president of the American Psychological Association and his colleagues. Langfeld was the author of The Aesthetic Attitude (1920: vi): “the motor theory of mind, namely that to every stimulus which the organism receives from without, it makes a definite response” resulting in the “tendency of the observer to project himself” into objects and body. 

As noted, psychologists and health professionals have repeatedly alluded to such benefits of expanded empathy as an increased sense of humor, appreciation for art and music, as well as an enhanced capacity to enjoy life itself. Attention to fine-grained distinctions in an individual’s experience of other individuals is hypothesized to be transferable across domains such as the experience of art, humor, and engaging with others. Expand your empathy—go to the art museum—go to a concert—read immersive fiction, a novel.

(8) Empathy is the new love: People want to be listened to. People want to feel as if they have been heard—people want to be heard. People want to be gotten for they authentically are as a possibility. People want others to appreciate from where they are coming—their point of view. People want to be acknowledged, recognized, appreciated for their contribution. Empathy delivers all these ways of relating and more. 

If empathy is the new love, then what is the old love? Folk wisdom suggests that love is blind; Plato, that love is a kind of madness, sometimes divine madness, sometimes just plain ordinary, everyday craziness—the one who is in love is semi-hypnotically held in bondage by an idealized depiction of the beloved, overlooking the partner’s failings and limitations; Bob Dylan, that love is just a four-letter word. So far, love sounds like tertiary syphilis—it makes one mad and causes one to go blind.

Less cynically, no one should have to choose between empathy and love in their positive dimensions. Talking Greek here, love includes eros—the erotic dimension, which gets a lot of attention as romantic relationships and aim-inhibited sexuality; philias—friendship between peers in building a community of fellow travelers; and agape—the spiritual love often attributed to Saint Paul for a higher power towards which humanity strives in its own clumsy and stumbling ways. 

A fourth item may usefully be added to the list—the love of a mother, parent, or care-taker for the infant, neonate, or child of tender art. The sound of a crying baby has the power to wake most grown-ups out of the deepest sleep—and that is because we care. Letting the anxious infant merge with the parent’s soothing calmness satisfies criteria for both love and empathy, and may be the common matrix out of which these come forth. 

Especially from a romantic perspective, the goal of love is to erase the boundary between the self and Other. (But also see above on the merge of the anxious infant with the calm adult.) Merger of one’s mind and body with the beloved is the aspiration and, at least temporarily, the outcome. 

In contrast to love, empathy navigates the boundary between oneself and Other such that the distinction between self and Other is sustained—any merger is temporary and transient—one has a vicarious experience of the Other and the integrity of self and Other are maintained. Thus, love and empathy have a different relationship to the boundary between self and Other. Empathy is committed to a firm, albeit semi-permeable boundary; whereas, especially in its more enthusiastic forms, love celebrates the cancelling of the boundary, though ultimately acknowledging the reality of the distinction self/Other.

(9) Reading and empathizing: “A good book is an empathy engine”—Chris Riddell, UK Children’s Laurate. Many analogies exist between reading a text and empathizing with another person. This is not a mere analogical argument. The practices of empathy and reading are applying the same underlying micro-practices, skills, techniques, and methods. Reading literature (we are not engaging with reading legal contracts or computer documentation) is an empathic practice—not merely analogous to one, though it may be that too. 

(Image credit: EmpathyLab (UK): Your brain on empathy reading)

Reading is an empathic practice in that it engages with another person—the Other—and does so at several levels. There are several levels of otherness—the Other of the character in the text is the most readily available—there is the implied Other addressed by the implied author, the Other of the narrator, who collapses into the implied author but often is distinct, and the actual author, who writes the words. Once again, I emphasize—and empathize—these are not merely analogous to acts of the practice of empathy, they are empathic gestures from start to finish, since they bring forth empathy and make it present in the encounter with an Other. 

The idea is that one relates to works of art such as a literary text with the same respect, aesthetic disinterest, moral interest as we relate to other human beings. That is also the case when the relationship breaks down. Someone throws cake at the Mona Lisa or tries to spray it with red paint. One is shocked in a way that is different than insulting or attacking a person, yet has strong objections like an appalling boundary violation has occurred. 

On the one hand, what empathy does for reading literature is bring it to life as the possibility of a laboratory for human emotions, affections, struggles, dynamics, success, and failure. Conversely, what literature does for empathy is provide a laboratory in which empathic relatedness can be challenged, tested, transformed, discarded, celebrated, explored, and made the object of inquiry. 

This is another area where it is hard to say just a little. Quoting from John Guillory (2025: p. 22ftnt 31), in turn, paraphrasing Stanislas Dehaene (Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (Viking Press 2009)): “…[Dehaene] describes reading as a refunctioning of regions of the brain dedicated to recognizing visual signals of a particular sort, chiefly the edge or corners of object; these forms the basis for inscriptive marks. Although the neurons of the areas that accomplish reading were not evolved for the purpose of reading, the human brain learned reading and writing by developing a new way of correlating visual and aural information in the brain. Dehaene calls this ‘neuronal recycling” (144–148). This is just the start of the neuroscience narrative.

The encounters between empathy and literature, relating as persons to art works and relating as art works to persons, are motivated. One considers how one relates to another person, and how it is the same and different than how one relates to works of art. At first glance, one treats art better than one treats people. One puts art in libraries and museums with air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter whereas one allows people to go homeless and sleep under bridges in appalling conditions. However, upon reflection one guiltily allows with shame that as a community, one is failing to live up to one’s own best standards. One recognizes one’s failure even as one refuses a trade-off between respect for art and respect for persons. 

(10) Empathy and critical thinking: We conclude with a positive proposal: Teach critical thinking. This is the empathic educational moment. Absent a rigorous and critical practice of empathy, I am cautious about engaging current political clichés in a highly polarized political world and “rhetoric” in the negative sense. 

Critical thinking includes putting oneself in the place of one’s opponent—the folk definition of empathy—not necessarily to agree with the other individual—but to consider what advantages and disadvantages are included in the opponent’s position. Taking a walk in the Other’s shoes after having taken off one’s own (to avoid the risk of projection) shows one where the shoe pinches. This “pinching” —to stay with the metaphor—is not mere knowledge but a basic inquiry into what the Other considers possible based on how the Other’s world is disclosed experientially. That is what we have attempted to do here by engaging with the most rigorous version of the lifeboat dilemma, instead of a strawman. Critical thinking is a possibility pump designed to get people to start again listening to one another, allowing the empathic receptivity (listening) to come forth. 

In our day and age of fake news, deep fake identity theft, not to mention common political propaganda, one arguably needs a course in critical thinking (e.g., Mill 1859; Haber 2020) to distinguish fact and fiction. Nevertheless, I boldly assert that most people, not suffering from delusional disorder or political pathologies of being The True Believer (Hoffer 1953)), are generally able to make this distinction. 

A rigorous and critical empathy creates a safe zone of acceptance and tolerance within which people can inquire into what is possible—debate and listen to a wide spectrum of ideas, positions, feelings, and expressions out of which new possibilities can come forth. For example, empathy and critical thinking support maintaining firm boundaries and limits against actors who would misuse social media to amplify and distort communications. Much of what Jürgen Habermas (1984) says about the communicative distortions in mass media, television, and film applies with a multiplicative effect to the problematic, if not toxic, politics occurring on the Internet and social networking. 

The extension to issues of politics, climate change, and community struggles follows immediately. Insofar as individuals skeptical of empathy are trying to force a decision between critical thinking and empathy, the choice must be declined. Both empathy and critical thinking are needed; hence, a rigorous and critical empathy is included in the definition of enlarged, critical thinking (and vice versa). (Note that “critical thinking” can mean a lot of things. Here key references include John Stuart Mill 1859; Haber 2020; “enlarged thinking” in Kant 1791/93 (AA 159); Arendt 1968: 9; Habermas 1984; Agosta 2024, 2025.) 

In conclusion, a positive alternative to abandoning facts and skipping critical thinking is suggested by Bob Dylan’s song about empathy. One has to push off the shore of certainty and venture forth into the unknown. We give Dylan the last word (1965: 185): “I wish that for just one time / You could stand inside my shoes / And just for that one moment / I could be you” [.] 

REFERENCES

Lou Agosta. (2025). Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 

______________. (2024). Empathy Lessons. 2nd Edition. Chicago: Two Pears Press. 

______________. (2014). A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Pivot. 

Anonymous Wikipedia Content. (2012). Trolley problem (The trolley dilemma). Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem [checked 2023-06-25]

Arendt, Hannah. (1952/1958). The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd Edition. Cleveland and New York: Meridian (World) Publishing, 1958.

Gordon Allport. (19370. Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Holt 1937).

Cathy Caruth. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins.

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This blog post, blog and all content were prepared by Lou Agosta without any use of Generative AI. None. The author has been a big fan of the em dash ever since “graduating” from a Smith Corona typewriter to a word processor. 

© Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project