One can always make a splash by throwing a rotten tomato, and those who throw one at empathy get a chance to gather Internet clicks by saying something shocking, even if it is of questionable accuracy. However, what about seriously engaging this thought literally as a debating point – is empathy a defect of western civilization dooming us to suicide and/or suicidal species extinction? As an exercise in thinking, consider the pros and cons.
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You know how modern agriculture can grow enough food to feed everyone on the planet thanks to the “Green Revolution” and high yield seeds, but people are still starving, because of the use of food by politicians and politics in the pejorative sense to perpetrate hostility, aggression, and bad actions? Likewise with empathy: Enough empathy is available to go around; but it is badly distributed. People are living and working in empathy deserts. Organizational politics, stress and burnout, attempts to control and dominate, egocentrism and narcissism, out-and-out aggression and greed, all result in empathy getting hoarded locally, creating “empathy deserts” even amid an adequate supply. Therefore, this approach does not call for “more” empathy, but rather for “expanded” empathy. The difference is subtle.
Indeed the one minute empathy training consists in driving out hostility, aggression, bullying, bad language, prejudice, politics in the pejorative sense, a long list of negative behaviors, and empathy naturally and spontaneously comes forth. The majority of people want to be empathic, and, given half a chance, will behave empathically. Does this mean would-be empaths and empathically motivated people have become suicidal?
The short version of suicidal empathy is as follows. We are in a lifeboat which is filled to the maximum after our ship sank. In the water, treading water, surrounding the lifeboat are additional survivors and other leaky lifeboats about to sink, leaving the survivors treading water. If the survivors in the lifeboat are empathic and take in the other survivors, then the lifeboat stil afloat will be swamped and we will all drown. The conclusion is that in such extreme situations, which are more common than one might imagine, then empathy needs to be turned off – or at least dialed down significantly – lest we all perish.
This thought experiment of the lifeboat and its extreme situation has received renewed attention as Elon Musk has notoriously said that empathy is a weakness of western civilization.
[On background, for Musk’s sound bite about empathy being a weakness, see: https://youtube.com/shorts/LWvOvgjNEds?si=GByQLE0yoFDyWtTr ). To be fair, Musk does not invoke the lifeboat scenario in the quoted statements; however, Musk and his would-be supporters have expounded at greater length on behavior in extremis as reported in the following CNN article, in which a simplified version of evolutionary psychology (not necessarily Musk’s) as the survival of the fittest, plays a leading role https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empathy-doge/index.html By the way, regarding Musk’s comment, empathy advocates are telling me, there is no such thing as bad press coverage, and you can’t get publicity like this at any price. It is almost as good as having your books banned by the Catholic Church!]
Like most thought experiments, the lifeboat scenario is an intuition pump designed to stimulate debate about a difficult and controversial subject, in this case, empathy in circumstances of scarcity, trauma, compromised agency, and extreme situations.
On background, the original formulation of the lifeboat situation is due to ecologist Garrett Hardin (1974) whose idea of “spaceship earth” envisions the rich and poor nations as being in a life-or-death struggle against one another for limited resources. That Hardin was an anti-immigration Nativist in a nation of immigrants is problematic (and he is called out by the Southern Poverty Law Project as giving support to white supremacist hate groups[1]); but his many personal limitations do not necessarily mean his thought-experiment of lifeboat ethics is without merit. We engage it as a thought-experiment on its own merits.
The key idea of Hardin’s thought experiment is that each nation is a lifeboat. Nations such as the USA are solid, water tight, and well off. Others such as the South Sudan, Burundi, Central African Republic and Bangladesh are sinking (in the case of Bangladesh, literally so) or at least leaking badly. In the water surrounding the lifeboat(s), there already are a lot of people treading water (think: refugees fleeing hunger and murderous gangs in South America) – and this number is growing. Therefore, Hardin’s argument goes, it behooves the well-off nations to establish strong borders that keep would-be refugees from the leaky boats from overwhelming the still water tight boats in order to prevent swamping us all. According to this scenario of “lifeboat ethics,” empathy is a luxury we cannot afford. Similar statements would be made about compassion, kindness, generosity, and, presumably, most of the teachings regarding neighborliness of Jesus of Nazareth, Confucius, and Buddha – not affordable in our extreme situation.
Now to engage with the strongest version of lifeboat ethics requires a scenario in which there really is a situation of extreme scarcity. For the sake of argument, though scarcity is not inevitable, let us suppose that it is indeed inevitable. Let us accept the flawed presupposition that spaceship earth has resources which are so limited that extreme measures and hard-heartedness are required.
Accepting the assumption of scarcity, the argument in favor of lifeboat ethics rejects the possibility that human beings have managed to survive on the planet by using their cognitive capabilities, innovating out of predicaments, by thinking about the consequences of their actions, optimizing those consequences, and finding ways of doing more with less. Here the limitations of the lifeboat dilemma as a thought experiment come into view. The ecological authorities who propose the thought experiment rule out every initiative and innovation to lessen the pain and suffering of the participants in the lifeboat scenario, whether in the boat or the water, thereby eliminating (or greatly reducing) the agency of those who would act empathically or who are willing to limit their own narrow self-interest.
For example, if it is proposed that the people in the lifeboat throw the swimmers their own life vests or life preservers (think: foreign aid), thereby increasing the chances of survival, the authorities rule there are not enough life vests.
If it is proposed that the people in the boats pull on the oars to circle the boats, tie the boats together to build a sort of pier, and use canvas to create a platform to support other survivors (think: the United Nations), there are no oars or canvas or rope or the seas are too rough.
If it is proposed that some good Samaritans in the lifeboat volunteer to treat the lifeboat as a “time share” into and out of which individuals rotate out of the water for a while and then back in, the better to survive (think: foreign guest worker program), the authorities rule the water is so cold as to make such sharing unworkable.
If it is proposed that the occupants in the lifeboat, pass the survivors in the water a thermos of hot medicinal tea (think: Doctors Without Borders), thereby delaying hypothermia, the authorities rule there is no such thermos.
If it proposed to implement a flotation device by tying the ends of one’s trousers together, capturing the air, and wrapping it around one’s shoulders (think: the peace corps), then the authorities rule that the fabric is too thin or torn.
If, after the people in the water have died of hypothermia or been killed by sharks, the people in the lifeboat can live for hundreds of days on sea turtles, raw fish, and rain water (think: micro lending), but only if they have a fishing line and a piece of canvas to catch the rain. The sea is a vast source of protein and can sustain many lifeboats, given a fishing line and a piece of putty to plug the leaks. The authorizes rule all that out, too. In short, the agency required to imagine and implement an empathic act or even a useful, life sustaining one, is cancelled by the steady drum-beat (and counter argument) of “not enough,” “not enough,” and more “not enough”.
This is why tragedy – the art form – was invented. Life presents contingent circumstance that constrain one’s agency, limit one’s choices, and make one both a survivor and a perpetrator (if one survives). As thinkers of the lifeboat dilemma, we are put into a double-bind. If one acts inclusively, thoughtlessly pulling people into the already overcrowded lifeboat, then everyone ends up in the water (and eventually under water). If one acts to repel any attempt to get into the lifeboat, then one enacts violence against those trying, perhaps legitimately to self-rescue, and one behaves hard-heartedly. One becomes a perpetrator, causing others to die. One is caught between the rock and hard place; literally, in this case, between the devil and the deep blue sea. That is the definition of moral trauma. Now empathize with that!
The people trying to climb into the lifeboat, who get pushed down, experience physical trauma as they drown. The people already in the boat who push down the otherwise innocent would-be survivors for whom there is no room in the boat, experience moral trauma. Whatever happens, their souls are damaged. The result is empathic distress, including forms of compassion fatigue, guilt, loss of self-respect, and burnout, one and all professional risks of the helping professions. Whether one gives into despair (or a hard-hearted “realism”) and becomes a survivalist, stock-piling canned goods, ammo, and guns, is a further point of debate. In addition to empathic distress, standard empathy confronts obstacles of emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and communications lost in translation.
Yet even in the face of lifeboat ethics, empathy remains indispensable. How so? If one is in a lifeboat one is by definition a survivor. Your ship sank! That is a necessary part of the definition of 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, blowing up the whole scenario and sending it back to the drawing board. This exposes the entire lifeboat scenario as a manipulation and mechanism for constraining, compromising, and denying agency to the participants in the dilemma. However, let us take the scenario at face value – help is not coming!
Meanwhile, awaiting rescue, one is at risk of becoming a perpetrator, albeit unwittingly, if one defends the lifeboat against those trying to climb into it by pushing them back down into the water. People are going to drown. In most tragic literature, the protagonist is both a survivor and a perpetrator.
For example, the Greek hero Oedipus was exposed as an infant to die, abandoned by his biological parents, who feared the prophecy of his murdering his father. He is rescued by a shepherd and goes on unwittingly to kill his biological father in a dispute as he (Oedipus) tries to avoid the fated prophecy, and, leaves the home of his foster parents (not realizing they have fostered him). Likewise, the people in the lifeboat are both survivors and perpetrators, the latter as they have to take violent action to defend their boat against the desperate swimmers who would occupy it.
Two wrong do not make a right, and there is no excuse for bad behavior. However, the people in the lifeboat are asked to make choices – life and death decisions – that no one is entitled to make, that no one should have to make, indeed that no one can make with integrity, yet that they make anyway and in any case, since doing nothing is also a choice. The point is not to marshal excuses – since there are none adequate to life and death – but to note that standard empathy is challenged in the face of moral trauma to become radical – to become radical empathy.
Empathy itself requires innovation. The proposal is that the lifeboat dilemma calls for and calls forth radical empathy. Radical empathy leverages the imagination to find a way forward in the face of tragic circumstances. Radical empathy is committed to empathizing in the face of empathic distress to solve the given dilemma through imagination variations when and where it is possible to do so; to comfort the survivors when there are any; and when there are no survivors by bearing witness to the tragic struggle where the outcome is a tragic one.
Empathy, whether standard or radical, has a direct answer to lifeboat ethics and those about to be cast into a lifeboat. The answer is: “Women and children first.” If that happens to be your own spouse and children, then so much the better. However, save someone; and while I cannot say what I action I would take in such an extreme situation, presumably one should be ready to surrender one’s place in the boat. That is the empathic moment and the answer to hard-hearted proposals to throw the weak overboard. Children are the future and, unless they survive, species extinction is the outcome, and species extinction is a completely different thought experiment, not relevant here. This is the empathic answer.
In the face of a thought-experiment such as lifeboat ethics, designed to take away one’s power and agency in the face of contingencies, the problem – how to allocate resources empathically in the face of extreme scarcity – cannot be directly solved. Rather the problem must be refuted. The setup of the experiment contains a flawed presupposition. Fundamentally flawed! The experiment makes it sound like scarcity is unavoidable. This is factually, scientifically, and indeed historically inaccurate.
Scarcity (let us consider the example of starvation) is occurring on our planet, in war zones, and even in the inner-city community in which I live, but not because of lack of food. Starvation is occurring because food is being used as a weapon of domination, including prejudice, aggression and war. There is enough food to go around (as will be easily demonstrated in the next paragraph) but hostile and oligarchical powers (governments) are withholding it from those who have been designated as “the enemy,” including civilian populations. A noncontroversial if no less gut-wrenching example was the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War (1967 – 1970), with examples of children near death with swollen belies due to malnourishment. This was due to armed military blockade not crop failures. Such withholding would, of course, be the contrary of empathic (or even decent!) behavior.
On background, spaceship earth (to use Hardin’s incisive term) has vastly more resources than a life boat and, therefore, vastly expanded opportunities for imaginative innovation. To stay with the example of feeding people, the development of Cyrus McCormick’s combine-wheat-reaper, and the follow-on agribusiness technology, allow some 2% of the population to grow enough food to feed the entire planet; and this in spite of the fact that human choices made under aggression continue to use food as a weapon of starvation. Prior to the Green Revolution, the other 98% of the population had to work twelve to sixteen hours a day to grow enough food to avoid a slow, agonizing death by starvation. Arguably, these people were historically in the lifeboat dilemma; and their behavior often showed it (which, of course, is not excuse for bad behavior as two wrongs do not make a right).
On further background, Norman Borloug’s (1914–2009) innovations in seeds and plants improved agricultural yields by integral factors, leading food experts to estimate his innovations saved over a billion people from starvation, earning Borloug the Nobel Peace Prize and the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Lots of wars have been fought over land – land also used to grow food. Garrett Hardin lived long enough to know about this (“Green Revolution”), but his commitment to anti-immigration politics apparently created a blind spot, preventing him from engaging.
Therefore, 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. However, the point is to send in emergency services and 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 suicide have 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. 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 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, and politics in the pejorative sense.
As Lord Acton famously said, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Granted, that corrupt leaders lacking integrity engage in abuses of power, is not new news. That super rich individuals and corporations form corrupt alliances with powerful politicians lacking integrity is called a lot of things – “oligarchy” is defined as the rule of the rich for the benefit of the rich; and “fascism” is defined as the rule of a military industrial complex pulling the strings of politicians at the expense of individuals and their well-being as citizens and their liberties. A new trail of tears comes forth based on fear and intimidation.
The political authorities argue, the current situation is an emergency, an invasion, a crisis that requires setting aside the rule of law. An early version of capitalism that rejects win-win participation and business innovation is privileged over creating a clearing for a rising tide, which raises all boats (to continue to riff on the lifeboat theme with a slogan from Ronald Regean). It is hard not to get cynical. Setting aside the rule of law – what? – so that the President can accept $400 million gifts from a foreign power in direct violation of the US Constitution. Granted this is a single example, it speaks volumes. A strange emergency indeed!
In the face of this, empathy proposes to speak truth to power. Changing the metaphor: while bureaucracy may need to be trimmed back from time to time, like forest management that burns the underbrush with a controlled burn, less it spawns an even bigger forest fire that burns down the nearby city, we are now seeing an uncontrolled burn. Entire departments serving the citizens are summarily laid waste jeopardizing emergency responses to tornadoes, national security, scientific innovation, foreign aid to allies and would-be friends, basic education, and business entrepreneurship. Key term: uncontrolled burn (credit to Garret Smith for calling my attention to this). It has happened that a controlled burn of the forest under brush got out of hand and resulted in a major forest fire. This is a description of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s (Doge’s) approach to cost cutting. Uncontrolled burn. My take – who else’s would it be? – is that the cost cutting “wizards” are undertaking an uncontrolled burn. Think: slash and burn.
What Musk (hereafter “M”), Stephen Miller (Deputy White House Chief of Staff) and John Vought 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 – individuals with a defective conscience who struggle to tell right from wrong, though without interviewing M, one has no way of knowing M’s or any individual’s mental status. One possibility is that the individual is projecting his 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, M’s soundbite is it. However, a further agenda lurks nearby.
Presumably a statement that “empathy is a weakness” would be a justification of the unempathic “slash and burn” bullying methods of the unelected puppet masters at Doge [pronounce: “dog”], the so-called US Department of Government of Efficiency, showing up at the IRS and Social Security offices and so on and demanding to see confidential citizen data and/or seemingly randomly sending employees home (“firing” them).
In the face of bullying, a critical and rigorous empathy sets limits, establishes boundaries, pushes back against attempts to control, dominate, and manipulate, and speaks truth to power. 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 Zeno’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. If one were looking for a short disqualifying reason to sideline unelected puppet masters such as M and fellow traveller Stephen Miller (see more on him 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.
When the imagination is constrained to rule out every option except the narrowest, strictest self-interest, then the result is a scenario in which pain and suffering are going to be widespread and people are going to get hurt. Even those who do not suffer physical trauma will face confrontation with moral trauma. People are starting to wonder if, given the lifeboat scenario, they might indeed be better off in having gone down with the ship. However, this is not caused by (or the fault of) empathy – it is due to lack of imagination. If we human beings were not empathic (and compassionate, generous, kind), then we would not experience conflict, distress, trauma, in short, the breakdown of standard empathy in the face of empathic distress and the requirement for radical empathy. Now we will never know for sure whether Garrett Hardin was overcome by empathic distress or suffered from a clinical depression or both; however, it is a generally accepted fact that Hardin ended his own life by suicide. The first documented case of suicidal empathy?
We conclude with a positive proposal, on which I have repeatedly written and published: 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—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. (2024). Empathy Lessons. 2nd Edition. Chicago: Two Pears Press.
__________. (2025). Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hannah Arendt. (1952/1958). The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd Edition. Cleveland and New York: Meridian (World) Publishing, 1958.
________________. (1968). Men in Dark Times. New York: Harvest Book (Harcourt Brace).
Lisa Blankenship. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT:
Bob Dylan. (1965). Bob Dylan: The Lyrics: 1961–2012. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Garrett Hardin. (1974). Commentary: Living on a Lifeboat. BioScience, Volume 24, Issue 10, October 1974, Pages 561–568, https://doi.org/10.2307/1296629
Jonathan Haber. (2020). Critical Thinking. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Jürgen Habermas. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action,Vol 1, Thomas McCarthy (tr.). Boston: Beacon Press.
Eric Hoffer. (1953). The True Believe: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. New York: Harper Perennial.
Immanuel Kant. (1791/93). Critique of the Power of Judgment, Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (trs.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. edition.
Elon Musk. (2025). Sound byte on empathy: see: https://youtube.com/shorts/LWvOvgjNEds?si=GByQLE0yoFDyWtTr
Elon Musk. (2025). About the interview with Joe Rogan on empathy: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empathy-doge/index.html
Southern Poverty Law Project. (2025). Garett Hardin: https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/garrett-hardin/
Southern Poverty Law Project. (2025). Stephen Miller: https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/stephen-miller/
Wikipedia: lifeboat ethics / ecologist Garret Hardin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_ethics
Wikipedia: Norman Borlaug : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
Acknowledgement: I appreciate William Ickes calling my attention to suicidal empathy, lifeboat ethics, and the issues around it, including current political debates. Bill is a deep thinker in all matters relating to empathy, social science, and contemporary community struggles. I am grateful for his feedback and friendship. The views expressed here are my own, albeit inspired by Professor Ickes.
Image credit: A photo of a lifeboat from the RMS Titanic: Wikimedia commons.
(c) Lou Agosta and the Chicago Empathy Project
[1] Garett Hardin: https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/garrett-hardin/ UPDATE (12/02/2025): Another reason to avoid social media – yet we need to track the toxic insanity: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/maga-s-war-on-empathy-was-started-by-a-woman/ar-AA1Ru1tZ
Categories: empathic distress, empathy against fanaticism, empathy and politics, empathy capitalist tool, extreme empathy, lifeboat dilemma, lifeboat ethics, suicidal empathy
Empathy Lessons 