In Defence of Empathy

Frank Podmore

October 15, 2025

Can you understand other people?

This should not be a difficult or controversial question so, for the avoidance of suspense, this essay will assume you can. Yet, across the political spectrum there are people who have given up on the notion that understanding other humans’ feelings is desirable or even possible. This essay doesn’t claim that we should or must embrace, adopt or practise radical empathy – by which I mean the capacity for everyone to empathise with anyone, at every level. Rather it assumes that this form of empathy already exists – indeed that this is what we mean when we talk about empathy – and asks why anyone would deny it.

The capacity to understand one another defines humanity as a species. The ability to perceive complex emotions and understand the cause-and-effect relationship between those emotions and people’s actions is ours and, barring hitherto undiscovered complex life elsewhere in the universe, it’s ours alone. In addition to simply identifying emotions in others - a sort of pity or sympathy displayed by many non-human animals - it combines with our capacity for abstraction and reasoning, so that we are able not only to recognise emotions, but to identify emotions as the motivating factor for behaviours that we haven’t even witnessed.

Empathy evolved like every other trait in every life form, because it allowed a greater survival rate to the individuals who possessed it. This may seem like an excessively and even unpleasantly dry account of such a powerful and profound aspect of our consciousness, but the truth value of a statement isn’t correlated with its dryness. More to the point, the evolutionary account is not the end of the story.

So, empathy has an evolutionary ‘point’ to it but precisely because of this, it has no ‘off switch’ or handy limiter by which it can turned up and down at will. It is not instrumental at the conscious level. For this reason, it’s impossible to claim, as Elon Musk has, that empathy has ‘gone too far’. Empathy is not an ethic or rule that can be applied or misapplied, it’s a non-negotiable aspect of human thought, one which we all apply even when it leads us to explanations that are palpably false. For example, we often casually apply the language of empathy to objects and machines, such that we might say of a malfunctioning coffee machine ‘It doesn’t like me’ or of a printer that ‘It doesn’t want to connect to the Wi-Fi’. The point is not that we in any sense believe such statements to be true at the literal level, but the ease with which we use and understand them shows the powerful grasp that empathy has on our capacity to reason.

Of course, when Musk claimed empathy had gone too far, he was thinking not of machines like his (slightly) self-driving cars or of ‘Grok’, his misnamed chatbot, but of people who want to help other people. It would be easy to dismiss this as a lack of empathy, but if Musk didn’t on some level possess empathy it would be pointless to invoke it at all. What is sometimes conceived as a lack of empathy is often a turning away from a suffering we cannot help but share, of which if we were truly indifferent, no explanation would be required.

It is, however, presumably this evolutionary concept of empathy that led Elon Musk to make his false claim that empathy has ‘gone too far’. His conception of empathy is instrumental: valuable insofar as it helps him. But this is to confound at least three different ideas: the individual experience of empathy; the aims or goals an individual identifies for themselves and attempts to carry out; and the evolutionary ‘purpose’ of a given trait. Musk believes that if empathy prevents him from achieving his political projects or business schemes (much the same thing for him), then it has failed at its purpose. He makes this mistake because he has misidentified this purpose.

It’s a common error to perceive evolution as teleological, a process which had or has a defined purpose or outcome. Usually this is implicitly (and egotistically), us: modern humans. This is the mistake Musk has made, anthropomorphising an amoral process into something that can have a good or bad outcome, when in fact it just is. Ironically, perceiving a complex but fundamentally mundane process as having a specific and desirable conclusion, as though it had an aim in mind, is a thing you can only do if you have (radical) empathy. Even a man as foolish and evil as Musk cannot escape his humanity. This is an encouraging thought, not least because it shows why his mode of politics will always ultimately fail: it is literally impossible to decide who is and is not deserving of empathy.

The fundamental flaw with the ‘techbro’ worldview, a type of naïve positivism of which Musk is the exemplar, is that it mistakes a rational scientific stance for an account of human interactions, so that empathy is described as evolving for a reason (which is true) and it’s therefore assumed that it’s in some measure ‘reasonable’ and can be controlled or tamed such that it will behave reasonably in the quest for certain ends (which is a category error). The ‘unreasonableness’ of empathy, our tendency to use it to explain machines or natural forces, makes it profoundly irritating to naïve scientific positivism of this kind: how can a trait that leads us to believe false things and make false statements be useful?

More broadly in the MAGA movement, the late Charlie Kirk infamously also attacked the idea of empathy. But even more so than Musk, he was unable actually to disclaim it even while attacking it:

[The] new communications strategy for Democrats [...] is not to do what Bill Clinton used to do, where he would say, "I feel your pain." Instead, it is to say, "You're actually not in pain." Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It was all about empathy and sympathy. I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage.

Here Kirk invoked empathy in order to immediately dismiss it, apparently on a semantic basis. But the tenor of his argument before the dismissal is clear: he claims that the problem Democrats have is that they no longer empathise (or try, or pretend to empathise) with voters and instead dismiss their emotions, but then he tries to reverse course. Perhaps recognising that his broader philosophy can’t survive contact with the idea of fellow-feeling, he claims that empathy is a recent, ‘made up’ concept. At other times, his apparent criticism of empathy is still more explicitly couched in the language he claims to reject:

The same people who lecture you about 'empathy' have none for the soldiers discharged for the jab, the children mutilated by Big Medicine, or the lives devastated by fentanyl pouring over the border.

His problem with his political opponents (in this case, people who believe in vaccines and trans rights) is not that they invoke empathy per se, but that - so Kirk claims - they invoke it falsely and partially.

Both Kirk and Musk wrongly describe empathy as a recent phenomenon, with Kirk seeing it as ‘new age’ and Musk claiming it belongs to ‘western civilisation’. Part of the implication of what Musk is saying must necessarily be that people outside of the west lack empathy and that that, indeed, must be part of the problem with ‘them’. But this, too, is to invoke a need for more empathy!

If this failure to understand empathy were confined to the political right or just a section of it, that would be, as Musk might say, concerning. However, it extends much further than MAGA and its fellow travellers. There is also a strong strain of ostensibly left wing political argument which has given up on empathy altogether. One such manifestation of this was seen in an interview given by Diana Johnson, a UK Government Minister and member of the Labour Party, during which she told a male interviewer that she wasn’t interested in discussing a women’s issue (in fact she was discussing a Supreme Court ruling about gender identity) with a man. This was a truly bizarre moment, in which an elected politician claimed there was no point in talking to half the population of the world about the other half. Her claim was and is impossible if you believe empathy exists: of course she ought to be able to articulate a woman’s point of view to a man; of course a man ought to be able to understand; this doesn’t preclude the possibility that she couldn’t and he wouldn’t, but that would then be a failure of articulation and understanding, not of empathy per se.

It’s unclear from the broader context whether Johnson thought it was impossible to explain her view to Frost or merely unnecessary. Either way, this idea, that a government minister shouldn’t have to explain something to a journalist because she’s female and he’s male, is a repudiation not merely of empathy but of the entire liberal democratic project, which takes as axiomatic the validity of other viewpoints, even, occasionally problematically, false ones.

Fortunately for democracy, Johnson’s inability to explain her point had nothing to do with her gender or Frost’s, and everything to do with the fact that her ‘gender critical’, transphobic position makes no sense on its own merits. It’s for this reason and no other that she was unable to explain her position or that of the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer – the man whose views and statements, ironically enough, were actually under discussion (presumably she is interested in what he thinks). Frost might productively have asked Johnson to explain her view as though she was talking to a woman (or, indeed, a trans person of any gender identity – but that would have required him to make an intellectual leap he was unwilling to consider), which would’ve revealed that both Starmer and Johnson’s views are incoherent and indefensible.

Both participants were, of course, completely confident they had the capacity to discuss trans people even though neither is trans.

Johnson was retreating to an excessively naïve identity politics, wherein it is assumed (for her purposes) that identities can be – and to some extent are already – siloed, that the experiences adhering to those identities are both universal within and particular to that identity. This is a mirror image of the MAGA view that multiculturalism or even male-female friendship is impossible, that different groups are irreconcilably different and must be kept apart as much as is practical. This is why the UK Supreme Court ruling on a case brought by a group called For Women Scotland was widely discussed as a victory for women. Women’s views are taken to be universal: in this account all (cis)women have won the court case and dissenting voices within the group are assumed not to exist, then simply ignored when it becomes plain that they do – as they must – exist. At the same time, the experiences of the identity group are taken to be so particular that it’s impossible to explain them to anyone outside of it; a denial of empathy.

These views are of course completely incompatible with one another (some of the UK Supreme Court judges are men!). But both halves of the equation represent a failure of empathy, a comprehensive refusal to see that women’s views are diverse – that other valid views exist within any group – and a dismissal of the idea that someone from outside the group of cis women, whether a man or a trans woman, could have a valid view at all, and this despite the fact that the ruling directly concerns trans women.

Much as they might want to, neither Elon Musk nor Diane Johnson can actually disclaim their capacity for empathy, which is one reason their arguments fall flat. When Johnson claims that because women are under discussion and she’s a woman, it’s impossible for her to explain a man’s views to another man, she runs into an obvious mess. But she’s only able to fall into this trap at all because she and elements of her audience have previously imbibed the false idea that empathy is in some degree impossible. As with Musk, the causal chain of their mistaken view is clear: because her views are false, her arguments are shoddily constructed and so she falls back onto a claim that understanding itself is impossible so as not to have to defend her incoherent opinions. There’s no need to be persuasive if it’s impossible to understand you anyway.

Both the MAGA-techbro and identity-political views of empathy share the idea that it can be (or is) in some way fenced off. Both share the view that humans are in some way isolated within siloes, within nations, races, genders, religions, cultures or sexualities – and it is telling that it’s not immediately clear from such a list which are the siloes espoused by MAGA and which by idpol. If you believe yourself to be in some way isolated from other human beings – if in essence you see those categories as delimiting yourself and others – you’re denying the capacity for a pluralistic democratic society at all. From this follows the techbro embrace of MAGA, which denies such a society explicitly, but also the more naïve belief espoused by Johnson, that such-and-such an identity absolves politicians from justifying themselves to journalists – and so to the public. This is a lesser denial of democracy, but tends in the same direction.

While Musk and Johnson are very different political figures and individuals, they do have one other thing in common: transphobia. Perhaps then a further reason for their desire to take empathy out of the equation is that to be trans at all is fundamentally a matter of empathy. Trans people’s dysphoria is on the simplest level a recognition of oneself as belonging to a different group than the one to which one was assigned at birth, a conceptual leap only possible if you have the empathic capacity to identify the feeling of being a man or a woman. Whatever the broader philosophical and political ramifications of the existence of transgender people, it is an experience rooted in the most human of all faculties: empathy.