Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

3.2. 
Empathy’s charm 
Proposals that an increase in empathy would lead to morally better action (e.g. 
Persson and Savulescu, 2008; Savulescu and Persson, 2012b) are partly based on a 
recent line of psychological and neuroscientific research that investigated the role 
of empathy in explaining immoral behaviour in relation to personality disorders and 
Autism Spectrum disorders. Baron-Cohen (2011), in his 
The Science of Evil
, argues 
that describing cruel acts as evil explains nothing. Instead, he 
explores the 
hypothesis that such acts can be traced to a distinct psychological state – a lack of 
empathy.
Appeals for more empathy inspired (although not always informed) by social 
neuroscience abound.
In the introduction to his book,
The Empathic Civilization: 
The Race to Global Consciousness in a
World in Crisis
, Rifkin writes that:

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‘A radical new view of human nature is emerging in the biological and 
cognitive sciences and creating controversy in intellectual circles, the 
business community, and government. Recent discoveries in brain 
science and child development are forcing us to rethink the long-held 
belief that human beings are, by nature, aggressive, materialistic, 
utilitarian, and self-interested. The dawning realization that we are a 
fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching 
consequences for society.’ (2010a, p.1) 
Rifkin predicts that ‘we are at a decisive moment in the human journey where the 
race to global empathic consciousness is running up against global entropic 
collapse.’ (2010a, p. 42) To support this view, Rifkin describes the history of 
several civilizations and then explains the entropic biological, technological and 
environmental changes that threaten the continuation of civilization and may 
undermine human nature and empathic capacities. Rifkin sees sympathy as passive 
while empathy ‘conjures up active engagement – the willingness of an observer to 
become part of another's experience, to share the feeling of that experience’ (2010a, 
p. 12). 
Rifkin does not stop at pointing out the importance of such conceived empathy for 
the enjoyment and sharing of the experiences of others. He argues that world 
leaders act on the basis of faulty assumptions about human nature. According to 
Rifkin, the mistaken assumptions were lied down in the Enlightenment, at the dawn 
of the modern market economy and the emergence of the nation state: that human 
beings’ essential nature is rational, detached, autonomous, acquisitive and 
utilitarian and argued that individual salvation lies in unlimited material progress 
here on Earth. Social neuroscience, and the discovery of mirror-neurons in 
particular, claims Rifkin, has forced us to re-evaluate this outdated view of human 
nature. Given the economic and social problems we are facing, Rifkin says that 
what is ‘required now is nothing less than a leap to global empathic consciousness 
and in less than a generation.’ (2010b, p. 2)
Rifkin both envisages and describes empathy extended to all living things and the 
biosphere in general. He quotes Maslow who said that ‘[m]ore sensitive observers 

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are able to incorporate more of the world into the self, i.e., they are able to identify 
and empathize with wider and more inclusive circles of living and nonliving things’ 
(1969, p. 42) and contrasts this view with the Enlightenment ideas of human nature, 
which, according to him did not give emotions their deserved place and importance. 
While Rifkin sees the internet and other new communication technologies as the 
technology that will aid the ‘radical leap,’ Savulescu and Persson (2012b) add to 
the discussion by proposing MB as a way of achieving moral outcomes. 
There are many problems with Rifkin’s account. In the remaining parts of this 
chapter I will address two. One problem has to do with the extreme view of the 
utility (I dare to use this apparently 
passe
Enlightenment concept) and sufficiency 
of empathy in the making of a morally better world and agents. Rifkin (2010a), 
Baron-Cohen (2011) and Savulescu and Persson (2012b) seem to advocate an 
increase in empathy as a 
panacea,
but such an indiscriminate increase in empathetic 
sensitivity would hardly be conducive to moral outcomes. Focusing on the notion 
of empathetic distress, I will argue that while empathy might be conducive to moral 
outcomes, Baron-Cohen’s equivocation of ‘more empathy’ with ‘morally better’ is 
misguided. The second problem has to do with a more general equivocation of the 
pro-social with moral. I will argue that Jotterand, Harris and others, are correct in 
pointing out the importance of moral reasons in the quest for a better world and 
better moral agents.