Empathy and Outrage

I’ll start by saying that, at one point, I found myself so frustrated by Stolorow’s jargon that I fantasized choking the professor who assigned it. Until I realized that professor was me. Seeking to erase my grievous error, I called my co-professors suggesting that perhaps we could drop the article (not because I didn’t think it was important; just because, well, other important thing deserved our time and attention more, didn’t they?) I have Prof. Reitz to thank for her forbearance: she suggested that this might be a teachable moment if we could be patient enough to unpack it. And then I remembered why I had chosen the article in the first place.

Robert Stolorow has been a very influential writer in the psychoanalytic world, writing largely about serious mental illness, the meaning of symptoms, and the static, even rigid, philosophical beliefs that often underlie the clinical actions one takes in vivo, actions which we think (pretend?) are spontaneous responses to real time stimuli but which are more likely grounded in unexamined doctrinal (look it up) systems. In this piece, Stolorow ricochets from the easily accessible idea that some of us are Dr. Empathy and others are Dr. Outrage (comically extreme perhaps but often the shorthand with which we approach our clients/ patients/ defendants/ students/ to say nothing of the institutional world), to the obscure, even obfuscatory, language of the pseudo philosopher Incompatiblism? REALLY?? As Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers would say.

Stolorow is really just asking: can Dr. Empathy and Dr. Outrage be integrated into a consistent philosophical view, or are these positions irreconcilable to a degree we are rarely willing to admit? For example, we were all very facile about saying in our previous discussions that sure, we can empathize with the set of circumstances that “caused” someone to act grievously, while at the same time condemning the consequence of their actions. Stolorow suggests that to offer this bromide without weighing its implications, puts us in a state of philosophical inconsistency that threatens the legitimacy of either argument.

I think that the basic questions Stolorow sets forth, and that I pose for you, are these:

1) If we believe in determinism i.e. our actions are caused by either distal (for example, a bad childhood), or proximate (for example, poverty) events, how can there be any idea of moral responsibility? Moral responsibility implies that people have a choice about what they do; if we believe in free will than each of us is the architect of our actions and must assume responsibility for their outcomes. If you want to have it both ways, one question is: at what point is someone responsible/not responsible for their actions? How could you ever decide where what is determined ends, and what is chosen begins?

2) If we believe in moral responsibility, which implies that we have free will, and so we believe it correct to hold people morally responsible for their actions, than this (philosophically speaking) must be applied across the board. In other words, if you hold those in power responsible for their actions you must hold those not in power responsible for their actions or, conversely, if you excuse oppressed people from moral culpability because their circumstances dictated their actions, in order to be consistent, you would also have to understand the circumstances surrounding the crimes of those in power at any given moment. So another question is: how can you excuse one set of people but not another? Who determines who gets a deterministic pass and who doesn’t?


Finally, I will just say-to avoid our falling back on the same old answers-that I am asking you now to wear the philosopher’s hat and think about logical consistency. Each one of us can make a political argument about the way to proceed in the world; a political argument takes into account expediencies, stakeholders; and the felicity calculus: what brings the biggest bang for the buck in any particular circumstance, what is actually doable. The philosopher has no such care; s/he asks, as did Stolorow (p. 259) Can we transcend the traditional compatibilist-incompatibilist dichotomy? In simpler words, is it possible for Dr. Outrage and Dr. Empathy to share a lab coat? What would that look like?