Empathy for Underserved, Under-represented, Voiceless Communities

Credit: NPS Photo / Ken Conger.

By Scott Slovic

Maximilian Werner has published “Of Wolves, George Floyd, and the Limits of Human Empathy,” a penetrating reflection on our species’ failure to extend empathy and ethical consideration to other species, particularly to such wild predators as coyotes, mountain lions, bobcats, black bears, and wolves. Werner boldly likens this empathetic failure to the recent “horrific treatment” of George Floyd, who was murdered in May 2020. “If the comparison offends,” writes Werner, “I would ask readers to reflect on the limits of their own empathy and consider why it ends with humans rather than beginning with them.”

Why does human empathy so often seem to be restricted to our own kind, and do any aspects of the arithmetic of compassion apply to our thinking and feeling about other species? It turns out that both the insensitivity and sensitivity linked to psychic numbing are, in various ways, relevant to our extension of empathy to animals. On the one hand, the power of singularity, the compassion we tend to feel toward an imperiled individual, applies similarly as a motivating factor when either a single human being or a single animal, such as a domestic dog, is threatened aboard a sinking ship. Werner’s article, on the other hand, refers to the case of a single wolf in the state of Utah who was blamed for the death of a calf, inspiring the Utah legislature to turn the northeastern region of the state into a “kill zone for any wolf unlucky to wander into it.” In this case, the “single villain” heightened public—and political—passion to respond to the perceived threat from not just one animal, but an entire species. What Werner calls “a moment of surprising clarity but misguided insight” is an instance of violent antipathy triggered by the opposite of psychic numbing: the power of one. This mirrors the strongly punitive impulse frequently felt toward individual human wrongdoers, demonstrating the effect of identifiability on human attitudes toward perceived villains.

Werner’s article powerfully demonstrates how the arithmetic of compassion, like the arithmetic of hatred, is not merely restricted to our thinking about human beings. Racism and speciesism share fundamental psychological characteristics. There is much at stake, socially and ecologically, in recognizing the psychological factors that promote and inhibit our empathy for what Werner calls “underserved, under-represented, voiceless communities.”