Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty [Hardcover]

This short book - less than 130 pages of text (not counting footnotes) - proposes that evil is really the absence of empathy (well, not quite, there is also a "positive" version of the absence of empathy), and argues the case through philosophy (empathy it's possible to study empirically, evil it's not), brain science (there's a complex network of 10 areas involved in empathy and its absence), psychiatry and developmental pscyhology (some "negative" forms of zero empathy, eg borderline personality, relate to shortcomings in nurture) and the perspective of evolution (we have a bell-curve distribution of emphathy and of the capacity to systematise, so maybe being in the middle of the curves is best for survival?)

Baron-Cohen draws extensively on the work of others as well as his own research into the autistic spectrum and empathy, but brings it all together into a new paradigm. I imagine most readers of the book will be thoroughly engrossed by this enterprise whether or not they find it persuasive.

While it's good that the book is short and covers so many fiels of enquiry, it inevitably leaves many quesitons unasked and unanswered. Looking at these from a few perspectives: (a) philosophical - Baron-Cohen gives a really interesting perspective on the thesis that morality has to do with rationality (the systematising trait) and that it has to do with the emotions (the empathising trait): are we dealing with one thing here or two? And is the absence of morality ("evil, or zero empathy") the absence of one thing or two?; (b) psychiatry/developmental psychology - it's interesting that brain science shows that empathy circuits are not working right in borderline personality, psychopathy and narcissism. What about eg schizophrenia? Are brain-circuits just warped in some of these cases, rather than absent as with Asperger's and autism? (c) brain science - if this is what justifies putting together the "false developmental paths" that are narcissism and borderline personality with Asperger's, why not go with brain science when it tells us the empathy circuits of Buddhist monks work overtime? (Baron-Cohen says, "yes, but they're not empathetic in the usual sense of the term").

All that said: this is a really interesting book; and highly recommended.

A challenging and original book, it is sometimes difficult to avoid criticising the logic, but there is no doubting the potency of the question. Understanding how people can be capable of suspending their feelings for others in order to commit acts of horror on them is the coalescing idea, and Baron-Cohen does much to identify the workaday nature of psychopathy that occasionally flares up into full scale violence. He counterposes this with the notion that the 'internal pot of gold' deposited by stable and responsible parenting as the best defence against the dark side of human nature. If I have a dissatisfaction with the argument, it is the tendency to look for pathology ahead of temporality. It seems clear from his examples that people in certain circumstances suspend their empathy in order to carry out an atrocity to which their conscience otherwise would object (see Their Darkest Hour: People Tested to the Extreme in WWII for some more horrific examplars). That, and in some of the situations he cites(the unspeakableness of the child soldier attack, for instance), it might well be the fullest volume of empathy that fires the imagination to such ghastliness, rather than the detachment of fellow feeling that Baron-Cohen appears to blame. They knew what would hurt, and hurt the worst.

Regardless, an excellent book on neuropsychology for the non-scientist, and a handy guide at the back for identifying those workplace psychopaths that haunt one's daily life.

Whatever Jesus may or may not have said about the importance of loving one another, Christians have nevertheless often resorted to violence down the ages. Martin Luther, for example, although a follower of a man who was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and died a Jew, wrote a pamphlet entitled "Against the Jews" in which he called on his fellow Christians to burn synagogues and destroy Jewish homes. Four hundred years later, the young Adolf Hitler quoted Luther "to give his own Nazi racist views some respectability". The two Nazi scientists, pictured performing a cold water immersion experiment on an inmate of Dachau Concentration Camp, share at least one character trait with Luther: an absence of empathy. All three were educated and intelligent individuals who were nonetheless capable of disregarding the thoughts and feelings of other human beings, of treating them as objects, with tragic consequences. How could they do this?

This one image, the first illustration in this engaging and important book, stands for the millions of instances of human cruelty that occurred in that war alone, to say nothing of what can be found in any newspaper on any day of the week. Simon Baron-Cohen's main goal is to understand human cruelty and to replace the unscientific term "evil" with the scientific term "empathy". He wants to move "the debate out of the realm of religion and into the realm of science", not because he is anti-religion (indeed, he regards Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a candidate for someone with super-empathy) but because "religion has been singularly anti-enquiry on the topic of the causes of evil".

Baron-Cohen is not satisfied with the circularity of the concept of "evil", with tabloid explanations that would have us believe that the reason so-and-so did such-and-such an evil thing is because, well, so-and-so is evil. Instead, he makes a compelling case for the explanatory power of empathy, how it's distributed in the population, how any individual can experience ups and downs of empathy, how neurological damage can reduce or even eliminate empathy altogether, and how empathy can be acquired or encouraged, either through practice as an adult or, perhaps most importantly, by means of good parenting endowing each child with his or her very own "internal pot of gold".

Don't be misled into thinking that this short book must be short on ideas. As with any work of popular science, we see only a fraction of the research that has gone before (much of which is cited in the notes and references). The "ten new ideas" summarized in chapter six give a feel for the scope of empathy as an explanatory tool. These concepts include the "empathy spectrum" and the idea that people at one end of this range have "zero degrees of empathy". Also important to this scientific account, but which may be hard to swallow for anyone used to thinking of evil in metaphysical terms, as some kind of stain on a non-physical soul, is the idea of an "empathy circuit" in the brain. The ventral part of the medial prefrontal cortex doesn't (I imagine) get taught much in Sunday school, and yet its role in thinking about other people's thoughts and feelings marks it out as a crucial region in the brain. The remarkable case of Phineas Gage shows what can happen when the vMPFC is damaged. Gage survived, but he was not the same: his empathy circuit went down.

"Treating other people as if they were just objects is one of the worst things you can do to another human being, to ignore their subjectivity, their thoughts and feelings." This is exactly how those Nazi scientists treated the subjects of their experiments (an ironic term, since the prisoners were reduced to mere objects), and it might strike some as strange for science - with its emphasis on objectivity - to have anything at all to say about human feeling. When Baron-Cohen begins listing brain regions and "genes for empathy" (with the usual caveat that genes only ever directly produce proteins), these same sceptics may well feel vindicated.

As with all good science, however, the arguments are well supported with evidence and reasons. More broadly, I think this kind of work is an example of the science of human flourishing in action. In The Moral Landscape Sam Harris develops a powerful case for the importance of science in discriminating between moral values, widely thought to lie outside its scope. However, once we're dealing with facts about human well-being - including, say, facts about levels of empathy - then science not religion is the tool we need.

For example, people with zero degrees of empathy divide into Zero-Positive and Zero-Negative. Both types have no awareness of how they come across to others and think only about their own interests. The important difference is that Zero-Positives (e.g. people with Asperger Syndrome), although they are insensitive to others, do not generally commit acts of cruelty, unlike Zero-Negatives (e.g. psychopaths). Such knowledge is vital in sentencing policy. Clearly, while incarcerating some Zero-Negatives who have committed a crime is justified, in a civilized, compassionate society we should be helping Zero-Positives "to find friendship, companionship and other forms of comfort, without jeopardizing anyone's safety".

Simon Baron-Cohen makes a bold claim in this brilliant book, that empathy is one of the most valuable resources in the world. I'm persuaded by the arguments, and impressed by the humane motives driving the science. Those whose stories he tells are still people, however damaged they may be, and deserving of the best understanding we can manage. His belief that this is scientific will be controversial to some, but that's nothing new. For me, given that empathy is all about switching from a single- to a double- (or triple-?) minded focus of attention, I wonder if one reason why I enjoy the theatre so much is that it is such a good workout for my empathy circuit. Certainly, anything that helps put you in someone else's shoes is good for world peace!