Imagining Yourself in Another's Shoes vs Extending Your Concern

I have a new article out today, "Imagining Yourself in Another's Shoes vs. Extending Your Concern: Empirical and Ethical Differences". It's my case against the "Golden Rule" and against attempts to ground moral psychology in "imagining yourself in another's shoes", in favor of an alternative idea, inspired by the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi, that involves extending one's concern for nearby others to more distant others.

My thought is not that Golden Rule / others' shoes thinking is bad, exactly, but that both empirically and ethically, Mengzian extension is better. The key difference is: In Golden Rule / others' shoes thinking, moral expansion involves extending self-concern to other people, while in Mengzian extension, moral expansion involves extending concern for nearby others to more distant others.

We might model Others' Shoes / Golden Rule thinking as follows:

* If I were in the situation of Person X, I would want to be treated in manner M.
* Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
* Thus, I will treat Person X in manner M.

We might model Mengzian Extension as follows:

* I care about Person Y and want W for them.
* Person X, though more distant, is relevantly similar to Person Y.
* Thus, I want W for Person X.

Alternative and more complex formulations are possible, but this sketch captures the core difference. Mengzian Extension grounds general moral concern on the natural concern we already have for others close to us, whether spatially close, like a nearby suffering animal or child in danger, or relationally close, like a close relative. In contrast, the Golden Rule grounds general moral concern on concern for oneself.

[Mengzi; image source, cropped]

An Ethical Objection:

While there's something ethically admirable about seeing others as like oneself and thus as deserving the types of treatment one would want for oneself, there's also something a bit... self-centered? egoistic?... about habitually grounding moral action through the lens of hypothetical self-interest. It's ethically purer and more admirable, I suggest, to ground our moral thinking from the beginning in concern for others.

A Developmental/Cognitive Objection:

Others' Shoes thinking introduces needless cognitive challenges: To use it correctly, you must determine what you would want if you were in the other's position and if you had such-and-such different beliefs and desires. But how do you assess which desires (and beliefs, and emotions, and personality traits, and so on) to change and which to hold constant for this thought experiment? Moreover, how do you know how you would react in such a hypothetical case? By routing the epistemic task through a hypothetical self-transformation, it potentially becomes harder to know or justify a choice than if the choice is based directly on knowledge of the other's beliefs, desires, or emotions. In extreme cases, there might not even be facts to track: What treat would you want if you were a prize-winning show poodle?

Mengzian Extension presents a different range of cognitive challenges. It requires recognizing what one wants for nearby others, and then reaching a judgment about whether more distant others are relevantly similar. This requires generalizing beyond nearby cases based on an assessment of what do and do not constitute differences that are relevant to the generalization. Although this is potentially complex and demanding, it avoids the convoluted hypothetical situational and motivational perspective-taking required by Others' Shoes thinking.

A Practical Objection:

Which approach more effectively expands moral concern to appropriate targets? If you want to convince a vicious king to be kinder to his people, is it more effective to encourage him to imagine being a peasant, or is it more effective to highlight the similarities between people he already cares about and those who are farther away? If you want to encourage donations to famine relief, is it better to ask people how they would feel if they were starving, or to compare distant starving people to nearby others the potential donor already cares about?

Armchair reflections and some limited empirical evidence (e.g., from my recent study with Kirstan Brodie, Jason Nemirow, and Fiery Cushman) suggest that across an important range of cases, Mengzian extension might be more effective -- though the question has not been systematically studied.

More details, of course, in the full paper.