Against empathy-by-default — LessWrong

TL;DR Section 1 presents an argument that I’ve heard from a couple people, that says that empathy happens “for free” as a side-effect of the general architecture of mammalian brains, basically because we tend to have similar feelings about similar situations, and “me being happy” is a kinda similar situation to “someone else being happy”, and thus if I find the former motivating then I’ll tend to find the latter motivating too, other things equal. …