Cognitive Empathy And Abortion

Try to figure out why people believe what they believe

Abortion is healthcare, shut up non-uterus haver, the government shouldn’t legislate morality, if you don’t like abortion don’t have it, and other nonsense

(Prefacing this by saying I’m pro-choice on abortion).

Abortion is one of the subject areas where it’s easiest to empathize with the other side, but where it seems like no one does.

Most of us think that there is some time at which it becomes immoral to kill humans. Maybe that time is when they exit the womb, maybe it is when they become conscious. But after that point, it becomes wrong to kill small and young humans.

Now—and I know this is a revolutionary concept—pro-lifers think that the point at which humans get the “thing you shouldn’t kill” status is at conception. So right after a fetus is conceived, it is wrong to kill, the same way that most people think it’s wrong to kill infants. Now, of course, one can dispute the details of this view, but it’s not a difficult view to get your head around. We all draw the line somewhere—pro-lifers just draw it very early.

But it seems like the vast majority of what pro-choicers say on the topic betrays a complete and total failure of cognitive empathy—of actually imagining what the people who disagree with you think. Your opponents do not agree with you and they are also not James Bond villains. Most people who have most views are relatively normal, and pretty similar to you—so if your model of the typical pro-lifer resembles an Ayn Rand villain, you should reconsider.

One slogan that pro-choicers like is that “if you don’t like abortion, don’t have one.” They think that this is a clever and sophisticated refutation, but this is only because they don’t have any cognitive empathy. Imagine believing that abortion is equivalent to killing an infant—that the fetus has a right to life that shouldn’t be violated. Well, if you believe that, just as you don’t say “if you don’t like infanticide, don’t kill your child” or “if you don’t like homicide, don’t kill people,” if abortion is a great evil that involves mass murder of babies, then those who oppose it should do more than just not partake in it—they should do things to prevent others from doing it, because it’s evil.

Another thing that pro-choicers like to say is that abortion is just healthcare. But now imagine that doctors were killing lots of infants and calling that healthcare. Okay, maybe that is healthcare, in the sense that it’s done in hospitals and provided by health insurance, but that doesn’t vindicate it. It’s healthcare in the sense that the ghastly experiments performed by the Nazis on Jews were pharmaceutical research. This again is just preaching to the choir—it has no ability to convince anyone with an IQ above room temperature who doesn’t already agree with you.

Or they say “the government shouldn’t legislate morality.” But if hundreds of thousands of babies were being murdered in cold blood, then everyone would support legislating morality in the sense of banning baby murder. Pro-lifers think that there is currently a mass murder of babies, so the government should legislate that.

Of course, sometimes there are people who say things like “well, I personally think that abortion is murder, but I don’t think my morality should be forced on others.” But these people are generally just trying to appear tolerant—if they actually thought for like five minutes they’d realize the incoherence of the position. If you think that there is currently a mass murder of babies, you should support making it illegal to kill babies.

I could, of course, go on. But the basic point is clear; it seems like most pro-choice people just can’t conceive of the psychology of pro-life people. Because of their inability to empathize with pro-lifers—to put themselves in their shoes—they end up saying things that will convince no one who has ever met a pro-lifer.

I think that having cognitive empathy is really important, helpful for making friends, influencing people, and believing true things.

Making friends

Lots of pro-choicers seem to think that pro-lifers are opposed to abortion because their hatred of women is so profound that they want to restrict women’s bodies (only their uterus, apparently !?) for no further reason. Lots of people seem to think that one who is pro-life must also be stupid or sexist. These people also seem not to like to not want to make friends with those who are stupid, sexist, and want to restrict the use of random female body parts.

But this is terrible! If you want to make friends, then you shouldn’t refuse to befriend half of the population because you incorrectly think they’re hateful bigots. Lots of politics is very complicated—it’s hard to, for example, figure out what effect a minimum wage will have on employment. So if you think that anyone who diverges from your view on a legitimately complicated issue is evil, you’ll make it so that people are terrified to share their political views around you.

Shockingly, if you think that half of the population is evil, you will make fewer friends than if you don’t.

Influencing people

Suppose that you were arguing about politics with someone. They proposed that the reason that you have some political view—e.g. that the minimum wage should be raised—is that you are a satanic pedophile who hates America and wants our economy to suffer.

I think it’s safe to say that they’d be unlikely to change your mind.

When you have a totally mistaken and maximally uncharitable theory of mind, you’ll never change anyone’s mind. So if you think that pro-life people—many of whom are women—just have a seething irrational hatred of women that manifests in a desire to control their uterus, you are unlikely to change their mind. The way you get someone to change their mind is by getting them to stop believing what they currently believe. But if you are wrong about what they currently believe, you’re totally unlikely to convince them.

Cognitive empathy is not about addressing the best version of what the other person believes. It’s about addressing the actual version of what they believe. I heard that Parfit would often, when presented with a stupid objection, modify the objection as if it were some serious but related objection and then respond to that. This is not a good practice—people often believe things for bad reasons. Your goal is to convince the other person, not some imaginary interlocutor who believes the best version of their views. If a person says it’s okay to eat meat because it’s natural, the correct response is not to argue against some sophisticated form of natural law theory that entails meat eating is fine on account of it corresponding with corresponds with the natural functions of things; it’s to point out that if it’s okay to do things that are natural, then slaughtering entire tribes, getting malaria and dying at a young age, and rape are fine because they’re all natural and unnatural things like modern medicine are bad.

The way you change a person’s mind is by convincing them that the things they currently believe are wrong. That’s why it’s important to actually address the things they currently believe.

Having true beliefs

Suppose you thought that the reason that only reason people were opposed to minimum wage increases was that they were satanic pedophiles who wanted to see America fall. Obviously, you wouldn’t develop a sophisticated view about the minimum wage. If you treat legitimate, evidence-based views as if they’re totally unjustified prejudices, then you’ll never figure out if they’re right. If the people you disagree with are wrong, grasping it won’t change your mind; if it’s right, then it should change your mind.

If, for example, you think shouting “abortion is healthcare,” settles the question of what the legal status of abortion should be, you will never have anything useful to say about abortion. I used to be a libertarian who had stupid views (obviously not all libertarians believe things for bad reasons—I’m just saying that I did). But I assumed that other people believed things for dumb reasons. As a result, it took years for me to outgrow my dogmatic political views. And the same is true in other domains—discovering why someone actually holds their views allows you to determine if their views are wrong or right. Try to see discussion as an effort in mind-reading—transmitting the information from your interlocutors brain into yours, and vice versa.

And this is why it’s important to address the true version of what your interlocutor believes rather than the reason you think is the best. The version you think is best will necessarily be one you’ve already considered—and rejected. If it didn’t convince you then, it’s unlikely to convince you now. But by listening to others, you can hear a new perspective on issues, which is more likely to convince you.

Maybe this is all obvious. But it seems like few people do it. People treat political discussions as point-scoring exercises when they shouldn’t. Rather than trying to think of clever talking points, try to actually imagine what it would be like to believe what the other person believes. Genuinely picture holding their views, and try to imagine why you’d do that. And this often turns out to allow you to be confident in your views. If you think about what someone believes and realize that the only difference between you and them is that they don’t grasp that morality should be about what matters, then you can safely ignore their views—they just have less information than you do. And sometimes it becomes clear that they believe the things they do because they’ve watched lots of CNN or Fox and gotten the sense that some view is right, though they don’t have any real arguments for it—they’ve just heard Greg Guttfeld say things in favor of the view that made it sound convincing.

It’s easy to make fun of the people who say things about abortion like that abortion is just healthcare or about veganism that it’s okay to eat meat because it’s natural. But we are all like those people. We all sometimes fail to empathize cognitively with the opposition, leading to us saying things that would never convince a clever interlocutor. It’s something we should really work on, for sake of elevating the quality of discourse, both public and private.