Book Review: The Science of Evil

In favor of philosophical argumentation

I.

As a wise man once said, the difference between psychology professor Simon Baron-Cohen and his cousin, the comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen, is that one makes a living peddling outdated and offensive stereotypes of marginalized groups, and the other is Borat. So I started Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Science of Evil expecting to write a critique of his ableism against autistic people and people with cluster B personality disorders, epitomized by the fact that he titled his book about us The Science of Evil.

What I discovered is one of the greatest works of apophatic moral philosophy ever written. As apophatic theology teaches us about God through saying what He is not, and apophatic mysticism teaches us about the unknowability and ineffability of spiritual experiences by telling us what they’re not like, The Science of Evil cogently and eloquently makes the case for the importance of ethical philosophy by writing a book in which it is entirely absent.

II.

Let me sketch out Baron-Cohen’s argument.

To Baron-Cohen, empathy has two components: “cognitive empathy”, which allows you to figure out what people think and feel; and “affective empathy”, which causes you to respond with an appropriate emotion to other people’s feelings. Your affective empathy motivates you to take an appropriate action about others’ feelings, while your cognitive empathy lets you identify what that action would be. If you have moderately low empathy, you cut in line or say mean things or step into other people’s personal space or ignore other people because you’re busy. If you have very low empathy, you abuse or rape or kill people. If you have no empathy at all, you become a terrorist, a serial killer, or a child molester, or commit the Holocaust. This last category is called “evil.”

The absence of empathy can be divided into two kinds, temporary and permanent. Permanent absence of empathy is, in turn, divided into two kinds, which Baron-Cohen calls “Zero Negative” and “Zero Positive.” Since those names are terrible, I will call them nonsystematizing and systematizing.

Temporary absence of empathy occurs when a person with empathy overrides their natural empathy in order to commit evil. For example, Baron-Cohen says, Nelson Mandela was generally a “super-empath” with an above-average amount of empathy, but he turned off his empathy when he ran the armed wing of the African National Congress’s resistance, which committed terrorist attacks while trying to minimize civilian casualties. Baron-Cohen is basically uninterested in temporary absence of empathy, beyond noting its existence.

To Baron-Cohen, most evil is committed by people with a permanent absence of empathy. You can tell that the Holocaust wasn’t committed by people like you, because look at yourself. You wouldn’t commit the Holocaust. Q.E.D.!

Nonsystematizing absence of empathy refers to three of the four cluster B personality disorders: borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder.¹ People with cluster B personality disorders usually have normal cognitive empathy: that is, they understand what other people are feeling. But they don’t feel appropriate feelings about other people’s distress—sadness, grief, righteous anger, guilt, remorse.

Yes, Baron-Cohen has theorized that the problem with borderlines is that we don’t feel enough guilt.

If cluster Bs truly understood all the suffering they caused those around them, they would stop self-harming and attempting suicide and drinking too much and stealing and assaulting people and obnoxiously bragging about their trivial accomplishments. The only reason they do these things is that they don’t feel appropriate emotions in response to other people’s feelings, and are therefore incapable of caring about then.

Baron-Cohen speculates that other mental illnesses might be examples of nonsystematizing permanent lack of empathy:

A characteristic of anorexia that many clinicians and parents instantly recognize is the self-centered lack of empathy, even though this is not one of the diagnostic criteria. While parents are beside themselves with worry as their daughter continues down the potentially fatal path of self-starvation, the girl herself may stubbornly insist she is happy with her body shape and weight. She may insist on eating separately from the rest of the family, more concerned with counting calories and weighing food to the nearest milligram than in fitting in with the family group. This inability to see another point of view looks a lot like another form of zero degrees of empathy

At the same time, there is systematizing lack of empathy. In addition to empathizing, another key cognitive process is systematizing, or noticing “repeatable, verifiable patterns.”² People who are good at noticing patterns tend to be good at science, math, music, and engineering. They easily understand how to use new technology like cell phones. They are highly organized, with tidy rooms and strict daily schedules.

Unfortunately, people with high levels of systematizing are naturally bad at empathy.³ Systematizers care about truth above all else, want patterns to stay predictable and consistent, and want things to be precise. But people are impossible to reliably predict or to understand with precision. Feelings are inherently vague, and not possible to clearly understand the way that physics or biology can be clearly understood. People disagree with each other, so there’s no such thing as truth in a social context. People break rules and tell lies, and systematizers care about people following rules and telling the truth.

People with “classic autism” are so bad at empathy that they can’t understand that other people have feelings at all, so they pursue their goals with single-minded abandon. All undesirable behavior of “classic autistics” is downstream of their inability to understand other people have feelings. Classic autistics wouldn’t have meltdowns in the middle of the grocery store if they really understood that their parents are embarrassed.

Conversely, people with Asperger syndrome are good enough at systematizing that their systematizing compensates for their inability to experience empathy. This is, in fact, the primary difference between people with Asperger syndrome and classic autistics.⁴ People with Asperger syndrome like rules, so they may develop systems of moral rules that involve treating everyone equally and fairly. Though these systems are nowhere near as good as true empathy—which is why people with Asperger syndrome are sometimes thoughtless and rude—it keeps people with Asperger syndrome from being serial killers or terrorists.

Finally, while this system may explain terrorists and serial killers, it raises a lot of questions about the Holocaust. Surely Germany didn’t have a sudden epidemic of borderline personality disorder in 1931. The answer is that the Nazi elite all had nonsystematizing permanent absence of empathy. However, the Nazi elite cleverly divided the Holocaust into many small tasks. Each person—in spite of having intact empathetic feelings about the Jews—could rationalize that they didn’t cause the Holocaust, they just rounded up some Jews or drove the train or sourced the poison gas. As such, their affective empathy didn’t stop them, as it would for murder; it felt to them more like saying something mildly rude in conversation or not wanting to comfort a friend going through a hard time when they’re busy.

Some people are super-empathizers. I mentioned Nelson Mandela above. Super-empathizers are incredibly moral. Super-empathy is only good. People think that intense affective empathy might mean you’re distressed by other people’s pain all the time, but it’s clearly an inappropriate emotional response to be so upset by someone else’s pain that you can’t function. So super-empathizers are immune to such distress. A sample super-empathizer is Hannah:

Hannah is a psychotherapist who has a natural gift for tuning into how others are feeling. As soon as you walk into her living room, she is already reading your face, your gait, your posture. The first thing she asks you is “How are you?” but this is no perfunctory platitude. Her intonation—even before you have taken off your coat—suggests an invitation to confide, to disclose, to share. Even if you just answer with a short phrase, your tone of voice reveals to her your inner emotional state, and she quickly follows up your answer with “You sound a bit sad. What’s happened to upset you?”

Before you know it, you are opening up to this wonderful listener, who interjects only to offer sounds of comfort and concern, to mirror how you feel, occasionally offering soothing words to boost you and make you feel valued. Hannah is not doing this because it is her job to do so. She is like this with her clients, her friends, and even people she has only just met. Hannah’s friends feel cared for by her, and her friendships are built around sharing confidences and offering mutual support. She has an unstoppable drive to empathize.

Super-empathy is the greatest thing in the world:

Empathy is a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble. It is effective as a way of anticipating and resolving interpersonal problems, whether this is a marital conflict, an international conflict, a problem at work, difficulties in a friendship, political deadlocks, a family dispute, or a problem with a neighbor. I hope you have been persuaded that this resource is a better way to resolve problems than the alternatives (such as guns, laws, or religion). And unlike the arms industry, which costs trillions of dollars to maintain, or the prison industry and legal system, which cost millions of dollars to keep oiled, empathy is free. And unlike religion, empathy cannot by definition oppress anyone.

How much empathy someone has is innate and unchangeable. Some of it is set by genetics. The rest is determined by early childhood environment: people who were abused or neglected as children have lower empathy. It is possible that therapies will someday be developed to help people increase how much empathy they have, but such programs have yet to be developed. Preliminary work includes this set of body-horror videos about trains with poorly CGI’d human faces. Soon, all children will look at horrifying videos of trains, and evil will be eradicated from the world forever, at least as long as no one thinks to break it apart into small steps.

III.

Throughout this book, I found myself craving Socrates. Not the mythological Socrates, patron saint of wisdom, who has deep and insightful philosophical dialogues and humbly says that he knows nothing. No, I’m craving the annoying troll we see in Plato’s earlier dialogues. The guy who’s like:

SOCRATES: I see you’re on a jury. Why?
ORDINARY PERSON MINDING THEIR OWN BUSINESS: Well, I guess I want justice?
SOCRATES: What does justice mean? You can’t find out if you’re deciding things justly unless you know what justice is.
ORDINARY PERSON: I don’t know, giving people what they’re owed?
SOCRATES: Well, what if you borrowed a knife from someone and then he went mad and would kill people if you gave him the knife? You owe him the knife but it wouldn’t be just to give him the knife.
ORDINARY PERSON: Uh, sure, I guess that wouldn’t be just.
SOCRATES: So your definition doesn’t work. Do you have a new definition?
ORDINARY PERSON: No, not really. What’s your definition?
SOCRATES: Oh, I don’t know anything about justice. I’m an absolute idiot. I’m just trying to learn about justice from my betters, like you, someone who clearly knows what justice is because they’re on a jury.
ORDINARY PERSON: Oh, come on, it’s— it’s, you know, it’s justice! Everyone knows what justice is.
SOCRATES: Well, if you know what justice is, you shouldn’t have trouble telling me what it is.
ORDINARY PERSON: Fuck off, Socrates.

Reading Plato’s dialogues makes you really understand why the Athenians executed this guy.

Nevertheless, I have this fantasy of hiring a modern Socrates to follow Simon Baron-Cohen around. My modern Socrates would ask questions like:

• What does “evil” mean? What do terrorist attacks, child molestation, and the Holocaust have in common?

• Is rape—much less the Holocaust—really on a spectrum with cutting in line?

• Is it possible for something to be evil even if an average person wouldn’t go ‘wow, that seems really evil’? If it is, shouldn’t your theory account for that fact? If it isn’t, was slavery evil before the 19th slavery?

• Unlike 9/11, Nelson Mandela’s terrorist attacks were trying to achieve a just goal, after having ruled out other alternatives and while trying to minimize civilian casualties. These facts seem kind of relevant to whether they are evil or not. Shouldn’t a theory of evil incorporate this difference somewhere?

• How do we know that people do evil because of lack of empathy specifically? Don’t they sometimes do it out of anger or hatred or greed or ignorance?

• Is ‘it doesn’t seem like I would commit the Holocaust’ really proof that Nazis are doing something we would never do? If you polled Germans in 1920, how many of them would predict that they would commit a genocide?

• Shouldn’t people with a lot of cognitive empathy be able to understand why Nazis, terrorists, borderlines, and psychopaths do the things they do, instead of classifying them as some fundamentally alien and different form of person?

• Do people sometimes do things that make you sad for a reason other than not understanding or caring about your feelings? Isn’t it kind of unempathetic to assume that everything other people do is about you?

• Can’t you like patterns and be okay with patterns breaking? Aren’t good scientists really excited when their theory is falsified?

• Is it actually impossible to find consistent patterns in other people’s behavior? Isn’t this whole book about finding consistent patterns in other people’s behavior?

• Don’t science and engineering involve a lot of uncertainty, approximation, and this-isn’t-true-but-it’s-the-best-model-we-have heuristics? Why is that fundamentally different from having these models about people?

• If an autistic person is being bullied for talking nonstop about snowflakes, aren’t the neurotypicals failing to empathize with the autistic’s interest in snowflakes?

• If people with Asperger syndrome can have moral systems that aren’t based on empathy, why can’t neurotypicals?

• Doesn’t classic autism have a lot of symptoms that seem naively unrelated to evil, like gastrointestinal distress?

• Doesn’t it seem a little, uh, problematic to take a group of people who are mostly intellectually disabled and a group of people who mostly have above-average IQs and say the primary difference between them is that the former are evil?

• So, you can get people with functional empathy to commit genocide by breaking it down into small tasks, like someone with ADHD trying to get herself to go to the bank. Are there other ways you can get people with functional empathy to commit atrocities? Doesn’t that suggest that sometimes people commit atrocities while feeling empathy, so your theory is incomplete?

• Aren’t you kind of smuggling a lot into the definition of “feel an appropriate emotion”? How is this different from me saying “we would solve all world problems if we had more correct people, correct people have appropriate beliefs, they’re never wrong about anything because that would be an inappropriate belief, by definition correct people can’t oppress you because they only do correct things, by the way whether you’re correct or not depends on your genetics and early childhood environment”?

• What if I don’t want to share my feelings with Hannah?

• Does Hannah ever get listened to and comforted and encouraged by anyone, or is this a one-way street?

• What happens if Hannah faces a problem that isn’t best solved by making sympathetic noises about people’s feelings?

• Aren’t there sometimes problems that have nothing to do with one monkey being mad at another monkey? Like, disease or hunger or natural disasters or computer bugs or material scarcity or something?

• Is it actually possible to empathize with all eight billion people at once? If not, how do you deal with problems that affect billions of people?

• If early childhood environment affects whether someone has empathy, then wouldn’t teenage and adult environment also affect whether someone has empathy?

• Don’t you have to know facts about the world to cognitively empathize with people? If you don’t know that Catholics believe the Communion wafer is literally God, won’t you have trouble understanding their feelings about Communion desecration? If you don’t know that it’s rude to leave your shoes on in the house in Japan, won’t you have trouble choosing the appropriate shoe-related action? Doesn’t that suggest that there’s a lot of opportunty to improve cognitive empathy that we already know about?

• Don’t people usually care about some groups and not others? Aren’t there lots of people who care about their kids but are indifferent to the kids of someone they never met who lives half a world away? What accounts for this difference?

• Don’t people sometimes learn to care about a particular group? Like, all those stories about someone being a homophobe until their kid comes out as gay? Doesn’t that mean people can learn to have more affective empathy?

• If you want something a lot, aren’t you more willing to upset or hurt someone to get it than if you don’t want it very much?

• Don’t people, like, make choices? I realize that free will is a complicated philosophical concept but surely Simon Baron-Cohen has had the experience of being tempted to be mean and then deciding not to?

• So, uh, I don’t want to Godwin here, but given the topic it seems kind of relevant—isn’t “some people are naturally born evil due to their genetics” kind of a Nazi belief? Ought we to be maybe a little bit hesitant before speculating that the Maori have genes that make them naturally more likely to be evil? Has Stormfront read this book?

A lot of philosophy is abstruse, disconnected from real life, or just stupid. But you have to sometimes do basic philosophical analysis. You have to ask yourself questions like “what does this concept mean?” or “how would I know if this claim is true or not?” or “what are the implications of this belief?” Baron-Cohen dismisses these questions with an airy wave of his hand: “oh, that’s all philosophical mumbo-jumbo. I’m doing science! Look at this brain scan! Look at these genome-wide association studies! I have found the evil circuits of the brain and they’re the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the middle cingulate cortex, and areas of the temporal lobe.”

So many brilliant social scientists eke out a marginal living, working sixty-hour weeks as adjunct professors for less money than they’d make working at McDonalds, skipping meals and sleep to code interviews and analyze data so that they can contribute in some small way to the progress of human knowledge, and somehow this man not only has a secure position at Cambridge but a fucking knighthood for his contributions to psychology. I am a Zero Negative, so perhaps this is my lack of empathy talking, but I for one think the adjuncts should raise the tricolore, rip apart those nice neoclassical buildings, reassemble them into barricades, storm the Bastille that is Elsevier, and start a fucking Reign of Terror.

Metaphorically! Metaphorically!!!! Do not murder Simon Baron-Cohen. Methodological terrorism only.