The Thinking Sapling

There’s something quite fascinating in moments where we derive our actions from the emotions of others. It’s a quiet reminder, when we pause to reflect, that we don’t exist alone. Ever since I read David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, the concepts of empathy — or, in Hume’s words, sympathy — have intrigued me.

The ability to feel things by imagining another person’s state of being seems almost instrumental to life. We see it every day, from maintaining table manners at the dinner table to feeling pained by what we’ve seen in the world.

As a moral guideline, we’ve always been told to “put ourselves in others’ shoes.” Yet, the assumption that we can absorb others’ feelings by imagining their situation feels too simple. So for this blog, I’ll reflect on what we experience when we try to walk in the shoes of another.

To start, the emotions we imagine others feel don’t always give rise to the same emotions in us. A good example is pride. We imagine the admiration others have for us and feel proud. The inverse is also true, where we imagine their condemnation and feel shame.

This becomes even more apparent in matters of jealousy. Jealousy arises when we imagine the happiness of another person and desire it for ourselves. The thought that such pleasure isn’t ours pains us.

Even if we rationalise it by telling ourselves they don’t deserve their joy any more than we do, it doesn’t make us happy for them. Often, it makes us bitter. We might even delight in their downfall, believing that justice was served.

All these things don’t quite capture what we mean when we ask someone to put themselves in another’s shoes. Is it even possible to force ourselves to feel the way others do?

Many of us are fortunate to have known empathy that aligns more closely with how the other person feels. We see this in ourselves, where others’ emotions matter to us as much as they matter to them.

We might have people in our lives whose well-being is inherently valuable. Consider a time when a friend of ours receives good news. It is common—or I should hope—for us to be happy along with them. In their moment of joy, we can’t help but join them in it. Their joy is not only inherently valuable to them, but to us as well.

Inversely, when such people suffer, we can’t help but feel pain too. We’d do our best to bring them back up, not because we desire their admiration or out of self-interest, but because their being inherently matters.

I do not claim we feel their joy and sorrow exactly as they do, but we care about what they feel, and it’s not out of pride or gain. Their existence in the world isn’t valuable because it serves our ends, but because it is valuable in its own right.

For some, it might be as valuable as our own.

This form of empathy may seem limited to a small circle at first, but it is wider than it seems. Do we not feel sorrow in seeing people across the world struggle? The life of a child in poverty matters little to our pride or self-interest, and yet we “feel bad” for the child. The empathy we feel is weaker than what we feel for those nearer to us, but it undeniably still exists.

We don’t exist alone; our being matters to others. It might be small and quiet, but there will always be those we wish were better off—and those who quietly wish the same for us.

And that, to me, is a heartwarming thought.