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Converging Technologies for Human Progress 165
Empathy is historically distinct from sympathy. Landsberg argues that
whereas sympathy is a feeling that arises out of identification, empathy stems
from imagining difference. On the one hand, sympathy grew out of an ethics
of similarity – looking for sameness between the sympathizer and his or her
object grounded in emotive assumptions about shared experience. As such,
sympathy entails the projection of one’s own feelings (one’s own happiness)
on another. An extensive discussion in post-colonial social theory as well as
gender theory based on the concept of “otherness” speaks to this important
distinction (Guha and Spivak, 1988; Bhabha, 1994). On the other hand,
empathy, a relatively recent word that first appeared in English in 1904, is
distinctive in that even in its first usages, empathy, unlike sympathy, carried
“a cognitive component” (Landsberg, 2004: 149). I am aware that sympathy
necessarily carries a cognitive component in human processing. An
interesting neurocognitive behavioral study would be to study these semantic
distinctions as they operate in the brain as a query of sympathy and empathy
as two kinds of emotive moral reasoning.
Remembering Freedom of Thought
Freedom of thought is recognized in United States and international law,
but it is not articulated very well. As recently as 2002, the U.S. Supreme
Court noted, “[t]he right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech
must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of
thought” (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition 533 U.S. 234 2002). Following
World War II, the United Nations codified freedom of thought in its
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), but largely in the context of
free religious belief. Article 18 states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of
thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his
religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and
in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice,
worship and observance.” In 1937, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Benjamin Cardoza declared that freedom of thought is the “matrix, the
indispensable condition of nearly every other freedom,” 1 the simple transistor
had not yet been invented, and antidepressants and the Information Age were
40–50 years away. More recently, in 1995, a United Nations report on Ethics
and Neuroscience called attention to how new scientific and technological
developments are impacting the brain – a human organ the report recognized
as “the organic core of the person, the agent of his freedom but also of the
individual and social constraints which restrict that freedom” (Vincent,
1995). And yet, in spite of recognition of the human brain’s centrality to
freedom, the articulation of how to protect this very intimate and important
1 Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 326-27 (1937).