Empathy Is Not Agreement.
Understanding a belief is not the same as giving it moral shelter.
There is a strange anxiety around empathy in public argument. Ask why someone believes something ugly, frightened, conspiratorial, resentful, punitive or plainly wrong, and someone will usually hear you as excusing it. To understand a Reform voter is to validate Reform. To understand class resentment is to endorse every prejudice that travels under its banner. To understand why some people are frightened by immigration, angry about crime, hostile to welfare, suspicious of trans rights, or morally consumed by Gaza is to surrender the moral field before the argument has even begun.
This is understandable. Empathy has often been used as a laundering device. People with hard-edged views learn very quickly that their position sounds better if presented as pain. Prejudice becomes concern. Reaction becomes anxiety. Cruelty becomes a cry for help from a community nobody listened to. Before long, the demand for empathy becomes less a request to be understood than a claim to immunity. You are not allowed to criticise the belief because the belief comes wrapped in feeling.
So let us get the caveat out of the way early. Understanding why someone believes a cruel thing does not make the thing less cruel. Empathy does not decide whether a belief is true, just, proportionate, coherent, or politically acceptable. A person may have entirely intelligible reasons for arriving at an appalling conclusion. Their fear may be real. Their humiliation may be real. Their sense of loss may be real. None of that means the conclusion deserves obedience.
But the opposite mistake is also serious. If empathy can be abused as moral shelter, anti-empathy can become a permission slip for stupidity. Refusing to understand bad arguments does not make them disappear. It often makes them stronger, because you end up fighting a cartoon rather than the thing as it actually lives in people’s heads.
The distinction matters because empathy explains why a belief makes sense to someone. It does not decide whether that belief is right.
The unhelpful warmth of the word
Part of the problem is that empathy sounds nicer than it is. It comes to us dressed in the language of kindness, care and fellow-feeling. It sounds like something one should obviously have more of, like fibre or sleep. Nobody wants to be the person who says they are against empathy, unless they are auditioning for a very particular kind of podcast.
But empathy is not one simple thing. Psychologists often distinguish between affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Affective empathy is closer to feeling with someone; sharing or resonating with another person’s emotional state. Cognitive empathy is closer to understanding another person’s perspective; grasping what they think, feel, fear, want or believe without necessarily sharing it. That distinction is not just academic housekeeping. It changes what we are asking of ourselves in political argument.
Political empathy is usually cognitive before it is emotional. It is not necessarily a warm bath of fellow-feeling. It is not a requirement to feel the world exactly as your opponent feels it. It is the colder and more disciplined act of asking: what experience, fear, incentive, humiliation, media diet, institutional failure or social world makes this view feel reasonable to this person?
That question is not sentimental. It can be forensic. It asks what work the belief is doing. Is it explaining a loss? Displacing a fear? Providing someone with status? Giving moral shape to resentment? Offering a villain? Turning confusion into certainty? Making a complicated world feel legible?
This kind of empathy does not soften judgement. Done properly, it sharpens it.
The diagnostic use of empathy
Imagine someone who believes that immigration is responsible for every visible strain in their town: the queue at the GP, the pressure on housing, the change in shops, the lack of secure work, the unfamiliar languages on the bus, the sense that the place they knew has altered without their permission.
One response is simply to say that this is racist and move on. Sometimes the statement will be racist. Sometimes the politics attached to it will be racist. Sometimes the conclusion will be empirically wrong, morally crude, or encouraged by people who know exactly what they are doing. But the one-word dismissal rarely explains why the argument has purchase.
A more useful response asks what has made the claim feel true. Perhaps local services have been visibly degraded. Perhaps housing is scarce. Perhaps work is insecure. Perhaps the national political class has spent years talking as though belonging is a childish feeling unless it can be expressed in the correct metropolitan vocabulary. Perhaps newspapers and politicians have spent decades converting every social pressure into an immigration story because it is easier than talking honestly about underinvestment, labour markets, planning failure or the British state’s chronic preference for muddling through.
None of this means the anti-immigration conclusion is right. It means the conclusion is attached to something. If you do not understand the attachment, you cannot detach it.
The same is true across half the arguments that make public life unbearable. Some people talk about crime because they genuinely feel unsafe, not because they have read a policy paper on sentencing. Some talk about welfare through resentment because they feel trapped in a system where work has not delivered dignity. Some talk about patriotism defensively because they experience cosmopolitan disdain long before they encounter a serious argument about national identity. Some talk about trans rights with displaced anxieties about sex, authority, childhood, institutional trust and social change. Some talk about Gaza not as a foreign policy question but as a test of whether certain lives are allowed to matter in public.
Again, explanation is not acquittal. A displaced anxiety remains displaced. A false claim remains false. A cruel policy remains cruel. But arguments rarely survive on facts alone. They survive because they organise feeling. Empathy helps us see the organisation.
Listening is not obedience
This is where the language of listening becomes slippery. Politicians are forever listening to concerns. It is one of those phrases that can mean almost anything, which is why it is so useful. It can mean taking people seriously. It can mean buying time. It can mean triangulating towards a position you already wanted to hold. It can mean laundering panic into policy while looking sorrowful about it.
The danger is that listening becomes a mini-referendum. Someone expresses a concern; the politician validates the concern; the validation is treated as a mandate; the mandate becomes a policy whose cruelty is then defended as democratic humility. What else could we do? We listened.
But listening is not obedience, and empathy is not policy. A concern can be sincerely held and still badly aimed. It can describe a real wound while misidentifying the cause. It can be morally urgent in one register and politically disastrous in another. The task of politics is not to convert every expressed anxiety into legislation. It is to understand what people are saying, work out what is true within it, identify what is false or unjust, and respond in a way that is both humane and responsible.
This requires more than nodding sympathetically in a village hall. It requires judgement. It requires being able to say: yes, I can see why this feels like betrayal; no, I will not blame that neighbour for it. Yes, I understand why you feel unsafe; no, I will not build a justice policy on panic. Yes, I accept that rapid change can be disorienting; no, I will not pretend that dignity for one group requires humiliation for another.
Empathy without judgement becomes surrender. Judgement without empathy becomes theatre.
The cartoon opponent problem
One of the bad habits of modern argument is the assumption that bad beliefs must have stupid origins. Sometimes they do. There is no need to romanticise every prejudice into a tragic sociology. Some people believe ugly things because ugly things benefit them, flatter them, entertain them, or give them permission to treat others badly. There is such a thing as bad faith. There is such a thing as cruelty. There is such a thing as enjoying the boot and then composing an essay about economic anxiety afterwards.
But even bad faith has mechanisms. Even cruelty recruits stories. Even prejudice needs a structure of plausibility if it is going to travel beyond the already converted.
When we refuse to understand that structure, we make our opponents easier to despise but harder to defeat. This is especially tempting online, where the reward system favours the most contemptuous summary. Your opponent is not merely wrong; they are a fascist, a snowflake, a groomer, a tankie, a centrist dad, a bigot, a liberal elitist, a traitor, a crank, a ghoul. Some of these labels may occasionally be accurate. Most become less accurate with repetition. All of them can become substitutes for thought.
The cartoon opponent is emotionally useful. It allows you to win the argument before it begins. But it also leaves you with no explanation for why anyone disagrees with you except stupidity or wickedness. If the disagreement persists, your only remaining theory is that there are more stupid and wicked people than you hoped. That may be satisfying. It is not a strategy.
A serious politics has to ask why certain claims become believable. Not because belief confers legitimacy, but because durability requires explanation. If an argument keeps returning, across constituencies, platforms, factions and decades, then something is feeding it. The feed may be material deprivation. It may be status anxiety. It may be institutional failure. It may be propaganda. It may be theological, national, familial, aesthetic, or simply habitual. But unless you know what feeds the belief, you are reduced to swatting at symptoms.
Empathy can be manipulative too
There is another caveat, and it is important. Empathy is not automatically virtuous. Cognitive empathy can be used by therapists, negotiators and peacebuilders. It can also be used by interrogators, con artists, demagogues and advertisers. To understand what someone fears is also to know where pressure can be applied. To understand what someone wants is to know what can be sold to them. To understand someone’s humiliation is to know which enemy to offer them.
This is why the sentimental account of empathy is inadequate. Empathy is not goodness. It is a form of access. What matters is what you do with it.
A politician who understands why people feel abandoned can build solidarity, repair institutions and tell a more truthful story about power. They can also redirect that abandonment towards migrants, benefit claimants, public sector workers, judges, students, trans people, Muslims, cyclists, or whoever is currently available as a national stress ball. Both moves require empathy of a kind. The difference is moral and political judgement.
This is also why empathy should not be treated as the opposite of reason. Paul Bloom’s critique of empathy is useful here, even if one need not follow him all the way. His basic warning is that empathy can be biased, narrow and overly responsive to vivid individual cases. We feel intensely for the person placed before us and fail to reason well about the wider pattern. That criticism is worth taking seriously. Empathy can draw attention, but it cannot by itself allocate justice.
The answer is not to abolish empathy from public life. That would leave politics even more inhuman than it already is, which is quite an achievement. The answer is to put empathy in its proper place. It is a means of understanding, not a final court of appeal.
What empathy is for
The purpose of empathy in public argument is not to collapse disagreement. It is not to make all positions equally valid. It is not to ask vulnerable people to be endlessly patient with those debating their dignity as though it were a seminar question. Nor is it to demand that every person harmed by a political view must perform therapeutic curiosity towards the person harming them.
That last point matters. The duty to understand should fall most heavily on people with power, responsibility, security and a serious interest in persuasion. It should not become another burden placed on those already expected to absorb the consequences of other people’s fears. There is something obscene about telling the target of cruelty that their first obligation is to understand the cruel. Sometimes the first obligation is protection. Sometimes it is refusal. Sometimes it is simply getting through the day.
But for those engaged in argument, politics, organising, writing, teaching or leadership, empathy is part of the work. Not because everyone is secretly reasonable. Not because every conflict can be dissolved by tone. Not because the right conversation will magically convert the committed bigot, the bad-faith operator, or the man in the replies whose profile picture suggests he has strong views about both taxation and women in films.
Empathy matters because most political beliefs are not just propositions. They are identities, loyalties, memories, wounds, habits, class signals, moral intuitions and social inheritances. People do not usually experience themselves as selecting opinions from a shelf. They experience themselves as noticing what is obvious. The task of persuasion is therefore not only to correct information. It is to understand what has made the false thing feel obvious.
That is difficult work. It is slower than denunciation and less flattering than contempt. It does not always succeed. But it is the difference between arguing with a living belief and arguing with a paper target.
The harder discipline
The phrase empathy is not agreement risks sounding like a plea for politeness. It is not. Politeness is sometimes useful and sometimes merely decorative. There are polite forms of cowardice, polite forms of cruelty and polite ways to say monstrous things. Civility, by itself, is not the point.
The point is accuracy.
If someone’s belief is false, we should want to understand the particular shape of its falsehood. If it is cruel, we should want to know what makes the cruelty feel justified. If it is disproportionate, we should want to know what scale of fear it is answering. If it is politically dangerous, we should want to know why it is spreading. The better we understand the belief, the less excuse we have for lazy responses to it.
This is the harder discipline: to understand without surrendering, to judge without caricaturing, to listen without obeying, to empathise without granting moral shelter.
A belief may make sense to someone because of what they have lived through. It may make sense because of what they have been told. It may make sense because it protects them from shame, gives shape to loss, or makes them feel briefly powerful in a world that otherwise humiliates them. All of this is worth knowing.
And then, having known it, we still have to decide.
That is where empathy ends and politics begins.