The Ministry of National Education no longer swears by empathy. After Gabriel Attal announced, when he was still minister, the establishment of empathy courses to combat school violence and harassment, Nicole Belloubet, who succeeded him in February, followed suit and is now doubling down on efforts in this area after the latest attacks on students, one of which proved fatal. These courses, tested in several schools since January, should therefore be generalized at the start of the next school year as part of teaching “emotional life”. This supposedly miracle method comes from Denmark, where such lessons were implemented as early as 1975, heavily promoted and publicized by figures like Malene Rydahl, author of Happy as a Dane.
“In a society crossed by currents of violence and disrespect, it is important to say that the school learns something else and lives differently,” defended the minister while attending an empathy course in a CP class. in Nice on April 12. During this session, the teacher, to represent a harassed student, crumpled up a sheet of paper and asked the class to comment on his case. The children judged the fictional student “ugly” and “weird”. Then the teacher kneaded the paper into a ball to raise awareness of the discomfort that these comments could cause, before redeploying the sheet and encouraging the children to be more kind. As recounted Le Figaro“the teacher then encouraged them to ‘apologize’. By showing them that the sheet representing this fictitious student was still crumpled, the teacher wanted to make them aware ‘that we cannot erase everything’ and that ‘We must therefore “speak with respect”. ended up finding […] a young girl.”
What could we criticize about such a method? What could be better, a priori, than encouraging young and old to feel the feelings of others? In reality, there is reason to doubt its relevance to the extent that empathy is not necessarily the best ally of the distinction between good and evil, that is to say, of morality.
Empathy, in fact, is neither the best judge nor the best driver of action. This is what demonstrates, in an enlightening book with a provocative title published in 2017, Against Empathythe cognitive psychology researcher and Yale researcher Paul Bloom. Empathy, he analyzes, acts like a spotlight that only illuminates where it is pointed, which is why it tends to be biased. As hundreds of laboratory experiments suggest, not only does it extend more naturally toward pleasant people, but it is stronger toward those who are close to us or similar to us. It also tends to focus on a small number of people: we can feel what a loved one is feeling, not what dozens or hundreds of other human beings are suffering.
Distinction between empathy and rational compassion
The impact of empathy on action is equally questionable. When we suffer or feel anxious, we expect those close to us to return opposite emotions to us, and not to sink into depression or anxiety with us. Empathy can even be so heavy that it can lead to preferring to avoid the “victim”, and therefore not to help them. Bloom takes the example of the medical professions, the exercise of which requires a certain emotional distance: doctors and nurses could hardly fulfill their mission if they constantly suffered together with their patients. Thus, if empathy with the joy of others is undoubtedly beneficial to everyone, that which extends to sadness proves ambivalent.
In the case of school, it is easy to understand that empathy could prove counterproductive, either by promoting the solidarity of certain children with the bullies, or by disturbing and inhibiting children who feel the suffering of student victims.
In this regard, Paul Bloom distinguishes empathy from rational compassion, which consists of taking into account the feelings of others. In other words, it invites us to favor moral reasoning over emotional reactions alone. The latter makes it just as possible to condemn harassment or violence, and on more solid grounds. If these are questionable, it is not only because they make others suffer, it is above all because they are morally reprehensible. If they did not make anyone suffer, if their targets, out of masochism, delighted in being martyred, these acts would remain problematic from the point of view of what we call deontological ethics.
Fighting barbaric impulses
According to the most emblematic philosopher of deontological ethics, Immanuel Kant, moral action must be judged not by its result but by its motivations. The only thing that can, according to Kant, be considered good without reservation is what he calls “good will”. Thus, good consequences may result accidentally from an action motivated by the desire to harm an innocent person, and bad consequences may result from a well-motivated action. A will is only good when the individual chooses to do or refrain from doing something because it is his or her duty, that is, the right action is inexorably free and selfless.
Kant deduces three formulations of what he calls the “categorical imperative”. The best known, “act only according to the maxim by which you can also want it to become a universal law”, is accompanied by another, “act in such a way that you treat humanity, also in your person than in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, and never simply as a means. Harassing or violating others, from this perspective, amounts to violating the categorical imperative, that is to say, to acting badly.
Some will no doubt believe that no first grade student is capable of understanding such reasoning, and they will be right. But there are simpler ways to teach them, through the example of concrete situations. This is what the moral courses or lessons did in part following the Jules Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882. Considered archaic, removed in 1968, they were reintroduced in the 1980s and evolved until they became, today , EMC, Civic and Moral Education. But this, reinforced in 2023 and presented by the President of the Republic as a foundation of the “civic rearmament” of the nation, turns out to be much more a course on the “values” of the Republic than a real initiation to the moral. However, this aims to go beyond the contingency of a political regime to address fundamental human questions. What’s more, no link is made, at the top of the State, between empathy courses and EMC. We could add, finally, that the teaching of history and literature proves to be an excellent introduction to ethical reasoning. In short, National Education is already supposed to offer everything needed to combat barbaric impulses. Unless precisely, academic collapse and moral relativism are two inseparable phenomena.
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