MORAL EMPATHY

He decided to stop overthinking. Immediately he wondered if he was doing it right.

Long before Frodo dragged his hairy feet across Middle-earth, there was another ring, albeit less epic in production value, – The Ring of Gyges. Whereas Tolkien’s ring had wizards, hobbits, and a disconcerting number of walking scenes, Plato’s version was merely a shepherd and a poor impulse control problem.

Plato introduces this moral bauble in The Republic, in a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon. Glaucon, eager to test whether people are good by nature or just because someone’s watching, recounts the story of Gyges: a humble shepherd who discovers a magical ring that grants him invisibility. Like any upstanding character in mythology, he immediately seduces the queen, murders the king, and snatches the throne.

Glaucon, using this obviously unquestionable foundation, then presents his categorisation of good into three types: things we like for their own sake, things we like for their effects, and things we like for both. He unceremoniously dumps justice into the second category, implying people wear their morality, but only when someone’s looking, – like washing hands in men’s public restrooms.

But where is the guilt, shame, and moral identity in all of this? And using such a hypothetical extreme to draw conclusions about all human nature in such an unpersonal manner, feels very… political.

But I’d like to try a different version.

You’re offered a million pounds on one condition: your pet must suffer.

Like Plato’s Ring, there is no court, no witness, and no cosmic CCTV, yet most people say no without hesitation. But now comes part two – you can swallow a pill that removes every trace of the memory. No guilt, no shame, no story attached to your name. Has the wrongness changed?

“I don’t like silence” she said.
“Did you know that there’s no such thing as silence, just things you can and cannot hear” he said.
“Sorry, did I say silence, I meant science” she said.

This is a sleight of hand that separates two anchors of moral life. One anchor is the other’s experience (the creature’s suffering). The other is our self‑concept (the person I refuse to become). The pill removes self‑regard and leaves bare the fact of suffering. What remains of wrongness depends on what you think morality is.

Utilitarianism, – that ever-cheerful spreadsheet of ethics, says the wrongness sits in suffering itself, unless the money produces much greater overall good.

Kantian duty says never use a being as a mere means. Price tags on pain are category errors, duty doesn’t evaporate in private.

Virtue ethics puffs on its pipe and asks, rather smugly, what sort of person you’re becoming. Even if the memory is purged, the act remains part of a moral architecture – choosing the pill itself shows disordered priorities.

Egoism chimes in from the hot tub, suggesting your hesitation was just self-preservation. If guilt and consequences vanish, why bother? This is less moral philosophy, more tax avoidance with a conscience.

Meanwhile contrationa… contractrini… contractionisu… contractarianism, yep, that one, looks over the fence, waving a finger for it undermines trust.

These lenses clarify – but they leave a missing variable humming under the surface, the one that pulled your no out of your mouth before you could rationalise it. That missing variable is empathy.

Empathy is not a virtue – it’s a squatter. It moves in uninvited, rearranges the furniture, and floods the place with other people’s grief. Empathy explains the speed of your first no – you feel the animal’s pain (or can imagine it keenly). But empathy is also wildly selective. It swells for those we love, thins for strangers, dries up for enemies. It tracks our identities, our tribes, our narratives about who deserves what.

These differences reveal empathy’s mechanics – it’s tuneable, trainable, and sometimes overloaded. Empathy is a dial, one easily twisted by hormones, social context, Netflix documentaries, and whether you skipped breakfast. Which brings us to the punchline, if morality is built on empathy, then morality inherits its fickleness.

So maybe morality is a rational structure erected over an empathic foundation that bends like soggy cardboard in the rain.

If our moral reasons are carved from empathy (plus its guilt and the imagined audience), then our reasons bend as empathy is redirected. What looks like objective moral truth may often be stability in our empathic stance, not a law floating in space. Conversely, what looks like moral decay may be empathy drift – who we count, how vividly we can imagine them, and how durable that imagination is when no one is watching.

Some principles, however, remain stubborn –

Moral judgements track how many beings are in your empathy circle, how vividly you imagine their suffering, and how resistant that stance is to situational drift. Change the dial, change the judgement.

The more robust your internal audience, the less you need society’s CCTV to behave. Gyges’ failure is not the ring, it’s the vacant stalls in your inner theatre.

Even if morality is a construct, unnecessary, vividly imagined suffering remains our strongest, most durable moral anchor. Not eternal truth – just the last light that won’t go out.

So, what does this give us?

It explains why Gyges, the pet, and the pill all prick the same nerve – they’re not riddles about justice, they’re MRI scans of our empathic circuitry.

It shows disagreement isn’t always due to malice. Different people moralise differently because their empathy radios are tuned to different frequencies.

It predicts that anonymity and abstraction dull moral restraint, while vividness and vicinity amplify it. Show a face, tell a story, prompt a veil-of-ignorance, and people behave better, like toddlers who know they’re being watched.

It hints that ethics isn’t just something we argue – it’s something we can design. Institutions, rituals, and storytelling can act as tuning forks for empathy. If morality rides on its back, we might as well help it stay in tune.

In the end, the question isn’t merely, “Would you be good if unseen?” The sharper one is, “Who remains real to you when unseen?” If your empathy narrows to a narcissistic dot the moment the lights go off, your morality follows suit. If, instead, you cultivate a sturdy inner audience and a panoramic circle of concern, then no ring can make you invisible.

It is also important to note that people are very good at justifying things, – it’s ok to steal from them because they can afford it, or downloading a song I wasn’t going to buy anyway is a victimless crime.

The shepherd, the ring, the pet, the pill – they are mirrors. They do not reveal a divine moral order, but the scaffolding of your empathic architecture and the maintenance schedule you keep.

And that, far from trivialising morality, makes it something worth rehearsing, crafting, and guarding. Especially when nobody’s watching.

The only thing keeping you, you, is you, but, that’s what makes you, you.