No doubt I'll have to read the book of the article: Simon Baron-Cohen talks empathy, evil and justice at the Royal Institution | Carole Jahme | Science | guardian.co.uk: "Empathy is a primal ability that evolved long before our ancestors developed spoken language. By focusing on empathy as the foundation of virtuous behaviour and acknowledging its absence or erosion as a fuel for human vices, Baron-Cohen has unified the whole of human psychological behaviour"
As the article presents it there is a lot to commend the principle of taking note of empathy and I intuit a good set of connections to my puttering thinking about forgiveness and the Cross (bascially trying to take a practical theology approach before the systematics kicks in too early). There are big claims: healing of global society, definitive insight into the nature of evil ... but I'm concerned that it may be missing a thing or two. I'm wondering, for example, what about the evils that are brought about not by too little empathy but too much? Isn't this heading towards a reductionistic approach: lack of empathy is evil; what about the moral status, then of those who are on the autistic spectrum? I hope that the book has some nuance in the face of those kinds of issues... particularly as Baron-Cohen has published on Autism and Asperger's.
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