Empathy’s Role in Military Meaning

This paper defends empathy as essential to the military profession while addressing concerns about its potential risks, including moral injury. The author challenges recent critiques that dismiss empathy as toxic, arguing these critiques conflate empathy with emotional contagion. Properly understood, empathy involves understanding another's thoughts and feelings within their full context – a capability that enhances both the cognitive and moral dimensions of soldiering. Empathy improves soldiers’ thinking by reducing stereotypical assumptions, countering confirmation bias, and providing perspective on how others perceive them. Morally, empathy reinforces the humanity of subordinates, local populations, and enemies, countering dehumanization and grounding soldiers in two vital realities: war’s tragic nature and the necessity of aiming toward just and lasting peace. While excessive empathy risks over-identification, hesitation, or selective application, abandoning it entirely leaves soldiers’ judgments equally error-prone and morally compromised. 

Using Susan Wolf’s philosophical approach to life’s meaning as “active engagement in projects of worth,” the author analyzes the case of an Army officer that illustrates how defining success solely through outcomes – rather than recognizing meaning in worthy purposes and ethical means – intensifies susceptibility to moral injury, particularly when outcomes depend on factors beyond one's control as in the collective action of war. Soldiers require mature philosophical preparation integrating empathy with other virtues to derive meaning from their service and reduce vulnerability to moral injury.