Mania: I might have some problems with joy as well. I was enormously joyful at my wedding and when my daughter was born. If I were equally joyful for every wedding and every birth in the world, I would probably literally die from joy.

Now consider experiencing both the grief and the joy of the entire world. Equally. For all people, just as you do for close family members. It’s hard even to imagine the ups and downs demanded by deepening our fellow‐​feeling until we treat everyone as a friend.

Coldness: Another possible approach to UE might be to dull the emotions. Yet it isn’t clear that what’s failing in our social system is our excessive empathy for family and friends. Socialists seem much more often, and much more fairly, to cite our indifference to the plight of strangers. They want to raise up the empathy we feel for strangers, not to stamp down the empathy we feel for our family. Socialists would reject the anempathetic world I propose here–but this would only throw them back to the manic worlds I described earlier.

Knowledge and Empathy: It could be that our lack of UE is not due to a moral failing, but to a cognitive one: It’s simply impossible to know everyone else well enough to have meaningful empathy with them.

That is, I may claim that I am as joyful for the marriage of a couple in Sri Lanka as I was for my own. But if I don’t know anything about them, the claim seems patronizing and smarmy. I can always wish them well, as Smith recommends, but I can’t get much further than that without vastly augmented powers of perception, insight, and memory. To say nothing of the problems of emotional equilibrium discussed above.

The beings described in this set of considerations seem decreasingly human. In a few cases, they are strangely deficient, even powerless. In others, they approach the godlike: They have godlike knowledge, godlike depth of feeling and–I’m tempted to say–godlike passivity.

I have none of those, but I don’t see this as a moral failing, bridgeable or otherwise. Would I wave a magic wand to become one of these creatures? I honestly don’t know. I’ve never given much thought to becoming a demigod, and I don’t have anything to compare it to.

By now we are far removed from a camping trip among friends. We are still farther from any intelligible guide to society at large. We have had to add not just Cohen’s universal empathy, but many further superhuman capacities. All are either entailed by it or else necessary to keep our own sanity in despite of it. At present we have no idea how to attain any of these capacities. Lacking them is not clearly a moral failing, and adding them in does not clearly lead to a New Socialist Man (or to a New Capitalist Man, for that matter). The quest for universal empathy seems to lead to a creature whose reactions are not readily inferrable, and who may not be what we would term human at all.