Some people take empathy to mean everything good or moral, or to be kind in some general sense. I’ve come to realize that people mean different things by empathy. It’s a great question because a lot of people freak out when they see my title. How do you define empathy? And how is it distinct from, say, compassion or sympathy? Paul Bloom So if he’s right, then I’ve been wrong for virtually all of my life.Īfter reading his book and engaging him in this conversation, I think he’s (mostly) right. I’ve long believed empathy to be the basis for human solidarity (for reasons I explain below). To be perfectly transparent, I read Bloom’s book - and entered into this conversation - with a fair degree of skepticism.
I sat down with Bloom to talk about his case against empathy. What follows is a lucidly argued tract about the hazards of good intentions. “I want to make a case for the value of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday life, arguing that we should strive to use our heads rather than our hearts.” Such is the plea that Bloom makes in the opening pages of the book. Worse, to the extent that individuals and societies make ethical judgments on the basis of empathy, they become less sensitive to the suffering of greater and greater numbers of people.
The author of a new book titled Against Empathy, Bloom uses clinical studies and simple logic to argue that empathy, however well-intentioned, is a poor guide for moral reasoning.
Who can be against empathy? If our moral intuitions align on anything, is it not on the idea that empathy for other human beings is a good thing? What harm could come from identifying with the thoughts and feelings of our fellow creatures?Īccording to Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, most of us are completely wrong about empathy.
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