Big Think - Why I’m against empathy | Paul Bloom
Empathy is a poor moral guide. The reason is because we naturally feel the most empathy for the people who look, speak, and behave just like us. While empathy - that is, putting ourselves in another person’s shoes and feeling what they feel - is certainly good in many cases, it’s not always the appropriate response to a situation.
Empathy is an important part of all sorts of exciting activities, but Bloom is against empathy as a moral guide. Psychologists call this ‘Emotional empathy.’ A lot of people think this is core to being a good person. Who do you feel empathy for? Who do you most naturally put yourself in the shoes of? Answer to this from study after study, after study - we naturally feel empathy for people who look like us, who speak our language, who we feel are safe, and because of that, empathy is, of all of the human feelings, perhaps the most biased and parochial.
One philosopher in a critique of me said, “If my wife comes in and she’s mad at somebody at work- it’s all well and good for me to say, ‘I love you very much and I understand where you’re coming from,’ but isn’t what she wants me to share her anger, get angry with her?” Counterexample here is anxiety. I go to my partner and I’m very anxious, I’m stressed out. Do I want her to start sharing my feeling of anxiety? To look at me and say, “Oh my God, it’s horrible. Yeah, it’s horrible.” No! I want her to be calm. I want her to say, “I love you. Calm down. Let me tell you how to think about it differently.” Sometimes what we want from people isn’t a mirror of us, it’s rather, another intelligent, caring, loving person responding to us as a distinct being, and working to make our life better. And I think, sometimes, empathy is exactly what we do not want.
What you need is compassion - you need to care. So what I argue in the book is that our best decisions, our fairest, our most equitable ones, are done through a combination of a rational judgment of how does one make the world a better place plus compassion, love, caring. But not the sort of love and caring that requires you to put yourself in another person’s shoes. Even if empathy is, on balance, has a positive effect, compassion does better. If we could reconfigure our moral attitudes to be less biased, less parochial, more with our head and less with our heart, we would do better.