Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

The idea I’ll explore is that the act of feeling what you think others are feeling—whatever one chooses to call this—is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we’re better off without it.

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.

Jonathan Haidt argues, we are not judges; we are lawyers, making up explanations after the deeds have been done. Reason is impotent. “We celebrate rationality,” agrees de Waal, “but when push comes to shove we assign it little weight.”

From a Darwinian perspective, these preferences are no-brainers. Creatures who favor their own are at a huge advantage over those who are impartial. If there ever arose a human who was indifferent to friend versus stranger, to his child versus another child, his genes got trounced by the genes of those who cared more for their own. This is why we are not natural-born egalitarians.

Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now. This makes us care more about them, but it leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blind as well to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with. Empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism. It is shortsighted, motivating actions that might make things better in the short term but lead to tragic results in the future. It is innumerate, favoring the one over the many. It can spark violence; our empathy for those close to us is a powerful force for war and atrocity toward others. It is corrosive in personal relationships; it exhausts the spirit and can diminish the force of kindness and love.

suffering of someone living in another country, it’s far easier to empathize with those who

“empathy” and defended by so many scholars, theologians, educators, and politicians, is actually morally corrosive. If you are struggling with a moral decision and find yourself trying to feel someone else’s pain or pleasure, you should stop.

But I’ve never met anyone above the age of seven who didn’t appreciate the force of these arguments, agreeing that in certain instances—assuming that I got the facts right—we are better people if we disregard our gut feelings. To put it differently, I’ve met people who are stubborn, biased, purposely obtuse, slow on the uptake, suspicious of disagreement, and absurdly defensive—actually, I am very often exactly this kind of a person—but I’ve never met anyone who was insensitive to data and argument in the moral realm and who wasn’t capable, at least sometimes, of using moral reasoning to override his or her gut feelings.

Nowadays, many people only seriously consider claims about our mental lives if you can show them pretty pictures from a brain scanner.

Godwin’s Law says that as any online discussion proceeds, the odds of someone mentioning Hitler approaches certainty.

A lot of misery in the world—and a lot of bad birthday presents—exists because we understand other people by using ourselves as a model: This doesn’t offend me, so I assume it doesn’t offend you. I like this, so I assume you do too. And sometimes we get it wrong. As the Latin maxim goes, De gustibus non est disputandum.

But doing actual good, instead of doing what feels good, requires dealing with complex issues and being mindful of exploitation from competing, sometimes malicious and greedy, interests. To do so, you need to step back and not fall into empathy traps. The conclusion is not that one shouldn’t give, but rather that one should give intelligently, with an eye toward consequences.

But I’d give it a lot less weight than the needs of those who are actually suffering. If a child is starving, it doesn’t really matter whether the food is delivered by a smiling aid worker who hands it over and then gives the kid a hug, or dropped from the sky by a buzzing drone. The niceties of personal contact are far less important than actually saving lives.

This might be a fine attitude for a father—we’ll return to that question at the end of the next chapter—but it’s a poor attitude for a policy maker and a poor moral guide to our treatment of strangers.

A different analysis of the liberal-conservative contrast is proposed by Jonathan Haidt, based on his theory that humans possess a set of distinct moral foundations—including those concerning care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

The risks of empathy are perhaps most obvious with therapists, who have to continually deal with people who are depressed, anxious, deluded, and often in severe emotional pain. There is a rich theoretical discussion among therapists, particularly those of a psychoanalytic orientation, about the complex interpersonal relationships between therapists and their clients. But anyone who thinks that it’s important for a therapist to feel depressed or anxious while dealing with depressed or anxious people is missing the point of therapy. Actually, therapy would be an impossible job for many of us because of our inability to shut down our empathic responses. But good therapists are unusual in this regard. A friend of mine is a clinical psychologist with a busy schedule, working for several hours at a stretch, with one client leaving and the next coming in. This would kill me. I find it exhausting to spend even a short time with someone who is depressed or anxious. But my friend finds it exhilarating. She is engaged by her clients’ problems, interested in the challenges that arise, and excited by the possibility of improving their lives.

“I didn’t need him to be my mother—even for a day—I only needed him to know what he was doing. . . . His calmness didn’t make me feel abandoned, it made me feel secure. . . . I wanted to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not its echo.”

But without empathy, this doctor wouldn’t have been able to offer the care I ended up appreciating. He needed to inhabit my feelings long enough to offer an alternative to them and to help dissolve them by offering information, guidance, and reassurance.”

From the standpoint of the patient, it can be comforting to talk to someone who knows just how you are feeling. From the standpoint of the therapist, figuring out how to help the patient surely benefits from appreciating what the patient is going through. But this is not an argument in favor of empathy. To get this appreciation, you don’t need to actually mirror another’s feelings. There is a world of difference, after all, between understanding the misery of the person who is talking to you because you have felt misery in the past, even though now you are calm, and understanding the misery of the person who is talking to you because you are mirroring them and feeling their misery right now. The first, which doesn’t involve empathy in any sense, just understanding, has all the advantages of the second and none of its costs.

More generally, we just don’t like empathizing with the sad. It makes us sad, and we have enough problems of our own! Smith puts this more eloquently: “Nature, it seems, when she loaded us with our own sorrows, thought that they were enough, and therefore did not command us to take any further share in those of others, than what was necessary to prompt us to relieve them.” Smith suggests that sad people should be aware of how unwilling people are to empathize with them and should be reticent in sharing their sadness with others. Now I admit that there is something odd about getting life advice from Adam Smith (though there is an excellent book called How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life). Although he had close relationships with friends and was a wonderful son to his mother, there is no evidence that he ever had any close romantic or sexual relationship with man or woman. (I was once at the dinner after a morality conference, surrounded by Smith experts, and their heated argument was over whether he died a virgin.) But still, his caution about oversharing and his demands for reticence fit well with the arguments in this chapter and also sit well with my own cold and repressed Canadian heart.

George Orwell expresses admiration for Gandhi’s courage but is repelled by Gandhi’s rejection of special relationships—of friends and family, of sexual and romantic love. Orwell describes this as “inhuman,” and goes on to say: “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”

If you want to think about evil, real evil, a better way to proceed is this: Don’t think about what other people have done to you; think instead about your own actions that hurt others, that made others want you to apologize and make amends. Don’t think about other nations’ atrocities toward your country and its allies; think instead about the actions of your country that other people rage against. Your response might be: Well, none of that is evil. Sure, I did some things that I regret or that others blame me for. And yes, my country might have done ugly things to others. But these were hard choices, tough calls, or perhaps honest mistakes, never the consequence of some sort of pure malice. Precisely. This is how people typically think of their past evil acts.

So what could someone say in favor of anger? One consideration is that if other individuals are angry, you might need to be angry too. Flanagan sadly concedes this, noting that in societies where displays of anger are approved of, an individual without anger might be at a disadvantage when it comes to resolving disputes and disagreements.

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At the same time, though, my antiempathy argument presupposes rationality. To say “This sort of judgment is flawed” and to believe it myself and to expect you to believe it assumes a psychological capacity that isn’t subject to the same flaws. The argument, then, is that while we are influenced by gut feelings such as empathy, we are not slaves to them.

“Our efforts should instead be put toward cultivating the ability to step back and apply an objective and fair morality.” I had thought of this as a reasonable, actually pretty drab, ending, but many commentators seized on it, asking—often with scorn—exactly what this objective and fair morality was supposed to be. Did such a thing even exist? If so, why would one expect it to be a good thing? In a similar vein, a sociology professor once wrote to me and gently told me that my emphasis on reason expressed a particularly Western white male viewpoint. He didn’t use the phrase, but the gist of his polite letter was that I really should check my privilege.

As for the sociology professor, the idea that rationality is an especially white male Western pursuit is where the extremes of postmodern ideology circle around to meet with the most retrograde views of a barroom bigot. In fact, there is no reason to believe that those who are not male and not white have any special problems with reason. And with regard to the Western part, I would refer the professor to the earlier discussion of how Buddhist theology provides some exceptionally clear insights into why empathy is overrated.

I want to end this book by responding to these sorts of arguments, making the case that we are not as stupid as many scholars think we are.

Many do see it as devastating in this way. Jonathan Haidt captures a certain consensus when he suggests that social psychology research should motivate us to reject the notion that we are in control of our decisions. We should instead think of the conscious self as a lawyer who, when called upon to defend the actions of a client, provides after-the-fact justifications for decisions that have already been made. We are wrong to see rationality as the dog—it’s actually the tail.

It turns out that every demonstration of our irrationality is also a demonstration of how smart we are, because without our smarts we wouldn’t be able to appreciate that it’s a demonstration of irrationality.

If our thought processes in the political realm reflected how our minds generally work, we wouldn’t even make it out of bed each morning.