Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

Successful therapists and parents have a lot of cognitive empathy, but so too do successful con men, seducers, and torturers.

criminal psychopaths don’t have to be fiddling with a single dial of empathy: A simpler explanation is that they are good at understanding other people and bad at feeling their pain. They have high cognitive empathy but low emotional empathy.

I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.” Carlyle has a specific issue in mind, a case where he wanted to ridicule economists for objecting to something that was the subject of considerable feeling and heart, something that Carlyle had defended with great emotion. What was this issue that the economists were being so negative about? Slavery. Carlyle was upset because the economists were against slavery. He argued for the reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies and was annoyed that the economists railed against it. Think about this when you’re tempted to scorn economists and the cool approach they take to human affairs, and when you hear people equating strong feelings with goodness and cold reason with nastiness. In the real world, as we’ve seen, the truth is usually the opposite.

In a review article, Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki describe how they make sense of this distinction: “In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s well-being. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.”