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.

Further, spotlights only illuminate what they are pointed at, so empathy reflects our biases.

Even if one knows the best thing to do, one must be motivated to do it.

Association of Medical Colleges, and there is a special focus on empathy training in medical schools. For the most part, I’m all for this. As we’ve seen, people often use the term empathy to include all sorts of good things, and most of what goes on in the name of empathy training in medical school is hard to object to, such as encouraging doctors to listen to patients, to take time with them, and to show respect. It’s only when we think about empathy in a more literal sense that we run into problems. Christine Montross, a surgeon, weighs in on the risks of empathy: “If, while listening to the grieving mother’s raw and unbearable description of her son’s body in the morgue, I were to imagine my own son in his place, I would be incapacitated. My ability to attend to my patient’s psychiatric needs would be derailed by my own devastating sorrow. Similarly, if I were brought in by ambulance to the trauma bay of my local emergency department and required immediate surgery to save my life, I would not want the trauma surgeon on call to pause to empathize with my pain and suffering.”

Even days after birth, babies get upset by hearing other babies cry—more upset than if they hear a recording of their own crying. And there is abundant evidence that one- and two-year-olds are bothered by seeing others in pain.

In one study, Baumeister and his colleagues asked people to recall either an instance where they angered someone or one where they were angered by someone else. When people remembered incidents in which they were the perpetrator, they often described the harmful act as minor and done for good reasons. When they remembered incidents in which they were the victims, they were more likely to describe the action as significant, with long-lasting effects, and motivated by some combination of irrationality and sadism. Our own acts that upset others are innocent or forced; the acts that others do to upset us are crazy or cruel. The finding isn’t surprising if you consider that violent or harmful acts matter a lot more to the victim than to the perpetrator.