Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

If you removed our capacity for empathy, somehow excising it from our brains, we would still care more about our families and friends than for strangers. Compassion is biased; concern is biased; and even cost-benefit reasoning is biased.

Our attempts at rational deliberation can get confused or be based on faulty premises or get fogged up by self-interest.

morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one’s conduct by reason—that is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing—while giving equal weight to the interests of each individual affected by one’s decision.”

Incentives appeal to self-interest, custom appeals to our social nature, but a third way to elicit kindness is to get people to feel empathy.