Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

am not arguing that all the biases I have been discussing reflect the workings of empathy. Some do. It’s a lot easier to empathize with someone who is similar to you, or someone who has been kind to you in the past, or someone you love, and because of this, these are the individuals you are more likely to help. The same empathic biases that show up in neuroscience laboratories influence us in our day-to-day interactions. But other biases have causes that go deeper than empathy. We are constituted to favor our friends and family over strangers, to care more about members of our own group than people from different, perhaps opposing, groups. This fact about human nature is inevitable given our evolutionary history. Any creature that didn’t have special sentiments toward those that shared its genes and helped it in the past would get its ass kicked from a Darwinian perspective; it would falter relative to competitors with more parochial natures.