Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

To see these weaknesses, consider the example that I raised in the prologue, the murders of twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. Why did this give rise to such a powerful reaction? It was a mass shooting, and over the last thirty years in the United States, these have caused hundreds of deaths. This is horrible, but the toll from these mass shootings equals about one-tenth of 1 percent of American homicides, a statistical nonevent. (That is, if you could wave a magic wand and end all mass shootings forever, nobody looking at the overall homicide rates would even notice.) Actually, in the year of the Sandy Hook killings, more schoolchildren were murdered in one American city—Chicago—than were murdered in Newtown, and yet I’ve never thought about those murdered Chicago children before looking that up, and I’m not likely to think about them again . . . while my mind often drifts back to Newtown. Why? Part of the answer is that Sandy Hook was a single event. The murders in Chicago are more of a steady background noise. We’re constituted so that novel and unusual events catch our attention and trigger our emotional responses. But it’s also in large part because it’s easy for people like me to empathize with the children and teachers and parents of Newtown: They’re so much like those I know and love. Teenage black kids in Chicago, not so much.