Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

The myth of pure evil has many sources. One is what Steven Pinker calls “the moralization gap”—the tendency to diminish the severity of our own acts relative to the acts of others. You can see this in reports of violent criminals who are puzzled why people are making such a big deal of their crimes. The most extreme example is Frederick Treesh, one of a group of three “spree killers,” who allegedly told a police officer, “Other than the two we killed, the two we wounded, the woman we pistol-whipped, and the light bulbs we stuck in people’s mouths, we didn’t really hurt anybody.” 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. If John punches Bill, the event will usually mean more to Bill than to John; both the physics and psychology of punching mean that it has more of an imp...