Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

I’ve been arguing throughout this book that fair and moral and ultimately beneficial policies are best devised without empathy. We should decide just punishments based on a reasoned and fair analysis of what’s appropriate, not through empathic engagement with the pain of victims. We should refrain from giving to a child beggar in India if we believe that our giving would lead to more suffering. None of this denies that pain and suffering exist, and none of this is dehumanization in the sense that we should worry about. It’s just that we are better off focusing on some things and not others in order to achieve certain good ends. Since the ends matter, this is not cruel; it’s kind. We’ve seen that empathy’s relationship to violence and cruelty is complicated. It’s not true that those who do evil are necessarily low in empathy or that those who refrain from evil are high in empathy. We’ve seen how empathy can make us worse people, not merely in the sense that it leads to bad policy and can mess up certain relationships but in the stronger sense that it can actually motivate savage acts. As we think about empathy, it’s useful to compare