Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

empathy is always on the side of the censor. It is easy to feel the pain of the person who is upset by speech, and particularly easy to do so if the person is part of your community and is bothered by the same things you are. It seems mighty cold-blooded to tell someone who has been really hurt that they should just suck it up. The case for free speech, in contrast, is pretty unempathic. There are many arguments for why we should be reluctant to restrict the speech of others, some of them drawing on consequentialist concerns (the world is better off in the long run if all ideas, even bad ones, get an airing), some of them based on conceptions of human freedom in which the right to self-expression is paramount. There is also an enlightened form of self-interest going on in a defense of free speech: You get the right to say what you want, and in return I get that right for myself. But none of these are particularly empathic considerations, and, here, as elsewhere, a reasonable public policy draws upon more general, and less biased, motivations. Empathy also shows its nonpartisan nature in the legal context.