Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

If someone cares about me, my sadness should make her sad, my happiness should make her happy. If my niece is delighted because she just won a scholarship, this will make me happy, but not because I’m vicariously experiencing her pleasure. Instead it’s because I love her and want her to do well. Indeed, I might be just as happy if I heard about her good fortune before she did, so that no mirroring could conceivably take place.

Smith begins by talking about a virtue of empathy. If you’re anxious, it pays to be empathic with a calm friend because this will make you calm and help you make sense of your situation: “The mind, therefore, is rarely so disturbed, but that the company of a friend will restore it to some degree of tranquility and sedateness. The breast is, in some measure, calmed and composed the moment we come into his presence. We are immediately put in mind of the light in which he will view our situation, and we begin to view it ourselves in the same light; for the effect of sympathy is instantaneous.” Smith inverts the sort of empathic distress scenario that we’ve worried about in the therapeutic context, where a calm person (the therapist) meets an upset person (the client), and through empathy the calm person becomes upset. Here, the calm person meets the upset person and the upset person becomes calm. This is a better model for what should go on in therapy—the trick, then, is not for the therapist to have empathy; it’s for the patient to have it. It gets more complicated

quem precisa sentir empatia é quem está sofrendo

When Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize, I was delighted because he is a fellow psychologist; when Robert Schiller won one, I was delighted because he is from Yale and, more important, lives on my street, eight houses down from my own. So, in some possibly pathetic way, their great accomplishments became my own. Envy can also be reduced

title?) Asma begins by describing a time when he was on a panel on ethics, along with a priest and a communist. At some point he said, to the shock of his fellow participants, “I would strangle everyone in this room if it somehow prolonged my son’s life.” He was kidding as he said it, but during the drive home, he realized that he believed it. He would save his son’s life at the cost of others, and he wasn’t ashamed of it. He writes, “The utilitarian demand—that I should always maximize the greatest good for the greatest number—seemed reasonable to me in my twenties but made me laugh after my son was born.” Asma is in good company here. Blood is thicker

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

The moralization gap is one reason among many that we rarely see ourselves as the evil ones. As Baumeister puts it, “If we as social scientists restrict our focus to actions that everyone including the perpetrator agrees are evil, we will have almost nothing to study.” It

it’s not that certain cruel actions are committed because the perpetrators are self-consciously and deliberatively evil. Rather it is because they think they are doing good. They are fueled by a strong moral sense. As Pinker puts it: “The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest.” Henry Adams put this in stronger terms,

If you ask a proponent on either side why they are killing their enemies’ children, they don’t spout the sort of bureaucratic number crunching that Baron-Cohen worries about. They more often talk about the harm that’s been done to those they love. Some would argue that the solution is more empathy. For Israelis, then, empathy not just for their neighbors sitting in the café but for the suicide bomber who set off the bomb that maimed them. For the Palestinians, empathy not just for their brothers and sisters who had their homes crushed by tanks but for the soldiers driving the tanks. This is a nice thought, perhaps, but we’ve seen a lot of evidence by now suggesting that this is not how empathy works. Asking people to feel as much empathy for an enemy as for their own child is like asking them to feel as much hunger for a dog turd as for an apple—it’s logically possible, but it doesn’t reflect the normal functioning of the human mind. Perhaps

I’ve come up with similar findings in a series of studies done in collaboration with Yale graduate student Nick Stagnaro. We tell our subjects stories about terrible events, about journalists kidnapped in the Middle East, about child abuse in the United States. And then we ask them how best to respond to those responsible for the suffering. In the Middle East case, we give a continuum of political options, from doing nothing, to engaging in public criticism, all the way up to a military ground invasion. For the domestic version, we ask about increased penalties for the abuser, from raising their bail to making them eligible for the death penalty. Then we give people Baron-Cohen’s empathy scale. This has its problems, as discussed earlier, but it should give some rough approximation of how empathic people are. Just as with the genetic study of Buffone and Poulin, we found that the more empathic people are, the more they want a harsher punishment.

The Psychopathy Checklist is predictive of future bad behavior not because it assesses empathy and related sentiments but because, first, it contains items that assess criminal history and current antisocial behavior—questions about juvenile delinquency, criminal versatility, parasitic lifestyle—and, second, it contains items that have to do with lack of inhibition and poor impulse control.

There are those who think that the world would be a better place without anger. Many Buddhists see it as personally corrosive and socially harmful—“unwholesome” is the word sometimes used. Owen Flanagan once described a meeting with the Dalai Lama in which he asked the leader of the Tibetan Buddhists a great question: If it would stop the Holocaust, would you kill Hitler? “The Dalai Lama turned to consult the high lamas who were normally seated behind him, like a lion’s pride. After a few minutes of whispered conversation in Tibetan with his team, the Dalai Lama turned back to our group and explained that one should kill Hitler (actually with some ceremonial fanfare, in the way, to mix cultural practices, a Samurai warrior might). It is stopping a bad, a very bad, karmic causal chain. So ‘Yes, kill him. But don’t be angry.’ ” The Dalai Lama is conceding that a rational and caring individual is going to have to engage in, or at least support, certain acts of violence, including murder. But he sees it as a necessary evil, a last resort. If there were some way to stop that very bad karmic chain without violence, that would be better. This is not the perspective of an angry person—anger feeds off the suffering of others; an angry person wants wrongdoers to suffer. Anger, however, does make us irrational. There are

Jonathan Haidt captures a certain consensus when he suggests that social psychology research should motivate us to reject the notion that we are in control of our decisions. We should instead think of the conscious self as a lawyer who, when called upon to defend the actions of a client, provides after-the-fact justifications for decisions that have already been made. We are wrong to see rationality as the dog—it’s actually the tail.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Lawrence, KS: Digireads.com, 2010), 62.

134 “unmitigated communion” Vicki S. Helgeson and Heidi L. Fritz, “Unmitigated Agency and Unmitigated Communion: Distinctions from Agency and Communion,” Journal of Research in Personality 33, (1999): 131–58; Heidi L. Fritz and Vicki S. Helgeson, “Distinctions of Unmitigated Communion from Communion: Self-Neglect and Overinvolvement with Others,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1998): 121–40; Vicki S. Helgeson and Heidi L. Fritz, “A Theory of Unmitigated Communion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 2 (1998): 173–83. “overly nurturant, intrusive, and self-sacrificing” Helgeson and Fritz, “A theory,” 177. 135 “It’s surprising

138 Charles Goodman notes Charles Goodman, Consequences of Compassion: An Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). “In contrast to empathy” Tania Singer and Olga M. Klimecki, “Empathy and Compassion,” Current Biology 24 (2014): R875. The neurological difference Ibid. 139 “a warm positive state” Olga M. Klimecki, Matthieu Ricard, and Tania Singer, “Empathy Versus Compassion: Lessons from 1st and 3rd Person Methods,” in Compassion: Bridging Practice and Science, eds. Tania Singer and Matthias Bolz (Max Planck Society, 2013), e-book at http://www.compassion-training.org/?lang=en&page=home. “The empathic sharing” Ibid. ongoing experiments led by Singer For example, Olga M. Klimecki et al., “Differential Pattern of Functional Brain Plasticity after Compassion and Empathy Training,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9 (2014): 873–79. 140 “When experienced chronically Singer and Klimecki, “Empathy and Compassion.” conclusions

2001). 145 “tenderness and aestheticism” Atul Gawande, “Final Cut. Medical Arrogance and the Decline of the Autopsy,” The New Yorker 77 (2001): 94–99.