Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

This is less controversial than it sounds. Even the fans of moral emotions implicitly grant priority to reason. If you ask them why they think so highly of empathy (or compassion or pity or anything else), they won’t just insist, they won’t scream or weep or try to bite you. Rather they’ll make arguments.

I don’t mean to rag on my colleagues, but there is a certain lack of self-awareness about this point. It is one of the ironies of modern intellectual life that many scholars insist that rationality is impotent, that our efforts at reasoning are at best a smoke screen to justify selfish motivations and irrational feelings. And to make this point, these scholars write books and articles complete with complex chains of logic, citations of data, and carefully reasoned argument. It’s like someone insisting that there is no such thing as poetry—and making this case in the form of a poem.