Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

It turns out, though, that this the-whole-brain-does-it conclusion arises because neuroscientists—along with psychologists and philosophers—are often sloppy in their use of the term empathy. Some investigators look at what I see as empathy proper—what happens in the brain when someone feels the same thing they believe another person is feeling. Others look at what happens when we try to understand other people, usually called “social cognition” or “theory of mind” but sometimes called “cognitive empathy.” Others look at quite specific instantiations of empathy (such as what happens when you watch someone’s face contort in disgust), and still others study what goes on in the brain when a person decides to do something nice for another person, which is sometimes called “prosocial concern” but which one normally thinks of as niceness or kindness. Once you start pulling these different phenomena apart, which I’ll do below, things get more interesting, and you see how these different capacities relate to one another.