Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

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.

Indeed, some argue that the myth of pure evil gets things backward. That is, 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.”

Unfortunately, though, this isn’t how empathy works. Consider what happens when a country is about to go to war. Do leaders gain support by making rational arguments with statistical assessments of costs and benefits? Is the decision driven by the sort of “unempathic cost-benefit calculation” that Baron-Cohen complains about? Does this cold-blooded calculation explain the psychology of those who supported either side of the conflict in Gaza—or the American invasion of Iraq? Not so much. What is more typical is that people feel deeply about the crimes done in the past toward their families or compatriots or allies. Consider how the Israeli reaction to the news of three murdered Israeli teenagers spurred the attacks on Gaza, or how Hamas and other organizations used murdered Palestinians to generate support for attacks against Israel. 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.

The idea that empathy can motivate violence is an old one and is thoughtfully discussed by Adam Smith: “When we see one man oppressed or injured by another, the sympathy which we feel with the distress of the sufferer seems to serve only to animate our fellow-feeling with his resentment against the offender. We are rejoiced to see him attack his adversary in his turn, and are eager and ready to assist him.”

Interestingly, the studies by Buffone and Poulin also found that there was a greater connection between empathy and aggression in those subjects who had genes that made them more sensitive to vasopressin and oxytocin, hormones that are implicated in compassion, helping, and empathy. It’s not just that certain scenarios elicit empathy and hence trigger aggression. It’s that certain sorts of people are more vulnerable to being triggered in this way.

The traits that comprise the Psychopathy Checklist fall into four main categories: (1) how you deal with other people, assessing traits like grandiosity, superficial charm, and manipulativeness; (2) your emotional life, including your empathic responses, or lack thereof; (3) your lifestyle, with a focus on parasitic, impulsive, and irresponsible behaviors; and (4) your propensity for bad behavior in the past, including encounters with the criminal justice system. Then there are two additional criteria, involving sex and romance.

On the other hand, the traits are not just a hodgepodge of bad attributes: There are systematic patterns. Some have argued that there are three main components of psychopathy—disinhibition, boldness, and meanness. This last component strikes me as a strangely casual word for a psychological condition, but meanness does nicely capture a certain set of relevant dispositions, including “deficient empathy, disdain for and lack of close attachments with others, rebelliousness, excitement seeking, exploitativeness, and empowerment through cruelty.” When people talk about psychopathy in criminals, this is the trait that they are often thinking about.

Here it is important to go back to the distinction between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Many psychopaths have perfectly good cognitive empathy: They are adept at reading other people’s minds. This is what enables them to be such master manipulators, such excellent con men and seducers. When people say that psychopaths lack empathy, they are saying that it’s the emotional part of empathy that’s absent—the suffering of others doesn’t make them suffer.

A different concern is raised by Jennifer Skeem and her colleagues. They note that scores on both the “callous/lack of empathy” item and the “shallow affect” item are weak predictors of future violence and crime. 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. This conclusion about psychopaths fits well with what we know about aggressive behavior in nonpsychopaths. As we discussed in an earlier chapter, a meta-analysis summarized the data from all studies that looked at the relationship between empathy and aggression, including verbal aggression, physical aggression, and sexual aggression. It turns out that the relationship is surprisingly low.

David Livingstone Smith, who explores dehumanization from the standpoint of psychological essentialism. He draws on research suggesting that people usually think of themselves and those close to them as possessing a special human essence. But not everyone is seen this way. We might see members of certain groups as having not fully realized their essences, as primitive and childlike. We might deny them an essence altogether, seeing them as nonhuman, perhaps as objects or things. And in the worst case, we can deny them a human essence and also attribute to them a subhuman essence and hence think of them as akin to dogs or rats.

Rather, the women in pornography are depicted as aroused and compliant. In at least some cases, they are depicted as purely sexual beings, just lacking certain intellectual and emotional properties we normally associate with people. The real moral issue that concerns us (or should concern us) about the depiction of women in pornography isn’t that they are seen as objects, but that they are depicted as lesser individuals, as similar to stupid and submissive slaves. This establishes a parallel with the sort of cases discussed by Smith.

Kate Manne makes a similar argument in her discussion of the aftermath of a police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, where police officers screamed at protesters, “Bring it, you fucking animals, bring it!” For Manne, this can best be seen not as a failure to acknowledge the protesters’ humanity, but as “a slur and a battle cry,” as an “insult that depends, for its humiliating quality, on its targets’ distinctively human desire to be recognized as human beings.”

There is a big difference between actively denying someone’s human traits—dehumanization—and not thinking about these human traits but instead focusing on other aspects of the person. The first is terrible; the second is not.

Similarly, 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.

So when it comes to my imaginary genetically engineered child, I would put in some anger, but not too much, and I would make sure to add plenty of intelligence, concern for others, and self-control. I would be wary of removing anger altogether, but I would ensure that it could be modified, shaped, directed, and overridden by rational deliberation; that, at most, it could be a reliable and useful servant—but never a master. That’s how we should think about empathy.

(Also, if it were really true that the best explanations were at the lowest level, then nobody should be doing neuroscience. After all, categories such as “neuron” and “synapse” are themselves quite high-level descriptions of molecules, atoms, quarks, and so on.) All this means that you can do psychology without studying the brain, even though the mind is the brain. While we’re at it, one can do psychology without studying evolution, even though the brain has evolved, and one can do psychology without studying child development, even though we were all once children. Of course, a good psychologist should be receptive to evidence concerning the brain, evolution, development, and much else. But the study of psychology does not reduce to any of these things. There are many routes to understanding. And in particular, for a lot of what psychologists are interested in, the fact that the mind is the brain just doesn’t matter.

In the normal course of affairs, there isn’t such a disengagement. We go through a mental process that is typically called “choice,” where we think about the consequences of our actions. There is nothing magical about this. The neural basis of mental life is fully compatible with the existence of conscious deliberation and rational thought—with neural systems that analyze different options, construct logical chains of argument, reason through examples and analogies, and respond to the anticipated consequences of actions.

In this summation there’s also nothing here to require the existence of a unitary “self” that is guiding any of the processes. Yes there are varying degrees of aberration from the normal, but these are all statistical variations from an individually perceived mean. This is hardly free will.

Not every result from a psychology lab is like this; some are powerful and robust and easy to replicate. But even for these, there is the question of real-world relevance. Statistically significant doesn’t mean actually significant. Just because something has an effect in a controlled situation doesn’t mean that it’s important in real life.

It turns out that every demonstration of our irrationality is also a demonstration of how smart we are, because without our smarts we wouldn’t be able to appreciate that it’s a demonstration of irrationality.

But when it comes to intelligence, there is a law of diminishing returns. The difference between an IQ of 120 and an IQ of 100 (average) is going to be more important than the difference between 140 and 120. And once you pass a certain minimum, other capacities might be more important than intelligence. As David Brooks writes, social psychology “reminds us of the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, character over IQ.” Malcolm Gladwell, for his part, argues for the irrelevance of a high IQ. “If I had magical powers,” he says, “and offered to raise your IQ by 30 points, you’d say yes—right?” But then he goes on to say that you shouldn’t bother, because after you pass a certain basic threshold, IQ really doesn’t make any difference.

Indeed, high intelligence is not only related to success; it’s also related to good behavior. Highly intelligent people commit fewer violent crimes (holding other things, such as income, constant), and the difference in IQ between people in prison and those in the outside world is not a subtle one. There is also evidence that highly intelligent people are more cooperative, perhaps because intelligence allows one to appreciate the benefits of long-term coordination and to consider the perspectives of others.

Smith discusses the qualities that are most useful to a person. There are two, and neither of them directly has to do with feelings or sentiments, moral or otherwise. Those are “superior reason and understanding” and “self-command.” The first is important because it enables us to appreciate the consequences of our actions in the future: You can’t act to make the world better if you aren’t smart enough to know which action will achieve that goal. The second—which we would now call self-control—is critical as well, as it allows us to abstain from our immediate appetites to focus on long-term consequences.

Yes, certain political attitudes and beliefs might not be the products of careful reasoning, but perhaps they’re not supposed to be. Think about sports fans. When people root for the Red Sox or the Yankees, it’s not an exercise in rational deliberation, nor should it be. Rather, people are expressing loyalty to their team. Perhaps people’s views on health care, global warming, and the like should be viewed in a similar light, not as articulated conclusions, but rather as “Yay, team!” and “Boo, the other guys!” To complain that someone’s views on global warming aren’t grounded in the facts, then, is to miss the point. It would be like complaining that a Red Sox fan’s love of her team doesn’t reflect a realistic appraisal of the Sox’s performance in the last few seasons.

My point here is just that the failure of people to attend to data in the political domain does not reflect a limitation in their capacity for reason. It reflects how most people make sense of politics. They don’t care about truth because, for them, it’s not really about truth.

The effective altruists are unusual people, but the capacity to engage in such reasoning exists in all of us. Social psychologists are correct that some moral intuitions are impossible to justify. But as I argue in my book Just Babies, these are the exceptions.

We can easily justify these views by referring to fundamental concerns about harm, equity, and kindness.

We are not more empathic than our great-grandparents. We really don’t think of humanity as our family and we never will. Rather, our concern for others reflects a more abstract appreciation that regardless of our feelings, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love. Steven Pinker put this nicely: The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following idea: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them. . . . What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation.