Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

Empathy has its merits. It can be a great source of pleasure, involved in art and fiction and sports, and it can be a valuable aspect of intimate relationships. And it can sometimes spark us to do good. But on the whole, it’s a poor moral guide. It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty. It can lead to irrational and unfair political decisions, it can corrode certain important relationships, such as between a doctor and a patient, and make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives. I am against empathy, and one of the goals of this book is to persuade you to be against empathy too.

I can see the reasoning in this short opening. I'm open to being convinced as I begin.

The idea I’ll explore is that the act of feeling what you think others are feeling—whatever one chooses to call this—is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we’re better off without it.

Okay, so my initial impression is that I agree with the first sentence here but have reservations about the second.

Certainly many of us feel that if the people in our lives had more empathy for our situations—if they could really feel what our lives are like—they would treat us a lot better. I think this is all mistaken. The problems we face as a society and as individuals are rarely due to lack of empathy. Actually, they are often due to too much of it.

There is a broader agenda here. I want to make a case for the value of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday life, arguing that we should strive to use our heads rather than our hearts. We do this a lot already, but we should work on doing more.

It’s clear as well that emotions play a powerful role in our moral lives—and that sometimes this is a good thing.

We have gut feelings, but we also have the capacity to override them, to think through issues, including moral issues, and to come to conclusions that can surprise us. I think this is where the real action is. It’s what makes us distinctively human, and it gives us the potential to be better to one another, to create a world with less suffering and more flourishing and happiness.

I am going to argue three things, then. First, our moral decisions and actions are powerfully shaped by the force of empathy. Second, this often makes the world worse. And, third, we have the capacity to do better.

Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now. This makes us care more about them, but it leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blind as well to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with. Empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism. It is shortsighted, motivating actions that might make things better in the short term but lead to tragic results in the future. It is innumerate, favoring the one over the many. It can spark violence; our empathy for those close to us is a powerful force for war and atrocity toward others. It is corrosive in personal relationships; it exhausts the spirit and can diminish the force of kindness and love.

So this is the elevator pitch. All bad things. I await convincing, but I am currently sympathetic.

On balance, empathy is a negative in human affairs. It’s not cholesterol. It’s sugary soda, tempting and delicious and bad for us. Now I’ll tell you why.

I am a fan of deliberative reasoning and will push for its importance throughout the book, but I’ll admit that it too can steer us wrong. Robert Jay Lifton, in The Nazi Doctors, talks about the struggles of those who performed experiments on prisoners in concentration camps. He describes these doctors as smart people who used their intelligence to talk themselves into doing terrible things. They would have been better off listening to their hearts.

This was an initial instinct of mine for why being against empathy may be bad - you can reason yourself into believing whatever you want to, if you choose.

Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.

The definition we'll be working with throughout.

Empathy can be used to motivate others to do good. Just about all parents have at some point reminded children of the consequences of bad acts, prodding them with remarks like “How would you feel if someone did that to you?” Martin Hoffman estimates that these empathic prompts occur about four thousand times a year in the average child’s life. Every charity, every political movement, every social cause will use empathy to motivate action.

One paragraph from a selection of positive examples of empathy

And so there has to be more to morality than empathy. Our decisions about what’s right and what’s wrong, and our motivations to act, have many sources.

It can be motivated by a more diffuse concern for the fates of others—something often described as concern or compassion and which I will argue is a better moral guide than empathy.

As another example of how empathy can clash with other moral considerations, C. Daniel Batson and his colleagues did an experiment in which they told subjects about a ten-year-old girl named Sheri Summers who had a fatal disease and was waiting in line for treatment that would relieve her pain. Subjects were told that they could move her to the front of the line. When simply asked what to do, they acknowledged that she had to wait because other more needy children were ahead of her. But if they were first asked to imagine what she felt, they tended to choose to move her up, putting her ahead of children who were presumably more deserving. Here empathy was more powerful than fairness, leading to a decision that most of us would see as immoral.

This is good, I agree it is immoral and may favour some individuals more than others

Singer goes further and argues that individuals like Kravinsky, motivated by their cold logic and reasoning, actually do more to help people than those who are gripped by empathic feelings—a proposal that we will return to over and over again throughout this book.

Yes, and I agreed with Singer there

In general, then, one way to try to be good and do good is to attend to the consequences of one’s actions. This way of thinking about right and wrong is sometimes called “consequentialism,” and it has been defended in various forms by Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, and more recently by contemporary philosophers such as Peter Singer and Shelly Kagan. These philosophers disagree about critical details, but they share the view that maximizing good results, fundamentally, is what morality is all about.

As do I - broadly speaking

Many seemingly nonconsequentialist abstract principles can actually be defended in consequentialist terms; they can be seen as useful rules that we are better off applying absolutely, even if they sometimes make things worse.

This is closer to my consequentialism

Further, spotlights only illuminate what they are pointed at, so empathy reflects our biases. Although we might intellectually believe that the suffering of our neighbor is just as awful as the suffering of someone living in another country, it’s far easier to empathize with those who are close to us, those who are similar to us, and those we see as more attractive or vulnerable and less scary. Intellectually, a white American might believe that a black person matters just as much as a white person, but he or she will typically find it a lot easier to empathize with the plight of the latter than the former. In this regard, empathy distorts our moral judgments in pretty much the same way that prejudice does.

This seems to be the central problem with empathy - the question is whether it makes things, in the whole, worse

Now one reasonable reaction to this is that empathy isn’t to blame for this sort of irrational and disproportionate response. The real problem is that we don’t have enough empathy for other people. We should empathize with the children and families of Newtown, but we should also empathize with the children and families in Chicago. While we’re at it, we should empathize with billions of other people around the world, in Bangladesh and Pyongyang and the Sudan.

But we can’t. Intellectually, we can value the lives of all these individuals; we can give them weight when we make decisions. But what we can’t do is empathize with all of them. Indeed, you cannot empathize with more than one or two people at the same time.

If God exists, maybe He can simultaneously feel the pain and pleasure of every sentient being. But for us mortals, empathy really is a spotlight. It’s a spotlight that has a narrow focus, one that shines most brightly on those we love and gets dim for those who are strange or different or frightening.

Again this appears to be the issue. I tend to agree that this would be a problem.

Empathy is particularly insensitive to consequences that apply statistically rather than to specific individuals.

To the extent that you can appreciate that it’s better for one specific child to die than for an unknown and imprecise larger number of children to die, you are using capacities other than empathy.

I’ll argue that what really matters for kindness in our everyday interactions is not empathy but capacities such as self-control and intelligence and a more diffuse compassion. Indeed, those who are high in empathy can be too caught up in the suffering of other people. If you absorb the suffering of others, then you’re less able to help them in the long run because achieving long-term goals often requires inflicting short-term pain. Any good parent, for instance, often has to make a child do something, or stop doing something, in a way that causes the child immediate unhappiness but is better for him or her in the future: Do your homework, eat your vegetables, go to bed at a reasonable hour, sit still for this vaccination, go to the dentist. Making children suffer temporarily for their own good is made possible by love, intelligence, and compassion, but yet again, it can be impeded by empathy.

This is a good point, but again it's rhetorical. My mind is set open, now show me the data!

But there is another sense of empathy or, to put it differently, another facet of empathy. There is the capacity to understand what’s going on in other people’s heads, to know what makes them tick, what gives them joy and pain, what they see as humiliating or ennobling. We’re not talking here about me feeling your pain but rather about me understanding that you are in pain without necessarily experiencing any of it myself.

But this understanding of the minds of others is an amoral tool, useful for effecting whatever goals you choose. Successful therapists and parents have a lot of cognitive empathy, but so too do successful con men, seducers, and torturers.

Cognitive empathy is a useful tool, then—a necessary one for anyone who wishes to be a good person—but it is morally neutral.

Now, one might agree that empathy is on the whole unreliable yet still argue that we should exploit people’s empathy for good causes. I have some sympathy with this position, but I worry about the racism analogy. There is good reason to object to appeals to racism even in the service of a good cause because the downside of encouraging this general habit of mind could outweigh whatever good it does in specific cases. I feel the same for empathy and lean toward the view that we should aspire to a world in which a politician appealing to someone’s empathy would be seen in the same way as one appealing to people’s racist bias.

An interesting position, but it demonstrates his commitment to the cause of 'against empathy'. No spoofer this guy.

Our attempts at rational deliberation can get confused or be based on faulty premises or get fogged up by self-interest. But the problem here is with reasoning badly, not with reason itself. We should reason our way thorough moral issues. James Rachels sees reason as an essential part of morality—“morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one’s conduct by reason—that is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing—while giving equal weight to the interests of each individual affected by one’s decision.” Rachels didn’t mean this as a psychological claim about how people actually do deal with moral dilemmas but rather as a normative claim about how they should. And I think he’s right.

I think he's right too - whatever about empathy, morality informed by genuine reason is better than pure intuition.

Incentives appeal to self-interest, custom appeals to our social nature, but a third way to elicit kindness is to get people to feel empathy.

Over and over again, Batson finds that these empathy prompts make subjects more likely to do good—to give money, take over a task, and cooperate. Empathy makes them kind. Batson finds these effects even when helping is anonymous, when there is a justification for not helping, and when it’s easy to say no. He concludes from his work that these effects cannot be explained by a desire to enhance one’s reputation or a wish to avoid embarrassment or anything like that. Rather, empathy elicits a genuine desire to make another person’s life better. These are robust findings, and they make intuitive sense. Suppose you really were face-to-face with someone who, with some sacrifice on his part, could save your dying child. Your first move might be to elicit empathy, to get the person to feel your child’s pain or perhaps your own. Your first words might be: “How would you feel if it were your child?”

After many years and many millions of dollars, it turns out that there are three major findings from the neuroscience of empathy research.

The first finding is that an empathic response to someone else’s experience can involve the same brain tissue that’s active when you yourself have that experience. So “I feel your pain” isn’t just a gooey metaphor; it can be made neurologically literal: Other people’s pain really does activate the same brain area as your own pain, and more generally, there is neural evidence for a correspondence between self and other.

The neuroscience evidence shows an overlap, but it also shows differences. You can look at an fMRI scan and tell the difference between someone being poked in the hand and someone watching another person being poked in the hand. And, of course, there has to be a brain difference between self and other because there is a psychological difference. Watching someone getting slapped in the face doesn’t really make your cheek burn, and watching someone get a back rub doesn’t make your aches go away.

This is the second finding from neuroscience: Our empathic experience is influenced by what we think about the person we are empathizing with and how we judge the situation that person is in.

Empathy is also influenced by the group to which the other individual belongs—whether the person you are looking at or thinking about is one of Us or one of Them.

This is a good reason, for me at least, to be sceptical of empathy

We see how reactions to others, including our empathic reactions, reflect prior bias, preference, and judgment. This shows that it can’t be that empathy simply makes us moral.

Your empathy doesn’t drive your moral evaluation of the drug user with AIDS. Rather it’s your moral evaluation of the person that determines whether or not you feel empathy.

The third important finding from neuroscience concerns the difference between feeling and understanding.

What really happens when you deal with other people is that you get information through your senses (you see their facial expressions, you hear what they are saying, and so on), and this information influences what you believe and what you feel. One way it can influence you is by informing you about the mental states of the other person (you believe she is in pain); another way it can influence you is by causing you to have certain feelings (you feel pain yourself). Now, it’s certainly possible that one neural system does both of these things and that understanding and shared feelings have a common source. But it’s also possible that these are two separate processes and, importantly, that you can understand that someone is in pain without actually feeling it.

One system involves sharing the experience of others, what we’ve called empathy; the other involves inferences about the mental states of others—mentalizing or mind reading. While they can both be active at once, and often are, they occupy different parts of the brain.

One recent scientific article struggles with the question of whether these troubling individuals are high in empathy or low in empathy. For the authors, the evidence suggests both: “Psychopathic criminals can be charming and attuned while seducing a victim, thereby suggesting empathy, and later callous while raping a victim, thereby suggesting impaired empathy.” So which is it?

The mental life of the psychopath is only a puzzle if you think that the ability to make sense of people’s mental states (useful for charming someone) is the same as the ability to feel other’s experiences, including their pain (which gets in the way of assaulting someone). But they aren’t. So criminal psychopaths don’t have to be fiddling with a single dial of empathy: A simpler explanation is that they are good at understanding other people and bad at feeling their pain. They have high cognitive empathy but low emotional empathy.

The research we just talked about takes empathy down a peg. We mirror the feelings of others, but this mirroring is limited: Empathic suffering is different from actual suffering. Empathy is also contingent on how one feels about an individual. It’s not always the case, then, that we feel empathy and thereby treat someone well. Instead, we often think that someone is worth treating kindly (because he or she treated us nicely in the past or is simply like us) and then we feel empathy. And finally, emotional empathy—the sort of empathy that we’re obsessing about here—can be usefully disentangled from the essential capacity of understanding other people.

Why would empathy make us nicer? The obvious answer—the one that comes to mind immediately for many people—is that empathy allows our selfish motivations to extend to others.

It’s not clear, though, that selfishness can explain the good acts that empathy leads to. When empathy makes us feel pain, the reaction is often a desire to escape.

This feeling shouldn’t be that alien to many of us. People often cross the street to avoid encountering suffering people who are begging for money. It’s not that they don’t care (if they didn’t care, they would just walk by), it’s that they are bothered by the suffering and would rather not encounter it. Usually, escape is even easier. Steven Pinker writes: “For many years a charity called Save the Children ran magazine ads with a heartbreaking photograph of a destitute child and the caption ‘You can save Juan Ramos for five cents a day. Or you can turn the page.’ Most people turn the page.”

To the extent that empathy drives us to do positive things for others in situations where there are easy escapes, it must be motivating us in a different way. Indeed, some of the clever experiments developed by Batson and his colleagues gave people the option to leave the study—but they typically don’t take this option. Instead they help the person they are feeling empathy for. This is an embarrassment for the selfish-motivation theory.

If I love my baby, and she’s in anguish, empathy with her pain will make me pick her up and try to make her pain go away. This is not because doing so makes me feel better—it does, but if I just wanted my vicarious suffering to go away, I’d leave the crying baby and go for a walk. Rather, my empathy lets me know that someone I love is suffering, and since I love her, I’ll try to make her feel better.