One might also believe that some partiality makes sense in a personal context—if my child and a stranger were drowning and I could save just one, I’d save my child, and I don’t feel that this is the wrong choice. So the partiality of empathy and other psychological processes might be morally appropriate at least some of the time. These are concerns worth taking seriously, and I’ve tried to respond to them throughout this book.
I think at this stage, my take is that Paul Bloom has a good case against empathy in many contexts, particularly in considerations of morality, but his concessions in some places and weak responses in others make his overall thesis inadequately support and his arguments only support a more limited case than he thinks.
