Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

Once again, none of this is to deny the importance of traits such as compassion and kindness. We want to nurture these traits in our children and work to establish a culture that prizes and rewards them. But they are not enough. To make the world a better place, we would also want to bless people with more smarts and more self-control. These are central to leading a successful and happy life—and a good and moral one.

We do much better, after all, when the stakes become high, when being rational really matters. If our thought processes in the political realm reflected how our minds generally work, we wouldn’t even make it out of bed each morning. So if you’re curious about people’s capacity for reasoning, don’t look at cases where being right doesn’t matter and where it’s all about affiliation. Rather, look at how people cope in everyday life.

My own experience is that the level of rational discourse here is high. People know that they are involved in real decision processes, so they work to exercise their rational capacities: They make arguments, express ideas, and are receptive to the ideas of others. They sometimes even change their minds.