against empathy the case for rational compassion

Damn! If there is any consolation to be found, it is in the fact that this book was published in 2016, and Boler’s article was printed in 1997 – so, I’m not the only one late here. There’s only one thing worse than being a smartarse academic who challenges the otherwise unchallengeable – and that is being late to the game. I was almost expecting to be told to not be so bloody-minded and contrary, but instead she suggested I read Megan Boler’s ‘The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism’s gaze’. But then, in the middle of last year, I mentioned to the woman who sits beside me at work that I was starting to think empathy might not be the unbridled good that I’d always taken it to be. This hardly seems controversial – I mean, we have all read To Kill a Mockingbird, and so walking a mile in my shoes seems to be pretty good advice. You see, I’ve been doing research at work into intercultural understanding and multiculturalism, and a lot of the theory around that starts from the premise that for students to become interculturally understanding they first need to learn empathy.

First of all, I came to it as a bit of a convert. I’ve been on an odd sort of journey with this book. Without empathy, Bloom insists, our decisions would be clearer, fairer, and-yes-ultimately more moral.īrilliantly argued, urgent and humane, Against Empathy shows us that, when it comes to both major policy decisions and the choices we make in our everyday lives, limiting our impulse toward empathy is often the most compassionate choice we can make. With precision and wit, he demonstrates how empathy distorts our judgment in every aspect of our lives, from philanthropy and charity to the justice system from medical care and education to parenting and marriage. We are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it, but to draw instead upon a more distanced compassion.īasing his argument on groundbreaking scientific findings, Bloom makes the case that some of the worst decisions made by individuals and nations-who to give money to, when to go to war, how to respond to climate change, and who to imprison-are too often motivated by honest, yet misplaced, emotions. It muddles our judgment and, ironically, often leads to cruelty.

Far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. In Against Empathy, Bloom reveals empathy to be one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. Nothing could be farther from the truth, argues Yale researcher Paul Bloom. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don’t have enough of it. We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness.

Against empathy the case for rational compassion