The empathy trap

Being against empathy sounds like being against flowers or sparrows. Surely empathy is a good thing? Isn’t one of the main problems with the world that there isn’t enough of the stuff going around? Paul Bloom of Yale University is here to argue otherwise. As he explains, while empathy can be a good thing in certain circumstances, in general it is a poor moral guide. ‘It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty.’

As always this depends on definitions. And as Bloom says from the outset, ‘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.’

In all of this Bloom owes — and acknowledges — a certain debt to the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular to Adam Smith. The definition of ‘sympathy’ used by Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (to ‘place ourselves’ in the situation of another ‘and become in some measure the same person with him’) is acknowledged by Bloom to be a working definition of what we understand as empathy. And yet it is not such a good guide as people — particularly people on the political left — presently think. As he shows, the terrain is not simply rife with presumptuousness, it is a deeply uneven arbiter.

For instance if we can see a starving child we may pity that starving child. We may even donate money to alleviate the suffering of that particular starving child. But we may in the process ignore the many other starving children we could as well help but whose photos have not serendipitously been brought before us.