Sorry, I don’t feel your pain—the dangers of empathy

Sharing in other people's woe might seem the right thing to do, but it can lead us to make bad decisions

by David Edmonds / February 16, 2017 / Leave a comment

Published in March 2017 issue of Prospect Magazine

©Veronica Grech/Getty Images

Against Empathy: The Case For Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom (Bodley Head, £18.99)

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The Empathy Instinct: How to Create a More Civil Society by Peter Bazalgette (John Murray, £16.99)

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“Being against empathy is like being against kittens,” writes the psychologist Paul Bloom. Let’s at least agree that nobody can object to kittens. Even the new Twitter-obsessed occupant of the White House—a man who demonstrated his empathetic skills during his election campaign by publicly mocking a disabled reporter—briefly followed a Twitter account devoted to photos of cute felines.

The trepidation many Americans feel about the future (especially women, African-Americans, immigrants and Mexicans) makes the arrival of two new books about empathy especially timely. Superficially, the books share much in common. They’re chatty, pacy and readable. They cover similar territory; they even draw on the same quotations, including this from US President Barack Obama: “The biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit”; and, from a radically different perspective, Joseph Stalin’s famous line: “When one man dies it’s a tragedy, but when a million die it’s a statistic.”

Yet the books come to very different conclusions. Bazalgette takes the more common role of kitten-enthusiast, while Bloom adopts the more original and provocative stance of kitten-slayer. The latter’s book is a sustained polemic against empathy.

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Comments

JimmyMack
February 25, 2017 at 10:34
I work for a local authority that has help find homes for Syrian refugees. After the photograph was published of the body of the little boy ‎on the beach I was approached by lots of people offering to house a refugee. Many of the offers were kind but completely impractical - the offer of a room in a family home, for example. Others dropped out - not unreasonably - once the terms of the resettlement arrangements were made clear - we needed homes for larger families and rents would need to be way below market levels. We later tried to capitalise on this frustrated goodwill by asking if, instead of a refugee, people would take a single homeless person. None did, and this stuck me as odd given that the people coming forward seemed the kind who would be sympathetic to the local homeless. An example of Bloom's 'spotlight' empathy
Alyson
March 31, 2017 at 10:30
Tribalism has replaced empathy. Sociopaths tell us we no longer need it. They no longer imagine themselves as capable of feeling the same feelings as those they oppress. Greed is the first of the seven deadly sins and compassion is currently unfashionable

David Edmonds is a senior research associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and co-runs www.philosophybites.com.