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Arts & Books Magazine Book review Ethics

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
March 2017

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

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

Buy this book on Amazon

“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…

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David Edmonds

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

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