In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), Adam Smith observed that sensory experience alone could not spur us toward sympathetic engagement with others: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers.” For Smith, what made us moral beings was the imaginative capacity to “place ourselves in his situation. 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.The word “empathy”-a rendering of the German Einfühlung, “feeling into”-is only a century old, but people have been interested for a long time in the moral implications of feeling our way into the lives of others. 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.

Case against empathy