Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

The empathy trap

Not necessarily, says Paul Bloom. It’s generally a bad moral guide, and can lead to indifference and even cruelty

issue 28 January 2017

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.

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