Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom.

2/5 rating. 241 pages.

Book #11 of 2021. Read January 30, 2021.

This book puts forth the case against empathy as king in the moral domain.

While someone making the case that empathy does not lead inevitably to good moral outcomes seems insane, Paul makes a good argument throughout this book. As he says:

“I want to make a case for the value of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday life, arguing that we should strive to use our heads rather than our hearts.”

Instead of feeling empathy for other people, Paul asks for compassionate reasoning.

As Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki say: “In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s well-being. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.”

Unfortunately, even with these good arguments, this book could basically have been summed up in about a page or two, and I wouldn’t have had to suffer through the other two-hundred some pages. I think Paul’s reasoning makes sense and I hope that I tend to follow it, but I’ll follow the idea, and tell you to skip reading the book.

Quotes:

“The idea I’ll explore is that 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.”

“Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now. This makes us care more about them, but it leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blind as well to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with.”

“Intellectually, a white American might believe that a black person matters just as much as a white person, but he or she will typically find it a lot easier to empathize with the plight of the latter than the former. In this regard, empathy distorts our moral judgments in pretty much the same way that prejudice does.”

“Actually, in the year of the Sandy Hook killings, more schoolchildren were murdered in one American city—Chicago —than were murdered in Newtown, and yet I’ve never thought about those murdered Chicago children before looking that up, and I’m not likely to think about them again . . . while my mind often drifts back to Newtown.”

“It’s a spotlight that has a narrow focus, one that shines most brightly on those we love and gets dim for those who are strange or different or frightening.”

“There are emotions and considerations outside of empathy, and there are many reasons to care about others.”

“Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.” – Thomas Schelling

“Actually, and this is a hard thing to write, I usually get more upset if my Internet connection becomes slow and uncertain than when I read about some tragedy in a country I haven’t heard of.”

“If you want to harm some organization that supports a cause you object to, one mischievous way to do so is to send them a $5 donation.”

“We’re too quick to credit empathy for what’s right in the world.”

“[George Eliot] concluded that ‘a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral Sentiment.’”

“Political debates typically involve a disagreement not over whether we should empathize, but over who we should empathize with.”

“It is because of empathy that citizens of a country can be transfixed by a girl stuck in a well and largely indifferent to climate change. It is because of empathy that we often enact savage laws or enter into terrible wars; our feeling for the suffering of the few leads to disastrous consequences for the many.”

“Less empathy, more kindness.”

“One study found that nursing students who were especially prone to empathy spent less time providing care to patients and more time seeking out help from other hospital personnel, presumably because of how aversive they found it to deal with people who were suffering.”

“As Cicero said about the merits of friendship…it ‘improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.’”

#paulbloom #psychology #againstempathy #bookreviews #empathy #compassion

IG Link.