PDF Summary:Against Empathy, by Paul Bloom

If we want to be kind and moral people, it seems obvious that we should practice empathy—learning to understand what other people are feeling and thinking. Most of us probably believe that empathy should be a core component of our relationships. But what if this conventional understanding of empathy gets it wrong?

In Against Empathy, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom argues that empathy can motivate us to behave in ways that are unjust, irrational, and even cruel. He suggests that instead of practicing empathy, we should cultivate a rational form of compassion instead, and use this more measured and distanced approach to make decisions that are better for everyone involved.

In this guide, we’ll examine Bloom’s argument against empathy, explore the flaws that he finds in this emotion, and look at the methods that he recommends for making better, more moral decisions. We’ll also compare Bloom’s ideas to those of other psychologists and philosophers who’ve examined the role that empathy plays in life and relationships.

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Empathy Is Exhausting

Fourth, empathy can be onerous to experience and to sustain: Bloom writes that people who put others’ needs before their own or are otherwise highly empathetic can experience negative consequences, like feeling upset about other people’s pain or being in relationships where they don’t receive as much care as they give. This happens because empathy involves suffering when other people are suffering, which not only feels distressing but can also impair our ability to help the person who is suffering.

(Shortform note: Some people—like doctors, nurses, therapists, and first responders, whose work involves caring for others—experience “empathy fatigue” as a result of the trauma they witness. But in other contexts, experts don’t all agree that high levels of empathy are debilitating; for example, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen suggests that people with high empathy simply have an intuition for understanding how others feel. Yet when empathy takes a toll, compassion can serve as an alternative. Some psychologists define compassion as feeling empathy plus taking action to alleviate the other person’s pain. Taking action can help you to reinforce a healthy boundary between yourself and others.)

Empathy Motivates Violence

A final flaw of empathy is that it can motivate us to behave aggressively to protect someone who has been wronged. Bloom writes that empathy can even motivate us to engage in conflict on behalf of the victim of violence or injustice.

He offers the example of how white people in the American South empathized with white women allegedly raped by Black men and responded with lynchings and other forms of violence. (Shortform note: Philosopher Kathryn Norlock disputes Bloom’s view that lynchings of Black men occurred as a result of empathy for white women. She writes that instead, lynchings were motivated by a desire to maintain white supremacy. Many lynchings occurred without the “excuse” of a rape allegation, and Norlock argues that Americans have historically not been particularly empathetic to women who have experienced rape.)

(Shortform note: Empathy plays a morally ambiguous role in our behavior, according to philosopher Fritz Breithaupt, who wrote The Dark Sides of Empathy. Like Bloom, Breithaupt believes that we sometimes behave cruelly not due to a lack of empathy but due to a misuse of it. He warns that empathy can polarize people, make them more suspicious of others, and activate extremist thinking. However, unlike Bloom, Breithaupt considers empathy more positive than negative: He writes that we can learn to use empathy judiciously and prevent it from being manipulated.)

Why Isn’t Empathy Necessary?

We often rely on empathy when we make decisions that affect other people. Even though Bloom argues against relying on empathy, he doesn’t advocate for behaving selfishly or failing to consider the needs of others. Instead, he asserts that we can be kind and compassionate people without making empathy a part of our decision-making process.

In this section of the guide, we’ll explore Bloom’s explanation of how we don’t have to empathize with someone to treat them kindly or to act morally. We’ll also examine his argument that violence and cruelty don’t result from a lack of empathy and set out his argument that it isn’t empathy that makes us behave in ways that are morally right.

We Don’t Need Empathy to Act With Kindness

One reason that Bloom suggests that empathy is unnecessary is that we don’t have to feel empathy for someone to treat them kindly. This idea breaks down into three insights: that there are multiple emotions that enable kind behavior, that care is better than empathy at motivating kindness, and that concern motivates care. We’ll take a closer look at each of these next.

Self-Control, Intelligence, and Compassion Enable Kindness

Bloom writes that it’s not empathy but self-control, intelligence, and compassion that help us behave kindly toward others. Self-control and intelligence are relatively self-explanatory, and Bloom defines compassion as a concern for others and a desire for them to succeed.

(Shortform note: What is the source of kindness, if it isn’t empathy? It’s difficult to disentangle empathy from the capacities Bloom cites as enabling kindness. For instance, the same part of the brain that enables us to empathize with others also enables us to exercise self-control, which makes sense since self-control is like empathy for your future self. Additionally, intelligence and empathy seem correlated, and higher intelligence seems to contribute to greater concern for others. Some therapists even say that it’s more important to be kind than to be compassionate (or empathetic) because kindness is action-oriented.)

We Can Behave Kindly by Caring, Not Empathizing

Not only does Bloom write that empathy is unnecessary to care for other people, he also argues that we can be better, more moral people if we resist acting as empathy prompts us to. For example, when someone is in distress, it can sometimes be more helpful if we can react calmly and rationally rather than taking on the other person’s distress. That way, our ability to understand the situation and problem-solve won’t be hindered by our emotions.

Bloom points out that we feel happy when someone we love is happy and sad when someone we care about is sad not because our emotions mirror the other person’s, but because they arise from our care for the other person. He also points out that our emotions can actually get in the way of sharing in someone else’s happiness, such as when we’re envious of the accomplishment that’s made them happy, in which case it’s better not to rely on our emotions.

(Shortform note: Psychologist Jamil Zaki characterizes Bloom’s idea of emotions as a volatile force in our relationships as outdated. Zaki explains that researchers now understand that we work with, not against, our feelings. By believing that empathy is under our control, we can work harder to apply it in ways that fit our social and moral goals. According to Zaki, we should align empathy with morality, and behaving morally requires using both emotions and reason.)

Concern, Not Empathy, Motivates Us to Care for Others

Another reason that we don’t need empathy to act with kindness is that it’s not actually empathy, but concern, that motivates us to care for other people. The pressures of natural selection motivate altruistic behavior because it’s evolutionarily advantageous for us to care for those who share our genes. So, Bloom explains, human evolution has equipped us with a fundamental concern for other people’s welfare. This evolved capacity for concern (rather than empathy) is what motivates us to care for others.

(Shortform note: Empathy is often cited alongside other motivations in theories on the evolution of altruism. In The God Delusion, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins writes that altruism, kindness, and empathy all have Darwinian roots. The drive to ensure our genes survive motivates altruism within a kin group. But another evolutionary mechanism called the “reciprocity reflex” explains empathy toward those who don’t share our genes: We’re wired to help others who have helped us. Dawkins writes that this reciprocity, in which empathy plays a part, holds societies together.)

We Don’t Need Empathy to Understand Morality

A second reason that Bloom argues empathy is an inadequate guide for our moral decisions is that our moral system consists of more than simple empathic responses. Bloom suggests that children’s ability to help others, perhaps without true empathy, shows that we can behave in ways that care for others without feeling their emotions or taking on their experiences.

Bloom considers the idea that empathy might represent a developmental stepping stone toward a more mature understanding of morality. But he concludes that we don’t have enough evidence to know whether children help others because they’re empathizing (feeling what others are feeling) or because they’re just caring for others. Because the evidence is inconclusive, Bloom writes that we can’t demonstrate that empathy is necessary for the development of morality.

Can Children Understand Morality Before They Understand Empathy?

Though Bloom leaves questions about the development of empathy open, researchers have some theories about when and how children gain the ability to empathize with others. Even before that developmental milestone, they can behave helpfully and morally. Answers as to why might lie in the neocortex, the part of the brain that evolved the most recently.

In The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explains that the neocortex is the last part of the brain to fully develop (so the skills it enables are still maturing in childhood). In addition to enabling empathy, this part of the brain is also involved in language, abstract thought, imagination, and creativity. It even helps us to plan for the future and reflect on the past. The frontal lobes, part of the neocortex, seem to play an important role in morality and moral decisions.

By age 7 to 12, typically developing children are able to empathize with others. But if a child has deficits in the capacities that support empathy, adults usually notice long before age 7. Children with a notable lack of empathy, guilt, and moral regulation even as early as preschool seem to show more aggressive or violent tendencies later.

Experts also believe that children have to develop a “moral identity” to understand empathy and learn to behave in empathetic ways. Then, the natural skills that form the root of empathy can develop into more mature and deliberate behavior. The development of a sense of morality seems to rely on both emotional and cognitive processes, and empathy likely plays an important role in the development of moral judgment.

It’s Not a Lack of Empathy That Causes Violence and Cruelty

Finally, a third reason that Bloom characterizes empathy as unsuitable for guiding our decisions is that empathy doesn’t always prevent us from treating other people badly and, conversely, it’s not necessarily a lack of empathy that causes violence or cruelty.

Bloom writes that there are several theories about why we behave cruelly. Some experts think of violent behavior as a dysfunction of self-control. Others believe that violence is just part of our nature. Plus, we sometimes act cruelly in ways that are deliberate and consistent with our sense of morality. In all of these cases, it’s not a lack of empathy that causes violent behavior.

Some experts do theorize that a lack of empathy can lead to aggression by causing us to dehumanize and objectify other people. But Bloom argues that empathy isn’t a necessary component of our capacity to avoid dehumanization. In other words, we don’t need empathy to choose to treat other people as fully human.

Bloom also points out that, as we noted earlier, empathy (rather than a lack of empathy) may be implicated in some acts of violence. For instance, empathy may have played a part in motivating atrocities such as the genocide of Jewish people during the Holocaust. That’s because people were prompted to empathize with German children who had allegedly been abused by Jewish people to such an extent that they believed that cruel and violent acts, including genocide, seemed justifiable.

Is Cruelty Related to a Lack of Empathy, or to Something Else Altogether?

Researchers have suggested a number of different theories about what causes people to behave in cruel ways or to commit acts that we might call “evil.” As Bloom suggests, many factors beyond a lack of empathy have been blamed.

In The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo—the psychologist known for conducting the notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment that simulated a prison environment, with students playing prisoners and guards—suggests that circumstances can prompt psychologically healthy people to disengage from their normal sense of morality. In doing so, these circumstances can cause just about anyone to commit acts of evil. In other words, even though we think that our sense of morality is fixed, it can actually be heavily influenced by the situation and by variables such as identity cues, social pressures, anonymity, and dehumanization.

Similarly, in Humankind, historian Rutger Bregman writes that when we commit acts of cruelty and evil, we typically do so as a result of drives like a fear of strangers, a need to fit in, or a desire to act in the interest of the greater good. Bregman suggests that we engage in war and violence not because of something innate to human nature—in fact, he argues that humans are fundamentally good—but because the shift from a nomadic lifestyle to life in permanent settlements created more violent conditions. Under these conditions, we sometimes act in cruel or violent ways when we’re driven to protect our group.

Conversely, in The Science of Evil, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen argues that when people are cruel to each other, it’s not because of evil but because of “empathy erosion.” In this state of mind, we don’t relate to other people as people but treat them as objects. Baron-Cohen writes that though the acts of violence and persecution that the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews were awful, they weren’t unique to the Nazis. Instead, they exemplify what happens when people become so focused on the pursuit of their own interests that they don’t consider how their actions will impact others.

In Zero Degrees of Empathy, Baron-Cohen writes more about why we might experience a chronic lack of empathy. He theorizes that people who completely lack empathy fall into two groups. The first is people with autism spectrum disorders, who don’t have empathy but do have a systemizing nature that enables them to follow social rules. (Other experts disagree with this claim: They explain that while many people with autism may struggle with cognitive empathy, they may feel emotional empathy more strongly than others—and everyone on the spectrum is different.)

The second group that lacks empathy, according to Baron-Cohen’s model, comprises people with personality disorders who are capable of inflicting great harm on others. Of course, not everyone who lacks empathy commits evil acts. But Baron-Cohen thinks that deficits in empathy are a more compelling explanation than “evil” for violence and cruelty.

How Can We Make Better Decisions, With or Without Empathy?

In deconstructing how empathy affects our decisions and leads to less-than-ideal outcomes, Bloom proposes an alternative to empathy: reasoned compassion. In this section of the guide, we’ll explore how Bloom describes reasoned compassion and argues that it gives us the capacity to behave more rationally than we do when guided by empathy. We’ll also examine Bloom’s recommendations for strategies you can use to make more moral decisions when your actions affect other people.

(Shortform note: In his review of Against Empathy, psychologist Kenneth Barish offers an alternative interpretation of the research that Bloom cites when he draws a distinction between empathy and compassion. According to Barish, that research doesn’t support the idea that compassion and empathy are two separate psychological processes; instead, the research suggests that feeling empathic distress or feeling compassion are two different courses that we might take after we initially feel empathy for a person.)

What Is Reasoned Compassion?

In arguing against making decisions using empathy, Bloom asserts that we should use a conscious, deliberate, “reasoned” compassion to ensure that we act with care for others.

Though “reasoned compassion” might sound similar to “cognitive empathy”—which, as a reminder, involves understanding others’ experiences and does have a place in our interactions with others, according to Bloom—there’s a key difference between the two. While cognitive empathy involves understanding what another person is feeling, compassion is less about thinking through another person’s experience and more about caring about them and their welfare. Because compassion involves caring about other people and wanting them to be happy and to thrive, it enables us to feel for others without taking on their feelings.

Bloom explains that with reasoned compassion, we can bring our capacity for rational thinking to bear on moral problems. This form of compassion combines our capacity to care about other people with our ability to make detached, objective decisions. Intelligence, self-control, and concern for others are all key components of reasoned compassion, and these can all inform our decisions. For example, if your community is hit by a devastating storm, you might make a logical plan to distribute resources as widely as possible to the people affected, rather than focusing solely on people you know and with whom you naturally empathize.

(Shortform note: Various thinkers have suggested using rational thinking and compassionate feelings together. In Compassionate Reasoning, Marc Gopin argues for a form of reasoning guided by compassion. Gopin characterizes compassion as a crucial emotion in our interactions with others, one that we can apply to all people—and to all living beings, for that matter—in a way that enables sustainable care for everyone, regardless of whether they’re similar to or different from us. Gopin writes that the core of the shift from empathy to compassion is a shift away from personal distress and toward “a joyous embrace of and service to others.”)

Do We Have the Capacity for Reason?

Bloom anticipates one major reason why people might object to his suggestion to replace empathy with rational compassion: Some scholars suggest that our capacity for rational thinking isn’t strong enough (or dominant enough) to win out over more emotional influences. But Bloom disagrees. He asserts that we can choose reason over emotion when we make moral decisions.

An enduring idea in psychology is that we have two cognitive systems that engage in very different kinds of thinking: emotional and rational. Bloom explains that according to some researchers, the rational system is often powerless to overrule the emotional system. We’re irrational in many ways: We use heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to make decisions, which sees us succumb to the influence of cognitive biases and ignore base rates in our probability estimates, making incorrect judgments and irrational decisions.

But Bloom writes that if these flaws in our decision-making make it clear that we’re irrational, our ability to overcome them illustrates how intelligent we can be despite our irrationality. He suggests that though our ability to engage in rational thinking isn’t enough on its own to make us good or moral people, rationality is a key part of morality. Ultimately, he concludes that we all have the capacity to behave rationally and make better decisions.

Are Humans Rational or Irrational?

Bloom’s argument that we can choose to make decisions based on reason rather than emotion touches on a perennial debate about human nature. We often behave irrationally, but does that mean we’re fundamentally irrational? Justin E.H. Smith, author of Irrationality, argues that irrationality is inherent to human life. Smith contends that it doesn’t work when we try to suppress our irrational sides. But he writes that many of the good things in life come from that side of our nature, and it doesn’t serve us to overemphasize either the rational or the irrational parts of our thinking.

Another perspective comes from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow that even though we believe that we behave rationally, we actually make many of our decisions subconsciously and only later use rational thinking to justify them. While Bloom writes about an emotional system and a rational system, Kahneman talks about a fast, automatic system and a slow, deliberate system. The fact that the automatic system is faster than the deliberate system leaves us vulnerable to making mistakes and relying on cognitive biases when we make decisions.

That said, overcoming our cognitive biases and exercising our more rational side isn’t necessarily a matter of intelligence, as Bloom suggests: Some experts argue that intelligence and rationality are distinct. Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky demonstrated that even highly intelligent people are prone to irrational thinking and that rationality correlates only weakly with IQ.

How Can We Make Better, More Moral Decisions?

If you want to follow Bloom’s advice to rely less on empathy and more on rational compassion to guide your decisions, it might help to have an idea of where to start. We’ll explore four ideas that Bloom offers for making better decisions: strategies that involve exercising your capacity to think rationally—and also to use empathy productively and appropriately.

Exercise Self-Control

The first strategy for improving compassionate decision-making is to practice self-control, even in situations where you tend to react emotionally. Bloom writes that self-control may be the most useful measure of rational thinking because exercising self-control requires you to check your emotions, impulses, and irrational thinking. Practicing self-control can help you use reasoned compassion instead of empathy when you make decisions.

(Shortform note: Experts believe that self-control comprises a number of key elements, including the abilities to defer gratification and act cautiously. In much the same way that Bloom considers self-control and rational thinking intertwined, experts also cite cognitive ability as an important component of self-regulation. After all, exercising self-control often involves tasks like rationally considering all of our options before making a decision.)

Focus on the Decisions That Matter

Another strategy that might help you to make better moral decisions involves paying particular attention to the choices that matter most. Bloom writes that it’s most important to behave rationally when we’re making decisions that affect other people: These are situations in which the choices we make carry moral weight.

By drawing on our innate concern for treating people kindly and equitably and not harming them, we can make decisions that treat every person as valuable, according to Bloom. This can help us act more compassionately toward everyone than we would if we relied solely on our emotional responses, since we feel the value of the lives of those closest to us more keenly.

(Shortform note: One way to proceed rationally when you make a choice that affects others is to focus on making an ethical decision, which experts say requires a sensitivity to the implications of your choices and a method for considering the factors that influence your decision. You can use three frameworks to make more moral decisions: a consequentialist framework, which examines the future effects of a decision with the goal of producing the best outcome; a duty framework, which considers your obligations in a given situation; or a virtue framework, which focuses on the kind of person you want to be in your relationships with others.)

Consider the Consequences

A third technique to improve your decision-making process involves considering the repercussions that your choices may have for other people. Bloom writes that to make choices that are morally good, you have to anticipate the consequences of your actions. Since empathy doesn’t always have positive consequences—and often has negative ones, as Bloom argues throughout the book—thinking through the possible consequences of your actions can help you make more moral decisions and optimize your chances of achieving good results.

(Shortform note: Though many experts agree that we should try to anticipate the consequences of our actions, some say that consequences aren’t the most reliable measure of the merit of our decisions. In Thinking in Bets, poker player Annie Duke warns against “resulting,” or judging a decision solely by its outcome. Achieving a good outcome can be difficult under conditions of uncertainty, and Duke argues that we should aim to engage in a decision-making process that we can stand behind regardless of the ultimate outcome of the decision.)

Use Empathy Productively

Finally, Bloom concludes that it’s important to put empathy into its proper place in our decision-making processes. We can lean on our emotions to motivate us to do good, but we can use our reasoning abilities to figure out how to do good. Empathy’s weaknesses can outweigh its strengths when we use it in the wrong context. When we need to make decisions with moral weight, it makes sense to use alternatives such as reasoned compassion.

(Shortform note: Experts offer many perspectives on how we learn to behave morally and the extent to which reasoning assists that process. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt explains that the idea of reasoning your way to morality—similar to what Bloom suggests—is incompatible with the reality of human psychology. Haidt writes that instead of using rational thinking to figure out how to do good, we have to first figure out how to behave morally, using our character and beliefs as a guide, and then train ourselves to use reasoning morally, too.)

How Other Psychologists View Against Empathy

The idea that empathy is a negative force in our social interactions is controversial, and Bloom’s hypothesis has provoked disagreement, not least among psychologists. For example, Kenneth Barish writes that Bloom’s ideas in Against Empathy are “fundamentally incorrect” and misunderstand the nature of empathy, the relationship between emotion and reason, and the role that empathy plays in human interactions. Barish also objects to the book’s lack of appreciation for what he believes is a vital role for empathy in child development.

Similarly, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen writes that following Bloom’s advice of leaving empathy out of moral decisions poses serious dangers. In Baron-Cohen’s view, empathy tempers logic and prevents us from designing rational systems that fail to consider others’ humanity. He writes that an absence of empathy enabled people to believe in the morality of the Nazis’ Final Solution or their euthanasia program for people with learning difficulties.

In a debate against Bloom published in The New York Times, psychologist Jamil Zaki disagrees with Bloom’s idea that we’d be more moral people without empathy. Zaki writes that Bloom is “sparring against a straw version of ‘empathy.’” While Bloom focuses solely on the emotion-sharing aspects of empathy, Zaki writes that a complete conception of empathy includes sharing, thinking about, and caring about other people’s inner lives. While we can separate these processes, Zaki believes the approach of splitting them is too simplistic—and that arguing against an entire component of human psychology doesn’t speak to the way we actually live our moral and social lives.