Against Empathy

Paul Bloom opens Against Empathy with a personal anecdote about learning of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He describes his wife's impulse to retrieve their children from school and a stranger weeping in a coffeehouse over victims she did not know. This reaction, he argues, was powerfully shaped by empathy, a capacity most people regard as an unqualified good. Bloom's central thesis is the opposite: Empathy, understood as the act of feeling what you believe other people feel, is a poor moral guide that "grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty" (2). He is not arguing against morality, compassion, or kindness but contending that reasoned deliberation and a more distanced compassion serve us better than empathy's emotional pull. He compares empathy to sugary soda: "tempting and delicious and bad for us" (13).

Bloom distinguishes three common uses of the word empathy. The first treats it as a broad synonym for morality and kindness, which he does not oppose. The second refers to cognitive empathy, the ability to understand what others think and feel without sharing those feelings, which he considers morally neutral. The third sense, emotional empathy, is his primary target: the act of experiencing what another person experiences, feeling their pain as your own.

A key metaphor organizes his critique: Empathy functions as a spotlight. It illuminates the suffering of whoever it is directed at, but its focus is narrow, vulnerable to bias, and insensitive to scale. The Sandy Hook shooting drew enormous attention and charity, yet a higher number of children were murdered that same year in Chicago, a fact that attracted almost no public concern. The difference, Bloom suggests, is that the Newtown victims were easier for people like him to empathize with. Empathy's innumeracy means that the death of one named child can matter more to us than the deaths of thousands. The Willie Horton case illustrates a related failure: In 1987, Willie Horton, a convicted murderer released on furlough from a Massachusetts prison, committed rape and assault. The incident destroyed the furlough program politically, even though data suggested the program may have reduced overall crime.

Turning to the neuroscience of empathy, Bloom identifies three major findings. First, empathic responses involve some of the same brain regions activated during one's own experience, giving "I feel your pain" a literal neurological basis. Second, empathic experience is shaped by prior moral judgments: People feel more empathy for in-group members and for those not seen as responsible for their own suffering. Third, emotional empathy and cognitive empathy occupy different brain regions, explaining how psychopaths can be charming manipulators while remaining callous. Research finds only a weak connection between high empathy and good behavior; one meta-analysis shows that lack of empathy accounts for only about one percent of variation in aggression.

Bloom argues that empathy-driven kindness often causes active harm. Foreign aid can undermine long-term economic development; orphanages in Cambodia, fueled by foreigners' empathy, create incentives for separating children from parents; and giving to child beggars in the developing world can support criminal organizations. He cites philosopher Peter Singer's example of the Make-A-Wish Foundation spending at least $7,500 to give a leukemic child a day as a superhero, money that could have saved three children's lives through malaria bed nets. Bloom introduces the Effective Altruism movement, which combines genuine caring with rational assessment of how to do the most good. He also draws on literary scholar Elaine Scarry's argument for depersonalizing decision-making, an approach underlying practices like blind auditions, rather than trying to raise strangers to the emotional weight of loved ones.

In an interlude on politics, Bloom rejects the claim that liberalism is uniquely grounded in empathy. Conservative positions also draw on empathy, just directed toward different targets: gun owners who feel defenseless, police officers in danger, and small-business owners harmed by riots. On climate change, empathy actually favors inaction, since those harmed by mitigation policies are identifiable while future victims remain statistical abstractions.

Bloom's chapter on intimate relationships strikes a more concessive tone. He draws on research into "unmitigated communion," a construct developed by psychologists Vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz measuring excessive concern with others, which is associated with overprotectiveness and poor physical health. He connects these findings to a broader distinction between empathy and compassion. Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk and neuroscientist, told Bloom that Buddhist philosophy distinguishes empathy, which exhausts the practitioner, from a more distanced compassion that can be sustained indefinitely. Neuroscientist Tania Singer and colleagues confirm that empathy and compassion activate different brain regions: Empathy training is experienced as unpleasant, while compassion training is experienced as warm and invigorating. Separately, psychologist David DeSteno finds that mindfulness meditation increases kindness by reducing empathy-related brain activation. Bloom applies these findings to medicine, arguing that doctors serve patients better through calm competence than through emotional mirroring.

In a second interlude, Bloom challenges the developmental claim that empathy is the foundation of morality in children. He reviews evidence that toddlers help struggling adults without prompting but notes, drawing on researcher Paul Harris, that these helpful children typically do not show signs of empathic distress. Bloom concludes that empathy is not developmentally necessary for morality, though the evidence is not definitive.

Bloom's chapter on violence argues that empathy can motivate cruelty rather than prevent it. He opens with American soldiers at Dachau in 1945 who tortured captured SS soldiers after witnessing the camp's horrors, driven by moral outrage rather than sadism. Drawing on the moralization theory of violence advanced by researchers Tage Rai and Alan Fiske, he argues that most violence is motivated by "the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations" (185). Empathy for victims has historically fueled atrocities: Lynchings of Black people in the American South were partly driven by empathy for white women allegedly victimized by Black men, and leaders routinely invoke empathy for specific victims to justify wars and punitive policies. Bloom examines psychopathy, arguing that criminal history and poor impulse control are far stronger predictors of violence than low empathy. People with autism, also low in empathy, show no propensity for violence.

In his final chapter, Bloom defends human rationality. He acknowledges findings from the "heuristics and biases" tradition, which documents systematic errors in reasoning such as neglecting base rates (general background statistical frequencies) and susceptibility to framing effects, where the way a question is worded changes the answer. Yet he argues that every demonstration of irrationality simultaneously demonstrates intelligence: We recognize these as errors, proving we possess the rational capacity to assess our own limitations. Bloom makes a positive case for reason by pointing to the importance of IQ and self-control as predictors of life outcomes, citing psychologist Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiments, which showed that children who delayed gratification had better outcomes across the lifespan. He argues that the historical expansion of the moral circle reflects not an increase in empathy but a rational appreciation that others' lives have equal value, quoting psychologist Steven Pinker: "What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights" (240).

Bloom closes by conceding that empathy can sometimes motivate good action and has value as a source of pleasure in art, friendship, and romance. But in moral and political life, its negatives outweigh its positives. Reason, compassion, and self-control offer better guides to a more just and humane world.