The example of lynching appears there too, although more briefly than in his recent talk.īloom i s a professor of psychology at Yale, so it should not surprise that he gets something importantly right about the science of empathy for those that we see suffer from a harm. īloom’s presentation to the Canadian Philosophical Association this month was almost identical to an essay he contributed to The Atlantic in 2015. However, i t is jarring that he repeatedly uses lynching as an example of an empathy-fed atrocity.
I knew the bare outline of it and thought it sounded intriguing : Bloom holds that empathy for members of groups subjected to harm can lead to atrocity against other groups. He says the solution is to apply principles of justice and fairness but not to “go through the exercise of trying to get in the heads of people and feeling their pain.When I first heard about Paul Bloom’s book, Against Empathy, I was keen to be persuaded to his view. In this podcast, Bloom talks about why empathy is linked to prejudice and why the “biases and messiness of empathy” get in the way of genuine problem-solving. “We find ourselves in weird situations where we care a lot more about one specified person, one identifiable victim, than we care about a thousand people who are in the same situation.” “What empathy does, is it zooms you in on an individual,” he says. He argues that this kind of empathy can cause us to make short-sighted and even biased decisions.
At first glance, the title may seem callous but Bloom makes clear that he is against a very particular kind of empathy: feeling the pain and suffering of others. Bloom tackles the complexities of doing good in his new book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.
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