Against Empathy by Bloom
Ref: Paul Bloom (2016). Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Harper Collins.
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Summary
It is easy to see why so many people view empathy as a powerful force for goodness and moral change. It is easy to see why so many believe that the only problem with empathy is that too often we don’t have enough of it. I used to believe this as well. But now I don’t. Empathy has its merits. It can be a great source of pleasure, involved in art and fiction and sports, and it can be a valuable aspect of intimate relationships. And it can sometimes spark us to do good. But on the whole, it’s a poor moral guide. It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty. It can lead to irrational and unfair political decisions, it can corrode certain important relationships, such as between a doctor and a patient, and make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives. I am against empathy, and one of the goals of this book is to persuade you to be against empathy too.
Empathy (Emotional Empathy): The act of feeling what you believe other people feel- experiencing what they experience; the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does (the subject of this book).
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.
The problems we face as a society and as individuals are rarely due to lack of empathy. Actually, they are often due to too much of it.
I am going to argue three things; 1) our moral decisions and actions are powerfully shaped by the force of empathy, 2) this often makes the world worse, 3) we have the capacity to do better.
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. Empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism. It is shortsighted, motivating actions that might make things better in the short term but lead to tragic results in the future. It is innumerate, favoring the one over the many. It can spark violence; our empathy for those close to us is a powerful force for war and atrocity toward others. It is corrosive in personal relationships; it exhausts the spirit and can diminish the force of kindness and love.
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. We do this a lot already, but we should work on doing more.
“We don’t live in an age of reason, we live in an age of empathy.”-Frans de Waal.
I am not against morality, compassion, kindness, love, being a good neighbor, being a mensch, and doing the right thing. Actually, I’m writing this book because I’m for all those things. I want to make the world a better place. I’ve just come to believe that relying on empathy is the wrong way to do it.
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Ch 1 Other People’s Shoes
It makes sense that empathy would be seen by so many as the magic bullet of morality. The argument in its simplest form goes like this: Everyone is naturally interested in him- or herself; we care most about our own pleasure and pain. It requires nothing special to yank one’s hand away from a flame or to reach for a glass of water when thirsty. But empathy makes the experiences of others salient and important—your pain becomes my pain, your thirst becomes my thirst, and so I rescue you from the fire or give you something to drink. Empathy guides us to treat others as we treat ourselves and hence expands our selfish concerns to encompass other people.
For every specific problem, lack of empathy is seen as the diagnosis and more empathy as the cure.
One scholar derisively summed up the move toward trigger warnings as “ ‘empathetic correctness.’
Emotional Contagion: Where the feelings of one person bleed onto another, as when watching someone weep makes you sad or when another’s laughter makes you giddy.
Super-empath: Someone deeply moved by his feelings about other people.
It makes good sense for a society to enforce an absolute rule rather than trusting people to figure it for themselves.
One’s morality can be rooted in a religious worldview or a philosophical one. It can be motivated by a more diffuse concern for the fates of others—something often described as concern or compassion and which I argue is a better moral guide than empathy.
Empathy Issues
Empathy can sway us toward the one over the many. This perverse moral mathematics is part of the reason why governments and individuals care more about a little girl stuck in a well than about events that will affect millions or billions.
Empathy distorts our moral judgments in pretty much the same way that prejudice does.
Empathy is particularly insensitive to consequences that apply statistically rather than to specific individuals.
If you absorb the suffering of others, then you’re less able to help them in the long run because achieving long-term goals often requires inflicting short-term pain. Any good parent, for instance, often has to make a child do something, or stop doing something, in a way that causes the child immediate unhappiness but is better for him or her in the future: Do your homework, eat your vegetables, go to bed at a reasonable hour, sit still for this vaccination, go to the dentist. Making children suffer temporarily for their own good is made possible by love, intelligence, and compassion, but yet again, it can be impeded by empathy.
Empathy is biased and parochial; it focuses you on certain people at the expense of others; and it is innumerate, so it distorts our moral and policy decisions in ways that cause suffering instead of relieving it.
Empathy causes us to overrate present costs and underrate future costs. This skews our decisions so that if, say, we are faced with a choice where one specific child will die now or twenty children whose names we don’t know will die a year from now, empathy might guide us to choose to save the one.
There is some evidence that high empathy for the suffering of others can paralyze people, lead them to skewed decisions, and often spark irrational cruelty.
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Ch 2 The Anatomy of Empathy
Incentives appeal to self-interest, custom appeals to our social nature, but a third way to elicit kindness is to get people to feel empathy.
Empathy prompts make subjects more likely to do good—to give money, take over a task, and cooperate. Empathy makes them kind.
Cognitive Empathy (‘Social Cognition’, ‘Theory of Mind’): When we try to understand other people as opposed to feeling what they feel.
Major Finding from Neuroscience of empathy research
1) An empathic response to someone else’s experience can involve the same brain tissue that’s active when you yourself have that experience. So “I feel your pain” can be made neurologically literal.
There exist neural systems that treat the experiences and actions of others the same way they treat the experiences and actions of the self.
2) Whether or not we are consciously aware of it, empathy is modified by our beliefs, expectations, motivations, and judgments. Our empathic experience is influenced by what we think about the person we are empathizing with and how we judge the situation that person is in.
Separate Processes Theory of Empathy (‘A Tale of Two Systems’): Information from the senses is interpreted by two separate systems that 1) informs about the mental states of others (mentalizing, mind reading) and 2) causes certain feelings about the mental state of others (emotional empathy).
Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPC): Situated just behind the forehead, involved in mentalizing.
Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC): Situated right behind the MPC, involved in empathy.
People often cross the street to avoid encountering suffering people who are begging for money. It’s not that they don’t care (if they didn’t care, they would just walk by), it’s that they are bothered by the suffering and would rather not encounter it.
Empathizing-Systemizing Theory (Baron-Cohen): On average, women are higher on empathizing and men are higher on systematizing—an interest in analyzing or constructing systems.
Autism: Individuals possessing “extreme male brains,” with an unusual focus on systematizing.
A recent paper reviewed the findings from all available studies of the relationship between empathy and aggression. The results are summarized in the title: “The (Non)Relation between Empathy and Aggression: Surprising Results from a Meta-Analysis.” They report that only about 1% of the variation in aggression is accounted for by lack of empathy.
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Ch 3 Doing Good
Empathy-induced altruism is neither moral nor immoral; it is amoral.
Identifiable Victim Effect: The tendency of people to donate or give more when provided information (name, picture, background, etc) about the victim.
“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.”
Empathy’s Bias
A spotlight picks out a certain space to illuminate and leaves the rest in darkness; its focus is narrow. What you see depends on where you choose to point the spotlight, so its focus is vulnerable to your biases.
If our concern is driven by thoughts of the suffering of specific individuals, then it sets up a perverse situation in which the suffering of one can matter more than the suffering of a thousand.
Brain areas that correspond to the experience of empathy are sensitive to whether someone is a friend or a foe, part of one’s group or part of an opposing group. Empathy is sensitive to whether the person is pleasing to look at or disgusting, and much else.
Empathy’s narrow focus, specificity, and innumeracy mean that it’s always going to be influenced by what captures our attention.
Small donations can actually harm the charities, since the cost of processing a donation can be greater than the donation itself.
Foreign aid decreases the incentives for long-term economic and social development in the areas that would most benefit from such development. Food aid can put local farmers and markets out of business. (These are the same sorts of concerns that arise domestically when people object to both welfare programs and corporate bailouts—the money might make things better at the moment, helping people keep their jobs, but it can have negative downstream consequences.) Then there is the concern that food aid and medical care for combatants, including those involved in genocide, can actually end up killing more people than it saves.
A parent who lives too much in the head of his or her child will be overly protective and overly concerned, fearful, and uncertain, unable to exert any sort of discipline and control. Good parenting involves coping with the short-term suffering of your child—actually, sometimes causing the short-term suffering of your child. It involves denying children what they want—no, you can’t eat cake for dinner/get a tattoo/go to a party on a school night. It involves imposing some degree of discipline, which almost by definition makes children’s lives more unpleasant in the here and now. Empathy gets in the way of that, greedily focusing on the short-term buzz of increasing your children’s happiness right now at the possible expense of what’s actually good for them. It’s sometimes said that the problem with parenting is overriding your own selfish concerns. But it turns out that another problem is overriding your empathic concerns: the strong desire to alleviate the immediate suffering of those around you.
Consider child beggars in the developing world. The sight of an emaciated child is shocking to a well-fed Westerner, and it’s hard for a good person to resist helping out. And yet the act of doing so ends up supporting criminal organizations that enslave and often maim tens of thousands of children. By giving, you make the world worse. Actions that appear to help individuals in the short term can have terrible consequences for many more.
Hearing that my child has been mildly harmed is far more moving for me than hearing about the horrific death of thousands of strangers. This might be a fine attitude for a father—we’ll return to that question at the end of the next chapter—but it’s a poor attitude for a policy maker and a poor moral guide to our treatment of strangers.
The veil of ignorance fosters equality not by giving the millions of other people an imaginative weight equal to one’s own—a staggering mental labor—but by the much more efficient strategy of simply erasing for the moment one’s own dense array of attributes.
Escaping Empathy
It’s only when we escape from empathy and rely instead on the application of rules and principles or a calculation of costs and benefits that we can, to at least some extent, become fair and impartial.
Doing actual good, instead of doing what feels good, requires dealing with complex issues and being mindful of exploitation from competing, sometimes malicious and greedy, interests. To do so, you need to step back and not fall into empathy traps. The conclusion is not that one shouldn’t give, but rather that one should give intelligently, with an eye toward consequences.
Effective Altruism: A growing social movement that combines both the heart and the head.
Effective altruists distinguish between “man versus nature” problems and “man versus man” problems. Healing the sick is an example of “man versus nature,” and this is the sort of thing that effective altruists now focus on. Fighting global capitalism is “man versus man.” This has the potential for long-lasting change for the better, but the outcome is less certain. After all, many people are in favor of global capitalism, and many honestly believe that the spread of market economies is what will make the world a better place.
Depersonalization (Scarry): When we want to make fair and unbiased decisions about who to hire or who to give an award to, we don’t give everyone equal “imaginative weight,” fully appreciating the special circumstances and humanity of each individual. No, we instead reduce our candidates to X, Y, and Z, designing procedures, such as blind reviewing and blind auditions, to prevent judges from being biased, consciously or unconsciously, by a candidate’s sex, race, appearance—or anything other than what should be under evaluation. Alternatively, we can establish quota systems and diversity requirements to ensure sufficient representation by certain groups. These are conflicting solutions, grounded in different political visions, but they are both attempts to depersonalize the process and circumvent our natural preferences and biases.
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The Politics of Empathy
We’re too quick to credit empathy for what’s right in the world.
“Political systems have “a party of order or stability and a party of progress or reform.”-John Stuart Mill.
Our political natures seem to manifest themselves most clearly with, as one set of scholars put it, “matters of reproduction, relations with out-groups, suitable punishment for in-group miscreants, and traditional/innovative lifestyles.”
One analysis, by psychologists who study the relationship between politics and empathy, goes as follows: “To the extent that citizens identify with the distresses of others, they will prefer to assuage the distress that they witness. In the political realm, such actions would likely entail the invocation of government power on behalf of the perceived victims. Hence, ‘bleeding hearts,’ we hypothesize, would prefer liberal policy solutions to remedy problems encountered by distressed, generalized others.”
A different analysis of the liberal-conservative contrast is proposed by Jonathan Haidt, based on his theory that humans possess a set of distinct moral foundations—including those concerning care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. These are evolved universals, but they admit of variation, and research by Haidt and his colleagues suggests that liberals emphasize care and fairness over the others, while conservatives care about all these foundations more or less equally. This is why, according to Haidt, conservatives care more than liberals do about respect for the national flag (as this is associated with loyalty), children’s obedience toward parents (authority), and chastity (sanctity).
Political debates typically involve a disagreement not over whether we should empathize, but over who we should empathize with.
A reasonable public policy draws upon more general, and less biased, motivations.
There is no Party of Empathy. It’s not that liberal policies are driven by empathy and conservative ones are not. A more realistic perspective is that a politics of empathy drives concerns about people in the here and now.
Governments’ failures to enact prudent long-term policies are often attributed to the incentive system of democratic politics (which favors short-term fixes) and to the powerful influence of money. But the politics of empathy is also to blame. 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.
A reasoned, even counterempathic analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences is a better guide to planning for the future than the gut wrench of empathy.
Fair and moral and ultimately beneficial policies are best devised without empathy. We should decide just punishments based on a reasoned and fair analysis of what’s appropriate, not through empathic engagement with the pain of victims.
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Ch 4 Intimacy
Empathy Bell Curve: It starts at Level 0, where a person feels no empathy at all, as with some psychopaths and narcissists. And it runs all the way to Level 6, the point at which an individual is “continuously focused on other people’s feelings . . . in a constant state of hyperarousal, so that other people are never off their radar.”
Unmitigated Communion (Helgeson & Fritz): Excessive concern with others and placing others needs before one’s own; women typically score higher than men on this scale.
Helgeson & Fritz speculate that the gender difference explains women’s greater propensity to anxiety and depression, a conclusion that meshes with the proposal by Barbara Oakley, who, drawing on work on “pathological altruism,” notes, “It’s surprising how many diseases and syndromes commonly seen in women seem to be related to women’s generally stronger empathy for and focus on others.”
Agency: An emphasis on self and separation; a stereotypically male trait.
Communion: An emphasis on connection with people; a stereotypically female trait.
Empathic Distress: Suffering at the suffering of others.
In his book on Buddhist moral philosophy, Charles Goodman notes that Buddhist texts distinguish between “sentimental compassion,” which corresponds to what we would call empathy, and “great compassion,” which is what we would simply call “compassion.” The first is to be avoided, as it “exhausts the bodhisattva.” It’s the second that is worth pursuing. Great compassion is more distanced and reserved, and can be sustained indefinitely.
Bodhisattva: An enlightened person who vows not to pass into Nirvana, choosing instead to stay in the normal cycle of life and death to help the unenlightened masses.
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.
Compassion Training (‘Loving-Kindness Meditation’): The goal is to feel positive and warm thoughts toward a series of imagined persons, starting with someone close to you and moving to strangers and, perhaps, to enemies. Leads to activation of the brain’s medial orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum (as opposed to activation of the insula and ACC during empathy training).
Transformative Experiences: Experiences you have to undergo yourself in order to know what they’re like.
Parochial Affection: Affection for those around us that is driven by empathic feelings.
Telescopic Philanthropy: Caring about those in faraway lands while neglecting those close to you.
People’s Focus: Self + Close People + Strangers = 100%
Self = 100%; a pure egoist.
Self = 0%; some sort of crazy saint.
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Empathy as the Foundation of Morality
I’m against empathy, but I do believe that people feel compassion. We want to help others and want to employ our hearts and minds to achieve good ends. There are those who doubt even this, who reject the notion that we possess any sort of kind or compassionate motivation.
The “goals” of natural selection transcend our bodies. So, strange as it might seem, selfish genes create altruistic animals, motivating kindness toward others.
More than once I’ve found myself in a dark mood and only later realized that it was because I had been interacting with someone who was depressed. (Psychologists sometimes call this “emotional contagion.”)
People are not at a loss when asked why drunk driving is wrong, or why a company shouldn’t pay a woman less than a man for the same job, or why you should hold the door open for someone on crutches. We can easily justify these views by referring to fundamental concerns about harm, equity, and kindness.
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Ch 5 Violence and Cruelty
Violence is part of human nature, shared with other animals, evolved for punishment, defense, and predation. And unless we are transformed into angels, violence and the threat of violence are needed to rein in our worst instincts.
Moral beliefs motivate action, including violent action.
The more empathic people are, the more they want a harsher punishment.
The Myth of Pure Evil: The idea that evil is a mystical and terrible force, something alien to most of us. Possessed with this force, certain people are intentionally cruel, driven by malevolence, wanting suffering for its own sake.
If you want to think about evil, real evil, a better way to proceed is this: Don’t think about what other people have done to you; think instead about your own actions that hurt others, that made others want you to apologize and make amends. Don’t think about other nations’ atrocities toward your country and its allies; think instead about the actions of your country that other people rage against.
Moralization Gap: The tendency to diminish the severity of our own acts relative to the acts of others.
When it comes to serious acts, it’s almost always the case that the ramifications are worse for the victims than for the perpetrators. The moralization gap leads to a natural escalation of reprisals, both at the everyday level—disputes among friends, siblings, spouses—and at the level of international conflict. You do something nasty to me, and this seems so much nastier (more significant, unjustified, just meaner) to me than it does to you. And when I retaliate in what I see as an appropriate and measured way, it seems disproportionate to you, and you respond accordingly, and so on.
Moralization Theory: Terrible acts are done by those driven by a desire to do the right thing, to be moral.
“Moralization is the main cause of violence and cruelty: war, torture, genocide, honour killing, animal and human sacrifice, homicide, suicide, intimate-partner violence, rape, corporal punishment, execution, trial by combat, police brutality, hazing, castration, dueling…all are acts of morality, to the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.”-Tage Rai.
Empathy’s relationship to violence and cruelty is complicated. It’s not true that those who do evil are necessarily low in empathy or that those who refrain from evil are high in empathy. We’ve seen how empathy can make us worse people, not merely in the sense that it leads to bad policy and can mess up certain relationships but in the stronger sense that it can actually motivate savage acts.
As we think about empathy, it’s useful to compare it to anger. They have a lot in common: Both are universal responses that emerge in childhood.
Prinz thinks I’m too quick to dismiss the moral importance of anger: Righteous rage is a cornerstone of women’s liberation, civil rights, and battles against tyranny. It also outperforms empathy in crucial ways: anger is highly motivating, difficult to manipulate, applicable wherever injustice is found, and easier to insulate against bias. We fight for those who have been mistreated not because they are like us, but because we are passionate about principles. Rage can misdirect us when it comes unyoked from good reasoning, but together they are a potent pair. Reason is the rudder; rage propels us forward. Bloom recommends compassion, but the heat of healthy anger is what fuels the fight for justice.
Psychopathy
Some evil is done by people who really are different from the rest of us. There are sadists who get pleasure from the pain of others—though they are rare, so much so that the big book of psychiatric diagnoses, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, doesn’t even have an entry for them. No doubt there are souls so corrupted that they really do, as Alfred put it, want the world to burn. And surely there are honest-to-God psychopaths, who despite their small numbers are responsible for a relatively great amount of crime and misery. But even for many of these individuals, the idea of pure evil is a nonstarter when it comes to explaining their actions.
Criminal psychopaths don’t have to be fiddling with a single dial of empathy: A simpler explanation is that they are good at understanding other people and bad at feeling their pain. They have high cognitive empathy but low emotional empathy.
Psychopathy Checklist: Developed by Canadian psychologist Robert Hare; commonly used to make decisions about sentencing, parole, and other significant matters. 4 Main trait categories:
1) How you deal with other people, assessing traits like grandiosity, superficial charm, and manipulativeness.
2) Your emotional life, including your empathic responses, or lack thereof.
3) Your lifestyle, with a focus on parasitic, impulsive, and irresponsible behaviors.
4) Yyour propensity for bad behavior in the past, including encounters with the criminal justice system. Then there are two additional criteria, involving sex and romance.
Some argue there are three main components of psychopathy—disinhibition, boldness, and meanness.
Many psychopaths have perfectly good cognitive empathy: They are adept at reading other people’s minds. This is what enables them to be such master manipulators, such excellent con men and seducers. When people say that psychopaths lack empathy, they are saying that it’s the emotional part of empathy that’s absent—the suffering of others doesn’t make them suffer.
Dehumanization: Thinking about and treating other people as if they are less than fully human.
If it turned out that the nastiness associated with psychopathy is due to an empathy deficit—that would be an excellent case for the importance of empathy. But this is also the sort of thing that you can test in the lab, and it turns out to be unsupported.
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Ch 6 Age of Reason
The idea that rationality is an especially white male Western pursuit is where the extremes of postmodern ideology circle around to meet with the most retrograde views of a barroom bigot.
There is evidence from neuroscience—both regular, cognitive, affective, and social—making it abundantly clear that the brain really is the source of mental life…Some would disagree with this. There are scientists and philosophers who maintain that the neural basis of mental life has a particularly radical consequence. It shows that rational deliberation and free choice must be illusions. It shows that, to use the nice phrase coined by Sam Harris, each of us is little more than “a biochemical puppet.”
What really matters for kindness in our everyday interactions is not empathy but capacities such as self-control and intelligence and a more diffuse compassion.
If you are struggling with a moral decision and find yourself trying to feel someone else’s pain or pleasure, you should stop. This empathic engagement might give you some satisfaction, but it’s not how to improve things and can lead to bad decisions and bad outcomes.
Unless one is a Cartesian dualist (and one really shouldn’t be), the mind is the brain, and there is no such thing as an immaterial conductor using the brain to accomplish his will.
We go through a mental process that is typically called “choice,” where we think about the consequences of our actions. There is nothing magical about this. The neural basis of mental life is fully compatible with the existence of conscious deliberation and rational thought—with neural systems that analyze different options, construct logical chains of argument, reason through examples and analogies, and respond to the anticipated consequences of actions.
Jonathan Haidt captures a certain consensus when he suggests that social psychology research should motivate us to reject the notion that we are in control of our decisions. We should instead think of the conscious self as a lawyer who, when called upon to defend the actions of a client, provides after-the-fact justifications for decisions that have already been made. We are wrong to see rationality as the dog—it’s actually the tail.
Self-control can be seen as the purest embodiment of rationality in that it reflects the working of a brain system (embedded in the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that lies behind the forehead) that restrains our impulsive, irrational, or emotive desires.
Qualities most useful to a person (Adam Smith): 1) Superior reason and understanding and 2) Self-command. The first is important because it enables us to appreciate the consequences of our actions in the future: You can’t act to make the world better if you aren’t smart enough to know which action will achieve that goal. The second—which we would now call self-control—is critical as well, as it allows us to abstain from our immediate appetites to focus on long-term consequences.
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Resources
Give Well: Monitors the efficacy of charities and determine which make the most difference; https://www.givewell.org/.
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Terminology
Bodhisattva: An enlightened person who vows not to pass into Nirvana, choosing instead to stay in the normal cycle of life and death to help the unenlightened masses.
Consequentialism: A way of thinking about right and wrong in which you attend to the consequences of one’s action.
File-Drawer Problem (in Academia): Studies that fail to find an effect are therefore less likely to be submitted for publication, and if such work is submitted, it’s more difficult to get published, because null effects are notoriously uninteresting to reviewers and editors.
Godwin’s Law: As any online discussion proceeds, the odds of someone mentioning Hitler approaches certainty.
Morality: The effort to guide one’s conduct by reason.
Reason: The act of justification and explanation (Michael Lynch).
Utilitarian Demand: That one should always maximize the greatest good for the greatest number.
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Misc Statistics
By one estimate, alcohol is implicated in over half of violent crimes.
Make-A-Wish foundation says that the average cost for making a wish come true is $7,500.
In a series of classic studies, Walter Mischel investigated whether children could refrain from eating one marshmallow now to get two later. He found that the children who waited for two marshmallows did better in school and on their SATs as adolescents and ended up with better mental health, relationship quality, and income as adults.
Europe witnessed a thirtyfold drop in its homicide rate between the medieval and modern periods, and this, he argues, had much to do with the change from a culture of honor to a culture of dignity, which prizes restraint.
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Misc Quotes
“We are not judges; we are lawyers, making up explanations after the deeds have been done. Reason is impotent.”-Jonathan Haidt.
“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I myself become the wounded person.”-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”-Stalin.
“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”-Mother Teresa.
“Pity is a most dangerous emotion. Cambodia needs to get out of the beggar mentality. And foreigners need to stop reacting to pure emotion.”-Ou Virak (founder of a human rights organization in Phnom Penh).
“Reason is the slave of the passions.”-David Hume.
“Only boring people get bored.”
“What makes an apology work is the exchange of shame and power between the offender and the offended. By apologizing, you take the shame of your offense and redirect it to yourself.”-Aaron Lazare.
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”-George Orwell.
“There is a lot of evidence that the foundations of morality have evolved through the process of natural selection.”-Jonathan Haidt.
“Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed.”-Michael Ghiselin.
“It is not clear how much the conscious you—as opposed to the genetic and neural you—gets to do any deciding at all.”-Eagleman.
“The only real friend one has in the end is the dog…The more I get to know the human species, the more I care for my Benno.”-Joseph Goebbels.
“Without God, all things are permitted.”-Ivan Karamazov (The Brothers Kamarazov).
“It’s always the good men who do the most harm in the world.”-Henry Adams on Robert E. Lee.
“It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.”-Adam Smith (on why we should care about stranger).
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Chronology
14 Dec, 2012: Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting; Adam Lanza kills his mother in her bed and then goes to Sandy Hook Elementary School and murders 20 children and 6 adults, before committing suicide.-Against Empathy by Bloom.
2005: Natalee Holloway, an 18yo American student, goes missing while on vacation in Aruba, and is believed to have been abducted and murdered.-Against Empathy by Bloom.
Oct, 1987: Baby Jessica; 18-month old Jessica McClure falls into a well in TX triggering a 55h rescue operation that seizes the entire US with concern.-Against Empathy by Bloom.
1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s pens “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the best-selling novel of the 19c, which plays a significant role in changing Americans’ attitudes toward slavery.-Against Empathy by Bloom.
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