The Trouble with Empathy

Empathy has become one of the most widely invoked moral concepts of contemporary life. The idea that moral progress requires the expansion of our capacity to imagine ourselves in the position of others — to feel what they feel — has a considerable pedigree, from Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments to contemporary calls for leaders to demonstrate empathetic understanding.

The psychologist Paul Bloom has made an influential counter-argument: that empathy, understood as the feeling of what another feels, is a poor guide to moral action. It is parochial — we empathise more easily with people who resemble us, which reproduces the very biases it claims to overcome. It is exhausting — and therefore susceptible to compassion fatigue, the numbing that follows exposure to too much suffering. It is biased toward the concrete and identifiable at the expense of the abstract and statistical — a finding that has direct implications for how we respond to distant or diffuse harms.

Bloom proposes that rational compassion — a commitment to others' wellbeing that does not depend on emotional identification — is a more reliable basis for moral action than empathetic feeling. The argument is uncomfortable because it runs against deeply held intuitions about what morality requires and what kind of person one should aspire to be.

It is not, however, an argument against caring. It is an argument about the relationship between feeling and action, and about whether the feelings we most admire in ourselves are actually the most useful guides to behaving well toward others. The distinction between feeling another's pain and acting effectively to reduce it is real, and refusing to acknowledge it does not serve the people whose pain is at stake.