Question

Essay on the topic “Against Empathy”: Rhetorical analysis and response (800-1000 words)

Against Empathy

Paul Bloom, psychologist and Yale Professor, argues that empathy is a bad thing-that it makes the world worse. While we’ve been taught that putting yourself in another’s shoes cultivates compassion, it actually blinds you to the long-term consequences of your actions. In this animated interview feom The Atlantic, we hear Bloom’s case for why the world needs to ditch empathy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/474588/why-empathy-is-a-bad-thing/

Answer 1

• According to Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, most of us are completely wrong about empathy. The author of a new book titled Against Empathy, Bloom uses clinical studies and simple logic to argue that empathy, however well-intentioned, is a poor guide for moral reasoning.
• Worse, to the extent that individuals and societies make ethical judgments on the basis of empathy, they become less sensitive to the suffering of greater and greater numbers of people.
• Empathy means feeling the feelings of others,if someone is feeling pain,we feel it too.This is something which is different from being compassionate.Compassion means that you give your concern weight, you value it. You care about the other person, but you don’t necessarily pick up their feelings.
  
• Both have different consequences.According to Bloom,if we have empathy toward the other person, it will be painful if we are suffering. It will be exhausting. It will lead you to avoid others and avoid helping. But if we feel compassion for the other person, we'll be invigorated. We will be happy and will try to make life better of the person.
• Empathy has certain design features that do make it positive in certain restricted circumstances. For instance,If you and I are the only people on earth and you’re in pain and I can help you and make your pain go away, and I feel empathy toward you and so I make your life better, empathy has done something good. But the real world is nowhere near as simple.
• Empathy’s design failings have to do with the fact that it acts like a spotlight. It zooms you in. But spotlights only illuminate where you point them at, and for that reason empathy is biased.According to Bloom,we actually feel a lot less empathy for people who aren’t in our own culture, who don’t share our skin color, who don’t share our language. This is a terrible fact of human nature, and it operates at a subconscious level, but we know that it happens.
• Empathy also makes us feel towards a single person and not hundreds of them,we feel for some child who has gone missing but not maybe thousand children who are suffering from malnutrition.So it might feel good but empathy often leads us to make stupid and unethical decisions.We cannot put ourselves in the shoes of so many people but just one.
  
• In the moral domain, however, empathy leads us astray. We are much better off if we give up on empathy and become rational deliberators motivating by compassion and care for others.
• He acknowledges that it can be a good thing: it leads to greater enjoyment of art, fiction and sports, can be a valuable aspect of intimate relationships and can motivate generous behaviour. What he refutes is the widespread notion that more empathy is all that is required in order for us to become good and moral people.