Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (Bloom, Paul)

Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.

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Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. HarperCollins, 2016.

These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!

Prologue

As Jonathan Haidt argues, we are not judges; we are lawyers, making up explanations after the deeds have been done. Reason is impotent. “We celebrate rationality,” agrees de Waal, “but when push comes to shove we assign it little weight.”

But how could empathy steer us wrong? Well, read on. But in brief: 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.

CHAPTER 1       Other People’s Shoes

empathy—“ cognitive empathy” as opposed to “emotional empathy,” which is most of my focus.

Barack Obama described how empathy can be a choice. He stressed how important it is “to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town.

In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman put it like this: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I myself become the wounded person.”

You don’t need empathy to realize that it’s wrong to let a child drown.

we are capable of all sorts of moral judgments that aren’t grounded in empathy.

there has to be more to morality than empathy.

concern or compassion and which I will argue is a better moral guide than empathy.

empathy was more powerful than fairness,

puts his altruism in mathematical terms. Quoting scientific studies that show the risk of dying as a result of making a kidney donation to be only 1 in 4,000, he says that not making the donation would have meant he valued his life at 4,000 times that of a stranger, a valuation he finds totally unjustified.”

article describing how in Passau, Germany, in the winter of 1894, a four-year-old child playing tag fell through the ice of a frozen river and was rescued by a local priest named Johann Kuehberger—“ a brave comrade” as a local paper described him. According to some sources, the child was Adolf Hitler.

spotlights have a narrow focus, and this is one problem with empathy. It does poorly in a world where there are many people in need and where the effects of one’s actions are diffuse, often delayed, and difficult to compute, a world in which an act that helps one person in the here and now can lead to greater suffering in the future.

Further, spotlights only illuminate what they are pointed at, so empathy reflects our biases.

We’re constituted so that novel and unusual events catch our attention and trigger our emotional responses.

The town was inundated with so much charity that it added to their burden. Hundreds of volunteers had to be recruited to store the gifts and toys that got sent to the city, which kept arriving despite pleas from Newtown officials for people to stop. A vast warehouse was crammed with plush toys that the townspeople had no use for; millions of dollars rolled in to this relatively affluent community.

you cannot empathize with more than one or two people at the same time.

It 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 is particularly insensitive to consequences that apply statistically rather than to specific individuals. Imagine learning that a faulty vaccine has caused Rebecca Smith, an adorable eight-year-old, to get extremely sick. If you watch her suffering and listen to her and her family, the empathy will flow, and you’ll want to act. But suppose that stopping the vaccine program will cause, say, a dozen random children to die. Here your empathy is silent

Or consider Willie Horton. In 1987 Horton, a convicted murderer, was released on furlough from the Northeastern Correctional Center in Massachusetts and raped a woman after attacking and tying up her fiancé. The furlough program came to be seen as a humiliating mistake on the part of Governor Michael Dukakis and was used against him by his opponents during his subsequent run for president. Yet the program may have reduced the likelihood of such incidents. A report at the time found that the recidivism rate in Massachusetts had dropped in the fifteen years after the program was introduced and that convicts who were furloughed before being released were less likely to go on to commit a crime than those who were not. On balance, then, the world was better—fewer murders and fewer rapes—when the program was in place. But we react empathically to the victims of Horton’s actions, while our empathy is silent when it comes to the individuals who weren’t raped, assaulted, or killed as a result of the program.

Successful therapists and parents have a lot of cognitive empathy, but so too do successful con men, seducers, and torturers.

We do best when we rely on reason.

will argue that our empathy causes us to overrate present costs and underrate future costs.

CHAPTER 2       The Anatomy of Empathy

Godwin’s Law says that as any online discussion proceeds, the odds of someone mentioning Hitler approaches certainty.

One European study tested male soccer fans. The fan would receive a shock on the back of his hand and then watch another man receive the same shock. When the other man was described as a fan of the subject’s team, the empathic neural response—the overlap in self-other pain—was strong. But when the man was described as a fan of the opposing team, it wasn’t.

Jonathan Glover tells of a woman who lived near the death camps in Nazi Germany and who could easily see atrocities from her house, such as prisoners being shot and left to die. She wrote an angry letter: “One is often an unwilling witness to such outrages. I am anyway sickly and such a sight makes such a demand on my nerves that in the long run I cannot bear this. I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds be discontinued, or else be done where one does not see it.”

Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists.

Baron-Cohen claims that, on average, women are higher on empathizing and men are higher on systematizing—an interest in analyzing or constructing systems. Individuals with autism are seen as possessing “extreme male brains,” with an unusual focus on systematizing, which is often reflected in an obsessive focus on domains such as train schedules and jigsaw puzzles, and lower levels of empathizing, which is partially responsible for their difficulties in relating to others.

CHAPTER 3       Doing Good

Often—very often, I will argue—the action that empathy motivates is not what is morally right.

“Empathy-induced altruism is neither moral nor immoral; it is amoral.”

they increased special concern for the target of the empathy, despite the cost to others.

Empathy is not the only facet of our moral lives that has a spotlight nature. Emotions such as anger, guilt, shame, and gratitude are similar. But not all psychological processes are limited in this way.

Other studies compare how we respond to the suffering of one versus the suffering of many.

“the identifiable victim effect.”

“Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths— not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.”

Stalin has been quoted as saying, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” And Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” To the extent that we can recognize that the numbers are significant when it comes to moral decisions, it’s because of reason, not sentiments.

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.

vacation in Aruba and was believed to have been abducted and murdered. He points out that when Holloway went missing, the story of her plight took up far more television time than the concurrent genocide in Darfur.

fascinated by the plight of young children, particularly those who look like us and come from our community.

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.

“Will the world end up rescuing Somalia while ignoring the Sudan mainly because the former proves more photogenic?”

“disaster theory.”

arbitrariness of what we focus on, the way our interests fail to coincide with any reasonable assessment of where help is needed the most or where people can do the most good.

kindness motivated by empathy often has bad effects. It can make the world worse.

As a far more serious issue, consider Western aid to developing nations. It turns out that there is considerable debate over how much of such aid actually helps and a growing consensus that a lot of it has a negative effect.

world contains unscrupulous people who exploit others, so empathy can be strategically triggered for bad ends. Consider orphanages.

‘Pity is a most dangerous emotion,’ said Ou Virak, the founder of a human rights organization in Phnom Penh. ‘Cambodia needs to get out of the beggar mentality. And foreigners need to stop reacting to pure emotion.’

child beggars in the developing world.

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

The Effective Altruists define themselves as: “a growing social movement that combines both the heart and the head.” It’s a good motto. The heart is needed to motivate you to do good; the head is the smarts to figure out how best to make that goodness happen.

We are not psychologically constituted to feel toward a stranger as we feel toward someone we love. We are not capable of feeling a million times worse about the suffering of a million than about the suffering of one.

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.”

Louis CK’s advice about how to have exactly the body you want: “You just have to want a shitty body.

INTERLUDE      The Politics of Empathy

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.”

CHAPTER 4       Intimacy

empathy can also have negative consequences for those who experience it.

distinction between empathy and compassion is critical

Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.”

I am, to some extent, one of these people. I resonate to Dickens’s mockery. I could never take seriously people who refuse to take long flights to see those they love because of worries about contributing to climate change. Or even those who put their children into a public school that they know to be terrible even though they can easily afford a private school, just out of a broader principle of common good. Even when it comes to charity, I am not a good utilitarian. I give far too little to charity, and some of the charities that I do give to, such as Special Olympics, were chosen by accidents of sentiment, not through a thoughtful and impartial calculation. I eat meat. I retain both my kidneys, though I understand that I only need one and there are others who could really use my spare. And so on. Like Asma, and like most everyone I know, I care much more for me and mine than I care for strangers. But my partiality has limits,

MacFarquhar notes that there is something taboo about this question. That someone who “even asks himself how much he should do for his family and how much for strangers—weighing the two together on the same balance—may seem already a step too far.”

Self + Close People + Strangers = 100%

INTERLUDE      Empathy as the Foundation of Morality

“Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed.”

I did it to get peace of mind, don’t you see?”

These explanations assume a nonselfish psychology that underlies these selfish desires.

Without an appreciation of the source of one’s suffering, the shared feeling is morally inert.

CHAPTER 5       Violence and Cruelty

What do they have in common? Rai argues that such acts aren’t the result of sadistic urges, self-interest, or loss of control. Rather, the best explanation relates these acts to morality, to “the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.” It shouldn’t be surprising that morality can incite violence. Morality leads to action; it gets you to stick your nose in other people’s business.

“The SS escort did not hide their amusement at the sight of men and women squatting wherever they could, on the platforms and in the middle of the tracks, and the German passengers openly expressed their disgust: people like this deserve their fate, look at how they behave. These are not Menschen, human beings, but animals, it’s as clear as day.”

After a few minutes of whispered conversation in Tibetan with his team, the Dalai Lama turned back to our group and explained that one should kill Hitler (actually with some ceremonial fanfare, in the way, to mix cultural practices, a Samurai warrior might). It is stopping a bad, a very bad, karmic causal chain. So ‘Yes, kill him. But don’t be angry.’ ”

One set of experiments got people angry by showing them certain films and then asking them to judge appropriate punishments for actions that had nothing to do with what they were watching in the films. Even here, when it made no sense, the angry subjects were more punitive.

CHAPTER 6       Age of Reason

It shows that, to use the nice phrase coined by Sam Harris, each of us is little more than “a biochemical puppet.”

Political views share an interesting property with views about sports teams—they don’t really matter.

They don’t care about truth because, for them, it’s not really about truth.