![]() ![]() 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. 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. ![]() None of his shots are cheap.) As for innumeracy, Bloom points out that it’s really hard to truly empathize with more than one or two people at the same time. ![]() “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.” Throughout Against Empathy, Bloom is fastidious about acknowledging these sorts of caveats and counter-arguments. “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. This interview is an episode from The Well, our new publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the John Templeton Foundation.Subscr. Paul Bloom, psychologist and Yale professor, argues that empathy is a bad thingthat it makes the world worse. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |