The Case for Rational Compassion

And the need to develop critical feeling

Paul Bloom a decade ago wrote a book called “Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion”, which, among other things, attempted to discern when empathy helps us and when it doesn’t. This piece paraphrases the book and offers some commentary.

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Many people use empathy exclusively in positive contexts — they say empathy is all about kindness, love, morality, and making the world a better place. The implication is that a good person can do good things by putting themselves in someone else's shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, and feeling their pain or pleasure. Oftentimes, it does!

But not always. Empathy is a spotlight, zooming you in on specific people and problems. And that’s a good thing when we focus on the right people and problems. But the truth is we often lose touch with what’s meaningful to care about. As we’ll explain, empathy can be innumerate, irrational, and narrow-minded. 

Empathy is Innumerate

Since empathy is innumerate, it has trouble prioritizing groups over individuals, especially when the latter are named. This is why we spend more time worrying about an individual missing child than large scale genocides in other countries. As an example: If you show someone a photo of a named individual and ask them to feel empathy for that single person, most people want to help the person in the photo. But if you show someone a group of unnamed people suffering, most people struggle to feel the same empathy for an unnamed group of people than they’d give to that specific named individual.

Hundreds of years ago, Adam Smith wrote a parable that (adapted for a modern context) goes something like this: Imagine you knew you were going to lose your little finger tomorrow. And then imagine opening up Twitter and seeing that hundreds of people died in a country you've never heard of. The Twitter news will upset you less, even if it’s orders of magnitude worse.

Empathy is short-sighted

It's because of misplaced empathy that if someone gets sick from a vaccine, the FDA will shut down its production because it's easier to empathize with someone’s suffering, even if that vaccine happens to be saving dozens (if not millions) of lives. This is the same reason why there’s so much resistance to self-driving cars, even though we’d likely prevent millions of car accidents with their adoption. Of course you could feel tremendous empathy for the family of someone who died from a drug or a self-driving car accident, but it’s much harder to empathize with a statistical abstraction of people who would have died, but, thanks to the drug or self-driving car, they didn’t. This is another case where empathy leads us astray. Not only prioritizing individuals over groups, but by also prioritizing the harm that happened over the harm you avoided.

Empathy also often enables the case for violence and war. Whenever a democratic country goes to war, like the United States, they'll tell stories about suffering victims that need to be saved through the war. Take any recent war the U.S. has fought, for example: from Iraq, to ISIS, to Al Queda, each war began with stories of atrocities committed by our opponents to drum up the desire for war. To be sure, sometimes war is a good thing, and sometimes it isn’t. But an obsessive focus on victims can easily be exploited for nefarious ends. Nazis used the suffering of German children at the hand of the Jews to motivate the Holocaust. When Hitler argued for an invasion of Poland, he didn't say, “Oh, we’re going rule the world.” Instead, he said, “Our German citizens in Poland are being abused and murdered,” describing the scene in ways that would make you feel for them too.  

People sometimes think empathy will stop violence. But misplaced empathy often inspires it — because when you truly feel just how much someone was wronged, you often seek revenge. Conversely, the more empathetically detached you are, the less delirious of revenge you are. So it’s not empathy that stops violence — if anything, it’s self-control, or the ability to reign in our impulses and appetites that curbs it.

Empathy can not only be misguided from a macro perspective; it’s sometimes misguided in our personal lives too. Sometimes we gain empathy for the wrong people, specifically those who’ve caused some harm. For example, Norman Lear created the character Archie Bunker with the intent to criticize a racist bigot. But to Norman’s shock, Archie became a folk hero in American TV. 

Similarly, one could imagine feeling empathy for mass murderers, whose childhoods are plagued by abuse and other struggles no fault of their own. Indeed: When you zoom in close enough on an individual, either literally or metaphorically, you start to empathize with them. It’s a human feature and a bug — the more you empathize with someone, the more you’re likely to excuse their behavior. It’s a feature when it’s 99% of the population, but it’s a bug when abusive people take advantage of other people’s empathy to get what they want. 

How misplaced empathy bred communism

To give an extreme example, the power of weaponized empathy can explain how the world became obsessed with communism. 

In the 1930s, Entryism was a communist strategy where activists burrowed into an existing democratic organization and used the organization's own values and rules against it in order to take it over.

In its simplest form, Entryists used arguments like, “If you care about X, why can’t you care even more? Oh, you don’t care that much? Well then you must be a hypocrite.”

Or: "How can you say you care about equality if you don't have equal outcomes at all levels of the organization? How can you have equality of opportunity if parents have different wealth and thus opportunities to provide to their children….Do you care about equality of opportunity or not?" This is how people took an amazing concept like equality of opportunity and turned it into communism. 

If you read all their open letters, most communists had the same thing in common: They appealed to the values that the organization itself has already espoused. And then the leaders of that organization panicked at the thought that they’ll be viewed as not caring about equality.

So if you concede a concept like “equality of opportunity” (as opposed to, say, *sufficient* opportunity for all), then you’re just the person who doesn’t think it’s important enough to fix. You lose out of the gate. You’re a Trotskyite in 1932.

“Well,” you could say, “We need profound social change, just not *that* extreme.”

“Then how can you say that with all the inequality you see around you?” would reply the communist, “Obviously you're not in favor of equitable distribution *enough*.

Remember — the Communists hated the Trotskyists even more than they hated the Nazis. And then what happened to Trotsky…? Yep. Exactly.

This may be easier to understand using Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory; empathetic institutions have the normal liberal moral foundations of Care and Fairness deeply wired into their values, processes, and operations. Entryism hijacks those foundations and demands that you Care more and be Fairer — and empathetic institutions just can't resist that temptation. They’re always looking to swing the pendulum further in their direction.

Thus, the paradox of tolerance is the paradox of empathy — you empathize with the same people who use your empathy to get whatever they want, and your empathy prevents you from pushing back. If there’s no limiting principle, you just keep giving in until you can’t anymore. 

Zooming back to a more quotidian example, this phenomenon happens with parents too. Parents can’t give in to all their children’s demands, even though they constantly solicit bids for empathy. If they did, their children would turn into spoiled brats. Parents have to override their short-term empathetic urges in order to be compassionate in the long-term. 

The same is true with doctors and therapists. We want them to be caring and kind and understanding, sure. But we don’t want them to put themselves in our shoes and feel our pain. If they did feel our pain, they wouldn’t be able to do their jobs because they’d be so overwhelmed. Imagine if you saw your surgeon while anxious and your surgeon mirrored your same level of anxiety. You don’t want them to feel your pain, you want them to make you better. 

Just like our parents, we want our doctor to have some emotional distance from us so they can be critical and clinical in their decisions and recommendations. 

To that end, it’s worth disentangling empathy from rational compassion: Empathy is putting ourselves in other people’s shoes and feeling their pain. Rational compassion is caring for other people while detaching yourself from feeling their pain. The latter is more sustainable, and can’t be hijacked as easily.

Paul Bloom detailed a study on the difference between empathy and rational compassion: participants were given fMRI scans while engaging in empathic meditation. They were asked to think of another person’s suffering, to really feel what they may feel themselves. Then they were asked to do compassion meditations, without putting themselves in someone else’s shoes. This is what we know as mindfulness meditation, and it makes you kinder and more tolerant, especially towards strangers. 

An excess of empathy can be emotionally exhausting; it’s unpleasant, it’s difficult, and it makes you want to withdraw. On the other hand, compassion is exhilarating. It’s often seen as a positive experience, not to mention it makes you more likely to help those who are suffering.

Even in our personal lives, we don’t want our friends to truly empathize with us. We really just want them to understand us. Loving somebody doesn’t mean sharing their suffering; your goal is to rid your loved one of their sorrows, not dwell on the negativity.

To be clear, empathy is essential and enriching. There are times where having someone feel your pain can be exactly what you need, and when doing so for someone else is uniformly rewarding.

One of the joys of having children, or so I hear, is being able to take experiences you’ve had 100 times before and experience them all over again, for the first time through the eyes of another person. 

And to be sure, a dearth of empathy is even scarier than an excess of empathy. Context matters too. It’s possible Paul’s book wouldn’t make sense in most other times in history. So the point of this piece (and Paul’s book) isn’t to be against empathy, despite what the book title suggests. The point instead is to say that empathy is a tool in the toolkit, but not the whole toolkit—and like any tool, we should be mindful regarding its misuses and excesses.

It’s to say that empathy, on its own, is often a poor moral guide. It's blind, it’s innumerate, it’s exhausting, and it can be weaponized by the 1% to ruin communities and institutions for the remaining 99%. 

While appreciating all the benefits empathy provides, we must also appreciate that while it's empathy that causes me to favor somebody from my country over a stranger, or to favor a specific individual over an unnamed group, or to focus on the person dying from a self-driving car accident vs all the lives saved in the process—it's rationality that leads me to say, “Hey, that's unreasonable. It's not fair. It's not impartial. And it’s going to hurt the very people I want to help” 

In conclusion, empathy is a tool, which can be used for both good and for bad. We should harness its good parts while being self-aware of where it leads us astray. The ability to do that we can think of as “critical feeling”. While we learn critical thinking from a young age, we don’t really learn critical feeling. Our emotions often overpower our reason, however strong our critical thinking skills happen to be. Threading that needle is what rational compassion is all about.

Until next week,

Erik