It can distract us from rational thought and meaningful compassion.
Excerpted from article by
“Empathy is bad” sounds more like trolling than a substantive argument … If I’m honest with myself, despite having a great deal of respect for Bloom as a writer and thinker, I went into Against Empathy eagerly anticipating the holes I’d be able to poke in it.
The holes didn’t materialize. Instead, over the course of a brisk 250 pages, [Paul] Bloom laid out what really does feel like a tough-to-crack case against an idea that most of us have long known is key to repairing the world.
As Bloom points out early in the book, there are many subtly different definitions of empathy, so he goes with this one: “Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does”. His critique of empathy centers most notably on two of its features: empathy has a “spotlight effect” and entails a certain “innumeracy.” The two ideas aren’t wholly distinct. The spotlight effect simply refers to the fact that the act of feeling someone else’s pain causes us to zoom in on that pain and want to do something about it, often at the expense of other, more important causes. When, to take a real-life example Bloom invokes, the Make-A-Wish Foundation spent thousands of dollars to let a terminally ill child be Batman for a day in San Francisco, that was the spotlight effect: The focus on a single child’s suffering (and joy) led good people to spend a sum that could, put to more efficient use, save many lives. (This argument only holds, of course, under the assumption that had those donations not gone to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, they could have gone to some other worthy cause. Throughout Against Empathy, Bloom is fastidious about acknowledging these sorts of caveats and counter-arguments. None of his shots are cheap.)
Empathy is not just “the imagined ability to feel someone else’s feelings”. It just the same as love is an action word. When we act in a way that displays empathy rather than a lack-there-of. For example allowing an elderly woman to have the seat on a bus while you stand is empathy in action. A lack of empathy on the other hand is allowing someone who possibly suffers from arthritis joint and hip pain on top of other types of illnesses that come with age to stand even though you are healthy strong and able bodied just simply because you don’t have the ability to empathize. Empathy is built with practice by acting on feelings of empathy. Those who lack the ability to empathize can’t practice empathy because they simply lack the ability which is referred to as narcissism. A dangerously over used term these days. Only a mental healthcare professional can diagnose this disorder and it isn’t very common. This article is misguided and not factually based. The ability to think and act rationally has nothing to do with empathy.