So caustic were his criticisms, that people might think that Prinz managed to say all there is to say about the potential biases and shortcomings of empathy, but his voice did not remain unheard: a seed was planted, and others would follow his example. In particular, a famous psychologist decided to expand the critique on empathy, even succeeding in reaching laypersons, thanks to influential and powerful articles in magazines, such as The New Yorker (Bloom, 2013a, 2013b) and The Boston Review (Bloom, 2014). At the end of 2016, Paul Bloom released a book intended to provoke stark reactions both in the arena of public opinion and in scholarly research: Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. In this book, Bloom seems to pick up the harsh objections to empathy advanced by Jesse Prinz, making them even stronger and more extensive by using some of the latest research on empathy and compassion, and thereby building powerful criticisms about the connection between empathy and morality. Furthermore, Bloom, as opposed to Prinz, tries to find an alternative to empathy, a fellow-feeling able to overcome all the weaknesses that are inherent in empathy, and he identifies this feeling in what he calls rational compassion.

In this section I am going to review Bloom’s arguments against empathy, as well as his claims about the moral superiority of rational compassion. Once we get the full picture of the anti-empathic perspective, it will be the turn of this book to develop the position it intends to defend regarding the moral role of empathy, a position which, whilst acknowledging some of the deficits attributed to empathy, will also point out the crucial value of empathy within the moral domain.

Now, what are Paul Bloom’s cricisms? Luckily, he himself summarises them right at the beginning of his volume. In his words:

Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people 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 towards others. It is corrosive in personal relationships; it exhausts the spirit and can diminish the force of kindness and love.Footnote 1

Following this structure, we could break down the criticisms of Bloom in six subclasses, namely: (1) empathy as a spotlight; (2) empathy as biased; (3) empathy as short-sighted; (4) empathy as innumerate; (5) empathy as sparking violence; (6) empathy as corrosive. However, at closer inspection, (3) and (4) seem to be strongly connected with (1): empathy is short-sighted because it focuses on the hic et nunc, and it is innumerate, because spotlights can hardly be addressed to multitudes: they work at best with single individuals. Subclass (5), too, is a direct consequence of (2): basically, since we feel more empathy with people of my in-group, we might, out of empathy for them, attack others whom we regard as outsiders. Taking all of this into consideration and, for the sake of clarity and conciseness, I will divide Bloom’s criticisms in three categories:

  1. 1.

    Empathy as a spotlight.

  2. 2.

    Empathy as biased.

  3. 3.

    Empathy as corrosive.

1 Empathy as a Spotlight

Paul Bloom has a very plain and straightforward definition of empathy, but on balance I find it also correct, thought-provoking, and very much in accordance with mine (at least with the high-level form of this phenomenon): ‘Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.’Footnote 2

This feature of empathy, that of coming to see the world with the eyes of someone else, is for Bloom an extraordinary power of empathy, but it comes at a cost: not only is it fallible (we experience the world as we think someone else does and not exactly like them) but, in order to function, it needs what we could call the ‘spotlight effect’. In other words, empathy, exactly like a spotlight on stage, illuminates a small, clearly outlined piece of the general scenario; it does not embrace the ‘big picture’, but focuses on a single person, a certain act, and gives it predominance. This signifies a substantial problem in a world where people in need are extremely numerous and often live in distant, foreign lands. Many times, the only way we have to get acquainted with their suffering is through the news or statistical data, and none of these sources of information seem especially apt to favour a spotlight effect and thereby properly elicit empathy. Hence, empathy turns out to be disappointingly narrow.Footnote 3 Furthermore, the spotlight nature of empathy is a structural characteristic (and, for Bloom, also a shortcoming) that does not only make empathy narrow in terms of space (the one single person as opposed to the multitude, the one single action as opposed to the general context, for example) but also in terms of time. In fact, the here and now focus of empathy can hardly take into account the effect of actions that are diffused, perhaps delayed, and in any case difficult to compute. Sometimes helping a person in the here and now can have deleterious consequences in the future. Some other times the (empathic) desire of helping an individual can lead us to carry out an action that is less preferable than others. Remember the old adage: ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime’? Paul Bloom is convinced that the spotlight nature of empathy—prone to kinds of solutions that have an immediate impact—would create a legion of ‘fish-givers’ and not of ‘fish-teachers’. What is more, Bloom believes, exactly like Prinz,Footnote 4 that this spotlight nature that empathy has is inevitable: there is no way to overcome it, nor to enlarge this spotlight by pushing ourselves to feel more and more empathy for an increasing greater number of people:

Intellectually, we can value the lives of all these individuals; we can give them weight when we make decisions. But what we can’t do is empathize with all of them. Indeed, you cannot empathize with more than one or two people at the same time.Footnote 5

Paul Bloom does not offer any kind of psychological study in support of what it seems is a very dogmatic assertion, nevertheless, I would not brand this move as unjustified. After all, it is quite hard to think of a possible psychological experiment that can prove (or disprove) this statement. Perhaps, this is one of those cases in which the authority of a mental experiment is more than sufficient to prove the point and this is exactly Bloom’s strategy. It seems impossible, for instance, to empathise at the same time with people feeling different emotions: one cannot feel the jealousy of Amy, the happiness of Paul, and the anger of Liza all at the same time. But it looks impossible to feel simultaneously the same kind of emotion of different people, too, even if they are people you know very well. Imagine what it would look like to empathise, at the same time, with the sadness of your best friend who is going through a rough divorce, that of your grandfather who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and that of your little niece who cannot find her favourite toy. Does it appear implausible to you? That is because it is.Footnote 6

However, there is more. Empathy for Bloom does not only work better with the one as opposed to the many; it even puts the one at centre stage at the expenses of the many: it diverts our attention, impeding us from seeing the many.Footnote 7

2 Empathy as Biased

What does Paul Bloom intend to say, when he states that empathy is ‘biased’? Does he mean that empathy is intrinsically biased or that the empathy we are capable of reflects our biases? Both, it seems.Footnote 8 Empathy is inherently biased, because its spotlight nature makes it short-sighted, innumerate, narrow, for example, but empathy is also biased on account of the fact that our biases guide the direction of the spotlight itself. In other words, if we tend to empathise more with people we know, or who live in our proximity, or who are similar to us, as opposed to, say, people from distant lands and stemming from different cultural and ethnical backgrounds, this occurs partly because empathy works better under proximity and similarity conditions and partly as a result of previous biases we have towards certain kinds of people. Hence, the employment of empathy is never neutral. Instead, it follows from the very beginning the biases which are already present in us, like a pair of glasses that we permanently wear which put some elements in a favourable light and others less so.

All these biases affecting empathy bring it to be, for Bloom, an essentially parochial phenomenon: we are prone to being more empathetic towards subjects of our in-group and much less towards outsiders.Footnote 9 Of course, if empathy really mirrors and enhances our prejudices, it is hard to see in it a moral force, but there is another more worrisome consequence that is strictly tied to the inherently biased character of empathy, and it is the fact that parochialism and prejudices can lead to divisions, undue generalisations, and discrimination, and all these phenomena often bring about violence.Footnote 10

For example, if I am more empathic towards people belonging to group A (it can be something trivial like a football team, but also something like a common nationality, religion, or ethnic background) than to people within group B, it seems safe to affirm that I will be more partial and ready to justify a certain degree of violence against group B, if this should favour group A or prevent it from undergoing negative consequences. But even if that were not the case (suppose I am an extremely peaceful person who abhors any kind of violence, no matter how capable I am of empathising with the different parties within a competition), I would nonetheless be more disposed to justify (or forgive) certain (violent) acts if they happen to come from the party I favour. This can occur even on a large scale. Think, for instance, of the empathic wave which followed the attack of 9.11. What appears (nowadays as well as at that time) as a simple truism was repeated ad nauseam. The support on the part of American public opinion for a military intervention in Iraq would never have been possible without the thoughts of the American population constantly turning to the victims of the terrorist attack. Once a martyr (the people who died in the Twin Towers) and a common enemy (the Islamic fundamentalists) were found, it was easy for the phenomenon of empathy to occur ‘on track’, to feel for the people who lost their loved ones in the attack, and to dehumanise, not only the perpetrators of that horrible act, but entire neutral categories per se: the Arabs, the Muslims, the people of the Middle East, and those similar.

If one finds it surprising that empathy can be linked to violence, it is only because we are used to thinking of good acts as driven by empathy and ‘good sentiments’ in general and evil ones as stemming from a lack of empathy and humanity. But the truth is, for Bloom, that empathy can often be at the base of antithetic actions and sustain both sides in battle. In his words:

When scholars think about atrocities, such as the lynchings of blacks in the American South or the Holocaust in Europe, they typically think of hatred and racial ideology and dehumanization, and they are right to do so. But empathy also plays a role. Not empathy for those who are lynched or put into the gas chambers, of course, but empathy that is sparked by stories told about innocent victims of these hated groups, about white women raped by black men or German children preyed upon by Jewish paedophiles.Footnote 11

The conclusion, these being the premises, is crystal-clear: if empathy is incapable of overcoming our prejudices and changing the way we think, if the only effect empathy has is that of confirming and reinforcing our own biases, then empathy must not be taken into account as a guide for moral action.

3 Empathy as Corrosive

The final great argument fielded by Paul Bloom against the supposed moral role of empathy is that concerning its corrosiveness. This argument is quite interesting, since it does not focus on the negative consequences that empathy can have on others within an ethical context (its spotlight nature, its biases, and so on) but on the detrimental effects it can have on the empathiser herself. Hence, even if one were still convinced of the centrality of empathy in the moral sphere, one should refrain to make use of it at least because of its intrinsic harmfulness. The question is now what kind of (corrosive) harm can empathy cause?

Paul Bloom identifies the corrosiveness of empathy in the phenomenon he calls empathic distress,Footnote 12 described elsewhere as vicarious distress and personal distress. There are several studies which have focused on this potentially very negative feature of empathy,Footnote 13 but despite the slightly different terminologies they employ (Helgeson and Fritz refer to it with the label of ‘unmitigated communion’), the phenomenon they take into consideration is the same: it is the empathic experience of another subject’s state of distress. What all these pieces of research have investigated is the fact that by imagining our being in the distressful situation of another person who is suffering in some way, we can arouse in ourselves the same emotions that they have, and this can easily be overwhelming. If empathy is strong enough, the empathiser will not just picture in their mind the suffering of the target, but they will feel, to a certain degree, the same sorrow. As the above-mentioned experiments of Batson et al. show, empathic distress will lead to the opposite of altruism: the subject will be incapable of helping or they will even refrain from helping the other in need and will instead try to escape from the situation. Bloom uses the words of a surgeon to explain this phenomenon:

If, while listening to the grieving mother’s raw and unbearable description of her son’s body in the morgue, I were to imagine my own son in his place, I would be incapacitated. My ability to attend to my patient’s psychiatric needs would be derailed by my own devastating sorrow.Footnote 14

Empathy seems to bring the empathiser to be dangerously vulnerable towards others. The empathiser—so Bloom—would lose too much of their autonomy and would precariously be at the mercy of the emotions aroused in the targets of their empathy. This is why Paul Bloom, together with a strong emphasis on the centrality of consequentialist principles, suggests that morality should be guided (if fellow-feelings must play a role in morality at all) by what he coins rational compassion.

4 Rational Compassion

What exactly is rational compassion? Bloom develops this particular kind of fellow-feeling using the work of Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer and by contrasting it with empathy.Footnote 15 Rational compassion should offer the perfect alternative to empathy, as it possesses (so it seems) all its advantages, but is at the same time free from its shortcomings. Rational compassion does not involve the mirroring of any feeling, but rather, calm and warm feelings of care and affiliation: ‘In contrast to empathy’, write Klimecki and Singer, ‘compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s well-being’.Footnote 16

One of the conclusions that seem warranted from all these recent pieces of research is that empathy should not be seen as the only emotional or sentimental source we can rely on for motivational purposes when dealing with the active practice of morality. Compassion, as opposed to empathy, seems in fact to imply a tighter connection with helping behaviour (after all, when I feel for someone, in contrast to feel with someone, I am already thinking of myself as somebody who can actively do something for the others and not as a mere passive ‘receptor’ of their feelings).

These conclusions seem to find important confirmation in the studies conducted by Klimecki and Singer with the Buddhist monk and neuroscientist Matthieu Ricard. Basically, Ricard was subjected to a series of fMRI examinations during which he had to engage in two different types of meditation: in the first instance, Ricard had to employ compassion meditation, whereas in the second, he had to carry out an empathic kind of meditation.Footnote 17 These meditative acts were conducted while watching videos depicting other people suffering. This series of studies served to show a few interesting discoveries, which were then replicated in subsequent experiments of the same kind involving a group of 25 women out of 30 participants.Footnote 18 First of all, Klimecki and Singer demonstrated that empathy training (intended as ‘resonating with other people’s suffering’)Footnote 19 and compassion training led to the activation of different areas of the brain: empathy elicited the activation of neurons in the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex (among others), whereas compassion activated parts like the medial orbitofrontal cortex and the ventral striatum. This is something noteworthy, since it shows, in principle, that there is a neurological difference between compassion and empathy; they are, in other words, two different neurological mechanisms.

But there is something of even greater significance for Bloom’s purposes, and it is the way empathy training and compassion training, respectively, impacted on the participants’ psychology. It appears, in fact, from the experiments that empathy training induced ‘a stronger sharing of painful and distressing experiences’ in the participants, whereas compassion training counteracted this effect by increasing positive affect and decreasing negative affect to baseline levels.Footnote 20 Bloom chooses to cite the even more affecting words of Ricard to prove his point: ‘The empathic sharing […] very quickly became intolerable to me and I felt emotionally exhausted, very similar to being burned out. […] I felt so drained after the empathic resonance.’Footnote 21

To sum up, not only is empathy deleterious for morality (which, as repeated by Bloom many times in his book, should be based on consequentialist principles), it even loses the challenge with other types of fellow-feelings, in particular with compassion. Nevertheless, several neuroscientists and psychologists are of the opinion that it is not possible to feel compassion without first feeling affective empathy and that affective empathy works as a precursor to compassion.Footnote 22 If that turned out to be true, then empathy would be necessary, if not for morality itself, at least as a necessary component of compassion, and given the valuable role that compassion seems to play in moral behaviour (a role that even Bloom has not dared to deny) then empathy would be saved.

Not surprisingly, Bloom does not share this view. There are, in fact, cases in which we care for people and help them (which for Bloom constitutes compassion in its essence) without need to engage in affective empathy. Think, for instance, of the situation where you help a child who is afraid without thereby feeling their fear, such as when you reassure a child scared of the dark. Or when you feel concern and try to support a person who is suffering from a disease you have never had, like rheumatoid arthritis, and without experiencing their suffering in the slightest. Hence, if we can be concerned and worry about others without empathy, if we can help with no empathy, if, in short, we can act morally and be moral persons with no empathy, then empathy really is unnecessary for morality. Or maybe not.