But I’ll grant that people don’t always know what’s best for them, and commisery is definitely an easy state to fall into if not the best one. I’m not sure this is always true, or at least not obviously so, since commiseration is a common thing. The exact opposite is probably more helpful: being a calm sounding board or an upbeat entertainer. He points out that when a friend comes to you anxious or depressed, she doesn’t want you to be anxious or depressed too. I was particularly interested in Bloom’s claims that empathy is pretty exhausting, and that it can produce adverse outcomes. Bloom believes that we can be rationally compassionate even where we don’t empathize-giving others’ concerns weight or value without taking their emotions on-and that this is a more reliable guide for moral reasoning. In particular, it’s used in moral reasoning, where it can get you bad results, because 1) empathy doesn’t scale well-it’s hard to empathize with more than one person at a time-and 2) empathy is super biased-it’s easier to feel for family and friends or fellow white people or whatever, biases which we don’t necessarily want to appear in our moral reasoning.Įmpathy is not to be confused with understanding, which can be and often is dissociated with empathy. The gist is that empathy is about feeling what other folks feel, and while this is a tool appropriate for certain, limited circumstances, it’s often used for the wrong ones. I probably will, but since I’m in the middle of reading eight hundred other things, I made do with this Vox interview. I’ve heard about Paul Bloom’s book, and from more than one reader that I ought to check it out. I’m sure this has been discussed before here, but I don’t recall seeing anything.
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