Against Empathy

This skews our decisions so that if, say, we are faced with a choice where one specific child will die now or twenty children whose names we don’t know will die a year from now, empathy might guide us to choose to save the one. To me, this is a problem with empathy.

“the identifiable victim effect.”

Not Against Empathy but Against the Misapplication of Empathy. Or Empathy Is Not Everything. Or Empathy Plus Reason Make a Great Combination. Empathy is like cholesterol, with a good type and a bad type.

gone too far.

As Fredrik deBoer once put it, “Your haters are your closest readers.”)

as an apologist for psychopathy and predatory capitalism, and people have made unkind speculations about my childhood and personal life.

Boston Review article, one sociologist blogger called me “an intellectual disgrace and moral monster.”

When my New Yorker article went online, I checked out Twitter to

published articles in popular outlets describing earlier versions of these ideas—in The New Yorker (looking at policy issues), the Boston Review (looking at intimate relations), The Atlantic (defending the role of reason, exploring how empathy can motivate violence), and the New York Times (on the problems we have understanding the mental states of others).

product of conversation and criticism.