Bloom begins by clarifying that he is against emotional empathy as a compass for ethical decision making and goes further to suggest that this may even be harmful in our personal lives. In his book Bloom, a professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University, argues against the usefulness of empathy as it pertains to morality. I hadn’t thought about this encounter with kindly folk on a distant shore in many years, but reading Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion brought it to the front of my mind again.

My parents had each, individually, reached the same moral conclusion, but one was driven more by empathy than the other. I just couldn’t bear the thought of them being upset or afraid.” I’m paraphrasing, of course, but this was the general idea. If I saw a family with a little boy or girl in trouble I’d go help immediately. “Oh, I just think about how it must have looked to them when you got out of the car. It’s the right thing.” “Yes,” my mother said. My dad answered first: “You help people, Chris. Why? I asked my mother and my father this question later that night at the hotel and received two similar, but enlightened and distinct responses. They had no overt obligation to help us and yet they did so. What that couple did for us was a good thing to do, surely a moral thing. After the tow, they refused to accept monetary compensation and even invited us to a barbecue, which my parents politely declined. When it was clear that our car was irreversibly stuck, they headed down to help. They’d been watching us, they said with thinly veiled amusement, from a ridge above the beach. This particular tale ends with a nice local Canadian couple towing us off the beach in their four-wheel-drive truck. A review of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom. She eventually settled on a heady mixture of amusement, frustration, and just a dash of blind rage. My mother, who had been openly critical of the idea of getting anywhere too close to the sand, struggled to determine the appropriate cocktail of emotions to display. After a dozen or so taps of the accelerator and some cheeky attempts to re-angle the tires, the air inside the car reeked of burning rubber and my father, having finally come to terms with our predicament, taught me some new words that became the cornerstone of my adult vocabulary. I’m actually not quite sure why it happened, but I can recall the sudden lurch I felt as we abruptly stopped moving and the shrill squeals of the tires as they spun deeper into the sand. When I was five or six years old, my father somehow managed to get our two-wheel-drive rental car stuck in the middle of a remote Canadian beach.

Paul bloom against empathy review