The mirroring of another’s anguish is not, Bloom would claim, the principal source of kindness, a quality that he is supremely in favour of. He pins his colours to the mast of rational compassion rather than empathy, and it is a central tenet of the book’s argument – I think a correct one – that there exists a confusion in people’s minds about the meaning of the two terms. Indeed, his trenchant stand against empathy is an attempt to encourage us to think more accurately and more effectively about our relationship to our moral terms.
Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardianīloom, it should be said, is not in favour of an indifferent heartlessness. A low score on the empathy index is commonly believed to be a feature of psychopathy, but many psychopaths are supremely able to feel as others feel, which is why they make good torturers.
Indeed, he argues that an ability to intuit another’s feelings might well be an aid to some dubious moral behaviour. Feeling your pain is all well and good but not necessarily the best trigger of an effective moral response. The basis of Bloom’s argument is that fine feelings, like fine words, butter no parsnips. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion is a deliberately maverick work – astringent, provocative, often witty and unabashedly against a prevailing culture that places so high a premium on the virtue of empathy that at least 1,500 books available through Amazon apparently have a version of the word in their title. The remark sets the tone for his latest book. This, he was to discover, was like “being against kittens, a view considered so outlandish that it can’t be serious”. W hen people asked psychology professor Paul Bloom what new project he was working on, he would reply “empathy” – adding the rider that he was “against” it.
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