The case is against empathy as the sole explanation for morality, although it does figure prominently in a comprehensive moral theory.
The New Yorker
The Baby In The Well: The case against empathy
Paul Bloom
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)
3 comments:
Good article, definitively food for thought.
I've though about this a lot of times, and while I agree we as society have a deficit of empathy (and have some serious problems with psychopathic behaviour at responsibility positions and the environment it creates, breeding more of the same behaviour), the article is right and what we lack a lot of is what Rodger would call 'situational awareness' and lack of coordination. The major problem is more a cognitive deficit, and organisational deficit, than an emotional deficit.
But it's complex and there is a lot of unknown stuff going on, because both things are connected. The problem with 'empathy' as an adaptive method is has evolved and works on small and related closed (and close) groups. It works to 'alleviate' some of these cognitive and organisational shortcoming, minimizing the impact of sociopaths in these small closed groups (we used to live for the majority of our history, >150k years); and promoting the right people to the right positions, increasing feedback on how they develop their functions and adjusting to that feedback.
Empathy is very important, the problem is... it cannot reach and fill the gaps open by a developed civilization at a wider scale than the small communal level, where there are limited cognitive resources (individually) and attention capacity to cope with all the related events that may impact the well functioning of society and yourself.
Relying on it alone is not going to fix our problems, and in that the article is right.
P.S: This is way more important than discussing 'economics' or macro-economics (useless), because everything else in based off these foundational issues and mechanisms. There will be no fixing of 'that' until we have fixing of 'this'. That should be very clear by now.
Off course the discourse in economics or in politics stems from these issues, so discussion at these levels will never happen because it is what in the very first place is affecting discourse to go along one line or an other.
P.S: This is way more important than discussing 'economics' or macro-economics (useless), because everything else in based off these foundational issues and mechanisms. There will be no fixing of 'that' until we have fixing of 'this'. That should be very clear by now.
Yes, need to spend more time investigating this. Economics is theory-based and expressed chiefly through model-building. Policy is the result of political economy and that is a lot broader subject than economics, taking into account many different disciplines that are relevant to the issues.
Bloom fails to distinguish empathy from sympathy.
His title is provocative, but problematic, as most of the opposition to empathy is also directed against alleviating suffering such as that in Dafur. Don't encourage the bastards.
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