Making Sense with Sam Harris - #14 — The Virtues of Cold Blood

Episode Date: July 29, 2015

Sam Harris speaks with psychologist Paul Bloom about the limitations of empathy as a guide to moral reasoning. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm going to be speaking with Paul Bloom. Paul is the Brooks and Suzanne Reagan Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. He's published more than 100 scientific articles in journals such as Science and Nature. He's the editor of BBS, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which is a great journal. And he often publishes in the popular press, in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, etc. He's won

numerous awards. And he has a book, Just Babies, The Origins of Good and Evil, which I highly recommend. I've always really enjoyed my conversations with Paul, and it was a pleasure to get him on the podcast. And if you enjoy our conversation, please let us know about it. Twitter is probably the best place for that, and please copy Paul on that communication. He gives his Twitter address at the end of the podcast. And if you think we're dangerous morons, well then feel free to tell us that. We can take it.

But generally speaking, it's very helpful if you spread the word about the podcast on social media, and it's especially helpful if you review it on iTunes. I know as a consumer of these things, it's not immediately obvious why that would be so, but I can tell you as a producer of one, reviews are extremely helpful. So if you can bear it, please take a moment to write a sentence or two about the podcast and post that on iTunes. That would be much appreciated. And without any more fine print, I now give you Paul Bloom. Bloom. Well, I now have Paul Bloom on the line, notorious Yale psychologist. Hey, Paul, how you doing? I'm doing well. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. Well, thank you for coming on the podcast. Notorious, huh? Yes, notorious for attacking empathy of late, which has been a surprise to many people. I want to get into that, but before we do,

I want to just back up and introduce you to listeners who may not be totally familiar with your work. What have you focused on and what are you focusing on these days before we get into your recent controversial views on empathy? So I've worked on a range of different issues in my research career. I sort of have a bit of an academic deficit disorder with regard to my research focus. So I worked on language learning, religious belief, pleasure, and most of all over the last several years, morality. So I completed a book, Just Babies, on the origins of morality. And recently I've become interested in more normative questions of how we can be moral people. We can make the best moral judgments and do the best moral actions. So this brought me to look at debates over the relative merits and our capacity for reason,

issues about compassion and care, and in particular, issues about empathy. So my next book, which is still being written, is going to in particular issues about empathy. So my next book, which is still being written, is going to be a critique of empathy. It's tentatively called Against Empathy, and I've written some articles exploring that. So that's sort of a natural offshoot of my broader interests in moral cognition. That's a great title. So I think we'll want to get into the larger question of a scientific understanding of morality as well, because as you know, that's an area of interest of mine. And

I think it's an area where we don't totally agree, if I'm not mistaken. So that could be interesting. But you've spent a lot of time doing, I guess, what would be called developmental psychology. I'm wondering, you're a parent, I'm wondering if your understanding of the human mind in those terms has affected your parenting. Is there anything in science that has affected the way you operate in the world in that domain? Almost nothing. I mean, my kids now are teenagers, one's off to university, and reflecting on it, none of my interactions, nothing I've done with them has been influenced by either my own research or everything I've known about psychology. The reason for the almost is I feel my psychological training

has given me, I think, healthy skepticism about what psychologists have to say about child rearing. Right. So, you know, you have kids, and, you know, there's so many choice points. You know, sleeping in a separate bed, sleeping with you, what sort of punishment, what sort of discipline, a range of problems. And psychologists weigh in enthusiastically on all of them. And being a psychologist myself, I know, for the most part, we don't know what we're talking about. know for the most part, we don't know what we're talking about. And for the most part, kids are pretty resilient. So, you know, if you love your

kid, if you don't do anything grotesquely wrong, your kid will turn out the way your kid turns out. Let's back up there. What do you make of that fact that science has not informed your life in that respect? Because I share your incorrigibility or disregard of science, and although it's not the result of being especially close to those particular data, is it really just that you feel like we don't know anything of substance that's actionable for a parent, or is it just that it's too hard to bring that kind of understanding online when you're in the trenches being a parent?

How do you explain the fact that you wind up parenting more or less exactly the way you would parent if you were a non-scientist? Yeah, I think it's parents are intensely interested in the data and very willing to act upon it. I think too willing to act upon it, too willing to take psychologists seriously. I think too willing to act upon it, too willing to take psychologists seriously. I think the problem is your option one, which is we just don't know much about development or what makes people happy or healthy. I don't want to exaggerate it. Certain things around the edges, we do know. There's some, I think, useful, narrow techniques for helping your kid get to sleep and dealing

with certain crises. Certainly, you know, issues about food and allergies. And we have some interesting tidbits and local facts that are useful. But the broader question everybody wants to know, which is how do I raise my kid to be a good, happy, successful, healthy kid? We just don't know. And it's not for lack of trying. kid. We just don't know. And it's not for lack of trying. In general, I'm very enthusiastic about my field. And I've written popular books trying to extend the insights from my field to broader questions that interest a lot of people, like how does pleasure work? Or why do people have religious belief? But I'll confess that for many of the most important domains of our lives,

religious belief. But I'll confess that for many of the most important domains of our lives, we've come up with very, very little. And is that just a larger statement about how hard it is to understand the human mind in truly scientific terms? Yeah, I think psychology has turned out to be a much more difficult field than physics or chemistry or the harder sciences. I don't think psychologists are stupider than physicists or chemists. I just think the problems have turned out to be more difficult. I think to some extent we're in a pre-Papernican phase in psychology. We're waiting to turn into a full-fledged science.

And the problem I think is most urgent for domains like health and happiness and success over more specific narrow problems like visual perception or motor control or short-term memory. There, the science gets done. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, Jerry Fodor had something, his first law of cognitive science. Jerry Fodor had something, his first law of cognitive science. This isn't quite it, but my memory of it was the more intuitively interesting something is, the less we know about it. So there's a form of sticker shock. I teach intro psych, and people coming in want to know questions like, why are some people mentally ill? What could I do to be happier? Why do people change their minds about things? And what I tell them is the best science we have, which is on problems like color vision and amnesia, long-term memory, and language processing. We know the most about what intuitively matters the least. I'm not sure whether this is some sort of, you know, savage law of the universe, or just reflects the fact that the problems that we're most

interested in are just the hardest to resolve. I think there is a savage law of the universe in a related sense. It actually may connect with Fodor's law, which is that we have obviously not been designed by evolution to understand our circumstance in any deep sense. Our common sense intuitions about how things work are applicable within the domain of hurling rocks in parabolic arcs at one another and moving at the speed at which apes move. So when you get down to the very small in physics or the very large in cosmology, our intuitions are obviously at odds with what we're discovering to be true. And I think that may be true with the brain. It's certainly true with the significance of information processing or even the fact that information processing is a thing that can be studied.

And so our intuitions about what is interesting also is part of that picture. I was having a conversation with the physicist Max Tegmark recently, who's done some very interesting work in cosmology, among other areas. And we were talking about this, and he made this point, which is kind of a stronger version of a point that I just made, which I thought was interesting, because he said that it's not only not surprising that what we find to be true violates our intuitions, it should be expected. If we take evolution seriously, that our cognitive toolkit has evolved for a certain domain

and has not at all been constrained by the way reality is altogether, we should expect the truth to be deeply counterintuitive and we should be distrustful of explanations that mesh well with our common sense. And I think that is probably true across the board. It probably doesn't just apply to things like quantum mechanics and cosmology, but it may apply to areas much closer to your area of interest, for instance, normative solutions to moral problems. We have not evolved to function well in a group of 7 billion people trying to run a global economy and solve civilizational problems. We have evolved in small bands of hunter-gatherers and are tuned to the social challenges we encounter in those

circumstances. So this may be a bridge from where we just were to talk about things like empathy and morality, but I just want to get your reaction to that. Right. I think the point is exactly right, and it highlights both the similarities and the differences between psychology and a field like physics. So in both cases, we have these bedrock foundational intuitions that have evolved through natural selection. For physics, it's middle-sized objects that move in certain ways. For psychology, it's people, beliefs, and desires. And so the question is, how come we made so much success in physics, where we have quantum theory, we have cosmology? We understand the very big and the very

small, and not the equivalent success in psychology. And one answer could be what we're talking about before. The problems in psychology are simply, in some way, harder. Another issue, though, is something which has been raised by the evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmetes, which is that our intuitions might blind us in certain ways that make psychology hard to do. So we have what she calls instinct blindness, which is the sense which is that if something is psychologically natural, it seems to sort of not need explanation and doesn't benefit from explanation. You know, if you take something very simple, which we can explain, which is why people love their children. And, you know, that's evolution 101.

People have evolved to love their children for a sort of standard functional reason. And we could talk about where in the brain this capacity is. We talk about what triggers it and what doesn't trigger it. But my experience is if you say these things, which I think is a rather trivial and fairly obvious example, people find it almost repellent. And so, you know, a lot of psychology, I think, runs against the problem that people don't want to hear it. It doesn't seem right. It seems to sort of violate certain sacred intuitions that we might have. Let's linger on that point for a second, because that is a difference, obviously,

between psychology and physics. So what's going on there? Do you think it's just when you say that, when you give any kind of, quote, reductive explanation for something like love, do you think the message that people draw is that they don't really love their children or that love isn't really important or what's happening there? I think there's two things that might be independent or might be connected. One is they don't think this needs an explanation. I see this in many realms. People, you know, I tell people, well, I study why certain things, why people think killing is wrong. And they look at me and say, well, duh, of course killing is wrong.

There's a waste of taxpayer dollars. Exactly. And you say, you say you're a professor and, you know, and, and I used to say, I, you know, I study, you know, why do people enjoy orgasm and chocolate? And people laugh because it's obvious, of course we do. And it needs tremendous, you need to be, I think William James talked about it, said you need to be an almost depraved person to want to explain these things, to go beyond a common sense intuition. So problem one is that people, it takes a lot of work to get people to understand that these are contingent facts. If we were wired up differently, if evolution were differently, we would want to eat our children, not love them.

We would have sex with trees and not people. So you have to explain how things work out. So that's one problem. I think the second problem really is, I think people find it almost morally repellent to dig in to these questions, particularly for moral questions. And actually, particularly for a question I think which has occupied you a lot more than it's occupied me, and you contribute a lot to this, which is when it comes to spiritual or religious matters. If you tell people you're

interested in why people believe in God or believe in an afterlife, they immediately run to the inference that you're attacking these beliefs and that there's something wrong with the enterprise. Yeah, yeah. So I interrupted you there with the inhomogeneity or the lack of analogy between psychology and physics. So apart from the bad vibe that people get when you start explaining prominent features of the human mind, explaining prominent features of the human mind, there's this sense that not only is it wrong or somehow unsavory to reduce these cherished mental states to something biological, there's a sense that it's just superfluous. These things don't have to be explained. I guess some people do have this attitude toward things like gravity, but in terms of our living, we don't feel like we need to explain it. But there's no real resistance to the enterprise of physics when you think about

an open-ended search for explanation. That's right. So for whatever reason, obvious physical facts don't meet with the same objection. I think maybe throughout history, at some point when somebody says, I'm interested in why things fall to the ground rather than fly into the air, other people laughed and said, it's obvious, you know, why would you question such a thing? But we don't do that now. We understand these are good questions. And more to the point that there aren't typically the moral implications for it. Nobody feels threatened if you say you're studying gravity or, you know, or energy or mass. Well, if you say you're studying gravity or energy or mass. Well, if you say you're studying love or religion or morality, it gets people scarred up. I mean,

maybe there's a case to be made that it should get people scarred up. Maybe a lot of society runs on certain things not being questioned and not being challenged. And the influence of people like you and me is not necessarily a positive one. Well, it does, I guess it gets people's guard up because it at least implicitly carries the message that things are not as they seem. And that's true across all of science. But when you're told that things are not as they seem with respect to gravity or the way diseases spread or anything else that science might tackle outside the human mind, you're not delivering the same kind of insult. Whereas if you say things are not as they seem with things like interpersonal love or parental love or spiritual experience, you are often explicitly, but at least implicitly, saying that the reasons

why you think you're doing something, the reason why you think this is so important to you, you love your kids, you love your wife, is not at all what is really pulling the levers of your mind. There's another explanation entirely that doesn't even treat these nouns necessarily at all. Now we're talking about genes, or we're talking about neurotransmitters, or we're talking about something that's not even available to your own inspection subjectively. If you continue the conversation long enough, I don't think that becomes deflationary in the way that people fear. But if you don't continue it long enough, you're left giving people the impression that love is nothing but a certain balance of neurotransmitters. And therefore, you're just a bag of chemicals. Get over yourself.

Yeah. I think that's right. I like the word insult, because that's often how it's taken. I mean, I've been, as I'm writing a part of my book that's looking at political psychology as part of a sort of a separate question about whether liberals and conservatives differ in their empathy. And one thing I've noticed in political psychology is political psychologists lean to a tremendous extent liberal. This is a point that John Hyten's colleagues wrote up in an article. And it's true of academics in general, but certainly it's true for political psychology. And one effect that this has is that there's endless detailed explanations of why conservatives believe what they do. You know, so what's going on when they reject affirmative

action or they don't like the president's health care plan. But there's extremely little reflection on why liberals believe what they do. Now, even if you think the liberal cause is the right one, you know, for just about every question, still, it's an empirical question how we come, how liberals come to the beliefs that they do. But it's considered as either a superfluous question or a taboo one. You know, liberals, if you're liberal, you think liberals believe what they do because it's the right answer. And you don't want to reduce it down to experience or, you know, God forbid, random arbitrary social experience. And of course, the same thing comes up with religion, which is that, you know, religious people often get very offended by studies of why

people are religious, while they find studies of why people are atheists fascinating, and often they raise it as a challenge. Why don't you go study atheists? And in fact, I think, you know, we should study atheists, and there's some work on atheists. And my experience is, when you talk about atheists under research on wider atheists, often they get their hackles up. Nobody wants their cherished beliefs to be put under the microscope by somebody like me. Not even me.

What you've done with empathy is even more seditious than that, I think, because it's not just that you are proposing that we study a necessary and cherished emotion. You're actually challenging the common sense view of it as being socially and psychologically beneficial and vital to our moral lives. You've come down very much on really a side of a controversy that most people didn't even know existed, which is that empathy in many cases is harmful and is not a good piece of software if you want to be a reliable moral actor in normative

terms. So tell me about what you've said about empathy and let's get into the details. So I always have to begin with the most boring way ever to begin anything, which is we're talking about terminology, because people use the term empathy in all sorts of ways. And I think my position is easily misunderstood. If you think some people think empathy, just as a word referring to anything good, compassion, care, love, morality, making the world a better place, and so on. Under that construal of empathy, I have nothing against it. I'm not a monster. I mean, I want to make the world a better place. Other people use the term empathy very narrowly to refer to understanding in a cold-blooded way what's going on in the minds of other people, understanding what they think and

what they feel. And I'm not against that, too, though, and we might want to talk about this. I think it's morally neutral. I think very great and wonderful and kind people have this sort of cognitive empathy, if you want to call it that. But so do con men, seducers, and sadists. One way, reason why bullies are very good at being bullies is that they exquisitely understand what's going on in the heads of their victims. Yeah, yeah. That's often misunderstood, by the way. We should just footnote that, that this form of cognitive empathy that you've just distinguished from the other form that you're about to describe is something that psychopaths have in spades. When we talk about psychopaths being devoid of empathy, it's not the empathy that allows us to understand another person's experience. That is not something that prototypically evil people lack. In fact, they, as you just said, they use this understanding to be

as successfully evil as they can be. That's exactly right. So, you know, another term for cognitive empathy is social intelligence. And I like that way of talking because it captures the point that intelligence is an extraordinary tool. Without it, you know, we couldn't do any great things. But in the hands of somebody with malevolent ends, intelligence could be used to make them a lot worse. And I think that social intelligence is exactly like that. Mind reading, another term for it, is a tool that could be used any way you want it. And the very best people in the world have tons of it.

And so do the very worst people in the world. So the sense of empathy I'm using, and this actually matches what most psychologists and most philosophers, how they use the term, is empathy is in the sense of what Adam Smith and David Hume and other philosophers call sympathy. And what it refers to is feeling what other people feel. So if you're in pain and I feel empathy for you, I will feel to some degree your pain. If you're humiliated, I will feel your humiliation. If you are happy, I will feel your happiness. And you could see why people are such

fans of this it Brings me closer to you it dissolves the boundaries between me and you and there's a lot of psychological research showing That if I feel empathy towards you, I'm more likely to help you Dan Batson's done some wonderful studies on them And I don't contest that at all But the problem with empathy and one of the problems of empathy that are many But the problem with empathy, and one of the problems of empathy, there are many, but the main problem is it serves as a spotlight. It zooms me in on a person in the here and now. And as a result, it's biased, it's parochial, it's short-sighted, and it's because of empathy that governments and societies care so much more about a little girl stuck in a well than about millions or more people suffering and dying through climate change. over mass shootings, which, however horrible, are a tiny proportion of gun homicides in America. 0.01% roughly. I mean, so if you ask people, they would say mass shootings are the most terrible things there are. You know, I live in Connecticut. Newtown's not that far away. After the Sandy Hook

killing, people were, including me, were deeply upset. But intellectually, if you could snap your fingers and make all the mass shootings go away forever, and then you did that, nobody would know based on the homicide numbers that it's so tiny. So it misdirects us. It causes us to focus on the wrong thing. It causes us to freak out at the suffering of one and ignore the suffering of a hundred. And in one of your books, I forget which one, you talk about the study where we care more about one than about eight. And you say something to the effect of, if there's ever a non... That's Paul Slovic's work. That's right. That's right. Some wonderful studies. And also somebody named Retoff and other

investigators have done this since. And you described this, that if there's ever a non-normative finding in psychology, that's it. And so I think there's many more examples like this that we could say, we could look and say as rational people, know, a black life matters as much as a white life. The life of an ugly person who doesn't inspire my empathy matters just as much as a beautiful person who does. And the lives of a hundred matter more than the life of one. and this is the amazingly non-normative finding from Slovak's work, is that especially if those hundred include the one you were caring about. So you can set up this paradigm where you show a reliable loss of concern when you add people to the group. So you start with one little girl whose story is very emotionally salient and people care about her to a maximal degree. And then you add her brother to the story and people

care a little less. And then you add eight more people to the story, keeping the same girl and people's care just drops off a cliff. That's truly amazing. It's not one attractive girl versus a hundred faceless people. It can be the one attractive girl along with the hundred and you care less. It's a magnificent and horrible finding. And, you know, I've long championed the forces of reason and rationality and moral judgment. I think far more than many social psychologists that were capable of that. And so there's an interesting duality here. On the one hand, our gut feelings push us towards the one girl and not the 100, even if the 100 includes the girl.

On the other hand, we're smart enough to recognize when we put it in this abstract way that that's a moral mistake. In some way, you could view the moral mistakes caused by empathy as analogous to the mistakes in rationality that people like Danny Kahneman have chronicled, where you see people just, you know, you get these puzzles and you ignore the base rates and you get things all messed up. And then when you step back and look at it and do the math, you realize, wow, that was

a mistake. My gut led me in the wrong way. Visual illusions are another case. It looks this way, but it isn't. You take out the ruler and you measure it, and although the lines look like they're different lengths, they're the same. So we have this additional capacity to do this, both for things that connect to the external warlike vision, but also for morality, where we have standards of reason and consistency. And we could use this to say, wow, our empathy is pushing us in the wrong direction. Yeah. So now, do you see us correcting for this in a way that is adequate to the magnitude of

the moral error, or is our way of correcting for it more haphazard than that? Our way of correcting this is always haphazard, but the analogy I make is with racism. So we know we have racist biases. Many of us have explicit racist biases, but there's a lot of evidence for implicit racial biases, biases that we don't know we have even, but that influence us in all sorts of ways. So what do you do? So suppose if you think racism is okay, then there's not a problem. But suppose, you know, as you and I do, we think racism is wrong. So what do you do about it? Well, the answer is not you try harder. You know, we know trying hard doesn't work for these sort of biases. But there are

different sorts of fixes. So in fact, for biases, often there's technological fixes. One story, this may be apocryphal, but it's a good story, is that symphony orchestras were heavily biased in favor of men. Because they claimed that, you know, the people making judgments who were both men and women said men just sound better. They have stronger, more powerful styles. So what they did was they started auditioning people behind a screen. And then the sex ratio became more normal. So this is an example of you got a bias, you don't like it. And so you try to fix the world so it doesn't apply. And I could imagine similar things happening with empathy, where you change laws and policies so that empathy plays less of a role.

I'll give you one small example, just because of the trial of the Boston Marathon killer has come to an end, was recently in the news. But I think victim statements are a horrible idea. Where people come into court and describe in great detail their anguish and their pain and this plays some role in sentencing. And that seems, you know, hugely immoral because the extent to which you're going to be affected by the witness statements depends on how much they cry and whether they have the same color skin as you and whether they're attractive and whether they are stoic or weepy or whatever. And then this will then influence how many years in prison somebody has. Yeah.

And, you know, it seems bizarrely, intentionally, structurally irrational and immoral. Yeah, I've actually never thought about that before. I think you're absolutely right there. I'm wondering if the argument in favor of witness statements relates to the debt owed to the victims and their families, and that there's some sense that we owe this to them, the opportunity to vent and express their grievance this way, and that a judge and a court would be reluctant to deny that to them? Is that what makes this such a common feature of these kinds of trials? Yeah, I think that's what the argument for it is. And, you know, if it would make the victims happier, feel that they're getting what they deserve to make their statements,

it's an excellent case for it. But it seems to go too far to have these statements influence the sentencing. I mean, this isn't necessarily a bleeding heart argument. It could go both ways. I mean, if the victim's statements are done by people who don't inspire your empathy, if a white jury is listening to victim's statements by black people, they might say, this isn't capturing my empathy. This isn't upsetting me. Let's give the guy a light sentence. So I don't have any sort of view as to whether the sentences in these sort of cases are too harsh or too lenient. It's just that the

victim statements put noise and issues of incredible bias, including racial bias, and makes that part of the sentencing process. So that's an easy fix to get rid of things like that. I've often said that I think our laws and social institutions need to engineer our better judgment and our understanding of moral normativity and inoculate us against our failures of intuition. And even when we can summon the appropriate intuitions, we can't always summon them reliably, or it takes work to summon them. And what we want are laws that are wiser than we are. We want to be able to rely on a system that corrects for what at the end of the day we recognize to be a kind of, you know, a suite

of moral illusions or moral biases that are leading us to misallocate both emotional and very real resources. I think that's exactly right. You know, there's a phrase by Lincoln that Steve Pinker made as the title of his wonderful book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. And I think that, you know, those better angels, first and foremost, is deliberative, careful, analytic, cost-benefit reasoning on how to make the world a better place. And laws and policies should work to instill them. You know, under some analyses, that's what

something like a constitution is, which is, you know, a constitution is at a very higher level saying, look, you might get really excited and want to have a law that says you could reelect a popular third president or reinstill slavery or ban some ugly political doctrine you don't like, but you can't. We're going to block this. And you could undo the block, but it's going to be very difficult and take a very long period of time. Constitutions under this view are the sort of equivalent of waiting periods to buy a gun or get married. Just they slow you down. They make it harder. And by making it harder, it's, you know, Danny Kahneman talks about thinking fast and slow. And thinking slow, I think, is a lot better.

And I think good social institutions reflect, as you put it, the workings of thinking human suffering often hinges on what one thinks. But it seems to me that in questioning the moral value of empathy in its kind of emotional contagion form, you have trespassed on a taboo there. And tell me a little bit about how the conversation has gone in public. I noticed that there was a little bit of pushback recently in a New York Times op-ed, and you had that Target article in the Boston Review that I sent in a piece for. What has it been like to make the noises you've made recently about empathy? It has not been a popular argument. Some of the objections turn on a misunderstanding. So some people say, I'm outraged at what you're saying. I have a lot of evidence that empathy is good and doesn't suffer from the problems

that you say it suffers from. And then they go on to defend compassion, for instance. And I'm very careful in my book and in my work to distinguish empathy from compassion. And, you know, we should bookmark this because it connects to meditative practices, actually, in an interesting way. The good arguments I've heard against empathy, the ones that have made me scratch my head, is that empathy might be useful or central for intimate relationships. So when it comes to relationships between, say, us and our children and our friends, you are supposed to be biased and parochial and not impartial. And so a defender of empathy might say

that somebody who has zero empathy might be a fine policymaker, a fine moral judge, but a lousy husband or wife or father or mother. I don't think that's true. I think if you look at it closely, it's not, even here, it's not empathy that we're looking for, but understanding and caring. But those are the arguments that most give me pause. And in fact, I'm kind of, I'm certainly a consequentialist, and I'm on most days a utilitarian, but I've struggled with, and we've talked about this before, I've struggled with the question of the obligation we have towards those we're close to, like our children and to strangers. And I haven't been persuaded by people like Peter Singer, who says, in the long run, there should be no difference.

Right, right. Well, that's a very rich area to talk about. I'd like to go there, but I don't want to miss this point. Let's deal first with this distinction between empathy and compassion. How do you separate those? So I actually got thinking about this through a chance meeting with Matthew Ricard. Yeah, I know Matthew. I would think that you would. You guys have a lot of affinity. So I met him at a conference, and he was wearing these saffron robes and had a putific smile and radiated peace, and I was me. And I came up to him and started talking to him. We ended up getting a cup of coffee, and he asked me what I was up to.

And I was quite nervous because I'm not a confrontational guy, and I figured this is not a – it's like telling a rabbi, a rabbi, you're writing a book in favor of pork, you know, to tell this guy that I was against empathy. But to my surprise, he said, yeah, that's kind of, that's standard Buddhist teaching. And he pointed out that Buddhists make a distinction between what's called, sometimes called sentimental compassion, which is what I've been calling empathy, which is feeling other people's pain, getting into their head and great compassion, which is what I've been calling empathy, which is feeling other people's pain getting into their head, and great compassion, which is more distance. And he's done this wonderful research program with this neuroscientist, Tanya Singer,

where they carefully work explicitly to distinguish empathy from compassion. They get people in FMRI machines to do meditative practices that are either empathic or compassion. They look at how expert meditators do it, what more normal people do. And the moral of all of this, which connects to other psychological research, including the work of Richie Davidson, actually, who's done some wonderful work on this, is that empathy burns you out. It burns you out.

It saddens you. It makes you less effective effective what you should do instead is you should feel compassion what the Buddhist call loving-kindness you should feel positive and cheerful if you're dealing with somebody who is miserable and ashamed and in pain you don't feel miserable ashamed and you feel cheerful positive full of love and energy. So you care extraordinarily deeply about them, but you don't feel their pain. And I think once you make this, I don't care what you call it. I mean, in the end, you know, the issue isn't over what you call empathy or whether you should keep empathy under any definition. It's about what kind of intellectual and sentimental attitudes we should have towards people. And I think the attitude that they call

compassion is far better than the attitude that they call empathy. As you say, it's a clear recognition of the suffering. There's nothing about your attention that is distracting you from the reality of the other person's suffering, but it's not diminishing your own well-being. In the presence of that suffering, what you're feeling is a real commitment to alleviating it. That's different than simply being also miserable in the presence of human misery. That's exactly right. And you don't have to be a monk to appreciate this. I think people often have a failure of moral imagination where they'll say, well, you're not going to do anything nice if you don't have empathy. But think about all the things we do.

Think about giving to charity and helping out a friend and, you know, giving advice and, you know, volunteering, saving, to take a standard philosophical example, saving a girl's life who's drowning. In none of these cases do you have to put yourself in their shoes. What you have to do is care about them. Presumably, if I pass a girl drowning in shallow water as I walk by, I would rush in and pull her out. I'm not a monster. Head high water, I think you would go in there. Well, Singer's example, Peter Singer singer's example sets the bar very low yes it's extremely it's extremely shallow water the shallow pond is a really nice it's a shallow pond but i'm really wearing nice shoes and you know and then when it costs like 50 bucks for me that's nice shoes i go if i go and i'll

ruin my shoes but i'll go in nonetheless and singer's point goes on to say that uh you recognize that that a life is worth far more than fifty dollars and then singer goes on to make the point well then when you spend fifty dollars buying you know a meal or or a night out at a bar you're doing a moral equivalent to murdering a child so put that aside but i would i drift into the pond, shallow or deep, rescue the girl. But plainly, I don't have to put myself in her shoes. I don't have to feel what it's like to be drowning.

I don't have to imagine the sorrows of her parents learning that their beloved daughter had died. That's ridiculous. Rather, I notice she's drowning. I say, God, it's really, it would be horrible for this person to die. I get to save her and I save her. drowning I say God it's really would be horrible for this person to die I get to save her and I save her and I'm not special here

most of the kind things we do have nothing to do with empathy just as a lot of the very bad things we do are motivated by empathy let's get to that that's very interesting so the dark side of empathy but before we get there

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