For fast access, the radio interview with Anna Maria Tremonti on The Current is good, especially since it provides a written transcript as well. The whiff of controversy attracts media attention and gives him a forum for putting into popular discussion some ideas truly worth considering – ideas fully relevant to TOK and to the larger IB goals of engaging our students to care about the world and act effectively within it.įor a quick introduction to Bloom’s arguments and the discussion he’s managed to generate, I’ve listed a few articles and interviews in the References below. I’m even more impatient as he counter-argues a position on morality that isn’t characteristic of ethical systems in any case – that to be moral it’s enough just to feel empathy, without acting (effectively or otherwise).īloom’s strategy for communication, though, does seem to work. I remain impatient as he bases his criticisms of empathy on a narrow definition of the term as actually feeling what others feel (as if one could!) rather than feeling for others (imagination and emotion as ways of knowing) but with some distance (possibly given by reason and knowledge). Its title Against Empathy strikes me as pure click-bait – though it catches me long enough to read its less flamboyant subtitle, The Case for Rational Compassion. My initial reaction to this book, I’m afraid, is irritation. “We are much better off if we give up on empathy and become rational deliberators motivated by compassion and care for others.” Bloom adopts a provocative stance to focus attention on what we in IB Theory of Knowledge would call “ways of knowing”, and ties emotion, imagination, and reason to ethics as an area of knowledge. “In the moral domain…empathy leads us astray,” argues Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale University.

Against empathy review