Host: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. Elon Musk, the great critic of empathy, endlessly tries to get us upset and feeling empathic feelings for, say, victims of crime, for white South Africans who he views as persecuted. There's no hesitation using his enormous media powers to get us to feel empathy for people who he thinks deserve empathy.

I want to welcome Paul Bloom back to the show for part two of our discussion. We're going to switch gears a little bit and talk about your book Against Empathy. Thanks for doing part two.

Paul Bloom: Great to be back.

Host: So you wrote Against Empathy in 2016 and recently we have seen I guess a wave or a bunch of or a spate depends what you want to call it of I think mostly conservative thinkers and writers who have become let's call them the new critics of empathy. Elon Musk in 2025 on Joe Rogan's podcast said Democrats were succumbing to suicidal empathy.

Paul Bloom: There's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself.

Host: Yeah. Um, so that we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.

Host: We've seen a bunch of books. What do you make of these new critics of empathy and their views? Do they align with yours to some extent? I think—

Paul Bloom: I think there's an insight which is true and they didn't discover it. I didn't discover it. People have been talking with us for a long time which is if you take empathy as a sort of gut reaction of caring for another person, putting yourself in another person's shoes, it could be a very good thing obviously, there could also be a bad foundation for morality for a lot of reasons. One reason which I talk about a lot of my work is bias.

Paul Bloom: So I'm very likely, and there's a million laboratory studies and just common sense, I'll feel tremendous empathy for my kids, for my wife, my neighbors, my friends, people who look like me. Um, if they're in a far away country, if they don't speak my language, their skin's a different color, less empathy, no empathy, actually. So, to the extent we want to be really good people, we want to appreciate that the life of a stranger is actually in some important sense just as valuable as life of somebody close to us. We want to appreciate the moral value of the suffering of animals. Often we have no empathy at all for it. That we want to be good people in general. Um, empathy is a poor moral guide and we should do other things. So, in that way, I think these books often make this point.

Paul Bloom: Okay. The problem with these more recent books is they're all used, in the case of Gad Saad, they're used for a certain thing in the culture in the culture wars, attacking woke people, attacking Democrats, attacking liberals. Um, in the case of the more Christian religious books, the point about empathy is made to talk about certain liberal views, certain non-religious views. And the claim that they all make is that empathy has clouded the minds of these people we don't like very much anyhow and they should really listen to our morality which is much more sensible and rational. Okay? And the way we depart is I actually think that appeals to empathy and empathic reasoning, its failures show up all over the place.

Paul Bloom: So yes, you can imagine a liberal, say an extreme leftist, demanding somebody's speech gets shut down because they are overly empathic to the people who suffer from hearing this speech. But there are also a lot of cases where people like say Donald Trump exploit our empathy by getting people to care deeply about the victims of immigrant crime. No statistics here about whether immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than non-immigrants or whatever. Just here's a story of somebody who suffered at the hands of an immigrant, right? And so we should respond accordingly. And you know, someone who is in favor of gun control will use empathy as an argument to say, "Oh my god, here's a child who was killed by a gun who was sitting around. We got to ban guns." Someone who is on the opposite side will say, "Imagine here's a story of someone who was defenseless against a predator because they had no gun to defend themselves." It is very easy, and in my book, I give too many examples of cases where people on the right, people on the left use and misuse empathy to make their case.

Host: Why do you think we're seeing these new takes on empathy? These new critics of empathy on the march right now. Does it reveal something particular about this political moment? I mean to some extent one way of seeing this, I've heard this analysis, is kind of an anti-feminist move where empathy is seen as a sort of soft virtue, a soft feminine virtue, and so more stern, rational, harshminded people, serious-minded people will attack it and turn it aside.

Paul Bloom: I think it also fits a stereotype of the left.

Host: Okay.

Paul Bloom: So the stereotype on the left is they're the empathic group. So if you're attacking the left, it makes sense to go after them for their empathy. Now it turns out that when you do the studies, people on the right, people on the left, conservatives and liberals, there's no difference in empathy. What there is is a difference in who you feel empathic towards. Okay? So if you're a conservative of a certain sort, you may feel a lot of empathy towards police officers who risk their lives trying to protect us, dealing with violent criminals. If you're a liberal of a certain sort, you may feel tremendous empathy for, say, minority citizens who are harassed by the police, who maybe are shot by the police. And so for all of these culture war issues, the conservatives have empathy towards one side, the liberals towards the other side. But it is not true that one group feels more empathy overall.

Host: So are you seeing in these new critics of empathy that they're not really against empathy at large? They're against empathy for certain people.

Paul Bloom: I think that that's exactly right. And in fact, what you see when you read—I have not read Gad Saad's book, I have read two other books you mentioned—they have no hesitation about deploying empathic arguments if it suits their views. So one of the writers in an interview, on a podcast interview, goes on about how she cares deeply, makes a great empathic appeal for Christians who are victims of religious persecutions in other countries. Now nothing wrong with that, but she's the same person who would mock and deride people who made empathic pleas for other groups. Yeah. So there's a certain lack of consistency.

Host: And that was her response to the question about how do you think Trump should deal with immigration?

Paul Bloom: That's right. And I don't want to accuse people of being dishonest, and we all, I think we all suffer from these sort of distortions, but I have a feeling that for a lot of these writers, it's not empathy that they're objecting to. It's liberals. It's the non-religious if you're religious. It's people who have different views.

Host: It's become coded.

Paul Bloom: Yeah. So Elon Musk, the great critic of empathy, endlessly tries to get us upset and feeling empathic feelings for, say, victims of crime, for white South Africans who he views as persecuted. There's no hesitation using his enormous media powers to get us to feel empathy for people who he thinks deserve empathy.

Host: The subtitle of your book I think is the important thing here that might be getting lost in the mix. Yes, the title is Against Empathy. The subtitle might be more important. It's The Case for Rational Compassion. So how should we understand rational compassion?

Paul Bloom: Yeah. You know people will often criticize a book without reading it. And I get that. But often they've criticized my book without even reading the subtitle. Like, "Against Empathy? You must be some sort of psychopath."

Host: Yes.

Paul Bloom: But in fact, it's kind of the opposite. So the claim of the book, for better or worse, you could disagree with it. Claim the book is instead of this empathic feeling, it will drive me to love my daughter, but drive me to care for you less and a stranger in Africa even less. Instead of relying on empathy, what we should do is rely on two other things. Compassion and rationality. Compassion is just caring for others. Caring for others, valuing others as we value ourselves, giving their lives and their happiness and their feelings moral weight, so that we could be compelled to do the right thing to not to cause them to suffer and maybe to put our energies into improving their lives. That's one thing, compassion. The second thing is rationality, and here I fall under the sway of the people calls effective altruists who argue that the way to live a good life is to use your brains to kind of figure out how can I make the world a better place, not just what feels best, not just what pulls my heartstrings, but how could I use my time, my money, my resources to really make do the most good. And for that, you have to think through cost-benefit analysis. You have to look at the data. You have to get the facts. But I think the best people in the world use these two things in concert. They're real moral feelings. So without moral feelings, you wouldn't do a thing. Yeah. Real compassion, but also rationale to tell you what to do.

Host: Do you think most people understand the difference between compassion and empathy? Because I find most people would group the two. The idea of being against empathy, I think most people assume that oh that means that you don't care about the suffering of others and you won't want to take actions to alleviate that suffering which is the definition of compassion. Yeah.

Paul Bloom: I think people, the term empathy gets used in all sorts of ways. Yeah.

Host: People aren't making a mistake when they think empathy just means being good. Yeah.

Paul Bloom: Yeah, there's another sense of empathy which means kind of getting into your head and figuring out what you're thinking, which could be used as a tool for good or evil. There's different senses of the word empathy.

Host: Yeah.

Paul Bloom: Nothing rests on the term. I think what people will quickly get is there's a distinction between putting yourself in another person's shoes and feeling what they feel, how I'm using empathy, and caring about people, being a good person. Yeah. And so that distinction, whatever words you use for that, um that's an important distinction. I think people do get it once you kind of lay it out.

Host: Yeah. So, rational compassion. How can it help guide? Yes, there's individual decisions, but let's punt it up to policy decisions. How can that help guide better policy decisions?

Paul Bloom: It's a good question. I think part of the answer is sort of procedural where where it is it is I think a good thing when when countries and organizations and NGOs and so on have sort of strict strict articulated rules over when to act, when to intervene, what's a good thing to do. So the way it's done right now is there's a crisis, there's people in trouble and whether or not say Canada devotes resources to help those people depends on the color of their skin, the how dramatic the news story was, whether they're close to us or far away from us. And I think a better system would be to say, look, let's have a threshold of life saved. Let's have let's have sort of more impartial procedures. That sounds really cold.

Host: Yeah.

Paul Bloom: But the thing is, when we're not cold, when we use our hearts, we find that well, we tend to help white people a lot more than dark-skinned people, right? And we tend to help people whose plight resembles our who speak English more than people who don't speak English, right? Our biases creep in. We think, "Oh, we're being such good people. We're listening to our hearts." But our hearts are often kind of biased, selfish, narrow, bigoted organs.

Host: So, I want to drill down a little on the dark side of empathy. And I think that for all of the best parts of the human heart, right, of caring for others, creating an ingroup that you'll sacrifice for, there's a lot of those best parts of the human heart, at least historically, are often used to do some of the worst things we can do to others. So, a lot of empathy, it seems like, and you're the expert, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, can be used to create sometimes very sharp in-group outgroup divisions. And is that one of the bigger dangers that you're sort of trying to put your finger on here?

Paul Bloom: You know, when people talk about how we incite violence and war and genocides and terrible actions, they often think, oh, we appeal to the worst parts of people, to their hatreds and so on. Often we appeal to their empathy. Every call for war, every call for attack says, "Look at these victims. Look how much they're suffering."

Host: Yeah.

Paul Bloom: And often there's real victims. Look how much they're suffering and then using that as a catalyst for action. Um so much anti-immigrant sentiment is framed in terms look at these people who suffer because of the presence of immigrants trying to instill a real empathy for people to catalyze an action. I got into a big fight with a very prominent empathy scholar where he said look the whole Israel Palestinian conflict if only they had more empathy the world would be better. My view is they have tons of empathy. Israelis have enormous empathy for other Israelis. Palestinians enormous empathy for other Palestinian people have empathy for their family, their loved ones, their neighbors. That's what's driving so much out of conflict, right? Um empathy for the other group, not so much.

Host: So, they need more compassion as well.

Paul Bloom: They need more compassion. They need more rational compassion. They need more long-term thinking. And in some way, they need to be swayed less by stories of atrocity.

Host: Yeah. So this quote is attributed to Stalin but I don't think he ever said it. It's "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic." Um so I think sometimes yes a single story cannot be representative of a larger stat. Those are the dangers of some of these single stories of empathy you're talking about. But I'm curious just in our final moments here for advice for journalists though because for us the thing that we're often trained to do is exactly that insight by Stalin which is a wild thing to say that statistics won't do it for people. Find stories, find stories representative of the statistic. So just one example that's one of my favorites like a great moment in journalism was in 1945 John Hersey wrote Hiroshima and that it was the entire edition of The New Yorker and it told six stories of survivors after the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and it changed Americans relationship to the atomic age and it changed what Americans considered what they felt about what they did in Hiroshima. And to me, that's a great that's a great piece of journalism, particularly because it finds six individual stories you can empathize with. So, is this not an example of good journalism that leads to in some cases good moral reasoning? And for journalists, how do we know how do we know the difference here? Journalists have this extraordinary power because it's the stories that sway us.

Paul Bloom: Yeah. Yeah, you know, if I tell you 12,000 people died and so before I'm done a sentence, you're making snoring noises like 12 whatever people die all the time. Who cares? But if I tell you about a child and tell you the details and the sort of extent a good journalist or a good novelist can, I will pull at you. I will motivate you. And so many of the great social forces against motivating action to protect the Jews from the Holocaust, motivating end of slavery, stories of what it's like to be a slave, stories of discrimination that have motivated the civil rights movement have been the power of stories.

Paul Bloom: But for each of these examples, I can give you an example of the power of stories that are used for other purposes. Germans used the stories about Jewish pedophiles to motivate the Holocaust. People use the stories of black men raping women, detailed, powerful stories to motivate hatred towards blacks. So, journalists have this immensely powerful tool. You like AI. Tell me a story about somebody whose life was saved by their interaction with ChatGPT. Saved from loneliness and misery. I'm sure you can. You hate it. Tell me a story with whose life was ruined because they fell in love with it. Because there's so many people. There's always the stories to tell.

Paul Bloom: So my answer to your question is use the statistics, use the data to figure out where the real problems are, okay? Who's in peril? Is this an isolated story that doesn't fit the broader world? Then tell your story to make the case.

Host: Yes. Does it reflect and connect to the larger statistics, the actual empirical data?

Paul Bloom: Right. So, so take if there's a drug out there and the drug is making a hundred people's lives better and making one person suffer. If you tell me this powerful moving story of the suffering person that gets me to want to shut down a drug and make the world worse, you've done something awful.

Host: That's bad journalism.

Paul Bloom: That's bad journalism. Yeah. And you might win your prizes. You will have moved us. But instead in that situation, tell us a story of one of the hundred.

Host: That's a perfect place to end it. Thank you for the journalism advice and thank you for spending so much time with me today. It was truly a delight.

Paul Bloom: Perfect location, perfect conversation.