Will I love Against Empathy?

Paul Bloom wants to persuade the reader to be against empathy, as he is, because morally we’re better off without empathy.

He is right, and I see his argument as similar to the argument made by Sugden, although its structure is very different. Bloome, rightly, says that we cannot rely on empathy to be moral – we need something more and something more tangible.

That something might be rationality, although Bloome himself prefers to speak of reason. Moral theories have for too long relied on unstable ground: empathy and moral character.

If we care about morality, we must ground it… show more.

Can a book be a frenemy? I have a love/hate relationship with this one. Bloom presents the sharpest critique of empathy I’ve seen: empathy is terrible for our moral lives, according to him. I think he is quite wrong – much of my own book is devoted to refuting his – but his critique is important and he offers it up in a wonderfully clear and readable way.