Against Empathy?

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. It is taken as a self-evident truth that it is a good thing for medical students and practitioners to develop and exhibit empathy in their clinical encounters. In 2016 the psychologist Paul Bloom published a work of popular psychology entitled, provocatively, "Against Empathy. The Case for Rational Compassion". In this book he takes a strong line against empathy, arguing that it is not only not useful, but positively detrimental to human progress. Empathy, in the way Bloom defines it, leads to biased, shorted-sighted an practically useless action. In this essay I enjoy flirting with this broadside attack on one of our sacred cows. But I also a discover a major mismatch between what educationalists typically think of as empathy and the version presented by the author. The essay reviews this complex definitional landscape, visiting terms like pity, sympathy, moral imagination and compassion as well as the major varients of empathy itself. If we are going to avoid some of the evident pitfalls of emotion-dominated empathic responses, it really does help to be clear on what it is we have in mind when we discuss, teach and practice empathy.