![]() Recently, however, he has come to the conclusion that empathy is no more successful than reason in puncturing our biased self-concern and bridging the gap between ourselves and others so as to achieve moral action. ‘You can never be too rich or too thin… or too empathic.’īloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, admits that he himself once thought along these lines. ![]() ‘People often assume that empathy is an absolute good,’ writes Paul Bloom. Now, empathy is widely accepted as the sole true source of morality and social progress, each person’s bulwark against wrongdoing and the psychopath’s vital deficit. ![]() The term ‘empathy’ was coined by 19th-century psychologists to distinguish Hume’s nerve-quivering type of sympathy from the more detached, cerebral act of appreciating the predicaments of others. Morality only works, Hume claimed, because, in the same way that plucking one of the tautened strings of a musical instrument makes all the others vibrate, humans are naturally primed to be stirred by one another’s suffering. ![]() What else, in the absence of religious faith, and given our postmodern scepticism about how reasonable ‘reason’ is, could curb our wild, exorbitant egos? Even if reason is impartial, we increasingly agree with the 18th-century philosopher David Hume that it is ‘inert’, too ‘impotent’ to spur moral behaviour. ![]() ‘Without God’, said Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, ‘everything is permitted.’ For some psychologists, says Paul Bloom, ‘without God’ should be replaced by ‘without empathy’. ![]()
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