Episode #559 - Against Empathy

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In this episode of The Soul of Enterprise, Ron and Ed take on one of the most cherished virtues of our age — empathy — and ask whether it really belongs at the heart of moral or political reasoning.

Drawing on Kevin D. Williamson’s National Review essay “Against Empathy,” they explore his case that empathy, far from being a moral compass, often clouds judgment and replaces argument with feeling. Then they turn to Yale psychologist Paul Bloom’s provocative book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, which argues that reasoned compassion — not emotional identification — leads to better choices in ethics, policy, and everyday life.

From the courts to the classroom to the marketplace, Ron and Ed ask: what happens when emotion overrules principle? And what might a society guided by rational compassion look like instead?

SHOW NOTES

Segment one

Segment two

  • So how does empathy relate to business? Paul Bloom, author or Against Empathy, suggests that empathy leads to more kindness. However, if you made a sadist more empathetic, it would just lead to a happier sadist.

  • “People who literally experience others’ feelings are either characters in novels or nuts. Empathy is either an affectation, a literary device, or a delusion. Political empathy usually is an affectation, a pose assumed to mask nakedly political ends.” —Kevin Williamson in the article in the link https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2012/12/17/against-empathy/ 

  • Today I learned that Counselor Deanna Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation is a half-human, half-Betazoid empath who can sense the emotions of others. Her empathic abilities were a key part of her role as the ship's counselor.

  • Also from Kevin’s article: “Empathy, or the imitation of empathy, entirely negates the need for argument in a great many circumstances.”

Segment three

  • Paul Bloom, the author of Against Empathy, was on Russ Robert’s podcast a few years ago. https://www.econtalk.org/paul-bloom-on-empathy/ 

  • “Or consider why economics is sometimes called “the dismal science.” It’s a derogatory description thought up by Thomas Carlyle in the 1800s, coined to draw a contrast with the “gay science” of music and poetry: “Not a ‘gay science,’ I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.” ― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

  • “Who would be more useful to an unemployed man: a man who knows what it is like to be unemployed, through long personal experience, or a man who never has been unemployed, because he built a business and employed himself? The main problems of the poor and unemployed do not include a shortage of people able to commiserate with them” —Kevin Williamson in his article titled Against Empathy https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2012/12/17/against-empathy/ 

  • Here is the other side of the empathy argument that we discussed on the show today: “Is empathy a sin? Some conservative Christians argue it can be” https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2025/08/21/is-empathy-a-sin-some-conservative-christians-argue-it-can-be/ 

Segment four

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