Narrator: Imagine you are presented with the story of Sheri Summers, a ten-year-old girl suffering from a fatal disease. She is on a long waiting list for a life-saving treatment. After hearing her heartbreaking story, you are given a choice: you can move her to the front of the line. Doing so gives Sheri a chance, but it means that other children, who have been waiting longer, will be pushed back, potentially losing their own chance at survival. What do you do? When test subjects were prompted to feel empathy for Sheri—to truly imagine her pain—most chose to move her up the list, an act that many would consider unfair and unjust. This unsettling conflict between feeling and fairness is the central puzzle explored in Paul Bloom’s provocative book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. It challenges the deeply held belief that empathy is the cornerstone of morality, arguing instead that this celebrated emotion is a dangerously flawed guide for making the world a better place.

Narrator: Paul Bloom argues that one of empathy’s greatest failings is its narrow and biased nature. He uses a powerful metaphor to explain this: empathy is a spotlight. It shines brightly on a single person or a small group, making their plight feel urgent and real, but it leaves everyone else in the darkness. This spotlight doesn't focus on who needs the most help, but on who is most relatable, attractive, or familiar to us.

This bias was tragically evident in the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The nation was gripped by an outpouring of empathy, and the town of Newtown was inundated with so much charity—gifts, money, and mountains of teddy bears—that it became a burden. Yet, during that same year, more schoolchildren were murdered in Chicago, a city with far fewer resources. Their deaths, however, didn't capture the national spotlight. They were a statistic, not a single, heart-wrenching story.

Empathy is drawn to the identifiable victim. We feel more for "Baby Jessica" trapped in a well than for the millions suffering from a distant famine. This is because empathy is triggered by individuals, not by abstract numbers. This selective focus means our moral priorities become dangerously skewed. We pour resources into emotionally resonant tragedies while ignoring larger, more devastating crises that lie just outside the spotlight’s beam.

Narrator: Building on the spotlight problem, Bloom demonstrates that empathy is terrible with numbers. Our feelings simply don't scale in a way that reflects reality. This concept is often captured by the grim saying, "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." Our emotional system is wired to respond to individual stories, not large-scale data.

Researchers have confirmed this through stark experiments. In one study, people were asked how much they would donate to save a child's life. They gave a certain amount. When asked how much they would give to save eight children, they donated roughly the same amount. Their empathy didn't multiply by eight. Shockingly, when a third group was shown a picture of a single, named child, donations soared, far exceeding the amount given to save the eight anonymous children. The identifiable one trumped the statistical many.

This innumeracy has profound real-world consequences. Consider the story of Batkid. In 2013, the Make-A-Wish Foundation spent thousands of dollars to fulfill the dream of Miles Scott, a five-year-old leukemia patient, by turning San Francisco into Gotham City for a day. It was a beautiful, empathic gesture that captured the world's heart. However, as ethicists like Peter Singer pointed out, the same amount of money could have purchased mosquito nets to save the lives of several children from malaria in the developing world. Empathy drew our attention and resources to the heartwarming story of one, while rational calculation pointed to a far more effective way to prevent suffering for many.

Narrator: Perhaps the most disturbing argument in the book is that empathy is not just an ineffective guide, but can be an active force for cruelty and injustice. Because empathy is biased toward our own group, it can be weaponized to justify harming others. Political debates, Bloom notes, are rarely a battle between empathy and apathy. More often, they are a clash of competing empathies.

For example, arguments for harsh anti-immigration policies are often fueled by empathy for citizens who fear losing their jobs or cultural identity. Conversely, arguments for open borders are driven by empathy for the suffering of refugees. Both sides are using empathy; they are just pointing the spotlight at different groups.

This dynamic can lead to horrific outcomes. After the 9/11 attacks, former Vice President Dick Cheney defended the use of torture not with cold logic, but with a deeply empathic appeal. He asked people to imagine the suffering of a victim in the World Trade Center, making a final call to his family. By focusing the empathic spotlight on the pain of American victims, he sought to make cruelty toward their enemies seem not only acceptable, but morally necessary. Empathy for "us" becomes a justification for violence against "them."

Narrator: A common objection to Bloom’s thesis is that we surely need empathy for our closest relationships—with partners, children, and friends. But here too, Bloom draws a critical distinction. What we value in these relationships is not necessarily emotional empathy—the act of feeling another’s pain—but rather understanding, kindness, and compassion.

Imagine your friend is overwhelmed with anxiety. Feeling their anxiety yourself—mirroring their distress—doesn't help them. In fact, it can make things worse, leaving two people paralyzed by anxiety instead of one. What your friend needs is for you to understand their feelings, care about their well-being, and offer calm, loving support. This is compassion, a more detached but equally warm concern for another.

Psychologists have a term for the dark side of excessive empathy in relationships: "unmitigated communion." This is an obsessive concern with others' problems to the point of self-neglect. People who score high on this trait often feel distressed and burned out. They need others to be happy for them to be happy, a recipe for emotional exhaustion. True love and friendship, Bloom suggests, require not that we drown in our loved ones' pain, but that we have the strength and composure to help them find their way out of it.

Narrator: If empathy is the problem, what is the solution? Bloom champions what he calls "rational compassion." This is not a cold, robotic calculus, but a fusion of the head and the heart. It begins with a genuine concern for others—the compassion part—but it uses reason, data, and logic to guide our actions toward the most effective outcomes.

Rational compassion asks not "What feels right?" but "What does the most good?" It is the mindset of the Effective Altruism movement, which uses evidence to determine which charities save the most lives per dollar. It is the mindset of Zell Kravinsky, a philanthropist who donated nearly his entire fortune and then, in an act of supreme altruism, gave one of his kidneys to a complete stranger. When asked why, Kravinsky didn't speak of feeling someone's pain. He spoke of mathematics, explaining that the risk to his own life was minuscule compared to the near-certainty of saving another's.

This approach allows us to overcome our biases. It helps us see that a life in a distant country is as valuable as a life next door, and that preventing a death from malaria is as important as responding to a highly publicized natural disaster. It is a more demanding, but ultimately more powerful, form of morality.

Narrator: The central, transformative idea of Against Empathy is that our desire to be good people requires us to be smarter, not just more emotional. Paul Bloom's case is not against kindness, love, or morality itself, but against the flawed assumption that feeling another's pain is the best way to help them. By showing how empathy narrows our focus, deceives us with numbers, and can even be used to justify cruelty, he argues that we must evolve beyond it.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge: to scrutinize our own good intentions. It asks us to question whether the warmth of our empathic glow is actually making the world a better place, or if it is merely making us feel better about ourselves. The ultimate test of our morality, Bloom suggests, lies not in the depth of our feelings, but in the effectiveness of our actions.