34 | Paul Bloom on Empathy, Rationality, Morality, and Cruelty

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2019

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Within every person’s mind there is on ongoing battle between reason and emotion. It’s not always a battle, of course; very often the two can work together. But at other times, our emotions push us toward actions that our reason would counsel against. Paul Bloom is a well-known psychologist and author who wrote the provocatively-titled book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, and is currently writing a book about the nature of cruelty. While I sympathize with parts of his anti-empathy stance, I try to stick up for the importance of empathy in the right circumstances. We have a great discussion about the relationship between reason and emotion. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Paul Bloom received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from MIT. He is currently the Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. His research ranges over a variety of topics in moral psychology and childhood development. He is the author of several books and the recipient of numerous prizes, including the $1 million Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize in 2017. Web site Yale web page Wikipedia page TED talk on The Origins of Pleasure Amazon page Publications Online courses at Coursera Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.7	And a few months ago I went on Twitter and took a brave contrary instance that empathy
0:11.0	is a good thing. Many people, of course, would agree with this automatically, but many other
0:15.9	people, have read a book by today's guest, Yale Psychology Professor Paul Bloom, which
0:21.1	is entitled Against Empathy, which I admit is a completely awesome book title. And Paul
0:26.7	and I actually discussed this on Twitter. He's an extremely reasonable, thoughtful guy.
0:31.6	And we do, in fact, disagree. His point is that empathy, the ability to think about things from
0:37.8	someone else's point of view to put yourself in their shoes, sounds good, and maybe it makes us
0:42.8	nice people on a personal level, but it gets in the way of being rational moral thinkers.
0:48.7	We tend to empathize with people close by, with people like ourselves, rather than being purely
0:54.9	rational about how to be the best people, how to live in the world correctly. I, on the other
1:00.1	hand, tend to emphasize the fact that people who think that they're being rational will often
1:05.2	take things into account that make perfect sense from their point of view, while perhaps not paying
1:10.8	as much attention to things that are front and center to people who are living very different
1:15.8	lives than them. To me, if you're really going to be rational, it is absolutely crucial that you
1:21.4	are empathetic, that you try to understand what other people who have very different experiences
1:26.2	than you have been going through. So Paul and I talk about this on the podcast. I don't think we
1:31.1	are necessarily coming to any agreement, but on the other hand, I don't think we disagree that much
1:35.9	either. We're trying to emphasize different aspects of a problem. And Paul is an extremely
1:40.6	interesting guy. I think you'll get a lot out of this conversation and hopefully we'll all be more
1:45.1	moral and good to each other at the end of it. So as always, please check out the Mindscape webpage
1:50.9	at preposterousuniverse.com slash podcast where you'll find links to Patreon and PayPal
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