Gahy humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And what idea is more dangerous

than that your empathy is actually something that is leading you astray. And you need to be more

rigorously rational, maybe less empathic. Maybe you feel other people's pain too much.

Maybe you use the claim of your own pain and suffering and victimization too much.

Today's guest is one of the world's leading moral philosophers, Paul Bloom.

He works a lot in moral psychology.

He looks at the development of our sense of right and wrong when we're babies.

He looks at our intuitions about moral responsibility, the role that anger and disgust and empathy play in our lives.

Most controversially, he wrote a book called Against Empathy in 2016. That is the bulk of this

conversation, me trying to tease out exactly what he means.

Like, shouldn't we all be more empathic? Shouldn't we have a broader empathic imagination

towards our opponents? Paul throws a few wrinkles into that. It makes a very interesting conversation,

a very interesting thinking. His other books include The Sweet Spot, How Pleasure

Works, and Just Babies, the origin of morality in little kids. This is fascinating, especially

the interplay between social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and how we know what is right

and what is wrong. I hope you enjoy this convo with the one and only, Paul Brum.

Let's start with empathy.

What's wrong with empathy?

So, you know, I wrote a book call against empathy. What's wrong with empathy? So, you know, I wrote a book called Against Empathy and got a lot of, it was the most

controversial thing I've ever written. And people use the term in different ways. So sometimes

people use the term empathy just to mean kindness, compassion, love. I'm not against that.

What I am against is empathy in the sense

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