Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and with me today is our guest, Paul Bloom.

Paul is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University.

He writes widely for venues such as the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and he's

published many books, including one of my favorites, How Pleasure Works, which I've plugged

on the show before.

His current book that he's working on, it'll be coming out sometime next year, is about empathy,

which he says people react positively to when he brings it up at parties until he tells them

that he's against it. So, Paul, that's what we're going to be talking about today. Why and in what

sense you are against empathy. So welcome to the show. Hey, thank you so much for having me here.

And maybe you could kick things off for us by just giving the basic skeleton of your argument,

and we can delve into the details later.

In what way are you against empathy?

So I've got to begin in a most boring possible way, which is by defining my terms.

Oh, excellent.

All the analytic philosophers in our audience will be cheering right now.

And 90% are now moving. We're a little dot to get to the good part. But for the analytic philosophers, empathy gets used in all sorts of ways. And some people use this as a catch-all term for everything good, for being moral, kind, loving, compassionate. And I'm not against that. I do think we should love each other. We should be

kind to each other to make it a better world. Empathy also gets used in a more narrow sense in

terms of understanding the mental states of other people. So if I'm thinking, oh my gosh, I think

she's bored or she's hungry or she's wondering that she wondering that I'm engaged in what

...