Paul Bloom’s essay, “Is Empathy Overrated”, is filled with very harsh claims that might just be reality. The word empathy has many different meanings to different people, and according to Bloom “empathy is like a spotlight directing attention and aid to where it’s needed” (Bloom 1). This sounds great, however, he goes on to say that spotlights have a narrow focus and that taking action on one person’s suffering in the moment can lead to even greater suffering in the future. He later goes deeper into this thinking and says that “what really matters for kindness in our everyday interactions is not empathy but capacities such as self-control and intelligence and a more diffuse compassion” (Bloom 4) How I understand this concept is that a moment of suffering must also be a moment for a lesson to be taught. When in reality, in most situations where someone is truly suffering, a “lesson” is probably one of the worst things to counter a moment of suffering.
The last major point he makes in the essay is that you can’t be empathic towards everyone. Bloom says “the real problem is that we don’t have enough empathy for other people” (Bloom 2). While this is true, that you can’t possibly be empathetic towards every person on earth, this doesn’t mean we should be empathetic at all. In my opinion, putting all your empathy towards a couple people is all that humans are capable of, and if everyone is empathetic towards one another then no one would be left out.
I do not agree with most of Bloom’s points. This is for a couple of different reasons. First, I think empathy is definitely needed in today’s world because without empathy, no one would have the urge to take action on such major problems. Secondly, one of the points that I really disagree with is how he implies that someone’s suffering should also be a time to learn. This could be true in some cases, however, a lot of the time someone’s suffering is too much of a vulnerable time for them to even think about what good can come out of it.
My understanding of empathy has always been being able to understand what someone else is going through and connect with them through those same feelings. My definition and Bloom’s definition are pretty similar, but there is one thing that he says about empathy that is different from my interpretation. He made it seem like you needed to be empathetic towards everyone or no one at all. This really challenged the initial perception of empathy because I always thought that you could be empathetic towards many different people at many different times. You don’t have to have empathy for everyone for it to be impactful.
One claim that evoked a strong response from me was when Bloom said “Intellectually, we can value the lives of all these individuals; we can give them weight when we make decisions. But what we can;t do is empathize with all of them. Indeed, you cannot empathize with more than one or two people at the same time” (Bloom 3) I disagree with this because in my opinion, we rarely need to ever empathize with more than one person at time. Feeling empathy is an in the moment thing, you don’t go around thinking of what you should be empathetic towards, it just happens.
