If Empathy Doesn’t Work, Try Religion

BOSTON REVIEW

By Claude S. Fischer

Beggar receiving money, New York City. Photograph: Library of Congress.

Paul Bloom, the noted Yale psychologist, wrote, in a 2013 New Yorker article and again in the most recent Boston Review forum, “Against Empathy.” We are urged to feel empathy in order to do good for others, but empathy is a poor guide to altruism. Empathy is “parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate,” Bloom writes. Isn’t there a better guide? My small addition to the conversation is simply to note this oddity: Bloom and the BR commentators did not refer to the obvious guide, at least for Americans: organized religion. [link]