This review of Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion was published in the Summer 2017 issue of New Humanist. The biggest problem we have in our society and in the world right now,’ Barack Obama suggested before he became US President, ‘is an empathy deficit.’ It is a view that has become almost unquestioned, indeed almost unquestionable. ‘Behind every progressive policy,’ the American academic George Lakoff suggests, ‘is a single moral value: empathy.’ For the psychologist Simon Baron […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alan kurdi, charity, effective altruism, emapthy, morality, paul bloom, peter singer, reason