Empathy sells; empathy’s limitations sell even better

By Lou Agosta on July 14, 2026 • ( 0 )

Listen to this article as a podcast on Youtube: https://youtu.be/kiz4Rgsqlk0?si=DqJFa1UwgqmiSG8g

As a popular trend, empathy peaked in 2009 with the publication of the late Franz de Waal’s now classic The Age of Empathy. De Waal goes on to profile “Our kinder, gentler [Bonobo ape] ancestors” on Oct 3, 2009 in the middle column of the then largely still hardcopy Wall Street Journal,” casting doubt on the “killer instincts” of our early humanoid ancestors. De Waal’s essay champions the position that this aggressive and over-sexed species, human beings (homosapiens), is capable of empathy, compassion, altruism, gratitude, generosity, and such “pro social” attitudes. Fast forward a decade and a half.

Empathy still sells and is honored and advocated as a powerful intervention to deescalate aggression and conflict. A rigorous and critical empathy still champions the many successful applications of tough love, red teaming, hard empathy, and limit setting while acknowledging the limitations and the ways that empathy can break down, including phenomena such as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, messages getting lost in translations, in the trials and errors of being empathic. A rigorous and critical empathy is committed to doing the hard work of overcoming these break downs and misfirings in order to relate authentically and in integrity to the other individuals and the community.

But if empathy still sells, its limitations sell even better. The latest trend is to denounce empathy as a weakness and a danger to western civilization. Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy (2025) goes further than the initial wave of anti-empathy advocates such as Paul Bloom (2016), Fritz Breithaupt (2017), Glenda Carpio (2023), and Namwali Serpall (2019). With Saad, the recommendation is not that one should apply rational compassion rather than empathy (Bloom) or deploy “enlarged thinking” (Carpio “channeling” Hannah Arendt) instead of empathy or that empathy is a kind of “slave morality” masquerading as kindness (Breithaupt). Rather “empathy” should be added to the list of “pro social” characteristics such as altruism, compassion, charity, generosity, gratitude, helping those in need, being kind to animals, turning the other cheek, and so on (even though empathy is not an emotion as such but a form of emotional communication among other things). Throw them all under the bus. Being kind makes you and your community a sucker, and as P.T. Barnum, the founder of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, famously noted, “There is a sucker born every minute.”

The anti-empathic advocates offer a thought experiment: If you are in an overcrowded life boat after your ship sank, then taking on further survivors may cause the boat to sink, and everyone will perish. Don’t be an empathic sucker; push the competition under. If you do not do so, you are at risk of (drum roll): suicidal empathy.

What is overlooked is that this “thought experiment” is a set-up and is a double bind. Given the rock and the hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea, the damned if you do and damned if you don’t, it is the reason the ancient Greeks invented tragic theatre. Life often presents people with unfair choices. Life presents choices that no one should have to make, that no one can make, though doing nothing is also a choice. The thought-experiment starts by taking away one’s agency. You are in a life boat, and it is because your ship sank. You do not need expanded empathy; you need rescue. “Women and children” first” is the rule in any abandon ship scenario. In an extreme situation, this sounds like the captain and crew providing the empathic leadership required of them. That is the empathic moment, not “shoot the survivors.” The “take down” of Saad’s Suicidal Empathy requires an article of its own. One is available, though it is not a book review as such (though one is in preparation) see: “Suicidal empathy is in the news. . .” by Lou Agosta: https://louagosta.com/2026/05/22/suicidal-empathy-is-in-the-news-what-you-need-to-know-to-debunk-the-anti-empathy-skeptics/ ) Finally, for a detailed discussion and critique of the anti-empathy cohort prior to Saad see the prepublication version of Chapter 3: Empathy and its discontents from Lou Agosta, (2025), Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature(click here to download). Selected sections of the following are based on this chapter.

The very idea that our civilization at risk due to an excess of empathy is so laughably absurd and “out there” as to give pause that the advocate of the idea may perhaps be delusional. This is the same civilization (“the West”) that brought us two world wars, the Armenian Genocide, Auschwitz, Hiroshima (“seemed like a good idea at the time”), the war on terror (“seemed like a good idea at the time”), “forever” wars in the middle east, Chernobyl, the internment and annihilation of ethnic and racial groups too numerous to list here, and this civilization is suffering from an excess of empathy? Granted that the vast majority of people are empathic people devoted to family, career, community and country, Saad and his fellow travelers are sensationalizing empathy’s acknowledged limitations by throwing a rotten tomato at it. One can always make a splash by throwing a rotten tomato. If Saad had said, empathy doesn’t work with psychopaths, antisocial personality disorder, bullies, corrupt politicians, and the criminally insane, then it would be easy to agree with the position. With such individuals and groups, one must set firm boundaries, define forceful limits, call for backup, and speak truth to power.

Unfortunately, once a “policeman” is kneeling on your neck or someone throws a bomb, it is too late for empathy. The perpetrator fails the readiness assessment for empathy and it is necessary to invoke self-defense. And remember the best defense is a good offense—provided that it is proportionate to the incoming violence (which is notoriously hard to determine). Self-defense, setting limits, establishing boundaries are what is needed.

Furthermore, Empathy 101 teaches that empathy does not work on an active battlefield, or if one is starving to death, or hanging upside down in a torture chamber. Never underestimate the power of empathy—never—but empathy in such extreme situations ends up looking like what the FBI Hostage Negotiating team uses to open communication with the hostage takers, or looking like “Red Team, Red Team!”—think like the opponent in a war game (on Red Teaming see Zenko 2015). What then is the source of resistance to empathy?

Taking the debate up a level from any particular author’s book, let us consider the causes of resistance to empathy. First, the listener or would-be empathic person does not want to make him- or herself vulnerable to the upset, emotional disequilibrium, or trauma of the struggling individual who is narrating sharing his or her struggle.

Note that all the things said here about resistance to empathy can also be said about compassion, altruism, kindness, generosity, gratitude, and the related set of pro-social attitudes. If the empathic person risks “empathic distress,” the compassionate person risks “compassion fatigue.” All the helping professions and first responders are at risk of a kind of “burn out,” affective depletion, or using up of one’s emotional resources. That means that professional self-care is an essential part of the commitment to service and that those playing the Long Game of expanding empathy in the community have in place practices to renew their emotional resources.

Resistance to empathy on the part of the listener is resistance to being affectively flooded, overwhelmed or otherwise put at the effect of excessive stimulation of a negative or even positive kind, which in excess can be painful. For example, who would want to empathize with a person such as Geheimrat Daniel Paul Schreber at the height of his psychotic breakdown?^[1] No one. However, in order to make a difference in helping Schreber it would be useful to get a taste of his distress, a sample of his fear, a vicarious experience of what he experienced as if in the theatre or film. So, if one is overwhelmed by emotional contagion, whether by empathic distress or compassion fatigue, then one is doing it wrong. One needs to take a sample of the other person’s distress, not the full-blown trauma itself. In empathizing, one needs to “tune up” one’s vicarious experience of the other and “tune down” one’s merger with them. This takes practice and even trial and error. Nevertheless, this is a real issue.

Given the level of empathy training, rare is the person who has enough control over their empathy regulation to tune it up or tune it down based on a continuum of disturbances varying from the mildly, everyday neurotic to the deeply psychotic. Note, however, that the antidote is expanded empathy. This bears repeating. If empathy is limited or parochial, then the solution is not to discard empathy to expand it, thus expanding inclusiveness and community.

Resistance to empathy also comes from the person who is the would-be recipient of empathy, compassion, etc. Pain and suffering can become a bad habit. The struggling individual is attached to their pain and suffering and these have become a kind of “comfort zone.” So letting go of the pain and suffering is itself more painful than the present pain. Letting go of the pain and suffering is filled with more pain and suffering than the person is willing to confront. As Marsha Linehan, the innovator in dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), famously noted, the way out of hell is through misery. Overcoming the bad habits, blind spots, and maladaptive behaviors that are the causes of a person’s suffering requires struggle and effort that is itself a kind of misery. Who wants to hear that? No one. Better to stay in one’s comfort zone of discomfort. Furthermore, overcoming one’s limitations and getting the empathy, dignity, respect, and recognition for which one is so hungry risks an encounter with the Unknown – new possibilities which have not been previously available both for success and failure – and the unknown is the most anxiety inspiring thing possible. Hence, further resistance to empathy.

Finally resistance to empathy comes from institutional inertia, namely, the faceless unempathic bureaucracy that seems to live in every call center, customer service desk, government function, or need for trouble shooting with a new appliance, computer interface, or product return. Any business person knows that customer service requires empathy. This is one place where “empathy sells, and empathy’s limitations sell even better” is completely and patently false. Lack of empathy sends the customer to the competition (and the customer will not even tell you about it – you will just be out of business!).

If Gad Saad is complaining about the fake empathy at many customer service desks and call centers and sales pitches (in general), then we are in agreement. Unfortunately, he is not – he seems really to be anti-kindness and anti-empathy along the lines of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” – even amidst a growing body count. In addition, one should not overlook that all-purpose tip and technique of “fake it till you make it.” Working from the outside inward – from practicing empathic behavior even if one’s feeling lag behind – is a proven method of “boot strapping” oneself into new skills and positive habits.

Regarding “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” that notorious “bad boy” Friedrich Nietzsche called such qualities as altruism, compassion, charity, and pro social attitudes aspects of “slave morality,” tips and techniques that those out of power can use to get power. Note that Nietzsche never mentioned the word “empathy,” but engaged with related phenomena such as altruism, charity, and so on. What is so wrong with the disempowered trying to expand their power? Since the ruling class are not volunteering to give up power, how else would anyone get power than by strategizing and struggling? What is wrong with the poor, the disadvantaged, the marginalized, the survivors of domestic violence, refugees from conflict zones and natural disasters, the early Christians with whom the Romans literally fed the lions (this list is not complete) getting back some of their power? Was the USA – and the sitcom theme song “Movin’ on Up” – not premised on struggling African Americans, immigrants, and the marginalized getting a “piece of the pie”?

I cut to the chase. The criticism of empathy as “suicidal empathy” is a new form of Social Darwinism. What the heck is Social Darwinism? The short version of Social Darwinism is the wolves saying the sheep should have more understanding for the wolves. “We wolves are very hungry. Have empathy for us and come here and let us bite your neck.” It is the masters in the manor house saying the slaves in the dirt-floored cabins out back should be more sympathetic towards the masters. “The burdens of leadership are hard, and riding shot gun over a chain gang of enslaved workers in the hot Mississippi sun is not easy.” The admittedly simplistic account of Neo-Social-Darwinism in the context of survival of the fittest is: if you get “extinguished,” then you deserved it. Well, not exactly. It means in a high stakes game of random variations and natural selection, you drew the short straw. If you were born in poverty, in a conflict zone, in a land rendered uninhabitable by rising waters, forest fires, or climate change, you did nothing to deserve your pain and suffering. This is the classic dilemma of bad things happening to innocent people, which all world religions and most philosophical systems attempt to address in different ways. Empathy alone is not going to fix the problem of evil and suffering, but, I maintain, empathy is called forth by these and is an important part of the solution.

Further background on what we might formally label as Neo-Social-Darwinism: In the Gilded Age of the robber barons of capitalism, when Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company forced small competitors out of existence using monopolistic, anti-competitive, and corrupt business practices, Standard Oil justified the action by saying “survival of the fittest.” That is Neo-Social-Darwinism. For example, when in 1894 railroad workers went on strike in Chicago for better wages, health insurance, an eight-hour day, and working conditions (sounds familiar?), US President Grover Cleveland called out 15,000 US Army (federal troops) on July 3, 1894 to break the strike under the pretext that it was preventing delivery of the US mail.

Here is another example of abuse of power to further undemocratic ends: On April 20, 1914, the Colorado National Guard and guards of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), surrounded and attacked a tent colony of 1,200 striking miners, ultimately killing over 20 men, women, and children by randomly firing machine guns into the camp before burning it all down. The massacre caused a national outcry, violent sympathy strikes (the “Ten Days War”), and congressional hearings that disgraced the Rockefeller family’s public image. The miner’s families, however, were still dead. (See “The Ludlow Massacre”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre.)

Not to minimize the abuses of power and rampant corruption in the current executive branch and Washington, DC, at large (Q3 2026), this is business as usual. Stephen Miller and Russell Voight, key policy architects and advisors to the current executive administration, seem to be studying the Grover Cleveland new gilded age play book and applying it to aspiring immigrants, diversity and inclusion, education, health care, and revisionist history that slaves were not so badly off. And if you believe that, I want to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.

Full disclosure: I mistakenly subscribed to the view that no such thing as bad publicity existed, and I declined in 2018 (and up until 2023) to mention the anti-empathy authors by name, instead referring to an “evolutionary psychologist,” a “celebrity psycholinguist,” a prominent “Germanic studies” teacher, or a mandarin professor of comparative literature. Why give “free publicity” to views that were seemingly committed to inhibiting, contracting, devaluing, rather than expressing, expanding, and implementing the practice of empathy?

The gambit did not work. The devaluing of empathy got traction, perhaps driven by publishers whose market research, whether accurate or not, suggested that the sales of empathy books had peaked, and who proposed to keep the pot boiling with works that throw empathy “under the bus.” The challenge is that it is getting crowded under the bus. One can always make a splash by throwing a rotten tomato, and the would-be critique of empathy uncharitably takes the weakest version of empathy and refutes it. In contrast, a rigorous and critical empathy engages in a process of continuous improvement of empathy by “cleaning up” the empathic breakdowns of emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and communications lost in translation, resulting in the expansion of empathy in the individual and the community.

Yet another reason that the practice of empathy sells but empathy’s limitations sell even better is a consequence of empathy’s own success. Empathy works. Empathy makes a profound and lasting difference to those who are treated with empathy. But in the age of TikTok does empathy work fast enough? Empathy and its many successes are themselves the occasions for the skepticism, resistance, and embracing the obstacles to empathy. A rigorous and critical empathy can be hard work; being empathic can leave one vulnerable; better to take the easy way out. The reader may say, I want instant empathy, like instant coffee, just add hot water and stir. Wouldn’t it be nice? Nor is anyone saying such a thing as “instant empathy” is impossible. It may work well enough in a pinch; but like instant coffee, the quality may not be on a par with that required by a more demanding or discriminating appreciation and taste – or a more challenging situation.

The pervasive cynicism and resignation of the world are naturally attracted to attacking the sources of inspiration and strength, not those of enervation and stagnation. A treatise on “The Dark Sides of Violence” will sadly remain timely and relevant, but no one disputes the accuracy of the description. One does not need a treatise “Against Eating Dirt,” because few are inclined to eat dirt (and if one is so inclined, it seems be a sign of a vitamin deficiency).

This brings us to the poster child for devaluing empathy, Fritz Breithaupt’s The Dark Sides of Empathy (2017) (hereafter referred to as “Dark Empathy”). Breithaupt asserts on page 8 that to “uncritically embrace empathy without caveats” is the goal debunked by the end of this [Breithaupt’s] book. Those who “uncritically embrace empathy” are debunked. Just so. Please stop right there. Who proposed uncritically embracing empathy—or anything? Uncritically embracing empathy is not proposed here. Attributing uncritical thinking to the masters of empathy such as C. Daniel Batson (2009), Simon Baron-Cohen (2014), Frans de Waal (2009), Jean Decety and William Ickes (2009), Susan Lanzoni (2018), Micah Zenko (2015) (this list is not complete), is itself a concerning sign of lack of critical thinking. Dark Empathy is at best naïve and at worse disingenuous in imaging practitioners of empathy are uncritical or lack rigor. “Uncritically embracing empathy” sets up a strawman, and gives a green light to uncritical thinking.

The program of Dark Empathy is systematically and sensationally to attribute examples of empathic distress to the practice of empathy itself, charge empathy with these misfirings, and, going forward, invalidate and dismiss the practice of empathy. Instead of engaging with the hard work of self-inquiry into one’s own blind spots to overcome the obstacles and resistances to empathy, Dark Empathy takes the easy way out, discards empathy, gives up on it. It is like giving up on nutrition because the cook may put too much salt in the soup or burned the roast.

Dark Empathy properly lists many of empathy’s breakdowns, misfirings, and obstacles (as do practitioners of a rigorous and critical empathy). These include things such as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, messages getting lost in translations in attempting to be empathic. A rigorous and critical empathy is committed to doing the hard work of overcoming these break downs and misfirings in order to relate authentically and in integrity to the other individual. In contrast, Dark Empathy’s commitment seems to be to sensationalizing the failings of empathy, not demonstrating how empathy works (and does not work) in literature, politics, psychology, etc. Or rather the commitment is that empathy does not work (full stop).

If Dark Empathy would have stopped at page 8—empathy is what makes us human (or words to that effect) and elaborated on that position—then it would have made a useful contribution. The author really says it: empathy is essential to our humanity. However, empathy then breaks down into empathic distress. The issue is that human beings are frequently inhumane—not just a few bad apples, but as the Holocaust and Hannah Arendt taught us about the banality of evil, and the famous quote from the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, everyone has the potential for real badness, evil, even if few act on it. Therefore, dial back empathy, abstain from empathy? (See Hannah Arendt. (1971). Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Press: 105–106; see also Lou Agosta. (2010). Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 73; this is the quotation from the Nazi Chief of the SS (Schutzstaffel) Heinrich Himmler and director of many of the genocidal programs against the Jewish people (and others) where he exhorts his men, seeming to demonstrate a kind of mutilated empathic understanding of how difficult it is to kill people and encouraging the executioners not to make any exceptions – and to kill them all. This is the paradigm case for a kind of “fiendish empathy” (as Heinz Kohut, MD, called it), and it might be redescribed as the breakdown of empathy in the presence of moral insanity and lack of integrity.)

Dark Empathy asserts sensible things about empathy up front, and then sensationalizes the negative and the resulting empathic distress by saying that empathic human beings perpetrate horrid actions. Accurate enough. Human beings are a difficult species. They are an empathic, caring, compassionate, and kind species as well as an aggressive, territorial, and rapacious one. Wouldn’t we want to work on expanding the former and inhibiting the latter?

That Roman soldiers drove nails through the limbs of the people they were crucifying does not invalidate the art of carpentry. Dark Empathy makes it sound like it does as it seemingly intentionally applies the same argument to empathy. Dark Empathy perpetrates a series of fallacies of numbing grossness by saying the forms of empathy are the motives for the horrid actions. This is not accurate. Aren’t the hidden variables aggression, uninhibited desire, territoriality (this list is not complete)?

The Dark Sides of Empathy succeeds in being provocative, even sensationalistic, identifying ways in which empathy can (and does) breakdown, misfire, and go astray. Yet The Dark Sides of Empathy is argumentatively uncharitable (in Donald Davidson’s sense): it uses the weakest versions of the empathy advocate’s arguments, not the strongest. On background, the analytic philosopher of language Donald Davidson innovated in defining a “a principle of charity”.

The principle of (argumentative) charity goes beyond honest translation or statement of an argument, as noted, asking the thinker to engage with the strongest version of an argument rather than intentionally weaking it through setting up a strawman or a distorted, ambiguous representation of the argument. (On “argumentative charity see: Donald Davidson. (1973). Radical interpretation. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2001: 125–139 (the principle of argumentative charity is discussed on 136–137); I am adding the word “argumentative” to distinguish clearly Davidson’s logical meaning from “altruistic charity,” which a form of compassion; see also Jonathan Haber. (2020). Critical Thinking. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press: 74.)

As noted, one can always make a splash by throwing a rotten tomato, and that is what The Dark Sides of Empathy does. The only concern is that my criticisms will sound like there is no such thing as bad publicity or sound like buying the book is worth it. It is not. I have read it very carefully, cover-to-cover, dear reader, so you do not have to. What a chore! Dark Empathy name drops Hölderlin, Goethe, Flaubert, Fontane, Hawthorne ((p. 172) one page only!), before turning to an in-depth engagement with the execution of the domestic (US) terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, which says as much about the dark side of the author as about any aspect of empathy. (Note: Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001): Executed by Federal authorities on June 11, 2001 for the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in April 1995 in which 168 people, including 19 children, were killed and 680 injured.)

One fundamental fallacy is to confuse empathic distress with empathy itself. That empathy can misfire and fail does not mean one should abstain from empathy. It means to expand one’s empathy one may usefully practice and develop one’s empathic capabilities. With practice and effort, one’s empathic abilities are broadened and deepened. The celebrated Self Psychologist and empathy innovator Heinz Kohut, MD, (who is not mentioned in Breithaupt) gives the example of the Nazis who equipped their dive bombers with sirens, the better to impart empathic distress in their victims, thus demonstrating their (the Nazis’) subtle “empathic” appreciation of their victims’ feelings. One is tempted to say, “The devil may quote scripture.” The devil frequently does, and Nazis and their fellow travelers may try to apply some subset of a description of “empathy.”

Note that Kohut speaks of “fiendish empathy” and the use of empathy for a “hostile purpose” while emphasizing his (Kohut’s) value neutral definition of empathy as “vicarious introspection” and a method of data gathering about the other person (1981: 529, 580).Nevertheless, the point is well taken that empathy is a powerful phenomenon in all its dimensions and requires careful handling.

The Nazi applies a kind of entry level emotional contagion or affective transmission of feelings, but the process breaks down at the point of empathic responsiveness. Empathic responsiveness requires a core of acknowledgement and recognition of the other person’s humanity.

Thus, it is arguably plainly evident that the would-be “empathy” of the Nazis or the white supremacists such as Timothy McVeigh^[1] misfires and does so completely. The would-be empathy gets itself entangle in a practical contradiction. It is a contradiction to relate humanely to another person being while dehumanizing the person. Empathy doesn’t work that way. Empathic responsiveness simply does not admit of bombing people or disqualifying them as “less than” or other than human when they plainly are human.

The risk of Dark Empathy to the reader is that the reader may think its author is an expert in empathy and start quoting the distortions, lack of rigor, critical faux pas, and simple inaccuracies as if they shed light on empathy. For example, in a case of shocking inaccuracy, the book sites Stockholm Syndrome as an example of the dark side of empathy (p. 37). The mechanism of Stockholm Syndrome is not empathy, but “identification with the aggressor [key term].” Because the hostages identified with the aggressor (the bank robber and hostage taker) in order to survive a five-day traumatic kidnapping means that people do what they have to do to survive.

It is not an example of empathy, but of Dark Empathy’s lack of psychological acumen – and of empathy. As noted above, identification with the authority figure is crucial in forming the human moral conscience during childhood; and this same mechanism of identification “goes off the rails,” misfunctions or rather functions in a pathological or at least problematic way, in the case of a kidnapping, in which, in order to survive, the victim actually builds a relationship with the perpetrator – does not pretend to do so, actually builds the relationship.

Breithaupt’s interpretation depends on overlooking the basic definition of empathy that empathy requires a firm boundary between the self and the other. Remember the pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer? His treatment of compassion and selflessness and/or merger, against which Nietzsche’s occasionally raged, are break downs of empathy. Never was it truer that “Good fences make good neighbors” (a fence, not a wall!), and there is a gate in the fence over which is the welcoming word “Empathy!”

A forced choice between more compassion and expanded empathy

In comparison with the long, hard slog through Dark Empathy, Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy is relatively easy to comprehend and situate. The case against empathy is that it is parochial, biased and limited based on preferences for “in group” individuals and associations such as family, neighborhood, and superficial similarities such as ethnic background, race, or local custom. Bloom’s recommendation is to pursue rational compassion. Bloom actually makes it sound like one has to choose between rational compassion and empathy. Given the state of the world, doesn’t the world need both more compassion and expanded empathy? The forced choice between the two must be declined.

Furthermore, the answer on the part of empathy advocates to the criticism of the “bias and limitation” of parochialism is direct: if empathy is sometimes parochial, the solution is not to abstain from empathy but to expand it. The empathic imperative is precisely: Be inclusive! Welcome the outsiders, the Others. Expanded empathy is what is required to broaden the scope and limits of the community to build harmonious and cooperative relationships that work for everyone. That building such a community is a high bar, takes nothing away from empathy. Given the complexity of the challenge, one would think that deploying various methods to make progress is proper.

As noted, Bloom’s choice between rational compassion and, as the title says, against empathy seems forced. Given the challenges at hand, don’t we need both empathy and compassion (of all kinds) to deal with this difficult species, human beings? Though I might be mistaken, I am not aware of any advocate of a rigorous and critical empathy who recommends abstaining from compassion. Why should advocates of rational compassion abstain from empathy?

Given that Against Empathy operates with the distinctions rationality and critical thinking (the latter implicitly), it has much to offer – just not much to offer against empathy. Its discussions of compassion fatigue, self-control, delayed gratification, caring and mirroring, the basis of morality, violence and cruelty, thinking about the consequences of one’s speech and actions, are all relevant to the dynamics between empathy and rational compassion.

Many of these distinctions such as self-control, delayed gratification, thinking about the consequences of one speech and actions, are features of adult behavior and speaking. Now it is a concerning fact that many adults are going about their business behaving in immature ways like adolescents who do not think about the consequences of their behavior and speaking. This says a lot about the breakdown of civility, education, and politics in our world, and, once again, the antidote is expanded rationality, compassion, and empathy.

This is a good place to note that empathy has a developmental sequence. The empathy of a two-year-old, who offers his own teddy bear to an upset grownup in tears whose adult suffering the child does not really understand, is on a continuum with, but different than, full adult empathy. Nor should the child’s empathy be dismissed. Children are exquisitely empathic, just not always with complicated adult issues. The adults deploy all the aspects of vicarious affect matching with the Other, appreciating who the other person is as a possibility, taking a walk cognitively in the Other person’s shoes (while remembering to take off one’s own to avoid project), and responding to the Other in a form of words and gestures that indicates to the Other that the listener “got” that with which the Other was struggling.

The key take-away on adult empathy with children in Christine Olden’s (1953) defining statement is as follows: when with a child, the adult is present to his or own fate as a child of the same age. Note that such a calling forth of the adult’s experience does not necessarily align his or her experience with that of the child in the moment, since the child may be happy and the adult unhappy (and so on), but the implicit experience called forth is the input to the empathic process of comparing and contrasting one’s own experience with that of the child out of which an empathic response can be produced.

What is characteristic of those against empathy is that they engage with the weakest version of the empathically-relevant phenomena at issue, not the strongest. They engage with the breakdowns and misfirings of empathy such as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and communications getting lost in translation. All these are real enough occurrence, and the recommendation is to improve on empathy by analyzing what occurred and taking steps to improve the practice in context. Yet the tactic of the anti-empaths is to roll these misfirings up into the definition of empathy, and then invalidate empathy. In contrast with this argumentative lack of charity, the sound practice of empathy “gets it” that empathy can fail; and it is precisely in overcoming these failures, obstacles and resistances that a rigorous and critical empathy comes forth and gets implemented.

As noted above, the analytic philosopher of language Donald Davidson (1973: 136–137) innovated in defining a “a principle of [argumentative] charity.” One seeks for that in vain in Against Empathy, where the title itself seems to be a provocation. Nor is there anything wrong with that as such – just do not pretend that provocation and rhetoric (in the negative sense) are going to expand one’s empathy. Never was it truer, resistance to empathy makes obstacles to empathy a part of the defining features of empathy in order to dismiss it.

For example, if one is suffering from compassion fatigue or empathic distress, which is a professional risk of first responders and members of the helping professions such as doctors and therapists, then one recommendation is to “dial down” the compassion and/or empathy. If one uncharitably weakens empathy or compassion by representing them as an “on off” switch, then one is faced with the false choice between these pro-social practices and hard-heartedness. However, if one represents compassion and empathy as being something that one can dial up and down, granted this requires practice and training, then one has the possibility of sampling the other person’s suffering and pain vicariously. One has a vicarious experience – a sample or trace affect of the Other’s experience – and one is able to put one’s toe in the river of the Other’s suffering (so to speak) without being flooded by it. Much remains to be said about this, but, for our present purposes, the point is to decline the false choice between more compassion and expanded empathy. Both are needed.

A particularly problematic example that Bloom cites is the case in which empathy allegedly incites to violence. The example Bloom gives is the cases of lynchings of black men in the US South who were accused of raping white woman, in which lynchings, Bloom maintains, empathy for the white woman became a motive to the violence. How shall I put it delicately? Simply stated, lynchings were a way of maintaining white supremacy and domination of black people through violence and should never be represented in any other way. Racism is the systematic denial of empathy.

These false accusations against innocent black men, who were literally grabbed off the street, are fanatical delusions similar to those that Jewish people drank the blood of Christian babies or that extra-terrestrials from Mars invaded New Jersey in 1931 – lies, damn lies, and total nonsense. I am sitting here holding my head in my hands and rocking back-and-forth quasi-catatonically. I am sick at heart. To site this racist accusation of rape as an example of empathy or motivating an empathic reaction is the reduction to absurdity of Bloom’s entire project. He just doesn’t get it. Even argumentative charity has its limits. At the very least, Bloom is tin-eared and unempathic to cite this common racist stereotype of rhetorical violence preceding physical violence, which is a tactic of domination, Jim Crow, white supremacy, and the imposition of injustice by violence. The most charitable thing to do to undo something so off the rails is to apologize and resign.

On background for the reader’s historical empathy, in 1931 eight black young adults and one juvenile, henceforth known as “The Scottsboro Boys,” were falsely accused of raping two women. After examination by a medical doctor, no evidence of rape was found. They were tried by an all-white male jury for rape and sentenced to death for the rape(s) (except for the juvenile, who was sentenced to life in prison). The NAACP and the Communist Party (regarding the latter, even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day) provided legal assistance to the young men and stopped the State from executing them; but they had to endure long and unjust years in prison. With this historical vignette of struggle for justice and empathy ringing in our ears, we turn to the next example of empathy under stress.

Mutilated empathy

Migrant Aesthetics by Glenda Carpio sets up an either/or choice between ending empire (e.g., racism, colonialism, imperialism, and so on) and expanding a rigorous and critical empathy. The book then mutilates empathy by confusing it with projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and other forms of miscommunication. The result is some 285 pages of penetrating analysis in which the reader does not get a single example of the practice of empathy resulting in a successful empathic relatedness in literary fiction (which is the author’s area of expertise and discussion). The attempt by Migrant Aesthetics to force a choice between expanding empathy and ending (or limiting) empire must be refused. Both results – ending (limiting) empire and expanding empathy – are needed. More on that shortly. (See Glenda Carpio. (2023). Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy by Glenda Carpio (New York: Columbia University Press.)

The good news is that empathy works whether one names it or not, whether one believes in it or not. Contra Carpio’s constant carping (forgive me, I just couldn’t resist), the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy knows that it can be wrong and can break down, misfire or go astray, flat out fail, as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, or communications getting lost in translation. It is precisely in engaging with and overcoming these obstacles and resistances to empathy that empathic relatedness and community are brought forth. Like with most powerful methods, skills, or interventions, practice makes the master. As a successful and popular teacher, Carpio knows the value of empathy, nor is mention of the word itself required.

The issue is that in 285 pages of penetrating, incisive analysis of migrant aesthetics (the category, not the title), Carpio does not provide a single example of what an effective empathy would look like. The reader is not given a single example of a healthy empathic relatedness that works, so that one could identify it if one happened to encounter it. This bears repeating: in some 285 pages of summary and analysis of the literary fictions of Dinaw Mengestu, Teju Cole, Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, Julie Otsuka, Junot Diaz, and some nonfiction of others, Migrant Aesthetics does not cite a single example of empathy that works right or functions as designed.

Not one. Granted that empathy does not always succeed, the reader of Migrant Aesthetics does not learn what a healthy, rigorous and critical empathy might look like if, rare as it may be (as empathy skeptics assert), if one happened to encounter empathy. None. Not one single example of what empathy looks like when it succeeds in producing empathic relatedness. This must give the reader pause. We take a step back—but not too far back.

Caprio asserts: “…[W]hat has been my central argument in this work: that the history of empire is key in understanding the roots of migration at a scale appropriate to its global dimensions (Carpio: p. 228).” That to be forced from one’s home and become a refugee of the road is definitely a source of pain, suffering, and trauma. Here the connection is direct—cause (routed from one’s home by aggression, starvation, etc.) and effect (pain, suffering, trauma). At the risk of over-simplification, yet a compelling one, white Europeans with cannons and machine guns go to Africa and Asia and exploit the natural resources and enslave or dominate the locals. A small subset of the locals is coopted—analogous to the concentration camp capos, both perpetrators and survivors (until they are not) being chosen from the prisoners—to make the job of domination by the ruling class easier. Even the surviving prisoners then become perpetrators as one starving prisoner “steals” bread or water from another or lies to save his own skin, thereby endangering another. And some of those local migrants journey back to headquarters, whether Boston, London, or New York, and some become the celebrated authors of migrant fiction (the literary distinction not the title).

Empathy is a powerful tool in deescalating conflict and restoring dignity to aggrieved parties and survivors of empire, and has been successfully employed in doing so from the troubles in Ireland to the Truth and Reconciliation session in South Africa (see Donna Hicks on Dignity (2011)). However, if anyone seriously believes that empathy is going to solve the problems created by empire, colonialism, imperialism, and so, then—how shall I put it delicately?—empathy is being “over sold.” This is usually the first step in setting up empathy as a “strawman” to be blamed for not fixing the many challenges facing civilized human beings committed to building a community that works for all persons.

There are at least two hidden variables behind the problematic causal analysis of empire that would help connect the dots between empire and empathy-based solutions: Human aggression and human hunger (hunger for many things, but here for food). These human beings are an aggressive species—and biologically omnivores. People can be kind and compassionate and empathic, but they also can behave aggressively and violently. Even if committed vegetarians, people also need to eat quite regularly, if not exactly three times a day.

To say, as Migrant Aesthetics does, that the arrival of the white European conquistador and their horses in the new world in 1492 was a catastrophe for the original inhabitants gets the measure of the event about right. In a way, the displacement of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia to Oklahoma is a kind of migration; but not really. It is a death march with strong aspects of genocide.

By all means denounce empire, but a more useful approach consistent with such righteous indignation might be to elaborate an analysis of human aggression, territoriality, lack of education, lack of critical thinking, the disturbing tendency of many human beings (“true believers” (Hoffer 1951) fanatically to follow authoritarian figures off a cliff. In that context, empathy is a proven way of deescalating violence and aggression and restoring dignity to the survivors.

There is a readiness assessment for empathy, and it requires that one be relatively safe and secure in one’s own person. Above all, the readiness requires a willingness to inquire into one’s own blind spots and preconscious biases. Empathy “the hard way” does not take the easy way out – e.g., bell hooks’ “eating the other” – the hard way includes the work of taking the Other’s perspective, giving up being righteous, giving up being aggrieved, asking for what one needs, and so on.

As it stands, Migrant Aesthetics misunderstands empathy, mutilates it, and then blames empathy because empathy can be misapplied by migrant authors, some of the male members who are both perpetrators and survivors, for calling attention to their plight and that of the devalued Other within us all.

The other hidden variable is that these humans are a hungry species. At the risk of over-simplification, long since incurred, the development of Cyrus McCormick’s combine-wheat-reaper, and the follow-on agribusiness technology, allow some 2% of the population to grow enough food to feed the entire planet; and this in spite of the fact that human choices made under aggression continue to use food as a weapon of starvation. Prior to the Green Revolution, the other 98% of the population had to work twelve to sixteen hours a day to grow enough food to avoid slow death by starvation. As noted, the migrant classics, admittedly shot through with empire, of Willa Cather and Ole Edvart Rolvaag, confront hunger as an ever-present specter, pending a successful harvest. Meanwhile, apparently large dairy herds really do contribute to greenhouse gases.

The grievance against empathy continues: Migrant Aesthetics writes (p. 4): “More broadly, the genre of immigrant literature depends on a model of reading founded on empathy—a model that my book takes to task. Literature promotes empathy, we are told, but empathy can easily slip into a projection of readers’ feelings and even into outright condescension.” As a reader, I am holding my head in my hands and rocking back-and-forth quasi-catatonically. Projection is a breakdown of empathy. I am in disbelief at the lack of common sense, lack of critical thinking, and absence of argumentative charity in confusing empathy and projection. Projection is a misfiring and/or going off the rails of empathy. Projection is a “getting lost in translation” of empathy. Now attribute these to empathy and dismiss empathy. Hmmm.

As regards “a model of reading founded on empathy,” please stop right there. Reading the story would not work—would not make any sense—would, strictly speaking, be unintelligible without empathy. Reading and empathy are joined at the hip, so to say. Without empathy, the actions and contingencies, the struggles and high spirits, setbacks and successes, that are represented in the story would be strange sounds and gestures appearing to an anthropologist on Mars or on her first day in an alien culture, prior to marshalling her empathic skills. Never underestimate the power of storytelling, but absent empathy, it does not get traction. Reading is founded on empathy. Reading teaches one to walk in someone else’s shoes. Reading takes one to worlds that don’t exist, like the world of Harry Potter. One can feel what it was like for Rosa Parks to refuse to sit in the back of that segregated bus in 1955. This calls out the convergence of reading and empathy—both open up new worlds, both provide vicarious experiences of the lives of Others, both point to possibilities that had not previously been imagined. In both reading and empathy, we relate to an Other—in the one case in-person, in the other case, in-fiction or the vicarious presentation of historical narrative.

If the reader did not bring the capacity for empathy to the reading of the text, the text itself would not make sense. Reading the simplest narrative about a snowman melting in the spring thaw, much less Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’s anguish at being patriarchally denied access to her son, would be unintelligible. Without the vicarious experience of empathic receptivity, the reading of the most dramatic fiction will be indistinguishable from reading the railroad schedule when the rail workers were on strike. Meaningless. Unintelligible. The water streaming from the abandoned child’s face would not be tears; the clenched fist would not be anger but an excess of adrenaline; the trembling would not be fear but Parkinson’s disorder. The migrant bones in the desert over which no one prayed would be calcified carbon, not an anguished cry for help and human response.

Without empathy, one would perhaps be able to provide an accurate description, whether as fact or fiction is irrelevant here, of the Other’s behavior from a third person perspective, but the behavior would lack vitality, energy, strength, aliveness, and relatedness to the things that matter to human beings. One would truly be like the philosopher Descartes looking out the window at people on the street below, wondering if the entities that appear to be people are really instead robot-like automata. Descartes was practicing an exercise in radical doubt, whereas the reader that lacked the capacity for empathy would be practicing an exercise in radical draining of meaning from the text in every sense from pragmatics to semantics—encountering empty words describing empty behavior, as noted, like reading a train schedule during the railway strike, instead of reading an engaging narrative such as Anna’s emotional, moral, cognitive. spiritual struggles to attain self-knowledge and personal fulfillment.

However, Migrant Aesthetic responds: You have now got the point. Drive out empathy to let justice and a small set of related responses come forth. It doesn’t work. Migrant Aesthetics “forecloses” (rejects) empathy, then immediately lets empathy back in. Empathy is indispensable, and it cannot be kept out.

Carpio (p. 8): “[…] [T]he writers I examine reject empathy as the main mode of rationality, opting instead for what Hannah Arendt called “representative thinking” that is, they urge reader to think, as themselves, from the position of another person and thus to call into question their own preconceptions and actions” [italics added]. Thus, Migrant Aesthetics rejects empathy while calling out “the position of another person,” which is precisely the folk definition of empathy.

Arendt’s reference here is of course to a single line in Immanuel Kant’s Third Critique (1791/93: AA 158) about “enlarged thinking” [erweiterten…Denkungart] that is, to think from the perspective of the Other. Sounds like the folk definition of empathy to me. This cipher of “enlarged thinking”, which remains unintegrated in Kant, became the inspiration for Arendt’s incomplete third volume of the life of the mind on political judgment. Once again, it is the folk definition of empathy.

The point is that Migrant aesthetics (the book, not the distinction) politicizes aesthetics with anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-empire-ist commitments, rhetoric (in the classical sense), and expressions, without necessarily making practical recommendations for political action. Migrant Aesthetics expels empathy from the garden of artistic achievement, because empathy does not provide a stable basis for political action.

Never underestimate the relevance of Immanuel Kant, yet if one wants measurable results from political action, apply Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971) or analysis based on Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), not Kant’s Third Critique. Hoffer calls out the mutilated logic of totalitarian thinking; and Alinsky knew quite a lot about building community, and though he did not use the word “empathy,” empathy lives in building community. (See also Tristam Adams. (2016). The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organises Empathy, London: Repeater Books, so the capitalist takes a walk in the Other’s shoes in order to sell him another pair; is nice to the workers in order to improve productivity; it seems to work well enough – see also the Chapter in Lou Agosta, The Lazy Person’s Guide to Empathy (with illustrations by Alex Zonis) on “Empathy: Capitalist tool.”)

In short, the rumor of empathy remains a rumor in the cases of Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy, Breithaupt’s Dark Empathy, Bloom’s Against Empathy or Carpio’s Migrant Aesthetics; the rumor is not confirmed; and empathy does not live in this work. It is where empathy goes to become projection, emotional contagion, and fake empathy. It is where empathy goes to become mutilated empathy like mutilated fragments of human bones in the desert. Don’t go there.

In summary, it is not a choice between expanding empathy and ending/reducing empire, and an engagement with both is needed. Survivors ask for empathy. When survivors are asked, “What do you want—what would make it better? What would soothe the trauma?” then rarely do they say punish the perpetrator (though occasionally they do). Mostly they ask for acknowledgement, to be heard and believed, to hear the truth about what happened, for apology, accountability, restitution, rehabilitation, prevention of further wrong (see Judith L. Herman, MD. (2023). Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. New York: Basic Books). Rarely do survivors make forgiveness a goal if that would require further interaction with the perpetrator (though self-forgiveness should not be dismissed). It bears repeating: though both are needed, survivors do not ask for an end to empire, but for empathy.

References

Tristam Adams. (2016). The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organises Empathy, London: Repeater Books

Lou Agosta. (2010). Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. London: PalgraveMacmillan.

Lou Agosta. (2018/2024). Empathy Lessons, 2^nd Edition. Chicago: Two Pears Press.

Lou Agosta. (2025). Chapter 3: Empathy and its discontents, in Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature. Palgrave Macmillan Press. Click here to download.

Lou Agosta. (2025). Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature. Palgrave Macmillan Press. Click here for Lou Agosta’s Amazon page.

Saul Alinsky. (1971). Rules for Radicals. New York: Vintage, 1989

Hannah Arendt. (1971). Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Press: see especially pp. 105–106.

C. Daniel Batson. (2009), These things called empathy Eight related but Distinct Phenomena. In The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, eds. Jean Decety and William Ickes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009: 3–16.

Paul Bloom. (2016). Against Empathy. New York: Ecco (Harper Collins).

Fritz Breithaupt. (2017). The Dark Sides of Empathy, Andrew Hamilton (tr.). Ithaca, NYY: Cornell UP.

Glenda Carpio. (2023). Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy. New York: Columbia UP.

Simon Baron-Cohen. (2014). Zero degrees of empathy. RSA [Renaissance Society of America] Video Presentation: https://youtu.be/Aq_nCTGSfWE [checked on 2023-02-26];

Donald Davidson. (1973). Radical interpretation. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2001: 125–139

Jean Decety and William Ickes. (2009). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Jonathan Haber. (2020). Critical Thinking. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press: 74.

Judith L. Herman, MD. (2023). Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. New York: Basic Books

Donna Hicks. (2011). Dignity. New Haven: Yale UP.

Eric Hoffer. (1951). The True Believer. New York: Random.

Immanuel Kant. (1791/93). Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013: AA 158.

Heinz Kohut. (1981). “On Empathy,” The Search for the Self: Volume 4: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut 1978-1981, London: Karnac Books, 2011: 525–535; see 529, 580 on empathy as vicarious introspection.

Susan Lanzoni. (2018). Empathy: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press; Micah Zenko. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.

The Ludlow Massacre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

Christine Olden. (1953). On adult empathy with children. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol 8 [annual]: 111–126.

Namwali Serpall. (2019). The banality of empathy. The New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/?lp_txn_id=1496946 [checked on 10/20/2023].

Tunku Varadarajan. (July 10, 2026): Gad Saad on Suicidal Empathy and Western Decline: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gad-saad-on-suicidal-empathy-and-western-decline-cdae269f?st=6zthGs&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Frans de Waal, Oct 3, 2009, Our kinder, gentler ancestors: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574449012560741086?st=jhYLwQ&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Frans de Waal. (2009). The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Harmony Books (Random House).

Tara Wells. (2017). Compassion is better than empathy, Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-clarity/201703/compassion-is-better-empathy?msockid=38a4e0db840c639d1086f7d48545627f

Micah Zenko. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.

Note: No generative AI or AI of any kind was used in the preparation and execution of this blog post or its publication or recorded version.

^[1] Daniel Paul Schreber (1842 – 1911) is the most famous schizophrenic of the late 19^th and early 20^th Century. He was the equivalent of a federal judge before his illness and in a successful attempt to convince the authorities of his recovery and to release him he wrote Memoirs of a Nervous Illness New York, trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter: New York Review of Books Publications, 2000. Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustave Jug, and Karl Jaspers all engaged with Schreber’s work in their own respective ways. Also relevant are Louis Sass (1994). The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press and Eric Santner. (1996). My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

^[1] 1968–2001: Executed by Federal authorities on June 11, 2001 for the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in April 1995 in which 168 people, including 19 children, were killed and 680 injured.