Quotes from Paul Bloom

In my own life, I do not live like an effective altruist. An effective altruist would really disapprove of my life. I don't give enough to charity and I still have both my kidneys.

Even the charities I give to are related to things that touch my life, like the Special Olympics. I'm not fully rational; I'm swayed by my biases and my emotions.

The real problem with natural selection is that it makes no intuitive sense. It is like quantum physics; we may intellectually grasp it, but it will never feel right to us.

If our wondrous kindness is evidence for God, is our capacity for great evil proof of the Devil?

We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods. The key to the happy life, it seems, is the good life: a life with sustained relationships, challenging work, and connections to community.

If our moral attitudes are entirely the result of nonrational factors, such as gut feelings and the absorption of cultural norms, they should either be stable or randomly drift over time, like skirt lengths or the widths of ties. They shouldn't show systematic change over human history. But they do.

I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.

Even in the most peaceful communities, an appetite for violence shows up in dreams, fantasies, sports, play, literature, movies and television. And, so long as we don't transform into angels, violence and the threat of violence - as in punishment and deterrence - is needed to rein in our worst instincts.

Our best hope for the future [...] lies in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don't empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.

Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.

Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.

On many issues, empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. The outrage that comes from adopting the perspective of a victim can drive an appetite for retribution.

The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept - and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series led to similar tears.

Most of us know nothing about constitutional law, so it's hardly surprising that we take sides in the Obamacare debate the way we root for the Red Sox or the Yankees. Loyalty to the team is what matters.

I love teaching. I wouldn't take a job that didn't include it.

Some of the natural world is appealing, some of it is terrifying, and some of it grosses us out. Modern people don't want to be dropped naked into a swamp. We want to tour Yosemite with our water bottles and G.P.S. devices. The natural world is a source of happiness and fulfillment, but only when prescribed in the right doses.

Having kids has proven to be this amazing - for me, this amazing source of ideas of anecdotes, of examples, I can test my own kids without human subject permission, so they pilot - I pilot my ideas on them. And so it is a tremendous advantage to have kids if you're going to be a developmental psychologist.

More-radical scholars insist that an inherent clash exists between science and our long-held conceptions about consciousness and moral agency: if you accept that our brains are a myriad of smaller components, you must reject such notions as character, praise, blame, and free will.

By "empathy," some people mean everything that is good - compassion, kindness, warmth, love, being a mensch, changing the world - and I'm for all of those things. I'm not a monster.

We know that young babies, as they become capable of moving voluntarily, will share. They will share food, for instance, with their siblings and with kids that are around. They will sooth. If they see somebody else in pain, even the youngest of toddlers will try to reach out and pat the person.

Humans are social beings, and we are happier, and better, when connected to others.

If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well - better, in many ways, than devout ones.

We can imagine our bodies being destroyed, our brains ceasing to function, our bones turning to dust, but it is harder - some would say impossible - to imagine the end of our very existence.

If evil is empathy erosion, and empathy erosion is a form of illness, then evil turns out to be nothing more than a particularly awful psychological disorder.