Quotes from Paul Bloom

But that's just me. Others see things differently. My point here is just that the failure of people to attend to data in the political domain does not reflect a limitation in their capacity for reason. It reflects how most people make sense of politics. They don't care about truth because, for them, it's not really about truth.

Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don't like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient. If you made a sadist more empathic, it would just lead to a happier sadist, and if I were indifferent to the baby's suffering, her crying would be nothing more than an annoyance.

As you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise," or Rabbi Hillel's statement, "What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary thereof.

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.

In an online class (part of the MasterClass series) on the topic, the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin says that the most foundational and basic advice for story construction is to present a formidable obstacle.

In a lovely paper called "Suspense in the Absence of Uncertainty," Richard Gerrig points out that suspense can be created even if one knows the outcome—the election of George Washington as president, say, or the successful creation of the atomic bomb by the United States in World War II—so long as there is uncertainty about how the obstacles are dealt with. It is this surmounting of obstacles that can pull us in; they're what give the opportunity of pleasure.

Carlyle was upset because the economists were against slavery. He argued for the reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies and was annoyed that the economists railed against it. Think about this when you're tempted to scorn economists and the cool approach they take to human affairs, and when you hear people equating strong feelings with goodness and cold reason with nastiness. In the real world, as we've seen, the truth is usually the opposite.

We have gut feelings, but we also have the capacity to override them, to think through issues, including moral issues, and to come to conclusions that can surprise us. I think this is where the real action is. It's what makes us distinctively human, and it gives us the potential to be better to one another, to create a world with less suffering and more flourishing and happiness. There

As Cicero said about the merits of friendship—but he could just as well have been talking about close relationships in general—it "improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief." I would prefer that those who care about me greet my panic with calm and my gloom with good cheer.

Being a good person likely is more related to distanced feelings of compassion and kindness, along with intelligence, self-control, and a sense of justice. Being a bad person has more to do with a lack of regard for others and an inability to control one's appetites.

The idea I'll explore is that the act of feeling what you think others are feeling—whatever one chooses to call this—is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we're better off without it.

Or take bullies. There is a stereotype of bullies as social incompetents who take their frustrations out on others. But actually, when it comes to understanding the minds of people, bullies might be better than average—more savvy about what makes other people tick. This is precisely why they can be so successful at bullying. People with low social intelligence, low "cognitive empathy"? Those are more often the bullies' victims.

It's not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists.

the world has been getting better: Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Blaise Pascal was even blunter: "All men seek happiness. This is without exception." And, to make clear how serious he is, he later adds: "This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

And so, for benign masochism to work, certain conditions must be met. The pain has to be relatively brief. It has to quickly fade, providing the space for pleasurable contrast. And the damage cannot be severe.

How much money and time—and attention and emotional energy—should we spend on ourselves, on those close to us, and on strangers?

Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, "High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

In April of 1945, in the Dachau concentration camp, several men were lined up against the wall, tortured, and shot. Such savagery was typical for Dachau. Tens of thousands of prisoners had been murdered there, through starvation, execution, the gas chamber, and even grotesque medical experiments. But this incident happened after the camp had been liberated. The victims were captured German soldiers, and it was the American liberators who were doing the killing.

Pain can be better than meditation, because while meditation requires the constant choice to engage with the monkey mind, to gently push away those distracting thoughts, pain does the trick for you.

What distinguishes torture from masochism? In torture, the intensity of the assault on the self can be more severe, limitlessly so. But this isn't the key difference. What really matters is choice. There are no safe words in torture. To voluntarily obliterate one's self, temporarily and under situations of control, is one thing, and it can be blissful.

If your suffering makes me suffer, if I feel what you feel, that's empathy in the sense that I'm interested in here. But if I understand that you are in pain without feeling it myself, this is what psychologists describe as social cognition, social intelligence, mind reading, theory of mind, or mentalizing. It's also sometimes described as a form of empathy—"cognitive empathy" as opposed to "emotional empathy," which is most of my focus.

The myth of pure evil has many sources. One is what Steven Pinker calls "the moralization gap"—the tendency to diminish the severity of our own acts relative to the acts of others.

I am particularly impressed by the research of Tania Singer, a cognitive neuroscientist, and Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk—two scholars working together to explore the distinction between empathy and compassion.