Wednesday morning, December 10th. Reading about a campaign to save one photogenic endangered animal while dozens of less charismatic species quietly disappear. The cute one gets millions in donations. The ugly ones get nothing. Empathy didn't help—it actively distorted our priorities. We feel good about caring while allocating resources based on which animal makes us feel the warmest feelings.

The Empathy Consensus

Here's what everyone agrees on:

Empathy is foundational to morality. Good leaders have empathy. Empathetic people make better decisions. We need more empathy in politics, in business, in daily life. Lack of empathy is a character flaw, possibly even evil. The world's problems stem from insufficient empathy. If we could just get people to feel each other's pain, everything would improve.

The promise: Empathy connects us to others' suffering and motivates us to help. It's the emotional foundation for ethics, justice, and compassion.

The reality: Empathy is biased, manipulable, and often actively counterproductive. It makes us worse at the very things it's supposed to improve: fair treatment, resource allocation, and moral decision-making.

Thesis: Empathy has been elevated to sacred status in modern culture, but it's a deeply flawed tool for moral decision-making. Empathy is not moral reasoning—it's an emotional response that activates selectively based on proximity, similarity, and emotional salience rather than actual need or fairness. It makes us care about the crying child in front of us while ignoring statistical lives we could save more cheaply. It makes us favor people who look like us, speak like us, or whose suffering we can vividly imagine. It can be deliberately manipulated by anyone who knows how to trigger emotional responses. Most dangerously, empathy gives us a sense of moral righteousness for decisions that are actually based on bias and incomplete information. The solution isn't more empathy—it's clearer thinking about what actually helps, combined with compassion that doesn't require feeling someone's pain to care about their welfare.

How Empathy Distorts Judgment

Let's look at specific ways empathy leads us astray:

The Identifiable Victim Effect

The research: People donate dramatically more to help one identified child than to help eight unidentified children—even when explicitly told the statistics.

Why empathy causes this: Empathy requires a specific target. We can imagine one child's suffering. Eight statistical children don't activate our empathy circuits. Our feelings determine our actions, and we feel more for the identified victim.

The result: We allocate resources based on emotional resonance rather than impact. The child whose photo goes viral gets ten million dollars. The eight children die quietly.

What clear thinking would do: Ask "where can my resources help the most people most effectively?" Act on that answer regardless of which story makes you cry.

The Similarity Bias

The pattern: Empathy activates more strongly for people who look like us, talk like us, share our background, or whose experiences we can easily imagine.

Real examples:

  • Disasters in culturally similar countries get more aid and media coverage
  • Doctors empathize more with patients from their own demographic groups
  • Jurors empathize more with defendants who share their background
  • We feel more outrage about injustice when the victim looks like us

Why this happens: Empathy is simulation. We imagine ourselves in their position. That's easier when they're similar to us.

The moral problem: Need isn't distributed according to similarity. Suffering doesn't respect demographics. But empathy-driven action does.

The Drama Preference

What empathy responds to:

  • Vivid, immediate suffering
  • Emotional stories with clear villains
  • Visible, tangible harm
  • Situations we can easily imagine

What empathy ignores:

  • Abstract statistical harm
  • Structural problems with no clear villain
  • Slow-moving catastrophes
  • Situations outside our experience

Example: One child falls into a well, and the nation mobilizes. Thousands of children die from preventable poverty-related causes, and we feel nothing. The well story activates empathy. The statistics don't.

The cost: We solve the dramatic problems while ignoring larger, more important problems that don't trigger emotional responses.

The Manipulation Vector

The problem: Anyone who understands empathy can manipulate it.

How it works:

  • Choose a sympathetic victim with emotional appeal
  • Tell their story vividly
  • Trigger identification and emotional response
  • Propose a solution that feels proportionate to the emotion
  • Audience acts based on feelings rather than analysis

This works for:

  • Charities using emotional appeals instead of impact data
  • Politicians using individual anecdotes instead of policy analysis
  • Companies using sympathy to avoid accountability
  • Anyone who wants emotional reaction instead of rational evaluation

The danger: We end up supporting ineffective solutions because they feel good, while ignoring effective solutions that don't trigger empathy.

When Empathy Makes Things Worse

Empathy isn't just neutral—it actively harms in specific contexts:

In Justice Systems

The pattern: Empathy for victims increases punishment severity. Empathy for defendants decreases it. Justice depends on which person the decision-maker empathizes with more.

The problem: Fair justice requires equal treatment based on actions, not emotional responses to individuals. Empathy makes us give lighter sentences to people we like and harsher sentences when we strongly empathize with victims.

What works better: Clear standards applied consistently regardless of emotional appeal.

In Resource Allocation

Healthcare example: Hospital resources are often allocated partly based on which patients provoke more empathy. The articulate, attractive patient with a compelling story gets more attention than the difficult, unlikeable patient with identical medical needs.

Development example: Photogenic poverty gets funding. Non-photogenic poverty gets ignored. Child victims get resources. Adult victims of equal suffering get less.

The correct approach: Allocate based on need and effectiveness, not emotional response.

In Parenting and Education

Empathy overflow: When parents empathize too strongly with children's discomfort, they prevent necessary experiences: difficult tasks, social challenges, disappointment, failure.

The result: Kids who've never learned to handle difficulty because empathetic parents removed all friction.

Better approach: Compassionate detachment. Care about your child's long-term development more than their immediate emotional comfort.

In Professional Settings

Empathy fatigue: Healthcare workers, therapists, and social workers who rely heavily on empathy burn out. They either become numb or leave the profession.

Why: You can't maintain high empathy for everyone you encounter in high-suffering environments. The emotional cost is unsustainable.

What works better: Compassion without empathy. Care about patient welfare without absorbing their suffering. Maintain professional distance while providing excellent care.

The Alternative: Principled Compassion

What's the difference?

Empathy: "I feel your pain. Let me help because your suffering hurts me." Compassion: "I recognize your suffering matters. Let me help based on what actually works."

Empathy requires emotional connection. If I can't feel what you're feeling, I don't act.

Compassion requires only recognition. I can acknowledge your suffering matters without feeling it myself.

Why Compassion Works Better

1. Sustainability

  • Empathy burns out. Compassion doesn't.
  • You can care about everyone's welfare without emotionally absorbing everyone's pain.
  • Healthcare workers with high compassion and low empathy are most effective and least prone to burnout.

2. Fairness

  • Compassion can be extended equally to everyone.
  • Empathy activates unevenly based on emotional triggers.
  • Compassionate doctors treat all patients well. Empathetic doctors favor patients they personally connect with.

3. Effectiveness

  • Compassion asks "what helps?" Empathy asks "what feels right given my emotional state?"
  • Compassion focuses on outcomes. Empathy focuses on emotional resonance.
  • Compassionate aid workers choose interventions based on impact data. Empathetic aid workers choose interventions that relieve their own distress.

4. Resistance to Manipulation

  • You can't manipulate compassion by telling emotional stories.
  • Compassion requires evidence of need and effective solutions.
  • Empathy can be triggered by anyone with a good story.

What This Looks Like In Practice

In everyday decisions:

Empathy-driven: Donate to the charity with the most emotional advertisement. Compassion-driven: Research which charities save the most lives per dollar. Donate to those.

Empathy-driven: Help the friend whose problems are most emotionally compelling. Compassion-driven: Help the friend who actually needs help most, even if they don't dramatize their situation.

Empathy-driven: Hire the candidate whose background story you connect with. Compassion-driven: Hire the candidate who's most qualified, regardless of emotional appeal.

In larger decisions:

Empathy-driven policy: Pour resources into whatever issue is currently emotionally salient. Compassion-driven policy: Allocate resources based on cost-effectiveness and need.

Empathy-driven charity: Fund photogenic causes that make donors feel good. Compassion-driven charity: Fund interventions with the highest impact per dollar.

Empathy-driven healthcare: Give more attention to patients you personally connect with. Compassion-driven healthcare: Give everyone excellent care based on medical need.

The Skills to Develop

If empathy isn't enough, what should we build instead?

1. Statistical Thinking

The skill: Understand numbers and populations, not just individuals.

Practice:

  • When you feel moved by one story, ask "how many people face this problem?"
  • Compare interventions by total impact, not emotional resonance
  • Look at data on effectiveness, not just vivid examples
  • Train yourself to care about numbers as much as stories

2. Principle-Based Ethics

The skill: Make decisions based on consistent principles rather than case-by-case emotional responses.

Practice:

  • Identify your core values (fairness, welfare, autonomy, etc.)
  • Apply them consistently regardless of emotional pull
  • Notice when empathy makes you want to violate your principles
  • Choose principle over feeling

3. Effective Altruism Mindset

The skill: Care about helping effectively, not just helping in ways that feel good.

Practice:

  • Ask "what's the most good I can do?" not "what would make me feel best?"
  • Research impact before committing resources
  • Be willing to help in ways that aren't emotionally satisfying if they work better
  • Measure results, not intentions

4. Compassionate Detachment

The skill: Care about others' welfare without absorbing their emotional state.

Practice:

  • Notice the difference between understanding suffering and feeling suffering
  • Maintain professional or personal boundaries while still helping
  • Recognize you can be most helpful when you're not overwhelmed by others' emotions
  • Focus on what helps rather than what relieves your discomfort

The Nuance Worth Keeping

Empathy isn't always wrong. It's wrong when:

  • You need fair, equal treatment across cases
  • You're allocating resources based on effectiveness
  • You need sustainability in a helping profession
  • You're vulnerable to manipulation
  • The most important problems don't trigger emotional responses

Empathy is useful when:

  • Building personal relationships where emotional connection matters
  • Understanding others' perspectives for communication
  • Motivating yourself to care initially (before developing principled compassion)
  • Connecting with individuals in low-stakes personal contexts

The key distinction: Use empathy for understanding and connection. Don't use it for decision-making about justice, resource allocation, or moral choices.

Takeaways

The argument:

  1. Empathy is biased toward the identifiable, similar, and emotionally salient
  2. This makes empathy systematically unfair in resource allocation and justice
  3. Empathy can be easily manipulated by anyone telling emotional stories
  4. Compassion—caring about welfare without feeling others' pain—works better
  5. Better decisions come from clear principles and statistical thinking than from emotional responses

What to do differently:

Stop:

  • Making decisions based on which story makes you feel most emotional
  • Trusting that your empathy reliably tracks what's important
  • Assuming empathy makes you a good person (it makes you a human with predictable biases)

Start:

  • Asking "what helps most?" instead of "what feels most compelling?"
  • Caring about statistical lives as much as identified victims
  • Making decisions based on principles and evidence rather than emotional pull
  • Developing compassion that doesn't require feeling others' pain to care about their welfare

The controversial bottom line: The most moral people aren't always the most empathetic. Often they're the ones who can turn empathy off when it distorts judgment, think clearly about what actually helps, and act on that analysis even when it doesn't feel emotionally satisfying. Empathy is a useful human capacity for connection and understanding. It's a terrible foundation for ethics. Stop outsourcing your moral thinking to your emotions.

Today's Sketch

December 10, 2025