Occupation: Professor Birth: December 24, 1963
My book is going to be called Against Empathy, which may give you a feeling for where my argument is going to go. Whenever I talk about this, I have ….
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 ….
The effects of Twitter and Facebook and all those things on people's psychologies is a really interesting question to which nobody knows the answer..
I draw a lot from Buddhism, which focuses on compassion and kindness, loving kindness, as they call it, but rejects empathy because it's a poor moral….
I think if we could turn the dial a bit, and try to take what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called "the point of view of the universe", and look fro….
I argue that we should be kind, we should be compassionate, and we should definitely be reasonable and rational, but that empathy leads us astray..
I think empathy can serve as a moral spark, motivating us to do good things. But anything can be a moral spark..
This enthusiasm [for empathy] may be misplaced. Empathy has some unfortunate features – it is parochial, narrow-minded and innumerate. We’re often at….
I think we're going to care more about Americans than Africans. I don't think that's ever going to go away, and I don't think it's ever going to go a….
If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than….
I kind of like social media, and I like hearing from people. I don't like the ugly stuff, but there are some people - smart people - who have a very ….
My younger son told me nobody uses email anymore. I'm this old fogie with my email. I don't know what I'm supposed to communicate with now - SnapChat?.
It's hard to pull apart empathy from compassion. What is really clear is that we innately care for other people at least to some extent..
I think we should really discourage this sort of empathic engagement when it comes to making moral decisions. I think we should focus on something li….
Because of empathy, we care more for, and devote far more resources to, someone who is familiar, from our country or our group, than a stranger..
I have huge admiration for people who think like the effective altruist, who try to rationally think about how they can change the world for the bett….
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 reall….
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 an….
When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they'll often use empathy. When Obama wanted to bomb Syria, he drew our attenti….
I think empathy is really important for pleasure..
For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what ….