Does not entirely agree with someone like Haidt, who says that the mind creates after-the-fact justifications for thinking – he thinks humans have the capacity for reasoning more on-the-fly. Empathy can lead to people just wanting to escape, like crossing the road from a homeless encampment. letting a child not eat broccoli), or even by just walking away from it (not wanting to hear the screams of terror in a concentration camp and so moving away from it). Empathy can lead to feeling too much pain at the present, and wanting to just make it go away, by either doing something that actually does more harm than good for someone (ex. Argues that the better way to make decisions is with cost-benefits analysis, employing reason and self-control – that is, thinking about the costs and benefits, and having a focus on the long-term vs the short term. something that wasn’t directly their fault. We also are less empathetic to people whom we perceive as being “deserving” of a particular fate, ex. While the biases are separate from empathy, empathy is deeply vulnerable to said biases. genocide in Darfur, shining mostly on those we love and being dim for frightening people or strangers). Says that empathy is not the source of all that is good due to its nature as a “spotlight” on a certain thing, and our own inherent biases in how we apply it (a suburban girl stuck in a well (“identifiable victim effect”) vs. Yale psychologist who argues that empathy is a human emotion that must be controlled for good, like anger is.
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