In recent years, empathy has gotten a bad rap. Paul Bloom's famous work Against Empathy argued empathy was necessarily biased and should be thrown out. Figures like Elon Musk argue our instinct for compassion is leading to bad outcomes. Here, philosopher Gigla Gonashvili argues we must reclaim our empathy from those who seek to temper it. We must embrace our will to care.

As we watch the world aflame today, we naturally wonder with whom we should empathize the most, or whether our empathy is of any use at all. Recently, there has been a growing discontent with empathy, primarily due to its partial and biased nature. And yet, empathy cannot be so easily discarded or downgraded. It is inextricably tied to the concept of the will—a fundamental concept in both philosophy and religion.

It is clear that we humans, along with other living beings, have empathy. It is a complex emotion that binds us to others and makes us think about them and their perspectives. Yet, on closer inspection, questions begin to arise. How much empathy should we have? For whom should we have it? Should we rely on it at all? Is it the true foundation of morality?

A strong case has been made against empathy—most famously by Paul Bloom in Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (2016). He argues that empathy is, in fact, a poor moral guide, one that might lead us blindly into other people’s shoes without providing a proper ethical reason for doing so.

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Unlike compassion, which has deeper, more ancient roots in both religious and moral thought, empathy is a relatively recent concept.

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This line of argumentation is indeed valid. For instance, a study conducted in 2018, “Empathic Neural Responses Predict Group Allegiance,” revealed a considerable group bias in us. It turned out that participants’ brains reacted more strongly to seeing hands pierced by a needle when those hands were labeled as belonging to their own religious group. Thus, empathy is not impartial: group bias seems to be deeply ingrained in us.

In place of empathy, Bloom recommends what he calls “rational compassion.” He defines compassion as a genuine care for others’ well-being without becoming emotionally immersed in their feelings. This compassion can be nurtured rationally, as rationality provides the evident means to achieve it without being an end in itself (that is, the goal is not to remain simply rational and cool-headed).

This focus, elaborated by Bloom, is certainly valuable: it highlights our shortsightedness (in which we so often persist) and our sense of group-belonging, which creates the danger of tribalism—even among people who consider themselves world citizens.

Yet, to my eyes, his argumentation leaves some fundamental aspects of empathy and compassion untreated. Therefore, in what follows, I will try to tackle the thorny issue of our shared feelings.

Unlike compassion, which has deeper, more ancient roots in both religious and moral thought, empathy is a relatively recent concept. First elaborated by Theodor Lipps at the end of the 19th century, it was initially designed to highlight the more cognitive, perspectival aspects of our experience of others. Empathy, while it has Greek roots, actually comes from the German Einfühlung (taken up most notably by Husserlian phenomenology) and can be translated as “feeling-into.” Compassion, on the other hand, is much like the Greek sympatheia: a “feeling-with” or “suffering-with” (com-patire).