Empathy betrays us

This week’s fine Rationally Speaking podcast had host Julia Galef interviewing Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom on the subject of empathy. I’ve always been fond of Professor Bloom’s work, having in some sense incorporated a bit of his science into my fiction writing, so I was eager to hear this particular podcast. Executive summary: Bloom thinks that empathy is a poor guide to how we should actually act in the world. Of course, it’s great to care about other people, but empathy — understood as putting ourselves in the position in another and feeling what that person feels — is a very biased and innumerate way of dealing with actual policy problems.

The whole podcast is worth a listen but one thing in particular struck me, an example given by Bloom about civil conflict in Sierra Leone. From the transcript (slightly reformatted for this blog):

Paul: […] I’ll give you one small example, from a book by Linda Paulman [sic]. Where she once asked warlords in Africa, I forget exactly where, why they chopped off children’s limbs. It was such a grotesque horrible thing to do, and like, why would they do it? The answer, and she got this answer from multiple people, was, “We do it for you. NGOs and American and European organizations don’t come to our country unless we give you atrocities. The atrocities energize people.”

Julia: Wait. The warlords want the charities to come in and help the country?

Paul: Yes, because the NGOs pay taxes to the warlords.

Often, the NGOs, and there’s a complicated moral issue here, help everybody, all the parties involved. They don’t take sides. They’re a net plus for the warlords, even taking away that they give the warlords money.

Julia: Wow.

Paul: Now, this is one example of some ugly incentives. But there’s no shortage of real world cases — where unscrupulous people, those who cut off the limbs of children to make them better beggars, those who set up fake orphanages, or simply drag children away from their parents into orphanages. They exploit the well-meaning, loving empathy of people, particularly wealthy American people, in order to profit themselves. And in the way they do it, they make the world worse.1

Even for a hardened cynic like myself I found part of this story hard to swallow, so I made an effort to chase it down to its source. It turns out to be Linda Polman, and she did indeed interview a warlord in Africa who made something very much like this claim. From her account:

The RUF [Faustus: The Revolutionary United Front, a Sierra Leone rebel faction] leadership eventually managed to break the cycle and save the country from total annihilation Lamin [Faustus: Mike Lamin, a RUF leader] explains. By using more and more violence, the RUF forced the Sierra Leone army, the government army, to use more and more violence, too. “And then even more. And even more still.” By 1999, the United Nations in Freetown was reporting that special amputation squads had been formed. Human Rights Watch interviewed members of “cut-hand gangs.” One of them said he had received a promotion after he brought back a rice bag full of hands. Mike Lamin continues: “It was only when you ever more amputees that you started paying attention to our fate.”2

And then the foreign aid, it did flow. Much of it to the benefit of the corrupt and the violent.

Here is the take-away: the world is so horrible to the first order that in it children get their limbs hacked off so that those who do the hacking off can profit. And it is so horrible to the second order that it’s our very possession of benign instincts that make the first order horror work.

If you would do good in the world, or at least refrain from doing bad, sometimes you need a cold heart.

That’s it. I’m going off to be sick now.

1Episode transcript of Rationally Speaking #142: Paul Bloom on, “The case against empathy.” pp. 13-4. Url: http://bit.ly/rstd142, downloaded September 9, 2015. Back to post.

2Linda Polman, The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid, trans. Liz Waters. (New York: Henry Holt, 2010). p. 167 (Amazon Kindle ed.) Back to post.

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