Here’s another critique of David Brooks recent NYT column on the limits of empathy, this one from Jason Marsh. I enjoyed his conclusion especially, worth a read…
Does empathy lead to altruism? The New York Times columnist gets it wrong.
Over the last few days, a lot of people have asked me about David Brooks’ Friday op-ed column in The New York Times on the “limits of empathy.” In it, Brooks argues that empathy is a “sideshow” to moral action. Considering the glut of recent books on empathy—such as Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy and Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization—Brooks writes that empathy “has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them.”
Empathy, in other words, is little more than a fad.
