Paul Bloom - Against Empathy (The Blodley Head, 2017) **

I like the title. It's controversial and it invites you start reading. Why on earth would a psychologist be against empathy? Furthermore, the subtitle speaks about "the case for rational compassion". That sounds like a programme.

But now in truth, what is Bloom's point?

First, that empathy is important in human relationships and in everyday life. He keeps insisting on this, and he keeps repeating this, obviously fearing that people will think he is against empathy in all its forms. He is very much against the whole list of books that are currently being published about the importance of empathy as if that were the solution to all our problems. Clearly, it is not.

Second, that empathy is a poor guide for moral decision-making, because the emotional aspect of empathy should not override the rational decision that will benefit society and people in a better way.

That's basically it. Luckily he writes well and many of his arguments are well-documented and substantiated. Bloom helps to refine the definition of empathy and make the distinction between emotional empathy and cognitive empathy.

On the negative side, the book is very repetitive, with a very loose structure, indications that was written hastily. I also wonder why the subtitle appears on the cover. The "case for rational compassion" is not really made, and definitely not substantiated with facts or figures. A major lack is the exploration of how empathy, indignation and a sense of injustice move people to act to improve things for others. It is easy to claim that cognitive empathy and rational compassion are to be preferred. The unanswered question is whether these are sufficiently energising to get people out of their chairs. My gut feeling is that emotional drive is still to be preferred over cognitive choices. But I may be wrong.

Jonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind (Penguin, 2012) ***½

American cultural and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" has become a standard in moral and political psychology. Haidt describes how - in the context of politcal thought and morality - judgments are made intuitively, with reason serving as the rationale to describe our judgment 'a posteriori', and not the other way round. We only appear to be rational beings when judging, in reality our judgment is made on the basis of a number of personal, emotional and group influences.

He gives a lot of examples of psychological tests in which the participants gave justifications for their behaviour afterwards, not based on reason. He explains that our social world is "Glauconian", named after the brother of Plato, who argued that people behave morally or just, only because they are kept in check by the social group to which they belong, by appearances and reputation.

Haidt guides us through the implications of cultural bias to assess morality, and he explains how we need to expand our typically liberal view of morality with the broader moral base that many cultures across the world have.

He breaks them down into five categories

1. the Care/Harm foundation
2. the Faith/Cheating foundation
3. the Loyalty/Betrayal foundation
4. the Authority/Subversion foundation
5. the Sanctity/Degradation foundation

... in which the first two are typically the strongest among liberal voters and the latter three more dominant among conservative voters. If you want to know where you are positioned, you can do the test yourself on his website.

Here are my test results, high scores on care and fairness, low scores on loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity.

But of course that's not the point of the book, even if every participant adds new data to his survey. Haidt's insights and approach shed some light on how our world functions today. Indeed, the question of moral choices is one of everyday politics and debates. Understanding why choices are made, and understanding the dynamics behind them are critical. What he does not do in the book is to dig a level deeper, namely to assess the psychology of the people who make these moral choices. Are there any common traits among these five foundations (insecurity, fear, dominance, control, ...).

One aspect of Haidt's approach is that it predicted the chances of Trump to win the presidential election. For the simple reason that all democrats always have a discourse that is focused on care and fairness, yet it totally ignores the three other foundational elements. The Republican party has invested more in topics such as loyalty to "our country", to "our religion", to "our sexual ethics", etc.

Food for thought ...

Paul Bloom - Just Babies - The Origin Of Good And Evil (Broadway, 2014) ***

Yale University psychology professor Paul Bloom ask the simple question: "is morality innate or the result of education?", and this book gives the results of his studies on the moral attitudes of babies and young children. Babies? Yes, studies can be conducted with babies as young as six months to determine their preferences for helping or obstructing characters in very simple tests. Obviously, this will not be reflected in their own behaviour, but babies seem to make judgments very early on about good and bad, about kindness or cruelty. At a later stage, children do show kind behaviour, but until the age of four only towards people they know, never for instance to adults they haven't met before.

The most violent time of everybody's life is around two years old, and as Bloom points out "Families survive the Terrible Twos because toddlers aren't strong enough to kill with their hands and aren't capable of using lethal weapons".

But Bloom goes further, and gives the results of experiments of generosity and altruism, just to check how moral people are and how selfish. He checks how group-thinking and racial bias occur and at what age, and especially under which influence, as well as the feelings of disgust and moral judgments.

"Just Babies" is an easy to read and enlightening book, and it ends with the positive message that it is possible to transcend some of our innate selfishness, by our unique human capabilities of imagination, compassion and rational thought.

Joshua Greene - Moral Tribes (Atlantic, 2013) ****½

Some books require to be simplified and to become part of any school curriculum. This is one of them. Joshua Green is head of the Moral Cognition Lab at Harvard University, and with "Moral Tribes", he has written one of the most significant books on morality of the last decades.

Green first describes the biological foundations of our morality, with first the defense of the "I" within the group, with all mechanisms needed to survive within a social context. Then he moves on to discuss the importance of group morality, the biological reflexes to protect the own tribe against neighbouring and competing tribes.

This is the kind of default positions for humans, a kind of automatic moral response against the others, which is often rationalised afterwards (they are evil, they have no sense of justice, etc.), but which is in essence a deep emotional and pre-rational response.

Luckily, we humans can also revert to "manual" response, when our brain can take over and think about what will provide the most happiness for most of us. In that sense, Greene belongs to the school of "utilitariansim" of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, which he would rather re-define as 'deep pragmatism'. The advantage of Greene's approach is that he has done extensive tests of people in a variety of moral dilemmas, looking at the statistics of behaviour and motivation of different test set-ups and thought experiments, such as the prisoners' dilemma or the trolley dilemma, the latter offering someone the choice wether they would push one person under a trolley to make it stop and hence avoid the death of five other people down the tracks. In fact, very few people will do that, but the majority would willingly turn a switch to re-route the trolley on a side-track, killing one person in the process to save five. Why would they do that? The fact that he looks at all these varieties and possibilities of choices and people's response to it, is not only an eye-opener, but framed and explained by Greene also illuminating to understand our most unconscious reactions and moral behaviours.

Greene stears us clearly outside of the traditional moral positions of collectivism versus individualism, and he manages to come with a quite compelling proposal consisting of six rules :
1. In the face of moral controversy, consult, but dot not trust, your moral instincts
2. Rights are not for making arguments, they're for ending arguments;
3. Focus on the facts, and make others do the same
4. Beware of biased fairness
5. Use common currency
6. Give

Each of these rules get ample attention and explanation in the book.

"Moral Tribes" is a fascinating exploration of our morality, and quite a convincing and highly readable one. As said at the beginning, how do we get thoughts like these known to broader audiences? Greene's proposals are definitely worth hearing.