Does Empathy Help Or Hurt Our Decisions.

In the room for debate, "Does Empathy Guide or Hinder Our Moral Action?", they describe the pros and cons of empathy towards people. Paul Bloom believed that empathy hurt us more than helped us. Bloom believes that empathy makes us narrow thinkers and that we show too much bias with it. He thinks that logic and reason help more in the matter because facts have no bias. On the other hand, Jamil Zaki demonstrates that empathy is a great guide for us. He examples that if we were consoling a sad friend, we wouldn't be using facts to help him/her. We would be using empathy to try to relieve the pain of him/her. All of this would decide on how big the issue is and how many people it would affect.

In my opinion empathy is a great tool and guide for us; as long as the issue isn't a huge crisis. Helping a friend through loss or pain is a great instance to use empathy because there is no narrow thinking. It's just a friend helping a friend because they know what they're going through and it's best to help that person out. If the action is trying to feed the homeless because they have no food, then that is another good use of empathy. People will feel for the homeless because they have been in that position (empathy), or because they truly feel bad (sympathy). Either way, empathy doesn't hurt in that position. There is one position that empathy doesn't work.

Politics and law are the places where empathy just does not help in a lot of ways. If they try to do the morally right thing, it will backlash at them. No one would tell a criminal, "Oh you robbed a bank because you needed money, okay you're free, I have been there before." In that sense empathy just helped out a criminal. It's the same for everything in politics because you wouldn't empathize over a certain group so they get privileges or because all they want is a better life. In this case, people need hard facts and reason because moral right and empathy leads them into a dark cave.