Empathy
The psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the emotions, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
The imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself.
The title sounds very wrong, better to say immoral. Empathy is, some might say, the highest human virtues. We teach children to be empathetic. Politicians call for more empathy. Social media asks us to “put ourselves in someone else’s shoes."
In many cases, such as friendship, parenting, and relationships, it is an essential part, but when empathy becomes the main tool for decision-making about society, it starts creating serious problems.
Dr. Paul Bloom says that empathy is powerful, but also biased, inefficient, and can easily easily weaponize. (Bloom)
Biases
Empathy does not treat all suffering equally. Instead, we focus on visible, emotionally vivid, and similar experiences. Just like great stories focus on one person, our empathy works only on a small scale. A single story of one suffering child can go viral, collecting enormous donations from around the world. While thousands of other people remain invisible.
Psychologists Dr. Jenni and Dr. Loewenstein call this the Identifiable Victim Effect (Jenni, Loewenstein)
When a tragedy is presented in the form of a statistic, people tend to feel a lack of emotional response. How sad were you during history lessons when the teacher mentioned the estimated total deaths? What did you feel after hearing 60-85 million? You might say "that's terrible". Whatever your answer is, it does not make you a heartless because empathy does not scale.
So, empathy doesn’t enable us to respond to the suffering itself, but rather to the suffering experienced by an individual who is empathetic.
Inefficient
Biased decisions by definition are not objective decisions. Now, you have $1 million, and only two possible ways to spend it.
Option A: Save one child suffering from an rare disease that requires expensive treatment.
Option B: Fund experimental vaccination programs that could save thousands of children.
Your money is yours to spend as you please. There’s no wrong answer; the willingness to spend that much money on someone else is commendable. $1 million is private property, and forcing someone to give it up for societal benefits will lead us down a communist path.
But there is a favorable answer when it comes to taxpayers money. Not objection decision are inefficient decisions.