Last week an argument was made, supposedly against empathy, by a psychologist and Yale professor, Paul Bloom. He argued that the emotional reward of helping others a little bit can blind a person to truly effective help, such as to the long-term consequences of your actions.

I disagree. Why would you care about the long-term consequences of your actions to others, if not due to empathy?

It seems to me that he’s really complaining about people feeling and not thinking. One example he gives is that some people care a lot more for a baby who has fallen down a well than they care about climate change, even though climate change is causing much more harm.

This is not a problem of empathy. Without empathy, one might think it’s good for the planet to warm and the human population to shrink. True, without empathy, one might only be concerned for having reasonable weather for oneself, but without empathy, one might not care at all about future generations.

The real problem is in marketing. Taking pictures of people visibly upset about a baby at the bottom of a well is easy. But a story about a climate change disaster requires travel and research. People are getting malaria in places that used to be high enough that it was too cold for mosquitoes. Drought is killing off crops in far-off parts of the world.

News agencies focus on reporting, not spinning the news. Yet when a baby falls down a well, they don’t take the temperature of the community, they focus on the people who care the most and are loudest, most expressive.

Even if they travel to places impacted severely by climate change, they find mostly quiet desperation, not the extreme emotional outbursts of a sudden calamity.

We don’t need less empathy. We need a way for people to engage responsibly with political issues. And that’s what we’re building, here at PeopleCount.org. Please add your name to our announcement list.