We have long treated empathy as the cornerstone of moral life. To call someone empathetic is to pay them a compliment. To accuse an individual of lacking it is to damn them. And yet empathy, on closer inspection, may be a less reliable moral guide than we imagine.

Three very different thinkers urge us to think more carefully about it: an 18th century Scottish economist, a 20th century American theologian and a contemporary psychologist.

Adam Smith is remembered today almost exclusively as the father of free-market economics. Yet, before writing The Wealth of Nations (1776), he produced a profound work of moral philosophy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), a text that deserves far more attention than it receives.

Smith called his central moral concept “sympathy”, but he used the term to describe something close to what we now call empathy: our capacity to imaginatively step into another person’s situation and feel something of what they feel. For Smith, this imaginative process is the foundation of moral judgment. We come to judge right from wrong by asking whether a fair-minded observer could approve of what a person in that situation felt and did.

Adam Smith, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Bloom all value empathy. Yet each argue that feeling another’s pain is only the starting point of moral judgement

There is something quietly radical about this idea. Smith suggests that morality is not handed down from philosophy or religion. It is practised daily in small acts of imagination, through which we try to understand each other. But Smith does not simply celebrate feeling. He argues that this feeling must be refined into something more disciplined: what he calls the “impartial spectator”, a kind of internal moral referee that each of us develops through experience. This is not a cold reasoning machine. It is an empathetic imagination that has been steadied over time into something closer to genuine judgement.

Yet, even such refined empathising operates unevenly. We can most easily imagine the situations of those who are near to us, familiar to us, similar to us. The suffering of strangers, especially strangers from different cultures or distant countries, is harder to feel. This suggests that empathy, for all its moral power, is parochial by nature.

If empathy struggles at the edges of individual moral life, it very nearly collapses when we move from the personal to the collective. Writing in 1932, at a moment when democracy was fracturing across Europe and industrial capitalism was grinding workers into poverty, Reinhold Niebuhr made a blunt and uncomfortable argument in Moral Man and Immoral Society. His conclusion was stark: individuals can be moral. Groups almost never are.

Think of it this way. A factory owner might genuinely care about her workers as human beings. She might worry about their families, feel moved by their hardships and even donate to local charities on their behalf. And yet the same individual will defend, tooth and nail, a wage structure that keeps her workers in poverty because, when she acts as an owner, as a member of a class, different forces take over. Power, competition, the logic of collective self-interest. Empathy does not stand a chance against those forces.

Niebuhr was not a cynic. He did not think human beings were simply selfish. He thought they were capable of genuine moral feeling, but this feeling was simply no match for the structural realities of collective life. Justice, he argued, is never given. It is won through organised resistance, through institutional reform, and through the exercise of countervailing power. The idea that societies can be made more just by making individuals more empathetic would have struck him as dangerously naive.

Niebuhr’s scepticism about empathy finds an unexpected ally in contemporary psychology. Paul Bloom, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, marshals decades of experimental evidence in Against Empathy (2016) to make a case that ought to give empathy’s admirers pause. The problem, Bloom argues, is not that we have too little empathy. It is that empathy is structurally incapable of guiding us well.

Research in psychology consistently shows that people will give more money to save one identifiable child than to save a thousand nameless victims. They will feel more distress about a neighbour’s lost pet than about a famine on another continent. Empathy, it turns out, is not a moral compass. It is a spotlight: powerful, but narrow. It illuminates what is vivid and nearby, and leaves everything else in the dark.

Worse still, empathy is easily hijacked. Consider a demagogue politician who wants you to fear immigrants and a humanitarian who wants you to help refugees. At the level of emotional technique, both rely on vivid stories and emotionally compelling images to make you feel before you can think. Empathy without judgement is not a virtue. It is a vulnerability.

Bloom’s alternative is what he calls “rational compassion” — caring about people’s well-being, and doing so with your head as much as your heart. The question shifts from how something makes us feel to what the evidence says will actually help. It is a less glamorous proposition than empathy. It may not make for good campaign posters. But it is, he argues, a far more reliable guide to doing good.

These three thinkers are separated by centuries, by discipline, by temperament. What is striking is how much they agree. None of them says that empathy is worthless. Smith builds his entire moral philosophy on it. Niebuhr acknowledges it softens the edges of conflict. Bloom concedes it motivates us to act at all. But all three insist, in their different ways, that empathy is a beginning, not an end.

The distinction they draw, and it matters enormously, is between different scales of moral life. In our personal relationships, in our communities, in the small acts of daily decency, empathy is irreplaceable. It is how we recognise each other as humans. It is the basis of kindness. Smith’s framework, with its emphasis on imaginative moral refinement, is still a powerful guide here.

But as we move from the personal to the political, from individual conscience to collective action, from kindness to justice, empathy becomes not just insufficient but potentially misleading. The problems that most urgently demand our attention in the 21st century are not ones we can feel our way through. They require the kind of impartial, evidence-driven reasoning that Bloom advocates, combined with the political realism that Niebuhr demands.

There is a lesson here for how we talk about moral and political life. We reach too quickly for the language of feeling. We ask leaders to show empathy, we praise policies that come from the heart, we distrust arguments that seem too cold or too rational. But perhaps what we need, in an age of manufactured outrage and algorithmically amplified feeling, is a little more of Smith’s “impartial spectator” and a little less of the raw nerve.

Empathy is not the enemy. But it is not enough either. The moral life begins in feeling and must be completed in thought.

The writer is a Rhodes Scholar and an academic based in the UK. He can be reached at naumanlawyer@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 7th, 2026