> Who are we to make such decisions?

We have to make these decisions all the time whenever we vote or suggest perspectives to influence friends and acquaintances about one public policy or another. If we don't make the decisions, someone else will, and it matters for things like how we respond to acts of terrorism, road safety laws, funding for the treatment of diseases, and so on. And ignoring the moral weightiness of the decisions doesn't remove the consequences or our responsibility for ourselves as a society.

> On a personal note, I don't believe in this "removal of empathy" idea that's been tossed around by a few psychologists. If psychopaths are effectively those people who lack empathy, then who shall we become if we throw it to the wayside?

The author suggested that cultivating compassion for others without choosing to imagine the experience of suffering their pain may be a better way to help other people. He uses some examples of Buddhists who choose to devote their lives to helping other people--they avoid experiencing empathic attachment because it burns them out, which would defeat their entire purpose. So if we throw empathy to the wayside, we might become more like Buddhist monks, if you want to read into it that way. The author proposes moderation more than extremes one way or the other, though; he recognizes that some degree of empathy is health in relating to other people.

Anecdotally, I agree with the author's perspectives because of my own experiences. For the past year I had a close family member who was hospitalized and continuously in pain. It was really impossible to allow myself to empathize strongly with her every time I saw her, because it would have been too psychologically exhausting to continue visiting on a regular basis.

> We have to make these decisions all the time whenever we vote or suggest perspectives to influence friends and acquaintances about one public policy or another. If we don't make the decisions, someone else will, and it matters for things like how we respond to acts of terrorism, road safety laws, funding for the treatment of diseases, and so on. And ignoring the moral weightiness of the decisions doesn't remove the consequences or our responsibility for ourselves as a society.

You make a good point. It is (more often than not) better to make the tough decisions as opposed to passively going with someone else's choice or not taking a position at all.

> He uses some examples of Buddhists who choose to devote their lives to helping other people--they avoid experiencing empathic attachment because it burns them out, which would defeat their entire purpose.

I see where the author comes from with this statement, and I think I better understand his stance. I reacted more emotionally than I should have to this text and threw out his ideas altogether. However, I still remain wary of its benefits to larger society as opposed to certain circumstances.

Especially because, in practice,

"> Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one"

usually means

"a hundred deaths [of our in-group] are worse than one [of our team, plus a thousand of an out-group]"

>Who are we to make such decisions?

Answer: decent, thinking people who can spot that we want our government to consider us to have moral weight, and therefore vote in favor of considering all citizens to hold equal moral weight before the State. Or, as certain textbooks on insurance or law teach: when we "refuse for moral reasons" to put a finite price on a human life, what we are actually de facto doing is setting a surprisingly low price on human life. The trade-offs don't go away just because we feel uncomfortable making them!

If naught else, psychopaths of the sort you mention are surely then those with all the more comprehensive control of themselves, through their ability to better regulate their emotion? That sounds like a useful quality in stable figures of authority or indeed anyone who would prefer to limit their irrational judgement.

> If naught else, psychopaths of the sort you mention are surely then those with all the more comprehensive control of themselves, through their ability to better regulate their emotion?

Regular psychopaths are a poor example here because one of the features of the disorder is a lack of control; they are impulsive and unable to balance risk with reward in gambling tests, and can have difficulty classifying others' emotions. (See the _Handbook of Psychopathy_.) They are more 'broken' than 'empathy selectively turned off', so it's not clear what, if anything, you could learn from them.

Mm absolutely - hence why 'removal of empathy' to result in the kind of aforementioned controlled psychopath sounds like it might result in the controlled individual, might it not?

You're absolutely on-point about regular psychopaths of course (as you know better than I).

>> Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one

> Who are we to make such decisions?

We are human beings who have free will. Do you suggest we allow both the hundred and the one to die, given that we lack the resources to save both?

Oh not at all. I'm not well-read enough to make such decisions. Though not it good to pose such a question for the sake of discussion.