The essay, “Is empathy overrated,” by Paul Bloom is about how Bloom believes that empathy is narrow, biased, and insensitive. He tells us that empathy has a narrow focus and that it “distorts our moral judgments the same way prejudice does.” He goes into detail with his strong beliefs, attempting to convince his readers that empathy is overrated, that the negatives of empathy outweigh its positives, and that there are better alternatives. 

Bloom’s three main points are all controversial, starting with how empathy is like a spotlight, and how it has such a narrow focus. His second point is that people can’t empathize with thousands of people and that we tend to empathize more with our loved ones and people were close to. His last big point is that empathy is insensitive, and how empathy is silent even when it’s needed sometimes like in the text when it says, “But suppose that stopping the vaccine program will cause, say, a dozen random children to die. Here your empathy is silent.” My initial reaction is who is he to assume that his readers would be silent here? He assumes a lot about his readers, and you can tell he wrote this piece to start a conversation rather than actually believing it. There’s no way someone can relate empathy to prejudice, and talk about how murders are just background noise. The only way someone would say these things is to make people disagree, they’re playing the naysayer or the devil’s advocate to spark conversation. “The murder in Chicago is more of steady background noise,” Bloom said. While I agree you can’t empathize with everyone, I think there are enough people in the world, and if there is an individual that needs empathy, they will have someone.