Article: List of Criticisms of Empathy

• Empathy gets confused with compassion.
   "compassion is active whereas empathy is passive."
   "Empathy is, in some ways, a necessary precursor to compassion"
  " A rather brutal analogy highlights the difference: A torturer will put a gun to your head. An empathic torturer will put the gun to your child’s head. A compassionate one will put the gun down…. "

• Empathy helps torturer be a better torturer

• Empathy is Dangerous
   "empathy alone can be quite dangerous (and arguably a little self-indulgent). "

• Empathy is Self-Indulgent
   "empathy alone can be quite dangerous (and arguably a little self-indulgent). "

• Empathy can be a Coercive
  "But it can also be a ‘negative’ or even a coercive emotion because it is ethically neutral."

• Empathy can be a ‘Negative'
  "But it can also be a ‘negative’ or even a coercive emotion because it is ethically neutral."

• Empathy is Ethically Neutral.
  "But it can also be a ‘negative’ or even a coercive emotion because it is ethically neutral."

• Empathy can be voyeuristic

• Empathy carries with it a slight tinge of entertainment or even voyeurism

• Empathy can drag us into wars
  "Dark political and economic forces can also use our natural sense of empathy to drag us into interminable wars over which we can have no long term influence. "

• Empathy can be highly damaging to mental heal

•  "Empathy in the Twenty-First century can also be highly damaging to mental health and well-being. "

• Empathy can be highly damaging well-being
  "Empathy then ensures that they eat their way into our soul and corrode our mental wellbeing."

• Empathy makes the worlds problems worse
  "Perhaps then, if we can collectively learn to think and act more creatively, we might just be able to deal with the world’s problems more effectively. We might learn to deal with them with intelligence and compassion, rather than risk making them worse with empathy."