What if mercy matters more than empathy?: Christian compassion begins not with imagining another person’s pain but with recognizing our shared dependence on grace. (Melissa Florer-Bixler, June 22, 2026, Christian Century)
Unlike the evangelicals who denounce empathy as a sin, Bloom doesn’t believe we should stop trying to understand others’ emotions or stop acting politically with the care of those we don’t understand in mind. Instead, Bloom is ambivalent about the moral weight we assign to empathy. Empathy can improve social cohesion and is a building block for good moral reasoning. And, as I have experienced, empathy can be marred by bias, or it can focus our attention on one person rather than on the social or political forces that harm all of us. Treating empathy as a silver bullet, our highest moral good, is doomed to fail us at ethically crucial moments.
But I have a harder time agreeing with Bloom’s conclusion: Instead of empathy, we should prize moral decisions based on compassionate but deliberative reasoning. Compassion, Bloom explains, doesn’t rely on my ability to discern someone’s feelings accurately. Whereas empathy is just as likely to leave us overwhelmed and fleeing from another person’s pain, compassion considers the other’s needs, takes them into account, and responds in kind. I may not know what it feels like to be facing starvation, and I may find it impossible to get inside the experience of someone struggling with addiction, but I can rationally assess others’ needs and respond.
I suspect that rationality is freighted with many of the same problems as empathy. How someone presents information changes how I understand the ethical stakes of a decision. Our rationality itself is bounded—no one has access to every piece of information before deciding. And I’m certain that cognitive bias affects what I believe is rational decision-making: I look for proof to validate my already existing beliefs every time I fill out my bracket for March Madness.
Thomas Aquinas understood the complexities of following Jesus, who taught us to love strangers while also sensing the strong pull of loving relationships with those closest to us. After all, we simply have more opportunities to love those in our nearest orbit. Because of this, we can’t devise a universal rule to guide every decision we make about caring for others. Instead, we can orient our decisions within the love of God, which, unlike our emotions or rationality, is not constrained by scarcity. Love is drawn from an inexhaustible well. The more we drink, the more like it we become. Mercy is the activation of this love. I am merciful because I am a creature to whom God has extended mercy, indefinitely and perfectly.
