Paul Bloom, the author of Against Empathy, argues why empathy is a bad thing and compassion is better.

An excerpt from the article:
"We are told that there is no such thing as too much empathy, that politicians and policy makers and religious leaders and community activists and everyone else should feel more empathetic. Bloom doesn’t buy it — empathy has certain pernicious effects, he argues, and often leads to results like the one demonstrated by Baton’s experiment: good-hearted people actively making the world worse. Empathy is not an accurate moral signpost, let alone a good basis for policy-making.

“Empathy is bad” sounds more like trolling than a substantive argument, more like something a Twitter egg hoping to start a dumb fight would tweet at you. If I’m honest with myself, despite having a great deal of respect for Bloom as a writer and thinker, I went into Against Empathy eagerly anticipating the holes I’d be able to poke in it. The holes didn’t materialize. Instead, over the course of a brisk 250 pages, Bloom laid out what really does feel like a tough-to-crack case against an idea that most of us have long known is key to repairing the world."