By “empathy,” some people mean everything that is good - compassion, kindness, warmth, love, being a mensch, changing the world - and I'm for all of those things. I'm not a monster.

Every president, Democratic or Republican, simply works on the supposition that it's better to keep jobs in America than let them go to Mexico.

We don't just respond to things as we see them, or feel them, or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.

I'm really interested in the pleasure we get from stories and the pleasure we get from movies, and certainly the pleasure we get from virtual experiences. My complaint is against empathy as a moral guide. But as a source of pleasure, it can't be beat.

This enthusiasm [for empathy] may be misplaced. Empathy has some unfortunate features – it is parochial, narrow-minded and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.

By “empathy,” some people mean everything that is good - compassion, kindness, warmth, love, being a mensch, changing the world - and I'm for all of those things. I'm not a monster.

And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data.