Thursday 28 April 2011

Simon Baron-Cohen on Empathy, Evil, and Justice


Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 208pp., ISBN 9780713997910.


Yesterday, a friend alerted me to this book, and today I saw a piece in The Guardian by Carol Jahme on Baron-Cohen’s recent RI Lecture on the same topic.


As Jahme summarises, Baron-Cohen ‘wants to raise awareness of the human empathic system and the devastating consequences when it malfunctions’, and ‘wants society to progress from condemning people as evil and instead understand why they acted without due concern for the pain they would cause’.


As Jahme goes on to say, his thesis has implications for those who work in the health care system and for the criminal justice system.

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