Sam Harris

So it's, you know, many of us have come to believe that this is a bug rather than a feature of our moral psychology.

And so empathy plays an unhelpful role there.

So ultimately I think

when we're making big decisions about what we should do and how to mitigate human suffering and what's worth valuing and how we should protect those values.

I think reason is the better tool, but it's not that I would want to dispense with any part of empathy either.

Right.

I'm not sure what the right answer is there, or even whether there is one right answer.

There could be multiple.

peaks on this part of the moral landscape.

So the opposition is between an ethic that's articulated by someone like the Dalai Lama, or really any exponent of classic Buddhism,

would say that the ultimate enlightened ethic is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers.

The mind of the Buddha would be truly dispassionate.

You would love and care about all people equally.

And by that light,

it seems some kind of ethical failing or at least a failure to fully actualize compassion in the limit or enlightened wisdom in the limit to care more or even much more about your kids than the kids of other people and to prioritize your energy in that way, right?

So you spend all this time trying to figure out how to keep your kids healthy and happy and

You'll attend to their minutest concerns, however superficial.

And again, there's a genocide raging in Sudan or wherever, and it takes up less than 1% of your bandwidth.

I'm not sure it would be a better world if everyone was running the Dalai Lama program there.

I think some prioritization of one's nearest and dearest ethically might be optimal for