Two Minds Blog

One of this year's most shocking developments has been a political fight over empathy -- yes, that  empathy -- with serious people disagreeing on whether empathy is a positive or negative force in the course of human affairs. Early in 2025, Vice President Vance invoked a Catholic doctrine called the ordo amoris  ("order of love") to argue that our moral duty extends more directly to our immediate friends and family than to people who are more distant in terms of race, religion, geography, or nationality. This drew a direct rebuke from then- Pope Francis I , who argued that the Vice President had misunderstood St. Augustine's writings on the topic. The Pope wrote a defense of unlimited empathy based on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, discovered "by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception." The Pope's message specifically took issue with new U.S. policies using increased force to target immigrants as criminals an...

The pace of technological change continues unabated, and many conversations turn to concerns about how our use of technology might be changing us humans in return. I wrote earlier this year about Jonathan Haidt's analysis of the ways in which two specific technologies -- smartphone and social media apps -- can have negative school or mental health consequences for adolescents. At a recent meeting of scholars on a journal's editorial board, my colleagues and I debated what uses of AI might be allowable versus not during the writing of a scientific article. And I wrote about risks that can occur when people use AI models as a companion or a counselor, tasks that it isn't always good at. In a recent book titled Jung vs. Borg (in which "Jung" is Carl the analytical psychiatrist, and "Borg" is the resistance-is-futile cyborg collective from  Star Trek ), Glen Slater argues that technology can have negative effects on us in four areas:  Loss of connection to ...