Listen to a podcast discussion about this article.
On any given morning in Beaver County, you can still find the old moral order alive and well—usually somewhere between the deli counter and the checkout line at the Beaver Super. If someone cuts in front of you, you don’t convene a panel discussion on his childhood. You give him a look. If he steals your parking space, you don’t draft a policy paper. You remember his license plate and revise your opinion of his upbringing.
In other words, we used to have a fairly reliable sense of who deserved the sympathy and who deserved the side-eye.
Then, somewhere beyond the county line—though it has been drifting steadily inward—sympathy got reassigned.
In 1965, Fulton J. Sheen—a man who could explain moral confusion with the clarity of a well-balanced checkbook—called it false compassion. It was, he said, the curious habit of feeling sorry “not for the mugged, but for the mugger.” The victim, in this arrangement, was expected to display resilience. The perpetrator was expected to receive understanding, counseling, and perhaps a thoughtful essay on the systemic forces that led him astray.
Sheen warned that this inversion would erode the moral clarity on which any orderly society depends. Right and wrong, once separated by something sturdier than a press release, would dissolve into a series of explanations. Judges would become social workers. Criminals would become case studies. And the victim would be left holding not only the bill, but the lecture explaining why it was, in some sense, his turn to pay.
Fast forward a few decades—past the mills, the Shell cracker plant, and a few rounds of national soul-searching—and along comes Gad Saad with a phrase that sounds less like a sermon and more like a warning label: suicidal empathy.
In his forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Saad describes a condition in which people become so committed to demonstrating empathy that they abandon the basic arithmetic of consequences. It is, in his telling, a kind of emotional overcorrection—an altruism so eager to be seen doing good that it forgets to ask whom it’s helping and at whose expense.
Where Sheen saw a moral failing, Saad sees something closer to a systems malfunction. Empathy, which evolved to help us cooperate and protect our own, has been coaxed into extending itself indiscriminately—even, at times, to those who would do us harm. The result is what he calls a maladaptive response: kindness applied with such enthusiasm that it begins to undermine the very society that made kindness possible.
If this sounds theoretical, it isn’t. You can see it in the modern habit of treating consequences as cruelty, as though accountability were an unfortunate relic best replaced by understanding. In policies that weigh the circumstances of the offender with exquisite care, while assuming the victim will simply absorb the inconvenience—like a pothole everyone agrees is regrettable but nobody quite gets around to fixing.
Both Sheen and Saad, separated by half a century and a difference in vocabulary, arrive at a similar conclusion: compassion, when detached from judgment, becomes something else entirely. Not kindness, exactly. More like a well-intentioned confusion.
The similarities are almost eerie. Sheen’s mugger and Saad’s “out-group” are distant relatives at the same uncomfortable family reunion. Both describe a world in which sympathy flows uphill toward the offender, while responsibility trickles down toward the offended. Both warn that such a reversal, charming in theory, becomes corrosive in practice.
The differences are just as instructive. Sheen spoke the language of sin and redemption, of moral order and the necessity of repentance. Saad speaks in the cooler tones of evolutionary psychology, where behaviors are judged by whether they help a group survive rather than whether they help a soul be saved. One warns of spiritual decay; the other of civilizational self-sabotage. It is, if nothing else, a reminder that you can arrive at the same uncomfortable truth by very different routes.
What neither man suggests—despite what their critics sometimes claim—is that compassion itself is the problem. On the contrary, both seem rather fond of it. The trouble begins when compassion is treated not as a virtue to be guided, but as a reflex to be indulged. Like a well-meaning committee that keeps approving projects without ever asking who’s paying for them, it proceeds with admirable enthusiasm and questionable results.
True compassion, in Sheen’s telling, does not excuse wrongdoing; it seeks to correct it. It does not confuse the victim with the perpetrator; it recognizes that helping one at the expense of the other is not kindness but a category error. Saad would likely add that a society unable to make that distinction will eventually find itself unable to protect either.
And so we arrive at the present moment, glowing with empathy and occasionally tripping over reality. The challenge, as always, is balance: to feel deeply without thinking poorly, to extend kindness without surrendering judgment, and to remember that compassion, like any virtue, works best when it knows where it’s going—and whom it’s meant to serve.
Otherwise, we risk perfecting a form of generosity that gives everything away, including the very things that made generosity possible in the first place—which, even in Beaver County, is generally considered bad business.
Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy may be pre-ordered here. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
