Michael Ventura, author of Applied Empathy, offered an interesting take on the subject of empathy in his article in the New York Times entitled The Dark Side of Empathy (May 4, 2025). He described two forms of empathy; one being the ability feel what others feel and the second being a cognitive capacity to understand what other people feel. As we are aware much of what is going on in government these days is a leadership that derides empathy as useless or “empathy weaponized”. Apparently what deportees or fired employees feel or don’t feel is of no consequence to this crew. Ventura characterized our new billionaire ‘second president’ as having the second form of empathy or the ability to turn his deep cognitive (strategic) understanding of peoples feelings into a very successful transactional business. This administration has also vilified ‘ethics’, as simply an inconvenience advanced by the weak. Mr. Ventura’s summary of empathy without ethics was very adept: “When empathy becomes unmoored from ethics, it becomes coercion with a smile.”

While cognition supports any effort to advance the crucial understanding of empathy, this writer is inclined to disagree that the singular capacity to cognitively understand of other people’s feelings is a second form of empathy (not even dark empathy). The Good Decision Project would call it a first form of sociopathy. I propose the capacity to use other peoples feelings to manipulate their behavior without a personal feelings feedback loop is a dangerous sickness.. That emotional neuropathy means crucial information needed by this kind of leader/administrator is missing and evil can cross the line with cheerful ease into practice. A blind person can make unique and important contributions to life, business, culture and community as long as that person knows he or she is blind and accommodates. A person whose brain can understand the feelings of another person and their likely needs but is blocked to the complex messages of feelings is dangerous. 

Good in this topic is simply knowing how to experience feelings; your own and others. Cognition is a critical guide to feelings but not a competitor with the feelings feedback message. Both the accurate directly experienced sensitivity to feelings and the ability to evaluate through cognition are critical to a good decision and a good leader. The discipline of The Good Decision is to integrate into your decisions that delicately designed form of perception available to humanity we call the “sense of”. Feelings don’t make decisions, but they do ground them, and no one survives the blunting of that capacity. For the religious out there feeling and the capacity to feel is a gift from Creation.