Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist and host of 'The Saad Truth,' opens this book with a provocation: that some of the most damaging forces in contemporary Western life are not cruelty or indifference but their opposite. His argument is that a particular strain of public compassion — one that shields people from uncomfortable truths, pathologizes dissent, and treats emotional safety as the highest civic value — is making individuals less capable and societies less free. Saad draws on evolutionary biology, institutional case studies, and cultural criticism to show how this dynamic plays out in universities, media, medicine, and politics. The book is written for readers who sense that something has gone wrong in public discourse but have not yet found a vocabulary for naming it that goes beyond partisan complaint. Saad offers that vocabulary in the idiom of science rather than ideology, which gives the argument reach across the usual fault lines. Whether one ultimately agrees with his diagnosis or not, the book forces a serious question: when does protecting people from difficulty become the harm itself? SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book's entire argument rests on an implicit anthropology of rationality. Saad treats the human capacity for evidence-based reasoning as something real and worth defending — not a social construction but a faculty that can be cultivated or degraded. This aligns with the Catholic understanding that reason is constitutive of human dignity, that the intellect is ordered toward truth as its natural end, and that distorting the conditions for rational inquiry is an offense against the person as such. - **Fallen**: Saad's diagnosis of 'suicidal empathy' maps closely onto what Aquinas calls the disordering of the passions by concupiscence — specifically, the way that misplaced pity (misericordia without prudential governance) can produce choices that feel virtuous while producing objectively harmful effects. His institutional examples show how disordered affect becomes systemic: policies designed to alleviate discomfort end up removing the friction that produces genuine competence and moral seriousness. - **Fallen (social dimension)**: The book documents what might be called a collective failure of the cogitative sense — the capacity for concrete perceptual judgment that Benjamin Suazo, drawing on Aquinas, identifies as the faculty most vulnerable to ideological distortion. When institutions reward emotional expression over accurate assessment, they progressively damage this faculty across an entire social body, not merely in isolated individuals. - **Redeemed**: This is where the book is genuinely weak. Saad's remedy is essentially rational courage — the willingness to say true things in the face of social pressure. That is not nothing, and it corresponds to the virtue of truthfulness as a component of justice. But it stops well short of any account of how disordered compassion is actually healed rather than simply resisted. The Redeemed state in the CCMMP requires grace, community, and a telos that Saad's naturalistic frame cannot supply. - **Prudence (foresight and civic wisdom)**: The book's strongest virtue contribution is its extended argument that the refusal to reckon with future consequences in the name of present emotional comfort is a failure of practical wisdom at the civic level. Saad shows, case by case, how short-term relief purchases long-term incapacity — a pattern that Aquinas would recognize as a defect in prudentia regnativa, the form of prudence that governs communities. SECTION THREE Bruce Perry's[^1] clinical finding in *Born for Love* shows that over-empathy can produce withdrawal rather than care: nurses who empathized most intensely with dying patients were most likely to avoid them until they had learned to modulate their distress. Perry's observation that 'overempathy can look from the outside like selfishness — and even produce selfish behavior' is, in miniature, exactly the institutional thesis Saad advances at cultural scale. Where Saad and Steven Hayes[^2] diverge is instructive: Hayes, in his ACT work, argues that cooperation and compassion are structurally adaptive — that competitive, threat-saturated social environments suppress cooperation, not that compassion itself is the problem. The contrast suggests that Saad's target is less compassion as such and more the particular social conditions (institutional threat, zero-sum framing) that deform it, a distinction the book itself does not always maintain. Jonathan Haidt's[^3] work on adolescent social media exposure provides a generational data layer that runs beneath Saad's argument: if young people were formed in information environments that systematically rewarded emotional expression and penalized empirical pushback, then the cultural pattern Saad observes is partly an artifact of that formation, not simply of bad ideas adopted by bad actors. ## References 1. Perry, Bruce D., and Szalavitz, Maia (2011). *Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential -- and Endangered*. — 'the most empathetic nurses were most likely to avoid dying patients early in their training' 2. Hayes, Steven (DMU video lecture). *ACT and RFT videos*. — 'the more of that the less of ability of us to cooperate as the social creatures that we are' 3. Haidt, Jonathan (DMU video lecture). *The Anxious Generation*. — 'if you were born in 1996, you and your age group is just different because you went through puberty on social media'
✓ Strengths
- ✓Saad uses evolutionary biology and behavioral data to argue that certain cultural expressions of compassion actively disable the rational faculties needed for sound civic judgment — a diagnostic move that complements the Thomistic account of how disordered passions cloud the intellect.
- ✓The book's core warning that misapplied sympathy can produce outcomes contrary to the welfare of those it intends to help is empirically grounded; it names specific institutional and policy cases rather than relying on abstract polemic.
- ✓By insisting that truth-telling is itself a form of care, Saad implicitly defends the virtue of truthfulness (justice-truthfulness) as a social good — a position compatible with the Catholic understanding that honesty serves both persons and the common good.
- ✓The foresight argument — that short-term emotional comfort purchased at the cost of long-term societal resilience constitutes a failure of practical wisdom — is a genuinely prudential contribution to public discourse.
- ✓Saad's willingness to name specific ideological formations as epistemically distorting mirrors the Catholic concern that ideologies, precisely by claiming total explanatory power, damage the cogitative sense and impair ordinary moral perception.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book operates almost entirely within a naturalistic-evolutionary frame; its account of the human person has no metaphysical floor — no imago Dei, no soul, no grace — which means the remedy it implicitly proposes (rational self-correction) underestimates the depth of the disorder it diagnoses.
- ⚠Saad's rhetorical posture risks conflating genuine compassion fatigue or institutional pathology with compassion as such; a Catholic reading must insist that caritas, rightly ordered by prudence, is not the disease but part of the cure.
- ⚠The book does not attend to the Redeemed state at all: there is no account of how persons or cultures are actually restored once the diagnosis is accepted, leaving readers with a critique but no telos.