![]() ![]() ![]() They had no overt obligation to help us and yet they did so. What that couple did for us was a good thing to do, surely a moral thing. After the tow, they refused to accept monetary compensation and even invited us to a barbecue, which my parents politely declined. When it was clear that our car was irreversibly stuck, they headed down to help. They’d been watching us, they said with thinly veiled amusement, from a ridge above the beach. This particular tale ends with a nice local Canadian couple towing us off the beach in their four-wheel-drive truck. A review of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom. ![]() ![]() She eventually settled on a heady mixture of amusement, frustration, and just a dash of blind rage. My mother, who had been openly critical of the idea of getting anywhere too close to the sand, struggled to determine the appropriate cocktail of emotions to display. After a dozen or so taps of the accelerator and some cheeky attempts to re-angle the tires, the air inside the car reeked of burning rubber and my father, having finally come to terms with our predicament, taught me some new words that became the cornerstone of my adult vocabulary. I’m actually not quite sure why it happened, but I can recall the sudden lurch I felt as we abruptly stopped moving and the shrill squeals of the tires as they spun deeper into the sand. When I was five or six years old, my father somehow managed to get our two-wheel-drive rental car stuck in the middle of a remote Canadian beach. ![]()
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