My take on Blooms take is that: Bloom isn’t against kindness, he against empathy as a fuzzy emotion that frames the effectiveness and kindness actions. He is saying it is unreliable and leads to unkind outcomes by inherent bias.

I believe bloom is arguing that the kindest action is probably one without the bias of believing you understand another’s experience. A certain empathy can cloud one’s judgement, especially if it is based on incorrect understanding. You see this played out where say, a socially liberal person proposes a “kind” policy, but this policy is turns out to be exploited. The socially conservative folks then argue against the kindness of the policy; but that was not the problem. The problem is optimization for the wrong metric with regard to the policy. It wasn’t exploited due to kindness, it was exploited due to effectiveness (rules, enforcement, implementation detail).

Social policy must be assessed on both effectiveness (factoring in cost, time and relation to other methods), acceptability by participants (no workers or no customers = no business) and kindness (societal acceptance, purpose).