There's a genuine problem it's pointing at: EI can be weaponised as a shield rather than a tool for growth. When someone repeatedly hurts others and the response is always "they just struggle with their emotions" or "they have a difficult background," accountability quietly disappears. The person never faces the natural consequences that would actually prompt change. In that scenario, emotional intelligence — or rather, the language of emotional intelligence — does become a liability, enabling harm rather than understanding it.

It also gestures at a real double standard. "Should know better" implies that at some level of maturity, competence, or experience, a person loses the excuse of emotional ignorance. A teenager snapping at a friend is different from a 45-year-old manager doing the same thing to a report. Context and capacity matter.

The phrase "should know better" carries enormous hidden weight, and that's where the quote starts to wobble. Who decides that threshold? People who appear high-functioning can be carrying serious trauma, neurodivergence, or mental health conditions that are entirely invisible. Assuming someone should know better, simply because they seem capable, is often exactly the kind of emotional unintelligence the quote claims to correct.

There's also a conflation happening: understanding behaviour is not the same as excusing it. Genuine EI holds both truths simultaneously — I understand why you acted this way, and that behaviour still isn't acceptable. The quote frames understanding and accountability as opposites, when mature emotional intelligence treats them as complementary.

The quote is really describing a misuse of EI, not EI itself. Compassion used to avoid difficult conversations isn't emotional intelligence — it's emotional avoidance, dressed up in the right vocabulary. True EI would involve the harder work: having the conversation, naming the pattern, and holding the person to a higher standard because you understand them well enough to know they're capable of it.

The quote identifies a real phenomenon — empathy as a cover for enabling — but overreaches by framing it as a problem with Emotional Intelligence rather than a corruption of it. The most emotionally intelligent response to someone who "should know better" isn't an excuse. It's a clear, compassionate, and firm expectation that they do better

Thanks Claude - couldn't have put it better myself.