Yes I always thought empathy was an interesting idea. Because it's sort of like a positive spin on prejudices, isn't it? Instead of bothering to talk to people and understanding them and helping them, you just sort of assume they want what you want, and somehow this makes you a moral actor.

And I think the funniest thing about empathy is how you have a bunch of self-proclaimed empathy experts, who can diagnose people with either empathy or no empathy, at which point they are either a sociopath or a psychopath.

And then, once they are diagnosed with such a thing on what is generally a very vague basis of criteria, then they are clinically recognised as being incapable of feeling human emotion, which in turn justifies us in our capacity to treat them like animals and second class citizens. We can rob them of freedom, we can lock them up, we can torture them, we can drug them, we can do anything we want, because they lack empathy.

And we call this "the justice system."

It's a lovely bit of cruelty, very novel. But alas, I never much cared for such follies. I just sort of figure people are people, and you have to make some kind of investigative effort to understand them rather than to bring out the Cartesian notepad and start looking for moral convenience within your own rationalisations.