...Empathy does not work for determining ethical behavior because it is 1) selective and 2) it provides no direction for how to act.
A new study suggests that people with high levels of empathy also have high levels of schadenfreude. That is, the more...empathetic they are, the more they also enjoy seeing other people suffer:
Americans who scored high on an empathy scale showed higher levels of [partisan animosity]. ...[In one part of the study,] undergraduates were shown a news story about a controversial speaker from the opposing party visiting a college campus. Students who had scored higher on the empathy scale were more likely to applaud efforts to deny the speaker a platform.
It gets worse. These high-empathy students were also more likely to be amused by reports that students protesting the speech had injured a bystander sympathetic to the speaker. [Wired Magazine, citing the study: https://www.wired.com/story/empathy-is-tearing-us-apart]
...What we call empathy is, for the most part, group identification: we feel empathy for whomever we decide is a member of the in-group, and hate for whomever we decide is a member of the out-group. ... [This demonstrates] the logical problems of [using] selective and directionless feelings as a basis of morality.
Greater "empathy" leads to exacerbated partisan animosity. Maybe reason is a better basis for political belief than feelings or empathy...it tears apart the country less, and it leads to policies founded in logic, not emotion.
Perhaps Trump's success is that he harnesses feelings and empathy in campaigning (like Dems usually do, in both campaigning and in policy generation), but his policies are more based in reason not empathy (like GOP policies usually are...the invisible hand...doing what is best for someone is not always a handout, etc.).
Link: Truth & Tolerance Blog Entry: "You lack empathy, I hope you die a horrible death."