Selective Empathy

Empathy is one of the components of conscience.  Allowing someone to either feel how they would if they were in someone else's position or to feel how they perceive someone else to feel, it can be a powerful experience for people who do not try to suppress it, and even for some of those who do try.  Regardless of this, it is still true that not only is empathy philosophically meaningless, but it is also perhaps rarely felt by its proponents towards all people.  Even people who pretend like they "know" empathy is a moral requirement (it is just a subjective feeling, and one that could actually hinder people from living out their obligations at that such as by motivating someone to shield others from just criticism, so it could not possibly be a moral obligation to have empathy) usually end up revealing that there is at least one group of people they do not care about having empathy for.

Selective empathy in people who believe or say that empathy is a moral necessity, which they might also erroneously think is also the only way to avoid mistreating others, is utterly hypocritical--yet what else would one expect from non-rationalists?  One might see people lament murder on the basis of empathy, already mistaking a subjective state of mind that is not even always voluntary for something rational or just.  These same people might be driven by empathy for some victims of murder or their surviving loved ones to not feel empathy for murderers even if they were murdered or worse, for instance.  This contradicts the supposed belief that empathy is universally good and needed and thus exposes their stupidity, which has numerous levels given the objective fact that it is logically impossible for empathy to be morally obligatory or to philosophically matter in itself.

Empathy does not matter because it is a largely involuntary emotional state instead of an actual belief, action, or desire to do what is morally right regardless of one's feelings or circumstances.  No one is rational by having or not having empathy because this has nothing to do with how thoroughly they have aligned with reason or how well they avoid assumptions.  No one loves justice by being empathetic unless they look past their subjective feelings to moral concepts that, if true, are perfectly consistent and a part of reality even when it might be inconvenient.  It would not be unclear to any consistently rational person why feeling as though one is experiencing the suffering or joys of others is not even important at all, except in the context of introspective awareness and perhaps as an additional but totally secondary motivator to treat people as they deserve (according to the commands of Christianity which actually have evidence supporting them).

Moral obligations, if they exist, do not depend on how one feels at any given moment or towards any particular person or situation.  If there is no such thing as morality in spite of the moral preferences of many individuals, then empathy is meaningless.  If moral obligations exist in spite of the preferences of many other individuals who wish to be incapable of wrongdoing and undeserving of any moral judgment, empathy neither proves something is morally good nor amounts to anything more than a personal emotion that some people experience frequently, others less frequently, and others not at all.  No one is intellectually or morally special just because they experience empathy, but all the more if they are stupid enough to not identify the hypocrisies of intentionally selective empathy or to think that empathy reveals moral obligations.  Something like empathy that is purely subjective on an epistemological level cannot unveil anything more than one's own feelings, if one has such feelings in the first place.