Sorry Mr. white male authority, but on the limits of human psychology I'd far prefer to trust a skilled long term meditation practitioner, who come from ancient traditions that have survived (because they are not codswallop) and are scientifically demonstrated to be successful at achieving real biophysical change with metta (empathy + loving kindness) and other related meditation objects.
Predictably, you set off a ridiculous flamewar with this ridiculous aside. Then you kept adding more fuel to it. You also violated the HN guidelines, which ask you not to call names in comments here. Please don't do these things on Hacker News. They're destructive of the discourse here.
Was that really necessary?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108582/ http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Nor does the pain of low status or unattractive people, or out-group members. And for that matter, the pain of 100 = pain of 100,000 - human emotions just don't scale.
I'll take principled moral philosophy any day.
The main purpose of empathy is to (often hypocritically) signal to our in-group that we will face a high psychological cost if we behave disloyally and are therefore more trustworthy.
It's unfortunate, because while I agree with you, the lesser-known version of empathy is actually useful with respect to dealing with pain. The characteristic in common is a sharing of emotion, but therapist empathy also includes intelligent analysis to overcome things like racial prejudice, dialog with the recipient to check for understanding, and well it's basically just hard work that pays decently if you're good at it.
It doesn't scale though, it's really only good on a 1-1 basis but some group situations can work. Supposedly parents are supposed to do it naturally with their children but everyone is so self-centered these days that I never see it.
Cognitive empathy would be more about recognizing that the pain felt by racists is real pain. Of course, then an unpleasant moral dilemma arises - should we take such pain seriously? Traditional appeals to empathy say no, since we have no affective empathy for racists (they are far more out-group than blacks). But is that correct?
Good question. I think therapists have an obligation to treat racists without prejudice. I've read a few papers written about the treatment of repulsive clients. Many times just by listening to and validating pain, the pain will shift and the defense - which may well be racism - will fall apart. So then I think the question is, is malignant racism only ever acceptable as a symptom of a deeper problem? I probably would be okay if the answer here was yes. (Unlike homosexuality, for example, because unlike racism, even if you construed homosexuality to be a defense, it's much harder to show that it's an unhealthy defense that actually hurts anyone.)