....of course I would have empathy then? How could I not? My family isn't the only family capable of suffering. If anything, my suffering would make me care more about the suffering of others. I would never want to inflict that pain on other families. It makes no sense.

Why care about genocide at all if you don't consider emotion? It's just sacks of meat getting destroyed, like cows, pigs, lambs. Why should we care if any living creature is killed, oppressed, suffers?

Emotion. It drives us to reason one way rather than another. Emotion drives us to make killing dogs illegal, while killing fish, birds, other mammals, etc is done by the millions every day.

There's no logic to religious debate as all religion is made up superstition. There's no logic to allowing one group of people to keep some land and not others other than the rationale that whoever has the bigger gun is allowed to keep the land. There's no logic to retaliation at all, because it's circular reasoning.

So, yeah, it's an appeal to emotion. Otherwise what the hell is the point of caring about any death? Logic will never stop the killing. Logic will never be able to come up with "a solution" that is acceptable to the human psyche. But emotion can.