Empathy is Not Always a Virtue

I’ve writ­ten a few times about the qual­i­ties of empa­thy and our soci­ety’s gen­er­al need for more of it in the last year or so. How­ev­er, empa­thy is not always a virtue. When you empathize with some­one so much that you become emo­tion­al­ly inca­pable of meet­ing your own respon­si­bil­i­ties (like, say, tak­ing your final exams), you have left the path of rea­son and account­abil­i­ty, and become a type of fun­da­men­tal­ist.

And there is no effec­tive mode of dis­course with a fun­da­men­tal­ist.