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.