Those seem like particularly bad reasons. I'm not sure if they are the arguments that the author has been given or if that's what he perceived those arguments to be.
My take on it is to remember that the people you are talking to are real people with reasons for doing things. Very few people do things that they think are wrong at the time of doing them.
I would guess that the single most common cause of bad faith arguments comes from people jumping to the conclusion that the person they are dealing with is acting in bad faith.
Reflecting on it some more perhaps you can boil it down to the implications of dealing with real people.
If you don't act with empathy you can hurt people. Is it your intention to hurt people?
If it turns out your motivation is, in fact, to hurt people then the issue isn't empathy but your own motivations. Reflecting on your motivations and what you feel like you should be doing as a person is the path to take here.
>Those seem like particularly bad reasons. I'm not sure if they are the arguments that the author has been given or if that's what he perceived those arguments to be.
I think this might have to just be axiomatic. At the bottom of every system is an axiom, whether it's identity in mathematics or "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" in USican politics or "empathy is good and to be pursued" in interpersonal relationships.
>If you don't act with empathy you can hurt people. Is it your intention to hurt people?
I dare say that if your mission is actually to hurt people as much as you can empathy will help you a lot in that goal because it lets you define strategies tailored to hurt the target based on their feelings. Without empathy you're limited to thinking about what would hurt you and then applying it to other people.
My take on it is to remember that the people you are talking to are real people with reasons for doing things. Very few people do things that they think are wrong at the time of doing them.
I would guess that the single most common cause of bad faith arguments comes from people jumping to the conclusion that the person they are dealing with is acting in bad faith.
Reflecting on it some more perhaps you can boil it down to the implications of dealing with real people.
If you don't act with empathy you can hurt people. Is it your intention to hurt people?
If it turns out your motivation is, in fact, to hurt people then the issue isn't empathy but your own motivations. Reflecting on your motivations and what you feel like you should be doing as a person is the path to take here.