My view in short is that attempting to act with empathy without first ensuring you understand the subject and those affected is exactly what you not should do.

My view in short is that attempting to act with empathy without first ensuring you understand the subject and those affected is exactly what you not should do. Too many people want to treat the symptom instead of finding and solving the cause. Logic and empathy has to be applied together - you need to figure out why people act like they do (which requires both), and then find a solution that is as beneficial as possible to as many as possible (which again requires both). Applying logic like a robot will lead to optimizing the wrong numbers and will hurt people, and empathy without logic will lead to knee-jerk reactions that again will have unintended sideeffects which will hurt people. And both logic and empathy requires the forgotten old principle of proportionality. You don't break down and cry over somebody's bruises (you'd be considered insane) and you don't fix a failing break by instead taking out the engine to ensure you won't crash.