> it is just that at absolute level of suffering your issues are ignorable. I'm curious, how do you go about establishing that level? Do you think it's really

> it is just that at absolute level of suffering your issues are ignorable. I'm curious, how do you go about establishing that level? Do you think it's really absolute, rather than relative to the stressors the observer feels? In reality, I think that's how most people actually operate. Something (extremely roughly) along the lines of: T >= O, where T is suffering of the target and O is suffering of the observer, results in empathy. That gets caught up in the fact that suffering is more about perception, and is itself relative. So maybe we have to say both are level of suffering as perceived by the observer. Something along the lines of "if I perceive you as suffering more than I do, I can have empathy for you". For what it's worth, I think this gets at the heart of the difference between sympathy (largely pity) and empathy more generally.