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 <i>not</i> should do. Too many people want to treat the symptom instead of finding and solving the cause.<p>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).<p>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.<p>And both logic and empathy requires the forgotten old principle of proportionality. You don&#x27;t break down and cry over somebody&#x27;s bruises (you&#x27;d be considered insane) and you don&#x27;t fix a failing break by instead taking out the engine to ensure you won&#x27;t crash.