Empathy as "feeling in" is a very important psychological tool, notably a torturer that doesn't use, or isn't able to use empathy might be very limited in his ability to extract information, as he is not able to finely assess if the psychological or physical technics applied do really hurt the torturee in the desired way. Similarly, the power surge that rapists are allegedly addicted to does seem to require empathy, the ability to feel the pain inflicted inside of the victim, with the apparent exception of rape cases on sleeping victims or even dead victims, which might originate in a different type of psychological mechanism.



Compassion as "suffering with" is a different matter, as by definition it consist in sharing the subjective situation of the other and is allegedly a natural state of mind for the "awakened" mind, that is free from duality in buddhism, in the sense that the mind doesn't e.g. think that anything exist per se, independently from space, space that is in turn a continuum.



Ethical norms, as derived from what is subjectively perceived as right or wrong , change from place to place and from period to period. The aspiration for truly "master" ethical norms that can be accessed and followed rationally might be originating in the emotional need for an attachment to something reassuring, fixed, outside of us, that if complied to, will insure our safety, however "the thought that phenomenons dependent on causes or conditions are real is ignorance", in other words nothing exists per se.



Matthieu Ricard as a biochemist turned buddhist lama is an interesting figure that can reveal a lot about the people's tendency to be cultural-centric or ethnocentric. For example a westerner will believe it to be true if a "specialist" says that carbon has six protons, because he knows that if he want to prove it to himself, it is available to him to study physics and to ultimately redo the lab work. However as buddhist lamas are specialists from a different culture, if ,e.g. they say there is such a thing as reincarnation, we will be tempted to dismiss it as simply beliefs by less advanced people, that will be dispelled with time, instead of realizing that it is also available to us to do the study and work necessary to perceive and understand reincarnation.



Something more self evident happens in mathematics, where we can admit that statement X has been proven if the "specialists" say so, however if we don't have to background to read the proof we will not be able to understand it. Once we have done the study, we can understand the proof, but only internally to ourself, as to someone that doesn't have the tools to understand it we will not be able to show that we understood it and why we understood it.