I will answer that separately. I understand that liberalism uses the notion of emotion based moral (and other) decisions. Fundamentally my morality is liberal, but it is in no way based on "prevailing" empathy. Empathy is an internal emotion that lets us feel the pain of others, that's it. There's no such thing as group empathy, and any description I made that suggests that is unintentional. A morality that is group based must by necessity be metaphysical (based on common descriptions of observable reality) even if that is a rationalization by individuals of their own individual empathy.
Well, that wasn't my point. My point is that a lot of liberal theories lean toward centralized and universal solutions because they seem to always imagine a sensible person (who just happens to think just like they do) being in charge of making all the decisions. That's why they don't work with real people. Yes, a benevolent dictator distributing things for the maximum good for everyone sounds wonderful so long as you imagine the dictator is benevolent. Once you realize that there is no way to guarantee the dictator will be benevolent or remain so even if you succeed in putting a benevolent dictator into power, the dictatorships and authoritarian governments that seem to appeal so strongly to liberals lose their luster and seem like bad deals.
My point is that empathy as the basis for morality is only useful if empathy produces fairly consistent results between individuals but it doesn't, even if two people are applying the Golden Rule with perfect precision. For example, if I were lying on the ground dying from a fatal wound, I might want to live every last minute of my life, no matter how painful, while you might prefer to be put out of your misery with a merciful shot to the head. If we both apply the Golden Rule to a wounded person that we feel empathy for as if they were ourselves, I'll let them suffer and die naturally while you'll put them out of their misery. Either one of us might be wrong and not doing what the person actually wants if they can't communicate that to us. One person might prefer to be dead rather than being brain damaged and confined to a wheelchair while another would want to live. They would make very different decisions for others, even if they were making the decision they'd want applied to themselves. Their empathy is perfect but it leads them to very different decisions.
That was my point about empathy and pregnancy. A pregnant woman who has spent years trying to get pregnant who loses her first trimester baby in a car accident may consider it murder while a woman on her way to abortion clinic may not care. And put those two women on a jury to make a decision about what happened to a third woman and their empathy will have less to do with how the third woman feels and more do to with how they feel. The empathy can be perfect and the decisions different.
You are presuming that empathy will produce consistent moral assessments but it won't, because people don't make consistent moral assessments of their own actions toward others and of others toward them, so they certainly aren't going to consistent when dealing wholly with others.
Fundamentally my morality is liberal, but it is in no way based on "prevailing" empathy.
My point is that is should be if you want to rely on empathy. That's as close to a common or singular morality as you are going to get out of empathy.
Empathy is an internal emotion that lets us feel the pain of others, that's it.
It's far more complicated than that, which you can find if you look in either autism or the behavior of sociopaths, two different manifestations of problems with empathy. Empathy is about being able to put yourself into the position of someone else to see things from their perspective. It does not necessarily have to do with pain, though it might.
There's no such thing as group empathy, and any description I made that suggests that is unintentional. A morality that is group based must by necessity be metaphysical (based on common descriptions of observable reality) even if that is a rationalization by individuals of their own individual empathy.
I'm not sure where you are trying to go with that line of argument.
Are all group moralities merely "rationalizations"?