The outward manifestations of lack of empathy can show up early in kids torturing animals. But empathy itself can't be measured and no group can decide what its quantity or quality should be. I know from my experience that I have a strong moral sense and, for example, always hated to see childhood friends torturing animals (frogs mostly). I can only speak with that degree of certainty about myself. But I can also point out in general that generations of people have grown up with less than full empathy as evidenced by abortion statistics clustered around societal and family groupings. Obviously there are other explanations for the clustering.
What about a kid that goes hunting with his dad, shoots Bambi without feeling guilty about it, and helps mom and dad turn Bambi into sausage? Is he morally defective? What about the kid who burns fire ants with gasoline? Or the kid who uses worms as bait and catches fish on hooks? What about a kid that shoots deer for trophies rather than the meat? All empathically defective? Where is your line? Oh, right. You don't have lines. So how can you tell if someone's empathy is proper or not?
Please note that I'm not arguing that empathy cannot contribute to moral behavior. Of course it can. But it's a component of it, not the sum total of it. And there are people with little or no empathy, including people with autism, who manage to be moral people.
But empathy itself can't be measured and no group can decide what its quantity or quality should be.
Yet you talk about instilling a proper sense of empthy. What does that mean?
I know from my experience that I have a strong moral sense and, for example, always hated to see childhood friends torturing animals (frogs mostly).
Yet you are willing to allow abortionists to murder millions of children who are as old as my child was when I first saw her heartbeat. From my perspective, your moral sense and your empathy seem a bit defective. Have you ever seen a picture of an embryo implanted into a woman in a fertility clinic? They give you those during IVF, you know. It's the first picture in a lot of baby albums. Have you ever seen an ultrasound of a 7-week old fetus' heart beating?
And what did you do to stop those kids from torturing animals? Were you willing to tolerate it so long as you weren't an active participant rather than someone who passively knew it was going on?
I can only speak with that degree of certainty about myself.
Of course, yet you seem to assume that you can apply your thinking more universally to create a common morality.
But I can also point out in general that generations of people have grown up with less than full empathy as evidenced by abortion statistics clustered around societal and family groupings. Obviously there are other explanations for the clustering.
I'm not sure what you are referencing here. I would argue that most people can have their sense of empathy emphasized or desensitized by humanizing or dehumanizing, personalizing or abstracting the subject of their moral decision. There are Freepers here who have had abortions who regret those decisions, because they know things now that they didn't know then. The problem wasn't that they were morally or empathically deficient but that they were either ignorant or manipulated by others.