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It is good for us to know that empathy is not a virtue, charity is. And they are not the same thing. Empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person by imagining yourself in their situation" per Cambridge Dictionary. Charity is “to will the good of the beloved” per the great sage Aquinas. Aquinas is simply condensing what Jesus taught and exemplified, which Paul says with many more words in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 and John says in his first letter. To be sure, being able to understand another person's feelings can fuel charity in some cases. It helps to ease the sting of the sacrifices you have to make for love when you can feel how hurt the other person is and put yourself in their psychological shoes. Empathy could also pervert charity by distorting your vision and taking your eyes off what is good for the person and focusing on how they are feeling. Empathy could make you irrational by optimising for reducing suffering or maximising pleasure instead of pursuing what is good for the person and others involved in their lives. You may have heard that empathy is such a virtue that Jesus even came in the flesh to experience what humanity experienced and this qualified Him to be a perfect advocate. But this is a gross misunderstanding of who Jesus is. Jesus, our God, did not aquire new information about human experience by becoming a man since He is omniscient. To “learn obedience” was not the writer of Hebrews asserting a limitation in God. His coming as a man enabled Him to experience Humanity for the sake of being fit by nature to suffer the punishment due to humanity. Only a man should suffer for man. Therefore, as a man He experienced all our temptations but did not sin. As a sinless man He could bear the punishment for mankind. But more relevantly for this conversation, His experiences give us an example of how a true man can live for God's glory. His incarnation was all for our benefit and not an iota for His. He did not learn human feeling by becoming man. He endured human feeling so that he can qualify as just substitute for human sins. Jesus did not come as a man to learn our feelings in other to be able to do us good. He had been doing us good from the garden of Eden. He made the decision to do us good even before He took on humanity. You can do people good without experiencing their feelings. You do not need to be in people's psychological shoes before you can tell what is good for them. You just need to know their being and what is good for them and pursue it. Empathy has this terrible feature of being easy to manipulate. People who are prone to entering the sensations of others are especially easy to stir about by projecting sensations and move the empath’s will in any direction the manipulator pleases. A manipulator just needs to act and project certain emotions suggesting they are in deep anguish and the “empath” will believe the manipulator is the victim or that sacrificing justice to alleviate their suffering is good. But justice is the good and perverting justice to make someone else feel better is proper evil. Perverting justice because justice will increase the suffering of a sufferer is satanic. Empathy without charity leads to a justice system where verdicts are given based on the emotions projected and magnified by the people involved. It leads to a justice system where the wicked will keep escaping by shedding tears and the stoic innocent will suffer in the wicked’s place. Empathy is not a strength in itself. It can be a weakness. Empathy does not cost anyone. It's a natural predisposition that people have. Charity is costly. We are not born with it. It takes effort to cultivate and costs us our comfort to implement. Empathy is useless if it is not serving the good but merely serving an awareness of people's feelings. Empathy is not a virtue. Charity is the virtue, that is to will of the good of people. A charitable psychopath is better than a foolish empath.