Is empathy a spook?

Thats not what a spook is.

Sure, it's easy to do that and desensitize yourself when you're in front of a computer and are practically unconnected to whatever is happening to you.

But try switching it off when you personally witness truly tragic shit happen right in front of you, like being in a natural disaster.

empathy is an emotion.
It's not a spook unless you make it one.

No, it's exactly the vital part of ego that's even mentioned in the book from what I can recall.

So cherish that empathy and use it as guideline for decent egoism, back it up with reason and you're golden.

Good, it's a waste of time. Now if only they stopped talking about it.

Comrade, you are being very anti-materialist right now

argument in favour of a pre-human origin of moral instincts, but also as a law of
Nature and a factor of evolution. Espinas devoted his main attention to such
animal societies (ants, bees) as are established upon a physiological division of
labour, and though his work is full of admirable hints in all possible directions, it
was written at a time when the evolution of human societies could not yet be
treated with the knowledge we now possess. Lanessan's lecture has more the
character of a brilliantly laid-out general plan of a work, in which mutual support
would be dealt with, beginning with rocks in the sea, and then passing in review
the world of plants, of animals and men. As to Büchner's work, suggestive though
it is and rich in facts, I could not agree with its leading idea. The book begins with a hymn to Love, and nearly all its illustrations are intended to prove the existence of love and sympathy among animals. However, to reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my
neighbour – whom I often do not know at all – which induces me to seize a pail
of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even
though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which
moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy
(understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses
to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces
wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to
play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the
autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy – an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.

Yes but no, read Mutual Aid

complementarycurrency.org/ccLibrary/Mutual_Aid-A_Factor_of_Evolution-Peter_Kropotkin.pdf

Also this is basically the same concept flipped turned upside down

yes

People that lack empathy are likely to have some form of Autism.

Neurotypicals are spooked.

Or are depressed, have some form of schizophrenia etc.
Being emphatically-challenged isn't just an Autism/psychopath thing.

Here's a lifehack:
Consider the fact that there is literally no diffrence between the two. It's just your spooked mind telling you there is.

Capability for empathy is directly tied to strength of ego. Weaker ego has lesser capability to care about anything, and is merely guided by fear and external suggestions.

Besides you can't even provide a consistent definition, so there is in fact spooky shit at work.

Your primal instincts aren't spooks you retard

It's the ultimate spookery

Well people here keep saying morality is a spook, because ultimately your desire to "help" other people is another way of improving the world for you. This leads to either a reductionist fallacy ("there's no truly good deed") or just plain a flawed argument when you consider self-sacrifice and empathy into consideration.

Checkmate, strict materialists.