The Judge warns you that if you empathize with yourself or others’ avoidable hardships, you are encouraging more of the behavior that caused the hardship. You’d better punish rather than empathize, it says. A key fallacy of this argument is the belief that empathizing with pain means condoning the action that brought the pain about. If your child plays in the part of the playground that you warned him not to play in and breaks his leg, you would first get a cast on his leg and empathize with his pain. After the pain subsided, you would have a conversation about lessons learned and how to avoid
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