I appreciate the well thought out response, and I certainly agree with you that many people use "empathy" today in the way you're describing. Perhaps this this is a pointless struggle on my part, the language will evolve, and eventually empathy and sympathy will be basically the same thing, similarly to how confound and confuse used to have different meanings but are now synonymous. That said, I can't help but notice that today, while some people use "empathy" and "sympathy" interchangeably, a great many people still make a distinction.
Now to your examples:
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Retired has discussed some of his friends who are veterans and who suffered from PTSD and at least one who took their own life. This makes me sad. I feel sadness for Retired and those who've lost people, but I feel sadness for those that suffer from PTSD as well. I feel sadness that they are struggling with something that is adversely affecting them. I call this sympathy.
When I try to consider PTSD from the point of view of someone who is affected by it - there is no point to projecting my own feelings or my own reason. I have no baseline - or at least nothing that is relatable to some of the veterans that Retired has mentioned. I think that the best we can do sometimes is just listen and try our best to understand on some level. And I think that this attempt to understand from someone else's perspective is at the heart of empathy. Projecting my feelings into your situation would be non productive to understanding how you feel.
Based on the actual definitions of the words, these are both examples of sympathy. Or perhaps the first example is just concern, and the second one qualifies as sympathy. Either way, I wouldn't categorize either as empathy, and I certainly wouldn't criticize either response as self-centered or hubristic. So I think we agree that both examples are generally good things.
As to your point about teaching kids:
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That said. Telling a child "How would you feel if so-and-so took your toy away?" may be useful in teaching them about consequences of their actions. And it may be useful in teaching a child about sympathy if your goal is for the child to feel sadness for someone whose toy was taken. But, this type of question, I think, falls into the description of empathy you are using whereby you are projecting yourself with your feelings and experiences into someone else's situation and saying 'what would I do and feel?'. And to your point, I think that this type of thinking is really not productive in understanding someone else's feelings - especially if you do not have shared experiences. But, I'm not sure that this is the way people think of the word 'empathy'.
I'm certainly no child psychologist, but I do have a three year old, and a 10 month old, and I will readily admit that I have tried your strategy with the 3 year old (mostly when she's doing something she shouldn't to the 10 month old.) I would argue that the logic is very much in line with Christ's teaching in Matthew 7:12, or at least the older negative version, i.e. "don't do to others what you don't want done to yourself."
That said, after some experience trying it out on a 3 year old, I'm not convinced that it works very well, if at all. At that age, it seems that what really works for kids is a clearly ordered rule structure. Listen when I speak to you, do as I tell you, don't hit other kids, don't grab things from other kids, etc. As they get older, the moral framework unfolds and the nuances are taught. On the way to that moral structure, I do think there's a place for thought experiments. It's useful to wonder what it would be like to experience some novel situation.
But, as you clearly laid out in your post, it's impossible for us to fully imagine every lived experience. I am a man, and try as I might, I can't fully imagine what it would feel like to be a woman who is violently raped. I understand that it's a horrible crime. I understand that it inflicts pain, and humiliation, and trauma. And so I try to have every bit of compassion I can summon for victims of rape. But if I limited my compassion to the extent of the psychological pain that I could personally imagine, I would probably sell it short. To have sympathy, I have to take my own understanding of similar pain, and intellectually place it in the context of someone who is different from me. Who is likely physically weaker than I am. Whose sexuality is inherently ordered to nurturing life. Who, rightly or wrongly, has to contend with a standard of sexual purity and desirability that is simply different from that of a man.
For me to try and be "empathetic" in that situation is to say to a female rape victim "I feel your pain." I hope we can agree that that would be obviously wrong in that situation. I'm suggesting that's it's always wrong, for the same reasons, in every situation.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is this: if you want to posit that empathy is simply the exercise of imagining the pain of another, I would say that's a good exercise, but it falls far short of the extent of compassion that we are called to give according to Christian love. To limit ourselves in that way I think is borne of hubris. And hubris, as the queen of the deadly sins, is
most certainly of the Devil.
