"Flannery O’Connor — a writer whose works are rife with warning label-worthy violence — famously said that sentimentality always leads to the gas chamber."

"Without any external anchor in law, mores, or trusted guides — or any openness to being challenged in one’s thinking — empathy turned inward will lead each of us to our individual prisons of the self."

That's the last paragraph of "'Empathetically Correct' Is the New Politically Correct/The movement for 'trigger warnings' in college classrooms is part of a troubling trend toward protecting people from their own individual sensitivities," by Karen Swallow Prior in The Atlantic.

Prior links to this New Yorker article from last year by Paul Bloom called "The Baby in the Well/The Case Against Empathy." Excerpt:

A “politics of empathy” doesn’t provide much clarity in the public sphere, either. Typically, political disputes involve a disagreement over whom we should empathize with....