Maybe we can strip away the jargon for a second and get to the core of things.
Remember a time you felt pain. There is something visceral in the feeling of pain. The thought that pain is bad seems so entirely natural to it; the idea flows right out of the nature of pain. To grasp the badness of pain is in some sense to grasp entirely what it is. When we suffer humiliation we just as readily think what is happening to us is a kind of badness. But there's something more substantive behind this: it is not as though we think the humiliation is bad entirely because it feels so wretched. Instead we regard it as fitting that we're treated a certain kind of way.
Of course we do not feel it when other people feel pain. Some of us are better at empathizing than others, but I don't think the kind of empathy where we're just immediately spurred to feel what the people around us feel is necessary. But someone who callously inflicts pain upon others because they—the person doing all the pushing and shoving for a laugh—don't feel that pain has something wrong with them. It is not that they have moral obligations in light of their conscience or fellow-feeling. They have no conscience, no fellow-feeling. What seems more plausible is they're failing to recognize their duties and obligations and so on. In some sense they are failing to treat something real—pain in others—as real. And if they do in some vague sense understand this, then it's in a rather abstract way. It's not a complete grasp of what pain is like in the distinctive experience of having it yourself. They are failing to understand something about what they're doing.
There are all sorts of ways we need to temper this. But people sometimes feel very impressed with themselves for looking out at all of the different codes of morality and conduct and thinking there's really nothing to it. There's nothing really deeper, one might say, than the fact that I feel empathy for these things and not these others things. On the other hand, it's not that we don't want to be changed so that our complex representations of other people's suffering become more narrow. It's that we think we shouldn't. Think about the bully above. Someone like that just isn't calibrated the right way. There is something we think quite worthy of blame in being so completely unable to get the world right. We regard callousness and wrathfulness as vices that we have to guard against, so that our circle of concern doesn't winnow too much.
There is something it's like to spend your life in a cramped, crowded box. There is something it's like to feel the constant drone of stress of a lack of privacy or space to roam. There is something it's like to have the constant smell of shit drowning your nostrils. There is something it's like to have no meaningful stimulation for your brain even if it's not a very sophisticated organ. Maybe these things just give away badness in the same way personal pain does. There's no arguing with it any more than there's arguing with pain. Maybe it's just in virtue of something more basic—pain itself, boredom, something else. But grasping what it's like seems to just be grasping that it is bad.
And we subject animals to this kind of treatment all the time. It seems difficult to see why this suffering would be any less real. We can say "Oh I don't care, morality isn't real" or "It's fine because I don't actually feel empathy for them." But you seem to really be failing to get something about the world. At very least the idea that empathy is somehow really fundamentally about you and how you feel seems like a deep misapprehension. Like there's something just deeply unimpressive about these statements. And sometimes I can't tell if people are joking when they say them. It really just seems like a bunch of bullshit people say when the going gets tough.
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