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I don't like when people treat empathy as an all-or-nothing, or when they say that not having empathy makes you a bad person. I am capable of empathizing with people, but only when they think the same way I do, which means I hardly have empathy at all. For example, if something makes someone upset, I can understand their thoughts/feelings if the same thing would make me upset. Otherwise, it's like I'm looking at an alien creature. It's why I've never understood why people get offended at jokes when they know that they're jokes, or why people don't find communism as upsetting as racism, and so on. And on the rare occasion I do think I've modeled someone mentally, I usually end up being wrong.
What would you call this phenomenon? Limited empathy?
You're making the all too common mistake of conflating empathy with sympathy. Empathy means the ability to understand where someone is coming from, their persective. Understand what it's like to be in their shoes. It does not mean you have to like or agree with their perspective. That is what sympathy is for, feelings of compassion and pity with someone's position or perspective, implicited agreeing with their plight.
The ability to empathise is always a good thing, at the very least for strictly utilitarian or pragmatic reasons. By understanding someone's perspective and motivations, you can predict how they will act in certain situations. You can better manipulate people. Hostage negotiators do this all the time - they negociate with criminals, empathise with them, understand them and use that information against them. The hostage negotiators don't like the hostage takers or agree with their goals.
It certainly makes you a less effective person. If we think empathy is a necessary precursor to sympathy (while being distinct phenomena), then that lack of sympathy caused by lack of empathy certainly could be one definition of 'bad'. Being able to forgive people you like is easy. It's being able to forgive people you don't like where true virtue is found.
I do understand the difference, and I do believe I'm capable of sympathy, but not empathy.
Also, on this topic, is there a meaningful difference between empathy and theory of mind? To me, they seem like the same concept and both are things that I lack, but "empathy" is the word people usually use when shaming.
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