What then are the guidelines in the aspirational project of promoting empathic humanism? These guidelines map to the distinctions of empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness, with the qualification that humans are capable of radical evil. Radical evil is that in the face of which standard empathy is challenged to become radical empathy, that is, the challenge to sustain the commitment to empathy in the face of empathy’s breakdown into empathic distress. This dilemma of the human striving to expand the individual’s humanity is documented in fear and trembling by the classic folktale, in which empathy is radicalized in the story by its absence. To be precise, it is not so much that the human being paradoxically becomes inhuman or nonhuman (these are distinct), but that the individual’s humanity is incomplete—something essential is missing—empathy. Yet the dehumanization that occurs in the radical reduction or elimination of empathy on the part of a given person, rare though such an individual may be, increases the risk of anti-social or even monstrous behavior being perpetrated by that person. Meanwhile, not fear and trembling, but empathy and trembling, is engaged by the folk story containing a thought experiment about a simpleton—a wise fool (sophomore)—who lacks the capacity for empathy and how he recovers it. C. Daniel Batson’s “empathy altruism hypothesis” provides evidence-based social psychology as to the ethical relevance of empathic concern. The work of Heinz Kohut (and others) is cited on “fiendish” empathy. The natural empath, an emerging empathic humanist, encounters the Good Samaritan. The position of this work, aspiring to an empathic humanism, is elaborated in that empathy discloses what the Other experiences and ethics, what to do about it.