There are two types of emotion, cognitive and affective. Sociopaths maintain cognitive empathy but have severely diminished or nonexistent affective empathy. An understanding of someones situation is cognitive empathy, the emotional response that this elicits in neurotypical humans is affective empathy. Autistic people would be more likely to have the inverse of what you do, in that they would have emotional response but an inability to correctly identify somebodies situation, thus leading to an incorrect emotional response. I actually feel as if I have 'better' cognitive empathy than affective empathy though. This shows that your perspective of empathy is entirely from a cognitive point of view. You don't see the point of trying to understand another persons situation unless you can use that knowledge to your advantage. The thing is that in addition to neurotypical people having a desire to understand the situations of others, the understanding they come to causes an automatic emotional response in them. IMO you cannot even really use that emotional response for anything, it is not an intellectual tool but rather a social tool. If you feel sad when someone else does, you will be more likely to support them in some way to make them not feel sad, and then your own empathy induced feeling of sadness will go away by comforting them, thus you have a motivation to comfort others, and it is good for society when everybody has a collective desire to comfort each other even if they don't directly gain anything from it. I certainly think that to an extent it is good to have some affective empathy, but I think that it is counterproductive to logical thinking as well. Somebody who passes a law out of empathy for others may get some emotional reward in doing so even if the law they pass is counterproductive to what they intended, but they will have trouble to see this if it requires logical analysis of information, because the emotional response they get from their action is immediate and gratifying. People with strong affective emotional characteristics are also easily manipulated people, and people with the theoretic/cognitive understanding of empathy can and do use this as a weakness to manipulate them. A lot of the problems in our world are made worse by the fact that strongly emotional non-analytical people are manipulated by non emotional strongly analytical people.