On a purely universal ethical level, it seems to me that empathy is to “double empathy” as respect for others is to mutual recognition. This is a lesson for all humans. Life is a two-way street.
“Mind reading” — the attribution of mental states to people — is not particularly empathetic or respectful. When I empathize with you, I don’t claim to read your mind. I pay attention to you in your particularity, without imposing my view of you on you.
Kantian respect for others is better served by not imputing mental states to people. The imputation of mental states tends to be presumptuous, and that can make it invasive.
What really matters for ethics are our commitments as evinced by words and deeds, not our supposed mental states. Our deeper intentionalities and spirit are embodied in the nuances and context of our “outer” words and deeds. What are often taken as clues to supposed mental states, such as facial expressions and vocal intonations, are superficial, ephemeral, and unreliable in comparison with these.
Explicit words should be questioned mainly when they seem to be out of sync with our deeds. Things like the spontaneous facial expressions and vocal intonations of others affect us psychologically, but that is as much a matter of our psychology as of the other person. The bottom line is that by themselves, these are not decisive evidence of what anyone’s attitudes truly are. Evidence of a person’s commitments and character comes from looking at the bigger picture of everything they say and do.
We all have the experience of fleeting feelings that we do not act on, but that momentarily affect us. Our spontaneous physical mannerisms may reflect these. Insofar as it is practically necessary to make judgments about people, we should judge them based not on superficial and ambiguous signs of the fleeting impulses they experience, but rather on the nuances and context of what they deliberately do.
For example, I work very hard not to show impatience with exasperating but ultimately harmless little behaviors of people I care about, but a flicker of impatience may nonetheless show on my face. In this kind of circumstance, I think someone deserves to be given credit for the deliberate choice not to make an impatient remark, rather than to be judged for a facial expression that was not a deliberate act.
The bigger picture is far more important than what is immediate. And we should not assume that other people’s subjective experience (or its relation to physical expression in the moment) is analogous to our own.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 