"Are all actions in life based on interest only"?

[emjay]

I don’t think empathy is about abstractly reducing the negative. It is fundamentally about establishing or sustaining a norm of behavior that would increase the chance that others would help reduce the negative when the negative happens to oneself.

I was not meaning it in an abstract sense, but just generalising by using the word negative. Nor was I thinking about the global/social meaning of empathy but just the fact that for an individual, empathy allows you to understand or envisage another's suffering, and the mere thought of that is often unpleasant enough to drive action to reduce or prevent the imagined thing continuing/occurring.