From a Buddhist perspective, any human being can have complete empathy and compassion for any other human being, no matter how different any two humans might be. To experience empathy and compassion, we need not have any circumstantial similarity to the other person. On the suicide prevention line, I've had as much connection to a 40 year-old African American heroin addict welfare mother living in the ghetto as to upper middle class young white male college graduate. All empathy takes is a willingness to recognize one's own capacity for the full range of human emotions and to allow oneself to put oneself into another's shoes. Moreover, one can let go of moralization and anger by recognizing that no one really, deep down, wants to cause death, destruction, pain, or suffering. Everyone, at root, wants to be happy and to support life. Some of us simply don't have the knowledge or the psychological resources to do so. Branden writes about this in the section on moralism in "The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand." He writes:

We are all of us organisms trying to survive. We are all of us organisms trying in our own way to use our abilities and capacities to satisfy our needs. Sometimes the paths we choose are pretty terrible, and sometimes the consequences are pretty awful for ourselves and others. Until and unless we are willing to try to understand where people are coming from, what they are trying to accomplish, and what model of reality they're operating from-such that they don't see themselves as having better alternatives, we cannot assist anyone to reach the moral vision that objectivism holds as a possibility for human beings.

The following story illustrates how someone who might look like he belongs on the lowest rung of hell, at first glance, really deserves our compassion and empathy (and for this story I have my mentor, Tal Ben-Shahar, to thank, who got it in turn from his mentor, Ohad Kamin). Anyway, here's the story:

A few years ago, somewhere in Siberia, the behavior of a certain wolf baffled farmers. The wolf raided and killed numerous cattle. While wolf raids are not uncommon in that part of Russia, these attacks were different. The wolf did not eat its prey, but simply killed it, then moved on to the next victim, killed it, and so on. It seemed that this wolf had no reason to kill. It was killing for killing's sake. The wolf's behavior seemed like the embodiment of evil. After months of ravaging numerous cattle, the wolf was finally shot and killed. The farmers took it in to a veterinary surgeon for examination hoping to better understand the "nature of the beast." Upon examination, the surgeon understood the reason for the wolf's strange behavior. The wolf had a broken tooth. Siberia is extremely cold and, exposed to the low temperature, a broken tooth causes acute pain. In order to alleviate the pain, the wolf had to find something warm in which to stick its broken tooth. Flesh was an ideal solution. Therefore, the wolf would stick its teeth into the flesh of cattle and when the flesh cooled, it moved to its next victim. Wolves do not kill for the sake of killing. It was only because the wolf was hurt that it behaved [in this way]. The implications of this story are of extreme importance in understanding the nature of evil, in human beings. People are by [default] good. It is only when they are hurt, when they are injured, that they revert to immoral or evil behavior.

This story, as Tal points out, sheds light on the nature of evil. People are not evil for the sake of being evil. People destroy themselves and others when they are, at some level, hurt. It is only when we recognize this capacity in ourselves that we can empathize with this capacity in others, that we can respond to evil with compassion and acceptance rather than moralization and outrage.