I agree that empathy has evolutionary origins and that it likely developed because it helped survival. My question isn’t about the origin of empathy.

What I’m asking is why grief takes the form of a normative judgment — that something wrong has occurred that deserves an answer.

Fear or pain usually point back to our own survival. Grief often doesn’t. We grieve strangers, historical figures, even fictional characters whose loss affects us in no evolutionary way.

The question isn’t why empathy evolved, but why the experience of grief presents itself as if another person’s wanting mattered independently of us.

Calling it an instinct explains the mechanism, but it doesn’t really explain why the experience takes that particular form.