But if a system is designed with empathy/rules/etc in mind by an empathetic designer/committee then that system is already > than a heartless individual even if they are human.
You cannot 'program' emotion. You can probably get semi-close by trying it your way, in the same way that Tesla is semi-close to FSD. There's too many edge cases to make it perfectly humane.
Empathy != experiencing emotions necessarily, just being aware of it.
We wouldn't want to program emotion into a killing machine anyway. Emotions are messy, meatbag programs that make us do suboptimal things driven by our own cultural, societal and personal biases.
Trolley problem where one side is one person who is dear to you, other side is two people you don't know. The majority of people would save the person they know well even if two innocent but unknown people die.
Also we probably can't specifically program emotion until we understand it better, but I reckon we'll see emotions/similar concepts arise as we build more intelligent machines. Humans are not special, we're just meat computers.