For the record, that word has never been used to describe Rust's goals by those who work on it. The slogan of the language is "empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software."
And for what it's worth, I think the people working on Rust are empathetic and it shows in their work. For example, he error messages given by the compiler try to hand hold you gently when you're learning the language.
What's the issue with Java? It empowers teams consisting of many heterogeneous people to get work done easier and limits the scope to logical errors only.
From my experience, empathy works better as a design strategy.