No, players will always do cruel and sadistic things for amusement. Gamers may have 167 emotions, but empathy aint one.
It depends on the situation, it's hard to feel any kind of empathy for those thousands of npc and their "it was inevitable" in front of absolutely anything and how they do not even care about anything happening in their sight, those npc are so empty and fake that even when you try to roleplay a character they do not even make illusion, so it's basically the same as you trying to care for a single common stone in the middle of a quarry.
But there's potential , because along all those emotion/reaction nothingness, you have that "my daughter/son was abducted" tale from a father/mother you encountered, and you decide to get in the goblin site the child is emprisonned into (now assuming it's not unplayable like goblin sites are unfortunately most of the time).
And you actually manage to free the child from those monsters and bring him/her back to mother/father, there you'll have the npc being thankful to you, they're happy and you can "feel" it in the dialogues, reactions from the npc that makes sense in the situation and that you can empathize with, this is what makes those npc existing, those aren't common rock in a quarry.
But sadly, those situations are extremely rare in the game, there's nearly nothing that play with emotions (positive or negative) because the immense majority is all is about "it was inevitable" , ruining the mood and attempts at roleplaying by making those npc so devoid of everything that in the end you feel that nothing really matters, and then you give up trying to empathize and you go in random rampage because it's all that make something actually happen.
Now that's exactly why i hope for the best with the new emotions, because Toady said that a lot of them are more than only text flavor and will impact the npc, and if it really works as he hinted and is not yet leading into another buggy mess (though it could be fun) , it would make those npc less empty and so more mattering, making then the adventure mode much more interesting to play in term of character interactions and roleplay.
Maybe i'm reading too much into the potential of those 119 emotions stuff and in the end we'll still have "it was inevitable" empty npc, but i really hope the best will happens.