Feelings
Feelings are most generally information that biological beings are capable of sensing in the situations they are in, exposed to or depending on. For example fear is information that there is risk, threat or direct danger to the own being or related concerns. Empathy is information about another's feelings.
This information is not necessarily resulting in the same reaction among receivers, see emotions, but varies depending on competence to handle the situation, depending on how it relates to past experiences and other factors.
Harvard professor Abraham Maslow pointed out that we humans are all born with an innate sense of positive and negative being-values. We are attracted to positive being values such as justice, honesty, truth, beauty, humour, liveliness, power (but not abusive power), order (but not nit-picking), intelligence (but not snobbery). Likewise we are repulsed by injustice, deadness, ugliness, weakness, falseness, deceit, chaos etc. Maslow also asserts that positive being values are only definable in terms of all other positive being values - in other words we cannot maximize any virtue and let it contain some negative being values without repulsion.
For example beauty that is associated with deceit becomes repulsive. Justice associated with cruelty is repulsive. These innate capabilities to feel attraction or repulsion is the foundation for morality - in other words, feelings well understood form the inner capability we are born with to arrive at what is good/bad and right/wrong.
This view contrasts sharply to extreme religious and extreme political teachings that always want to lay claim to what is moral - that humans are born in a moral vacuum and that it is only authority that can tell human beings what is right and wrong. Extremist exploitation of feeling increases in the measure that feelings are not merely distinguished but even separated from critical thought.