ABSTRACT
This chapter argues as follows that empathy may play a significant role in a comprehensive moral theory. (1) When witnessing someone in distress, one typically responds empathically, that is, with affect more appropriate to someone else’s situation than to one’s own. 1 Depending on one’s attributions about the cause of the other person’s distress, one may feel sympathetic distress, guilt, or empathic anger. (2) This bystander model, including the affects it generates, does not require a victim to be physically present, because of the human capacity to represent events and the power of represented events to evoke empathic as well as direct affect. Consequently, moral encounters involving harm or potential harm to others in the past or future, as well as in the present can ordinarily be counted upon to evoke empathic affect. (3) Empathic affects are congruent with two of Western Society’s major moral principles—caring and justice—both of which pertain to victims and beneficiaries of human actions. Empathic affects may therefore provide motivation for the operation of these principles in moral judgment, decision-making, and behavior. The integration of empathy and moral principles may thus provide the heart of a comprehensive moral theory. (4) Empathy-based morality has certain inherent biases (as do other types of morality), which may be reduced to a tolerable level by socialization.
