Science & Society
The complex relation between morality and empathy

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Morality and empathy are fundamental components of human nature across cultures. However, the wealth of empirical findings from developmental, behavioral, and social neuroscience demonstrates a complex relation between morality and empathy. At times, empathy guides moral judgment, yet other times empathy can interfere with it. To better understand such relations, we propose abandoning the catchall term of empathy in favor of more precise concepts, such as emotional sharing, empathic concern, and affective perspective-taking.

Introduction

The concept of empathy has received an enormous amount of attention over the past decade. It has appeared increasingly often in the popular press, political campaigns, and in a range of fields, including business, medical practice, ethics, justice, and the law. A simple search on PubMed reveals a 300% growth in the number of scientific publications using the term ‘empathy’ during the past 10 years.

There is broad consensus that empathy is a fundamental component of our social and emotional lives. Indeed, empathy has a vital role in social interaction, from bonding between mother and child, to understanding others’ feelings and subjective psychological states. Empathy-related processes are thought to motivate prosocial behavior (e.g., sharing, comforting, and helping) and caring for others, to inhibit aggression, and to provide the foundation for care-based morality.

However, empathy is not always a direct avenue to moral behavior, and this may come as a surprise to the reader. Indeed, at times, empathy can interfere with morality by introducing partiality, for instance by favoring in-group members. Empathy does provide the emotional fire and a push toward seeing a victim's suffering end, irrespective of its group membership and culturally determined dominance hierarchies. To better understand the relation between empathy and morality, we first briefly describe what each of the concepts encompasses.

Section snippets

Morality and empathy

Morality includes concepts such as justice, fairness, and rights, and comprises norms regarding how humans should treat one another. It is an evolved aspect of human nature because it contributes to fitness in shaping decisions and actions when living in complex social groups. Reinforcement of moral rules minimizes criminal behavior and social conflict, and moral norms provide safeguards against possible well-being or health infringements. Developmental studies provide empirical support for

Empathy is a limited resource

Given that empathy has evolved in the context of parental care and group living, it has some unfortunate features that can be seen very early during development. Children do not display empathic concern toward all people equally. Instead, they show bias toward individuals and members of groups with which they identify. For instance, young children of 2 years of age display more concern-related behaviors toward their mother than toward unfamiliar people [4]. Moreover, children (aged 3–9 years)

Affective perspective-taking and morality

Humans are arguably unique, not in their empathic concern and emotional sharing, but in that they can adopt the perspective of another, which can lead to expanding the circle of care from the tribe to all humanity. A substantial body of behavioral studies has documented that affective perspective-taking is a powerful way to elicit empathic concern for others, and reduce partiality toward one's social group. This perspective-taking can be elicited explicitly or implicitly. For instance,

Concluding remarks

There is no reason to see empathy and morality as either systematically opposed to one another, or inevitably complementary. It has been argued that moral progress involves expanding our concern from the family to humanity as a whole. Yet, it is difficult to feel the same concern toward someone who one has never met as one feels for one's own child or a lover. Nonetheless, over the course of history, humans have created social structures for upholding moral principles to all humanity, such as

Acknowledgments

The writing of this article was supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation (The Science of Philanthropy and Wisdom Research) to Dr. Jean Decety.

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