Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice

342 Pages·2000·15.64 MB·English

by  Martin L. Hoffman

Empathy and Moral Development
Implications for Caring and Justice
Contemporary theories have generally focused on the behavioral,
cognitive, or emotional dimensions of prosocial moral development.
In this volume, Martin L. Hoffman brings these three dimensions to-
gether while providing the first comprehensive account of prosocial
moral development in children. The main concept is empathy - one
feels what is appropriate for another person's situation, not one's own.
Hoffman discusses empathy's role in five moral situations: one harms
someone, one is an innocent bystander, one blames oneself though
innocent, one must choose which among several victims to help, or
one is torn between contradictory caring and justice concerns. The
book's focus is empathy's contribution to altruism and compassion for
others in physical, psychological, or economic distress; to feelings of
guilt over harming someone; to feelings of anger at others who do
harm; and to feelings of injustice when others do not receive their
due. Also highlighted are the psychological processes involved in em-
pathy's interaction with certain parental behaviors that foster moral
internalization in children and the psychological processes involved
in empathy's relation to abstract moral principles such as caring and
distributive justice. This important book is the culmination of three
decades of study and research by a leading figure in the area of child
and developmental psychology.
Martin L. Hoffman is Professor of Psychology at New York Univer-
sity. He is series editor for Cambridge Studies in Social and Emotional
Development.

Empathy and Moral
Development
IMPLICATIONS FOR CARING
AND JUSTICE
Martin L. Hoffman
New York University
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,
Sao Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA
www. Cambridge. org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521012973
© Cambridge University Press 2000
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2000
First paperback edition 2001
Reprinted 2003, 2007 (twice)
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-521-58034-2 Hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-01297-3 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel
timetables, and other factual information given in this work are correct at
the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee
the accuracy of such information thereafter.
This book is dedicated with love to
my wife, Ann,
my children, Amy and Jill,
and my grandchildren, Alison, Nicole, and
Sarah

Contents
Acknowledgments page ix
1 Introduction and Overview 1
Part I Innocent Bystander
2 Empathy, Its Arousal, and Prosocial Functioning 29
3 Development of Empathic Distress 63
4 Empathic Anger, Sympathy, Guilt, Feeling of
Injustice 93
Part II Transgression
5 Guilt and Moral Internalization 113
6 From Discipline to Internalization 140
Part III Virtual Transgression
7 Relationship Guilt and Other Virtual Guilts 175
Part IV Is Empathy Enough?
8 Empathy's Limitations: Over-Arousal and Bias 197
Part V Empathy and Moral Principles
9 Interaction and Bonding of Empathy and Moral
Principles 221
10 Development of Empathy-Based Justice Principles 250
vii
Contents
11 Multiple-Claimant and Caring-Versus-Justice
Dilemmas 263
Part VI Culture
12 The Universality and Culture Issue 273
Part VII Intervention
13 Implications for Socialization and Moral
Education 287
References 299
Author Index 319
Subject Index 325
viii
Acknowledgments
This book owes much to many. If my discipline and internal-
ization theory works, it was Amy and Jill's challenges that taught
me, for instance, that power assertion can be necessary for the
voice of induction to be heard. I used to think it was good for
children to have developmental psychologist parents, but in fact I
learned more from them than they benefited from my "using" psy-
chology.
My graduate students were important. I remember talking to one
in Ann Arbor about how different it must be to empathize with
someone in distress before, and after, one has a sense of oneself as
distinct from others. That discussion led me eventually to hypothe-
size that self-other differentiation transforms children's global em-
pathic distress in part into sympathetic distress. In a seminar I sug-
gested that inductions contribute to internalization because they
have meaning, which makes their content more memorable than
background factors such as the source of inductions being the par-
ents. An alert student said this reminded him of the "sleeper effect"
in persuasion research when the salience of the message is greater
than that of its source; another said it fits with Tulving's semantic-
episodic memory distinction. These comments made me think, hey,
my suggestion is plausible, so I'll stay with it.
Undergraduates helped, too, especially those in my 1997 class
to whom I taught the book's first draft. Their questions revealed
gaps in my theories, their anecdotes enlivened some of my concepts
such as empathic anger and relationship guilt, and their writing-style
IX