Empathy, Emotion Regulation, and Moral Judgment

Empathy’s role in moral judgment has not received as much attention as its role in moral motivation. Yet given that emotions have at least a causal influence on moral belief, it is plausible that empathy makes an important difference. However, critics like Jesse Prinz point to empathy’s inherent partiality and limitations as reasons to think that it has only a limited explanatory role and that it is normatively problematic. Drawing on the classical sentimentalist tradition in philosophy and recent psychological literature, I defend the view that when empathic reactions are subjected to emotion regulation by reference to an ideal perspective, they are after all fit to play a fundamental role in explaining why we make nonself-interested, interpersonally acceptable moral judgments. Getting along with others puts pressure on us to down-regulate empathy with the near and dear and up-regulate empathy with the distant and different. When we successfully do so, there’s good reason to think that the resulting judgments are vindicated rather than undermined. In recent years, some striking claims have been made about the importance of empathy – roughly, the capacity to share the feelings of others – to morality and prosocial action. Perhaps most notably, Michael Slote (2007, 2010) maintains that empathy is the “cement of the moral universe” that “arguably constitutes the basis of both metaethics and normative ethics” (2010, 4). As inevitably happens with philosophical enthusiasms, there has also been a backlash, even among those who believe emotions are central to moral thought. Within the sentimentalist camp, Jesse Prinz (2011a, b) makes a thorough case against empathy, arguing it’s neither constitutively, causally, developmentally, epistemically, nor motivationally necessary for moralizing. Indeed, Prinz argues that empathy is likely to lead us astray in moral thought, however important it is for personal relationships. Shaun Nichols (2004) and