Empathy in Ethics: A Study of the Impact of Empathy on Moral Judgment

Empathy is a human capacity by which they show emotional altruistic responses. By means of this characteristic, one can see the world from another person’s perspective and understand their feeling. Accordingly, people can understand the sufferings and pleasures of others by imagining their circumstances. Empathy plays a crucial role in morality, and in particular, it affects moral judgments. Some critics deny the usefulness of empathy for moral judgments. The critique is articulated in two different ways: there are arguments against the necessity of empathy for moral judgment, and there are arguments for the negative impact of empathy on moral judgment. In the present article, which draws on the descriptive-analytic method, we first study the arguments offered by critics, and then analyze three kinds of relations: causal, constitutive, and explanatory, to reconsider the negative impacts of empathy on moral judgment. We finally conclude that, first, empathy is justified as a constitutive element in explaining moral judgment, and second, while all types of empathy (cognitive and emotional) cannot be deemed necessary for moral judgment and its impacts cannot be seen as fully positive, we can at least show that cognitive empathy is a positive element of moral judgment.