• DOI:10.1007/BF00991641
• Corpus ID: 143830768

Empathy and justice motivation

@article{Hoffman1990EmpathyAJ,
  title={Empathy and justice motivation},
  author={Martin L. Hoffman},
  journal={Motivation and Emotion},
  year={1990},
  volume={14},
  pages={151-172}
}

• M. Hoffman
• Published 1 June 1990
• Psychology
• Motivation and Emotion

Empathic distress is defined as an aversive feeling contingent on another's physical, emotional, or economic distress. The paper (1) summarizes a developmental scheme consisting of four stages of empathic distress; (2) suggests that causal attributions may partly transform empathic distress into sympathy, empathic anger, feeling of injustice, and guilt feeling; (3) notes the evidence that these empathic affects often serve to motivate moral behavior, and therefore that they qualify as moral motives; (4) points up limitations of these affects/motives and the need to embed them in justice principles; (5) discusses links between empathic affects/motives and principles of distributive justice/ (6) argues that Rawls' theory of justice, which excludes empathy, may nevertheless require it for the “difference principle” to influence behavior in real life; (7) hypothesizes a functional equivalence between empathy and the “veil of ignorance”; and (8) speculates that the conjunction of empathic affect and justice-principle thinking — in life and in abstract didactic contexts like Rawls' “original position” — may produce a principle having the motivational and stabilizing properties of a “hot cognition.”