ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on elucidating the Empathic Motivation Hypothesis (EMH) and setting out some of the conceptual and empirical challenges it faces. Some use "empathy" more broadly, to include exercises in cognitive mindreading or perspective-taking. The chapter deals with preliminaries, distinguishing empathic concern from other dimensions of empathy, namely resonance, attunement, distress, and non-empathic concern. It presents the skeptical case against the synchronic version of EMH. The chapter examines the merits of EMH as a developmental, diachronic claim, focusing in particular on the evidence from psychopathologies and attachment theory. The thought that empathy plays an important role in moral motivation is almost a platitude of contemporary folk psychology. Parallel themes were mooted in German moral philosophy and aesthetics in the 1700s, and versions of the empathy construct remained prominent in continental accounts of moral motivation through the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries.
