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Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice, by Martin IL Hoffman. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 331 pp. $39.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-521-58034-X.
Can we hope for a general theory of prosocial moral development? With the publication of this book, Martin Hoffman has made a major contribution to this field. He presents his original theory of the development of empathy and moral internalization, and updates and extends it into a comprehensive theory of prosocial moral development that links its emotional/motivational, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions. The material is thoughtfully organized and clearly written. The result is a highly informative book that confronts a wide range of theoretical and empirical issues and provides a well-conceptualized and clearly structured agenda for future research.
The chapters examine five prototypic moral encounters that may give rise to empathic distress and its derivatives. They range from simple situations where one is an innocent bystander, one is a transgressor, real or virtual-to more complex situations that involve multiple claimants where the individual is forced to choose which victim to help and which to ignore, and caring versus justice dilemmas where one must choose between helping an individual or following a moral principle. The book...