It follows from my argument in chapter 12 that empathy, despite its faults, is a good bet for a universal prosocial morality. An important part of empathic morality is that cognitive development (selfother differentiation, language mediation, role-taking, causal attribution) enables simple empathic distress to be transformed into increasingly sophisticated motives to consider the welfare of others, taking their life condition as well as their immediate feelings into account (chapter 3). These cognitive contributions to empathy are brain-related and therefore available to people in all cultures, though not all cultures utilize them fully or in the same way. Empathy's amenity to cognitive influence is also important for another reason: It gives a potentially significant role to socialization and moral education, which may counteract empathic morality's limitations and magnify its capabilities.

Socialization of Empathic Morality

I described in chapter 6 how empathic distress and empathy-based guilt can, through inductions by parents, create emotionally charged scripts linking a child's harmful actions to empathic distress and empathy-based guilt and how these scripts become functionally autonomous and independent of the inductions that spawned them. Induction appears to be the discipline of choice for many educated middle-class Americans, although in a 1995 Harris poll, 80% of the 1,250 adults surveyed said they had spanked their children (see chapter 6, footnote 1). The poll unfortunately did not ask parents how frequently they spanked, define spanking, or give social class data, but it should put to rest the idea that American parents know that spanking is bad and no longer need advice about discipline.