This is how the magic works, how empathy can do good. But what are its actual effects in the real world? One way to try to answer this is to look at the relationship between how empathic and how moral a person is. Are empathic people morally better, on average, than less empathic people? As you might imagine, there has been a lot of work on this question. But before getting to the findings, it’s worth noting that this is difficult research to do well. It’s hard to measure the good that people do, how moral they are. And it’s hard to measure how empathic people are.
