 Prima facie, the difficulty of this enterprise consists in squaring a realistic account of human psychology with the universal scope and intersubjective validity of moral judgments, since human motivation and psychological mechanisms seem to be always situational, local, and of rather limited scope. Moreover, as evolutionary psychologists tell us in–group bias seems to be a universal trait of human psychology. One of the most promising attempts to solve this problem is certainly due to the tradition of eighteenth century moral philosophy associated with the names of David Hume and Adam Smith who tried to address all of the above philosophical desiderata by pointing to the central role that our empathic and sympathetic capacities have for constituting us as social and moral agents and for providing us with the psychological capacities to make and to respond to moral judgments. While philosophers in the Kantian tradition, who favor reason over sentiments, have generally been skeptical about this proposal, more recently the claim that empathy is central for morality and a flourishing human life has again been the topic of an intense and controversial debate. On the one hand, empathy has been hailed by researchers from a wide range of disciplines and also by some public figures, President Obama most prominently among them. Slote (2010) champions empathy as the sole foundation of moral judgment, de Waal (2006) conceives of it as the unique evolutionary building block of morality, Rifkin (2009) regards it even as a force whose cultivation has unique revolutionary powers to transform a world in crisis, and Baron-Cohen (2011, 194) views it as a “universal solvent” in that “any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.” On the other hand, such empathy enthusiasm has encountered penetrating criticism by Prinz (2011 a,b) and Bloom (2016), who emphasize its dark side, that is, its tendency to fall prey to so–called “here and now” biases. The following subsections will address these issues by surveying the relevant empirical research on the question whether empathy motivates us in a self-less manner, the question of whether empathy is inherently biased and partial to the in-group, and it will discuss how we might think of the normative character of moral judgments in light of our empathic capacities.(For a survey of other relevant issues from social psychology, specifically social neuroscience, consult also Decety and Lamm 2006; Decety and Ickes 2009, and Decety 20012. For a discussion of the importance empathy for medical practice see Halpern 2001)