 So far, this entry has discussed mainly research exploring the relation between empathy and prosocial/moral behavior or motivation. Other important areas for considering empathy’s role in moral matters have to do with addressing the questions of how and whether empathy contributes to our ability to distinguish between moral and conventional norms, to the making of moral judgments, and how empathy can be appealed to in explicating the normative authority of such judgments. In considering the first question, psychologists and philosophers have generally followed Turiel in understanding moral norms as expressing concerns for “rights, justice, and the welfare of other people” (Turiel 1983, 3) and as having a very specific “signature response patterns” (Kelly et. al. 2007) associated with it. Moral norms are generally regarded to be more important than conventional norms in that their normative validity is conceived as being independent of social authority or specific social practices and agreements. Their scope is also judged to be much broader—they are thought of to be valid in other countries, for example—, and violation of moral norms is generally understood to be a more serious offense than the violation of other norms. Notice however that in distinguishing between moral and conventional norms subjects do not necessarily associate a strict universality in the Kantian sense with moral norms and view them as applicable to all rational beings. Indeed there is some evidence that 6–9 year old children, for example, view the moral/conventional distinction as being fully applicable only to behavior of individuals in the in-group and view prescription against harming members of the out-group to be more like conventional norms (Rhodes and Chalik 2013). Accordingly, the fact that empathy shows considerable in-group bias, as discussed above, does not automatically count as evidence against it playing a role in allowing humans to distinguish between moral and conventional norms within a social context.