 Significantly, Hoffman combines his developmental explication of empathy with a sophisticated analysis of its importance for moral agency. He is thereby acutely aware of the limitations in our natural capacity to empathize or sympathize with others, particularly what he refers to as “here and now” biases, that is, the fact that we tend to empathize more with persons that are in some sense perceived to be closer to us. (For a neuro-scientific investigation of how racial bias modulates empathic responses see Xuo, Zuo, Wang and Han 2009). Like Batson, Hoffman does not regard the moral realm as being exclusively circumscribed by our ability to empathize with other people. Besides empathic abilities, moral agency requires also knowledge of abstract moral principles, such as the principles of caring and justice. Hoffman seems to conceive of those principles as being derived from cognitive sources that are independent from our empathic abilities. Yet Hoffmann is rather optimistic about the natural compatibility of empathic motivation and our commitment to moral principles. He regards stable and effective moral agency as requiring empathy so that moral principles can have a motivational basis in an agent’s psychology. Within this context, he has lately emphasized a final stage of empathy development or what he calls “witnessing”, an empathic response to the suffering of others that is so intense that we “become fully committed to help”(Hoffman 2014, 82). As he explains—in light of examples from the history of abolitionism, the civil rights movement, serfdom reform in Russia, and various cases before the Supreme Court— it is particularly such witnessing that has contributed towards bending the arc of the moral universe towards justice. Accordingly, and despite our natural limitations in empathizing with others, Hoffman still regards empathy as the “bedrock of morality” and “the glue of society”(Hoffman 2014, 96. Besides Hoffman 2011 and 2014, see also Deigh 2011 for a measured evaluation of empathy in the legal context ). 