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other’s perspective. Thus, I believe we can at least tentatively conclude that people who are predisposed
to empathy will make more consistent attributional judgments than those who are not so predisposed.
Davis’s multidimensional model helps clarify the concept of empathy, focusing us on the
empathic dispositions of perspective taking and empathic concern as candidates for inclusion in a system
of democratic education. It also highlights the important empirical findings that people with these
dispositions are likely to exhibit greater sympathetic concern for others in need, more tolerance towards
those with which they disagree, and attributional judgments of others’ behavior more similar to the
judgments they make of their own behavior. I can now demonstrate that, under a variety of theories, we
should want to educate democratic citizens to be disposed to be empathic.
II. Empathy, Democracy and Education
A. Deliberative Democracy
Deliberative democracy probably provides the theory of democracy in which the link between
empathy and democracy is the clearest. Though it would be impossible to examine every variant of
deliberative democratic theory, I will use the writings of Jürgen Habermas on discourse ethics and
deliberative democracy and Amy Gutmann’s exposition on democratic education to illustrate the links
among empathy, deliberative democracy and education.
In examining Habermas’s work on deliberative democracy, empathy does not seem to be present
at all, though affect is discussed on a few rare occasions. There is a relationship, though, between legal
norms—the focus of deliberative democracy—and moral norms. “Their limited sphere of validity
notwithstanding, legal norms, too, claim to be in accord with moral norms, that is, not to violate them”
(Habermas 1996, 155). In deliberative democracy we are concerned with a wider range of questions
(pragmatic, ethical-political and moral) than occur in deliberations concerning only moral norms, but
these broader norms must still accord with moral norms. The approach to moral norm validation
Habermas proposes is his theory of discourse ethics.
Habermas’s discourse ethics aims at describing a system that allows members of posttraditional
society, a society in which members can no longer appeal to religious or traditional sources of moral
Convention