One the general learning objectives in school education is often development of students’ abilities of empathy, as part of their ability to deal with moral questions in ethically commendable ways. In history teaching one of the main learning objectives is development ofstudents’ historical empathy, i.e. their ability of social perspective taking that involves putting oneself in the position of historical actors and understanding the cultural, social and psychological factors that probably were present in the historical situation. Our paper discusses the relation between development of historical empathy and development of moral sensitivity as learning objectives, and it presents the matrix that we have used in the preliminary analysis of the complexity of students’ responses in a questionnaire which involved historical dilemmas. The question discussed in the paper is part of a wider research project on intersections of historical and moral consciousness.

The empirical material discussed in the paper derives from a questionnaire study of c. 200 Swedish and Finnish lower secondary school students (9th grade). Students were asked to put themselves in the situation of particular historical actors and to answer questions that involved dealing with moral dilemmas. The students were asked to read an excerpt from Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (orig. 1992) that describes the actions of men in the Police Battalion in the Holocaust during World War II. After reading the text the students were asked to answer open questions relating to the events in the excerpt. The material was analysed using a theory-driven qualitative analysis and the students’ answers were interpreted as expressions of their ability of social perspective taking and moral sensitivity. The analytic frame was built on theories of levels of historical empathy (Lee & Ashby 2001), social perspective taking (Hartmann & Hasselhorn 2008), and moral sensitivity (Rest 1986). The paper analyses the patterns that are visible in the students’ responses, the focus being on potential connections between levels of