My talk honors the contribution of Ithiel de Sola Pool to empiricalpolitical theory, a field pioneered by Pool, David Easton, andGabriel Almond, inter alia. Pool's 1967 edited volume,Contemporary Political Science: Toward EmpiricalTheory illustrates some of the important early works inthis field, a field designed to generate political theory from thesystematic examination of empirical data. To demonstrate the kind ofwork Pool developed, I begin my talk by suggesting what studyingaltruism and genocide taught me about broader themes in political,social, and moral theory. I then suggest how I developed a newtheory of moral choice in order to explain the surprising findingthat identity trumped choice for all the participants I interviewedabout their actions during the Holocaust and World War II, fromNazis and bystanders to rescuers of Jews. This paper thus summarizesthe highlights of the 2010 Pool Lecture to provide a fewillustrations of the empirical findings that led me to develop anidentity-based theory of moral choice.