Frans de Waal on Chimpanzee—and Human—Politics
The Good Fight
The Existence of Empathy in Primates
Empathy is a very important feature. And without empathy, you cannot be a moral being because empathy is what draws you into others. David Hume assumed that the moral emotions are this, but he calls them moral sentiments at the basis of human morality. And it is built on a primate morality and a primate empathy, primate psychology basically. When humans are nice to each other, they're actually nicer and more altruistic than any primate I know. So we have these extremes in our psychology. You cannot say that humans are by definition nice or Humans are by definition nasty,. We are both and we alternate between the two."
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