The Existence of Empathy in Primates

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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."

Frans de Waal is a Dutch-American primatologist and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University. He is the author of, among other books, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes and Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Frans de Waal discuss how primate empathy forms the basis for human morality; the precedent for diversity in human gender and gender roles that exists in non-human primates; and why, despite attempts to separate human behavior from human biology, you can’t have one without the other.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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