Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.
Interpretation
Empathy is essential for understanding and practicing morality.
This quote emphasizes that empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, is a fundamental component of human morality. Without empathy, our moral judgments and actions lack depth and consideration for the experiences and emotions of others, making moral principles difficult to uphold and practice effectively.
In practice
During a community discussion on ethics, this quote could highlight the importance of empathy in moral decisions.
As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.
Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'
Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.
Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than _x000D_ bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.
If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation.
I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.
Common sense means living in the world as it is today; but creative people are people who don't want the world as it is today but want to make another world.
Even if it’s a dumb story, telling it changes people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinetisimal change ripples outward —ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter —maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.
Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.
Boundaries don't protect rivers, people do.
I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person.
Death is not a foe, but an inevitable adventure.
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