Primates demonstrate empathy similar to that of humans.
David Hume said humans, in observing pain, experience that pain, too. Therefore, we want to alleviate the pain of other people, to ameliorate the suffering it causes within us. This empathy for our fellow humans constitutes the basis for treating them decently.
Hume’s best friend Adam Smith, in his 1759 work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, agreed that instinctual empathy helped birth human morality. He wrote:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner.
Observations of modern primates, which are likely quite similar to the ancestors of human beings, lend credence to the moral notions of Hume and Smith. As The New York Times reports in “Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior” (courtesy of Bondo on his blog):
Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.
Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are. [The reporter is likely oversimplifying here, as journalists tend to do...]
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Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.
Research on the brains of humans and primates further supports the idea of innate empathy. In his most recent book, The Mind of the Market, Michael Shermer describes the latest scientific endeavors in this area.
According to findings Shermer cites, motor neurons known as “mirror neurons” comprise the foundation of human empathy. Giacomo Rizolatti discovered mirror neurons while experimenting with monkeys in the late 1980’s. Since then, scientists have found mirror neurons in humans as well.
Brain regions with mirror neurons light up when undertaking or experiencing an action but also while observing the action. And different neurons fire depending on the intent of the action, e.g., seeing one bring an apple to a cup or his mouth. If an intention is not evident—if an action has no context—then the mirror neuron network doesn’t fire as intensely. (Autistic children possess a malfunctioning mirror neuron network, which prevents them from assigning meaning to the actions of others, which then hampers their own behavioral responses.)
Furthermore, Christian Keysers and Bruno Wicker scanned the brains of test subjects as they experienced a disgusting odor and a video of someone making a face of disgust. These two scenarios—feeling disgust and watching disgust—both inspired the same brain activity. Also, these scientists found being touched in the leg and watching someone being touched in the same spot triggered congruent brain action.
Additionally, Jorge Moll discovered that charitable acts trigger the “reward” area of the brain that getting paid does. Essentially, charity gives people the same kind of emotional satisfaction as payment.
Of course, whatever natural impulses humans might have to do good, they still kill and hurt each other on occasion. But, considering the billions of humans on this planet, such antisocial behavior actually is rare. For every bad act we see on the news, millions of good acts have transpired that the media doesn’t deign to cover. (And why would it do so? “News” encompasses the unusual! The media has no reason to highlight what most people experience every day.)
As James Madison, a contemporary of Hume and Smith, suggested, men aren’t angels. But we aren’t devils, either.
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