Tag Archives: primates

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 … Continue reading →