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Understanding Our Morality
There are no uniquely human emotions. All emotions that we have, we share with other species. They may be a bit more sophisticated or elaborated in our species, but we share all of them. And I look at it a bit like the organs. You don’t find an organ in my body that you don’t find in a dog – heart, liver, lungs, brain. We basically have the same set of functional organs that we need to survive. And I think, for emotions, it’s the same thing.
The first time I saw a psychologist describe studies on empathy, she described children, and she would ask people in a family to cry and then she would look at the young children and how they would approach and how they would console this individual. And she said that those are acts of empathy. And I thought, well, if that is empathy, then I’ve seen a lot of empathy in my primates because chimps and bonobos, that’s what they do. If one of them cries, they go over and hug them and calm them down. Many people consider empathy as the core of human morality. You cannot have an interest in other people and wanting to help them if you don’t have empathy for them. And so empathy is the glue of our society, and our moral systems would be basically impossible, I think, if we had no empathy. I’m not saying that chimps and bonobos are moral beings the way we are, but they clearly have that capacity of being interested in the state of somebody else.
And reciprocity is the other one of the equation. Reciprocity has to do with me doing favors for you, you doing favors for me. And fairness is part of that equation. Do we have a fair distribution of benefits? And so empathy and reciprocity are, in my opinion, the pillars of morality. And both of them we share with other species. And chimpanzees, we did a study one time, we showed that you measure in the morning who grooms whom. Then later in the day you give them food and you see who shares with whom. And there’s a connection between the two. If I have groomed you for a long time in the morning, it’s more likely that you’re going to share food with me in the afternoon. It also works in a negative way. So you may have, for example, an individual who has been attacked by three others and has lost, and then hours later, he’s going to attack these three others, one by one, because one by one he can handle them. And so he takes revenge on them. So that’s also reciprocity. You have positive and negative reciprocity.
Human morality may be partially a human invention, because I think there are complexities to it that we don’t see in the other primates, but the basic psychology that’s behind it I think we can see in the other primates.
Respecting Our Emotions
We have a tense relationship with our body – that’s already in the Bible. You know, the flesh is weak. So we admire our mind, and we don’t admire our body. It’s better than what animals have because animals are, they don’t have a mind. They are dumb. I think it’s an attitude that has given us enormous problems. If you even look at the current problems in the world, like climate change and the Covid crisis, they are partly because we humans tend to place ourselves outside of nature, disconnected from the body like we are sort of indeed some sort of angels or gods. We think that we make the decisions in our mind, but the body makes a lot of decisions for us. Our emotions make an enormous amount of decisions for us.
And all the modern research in psychology indicates that the emotions are far more important than we used to think. Emotions affect everything we do. The most important decisions in our life are not rational decisions. So for example, the most important, one of the most important ones, is who you’re going to marry, or who you’re going to live with. That’s not a rational decision.
There are certain dynamics that people need to recognize, and so people sometimes come with intellectual explanations for things. I objected to this because I disagree with his opinion on this. And it may not be his opinion, or his competence, or his experience that you’re objecting to. It may be that you have an emotional reaction to a certain coworker because of personality and maybe status competition that’s going on. We should respect that connection that we have with our body and with our emotions, rather than sort of disparage it.