How To Be HumanA second level of empathy is when we consciously feel upset
by seeing someone else’s pain and determine to do something
in response. What’s interesting about this level, though, is that
it might equally lead to a ‘good’ moral response of sympathy,
or it might lead to a ‘bad’ one of fi ght or fl ight. In other words,
empathy of itself can only take us morally so far. Because we
empathise, we know we’re with others. But how we react to
others is another question entirely – though it’s the important
moral question, because following empathy alone, we might
well react badly.
The limitations of empathy become even more clear at a
third level. It concerns how we empathise with those whom
we perceive to be not in our in-group but in another group. ‘In
an imaging study of Caucasian and Chinese volunteers,’ Frith
explained by way of example, ‘the Causasians showed empathy,
detected as brain responses, to Causcasians; but not to Chinese
and vice versa.’ The general point is that empathy-as-ethics fails
in such contexts. And that’s particularly signifi cant because this
failure occurs when you are confronted by people who are what
we might otherwise called strangers, foreigners or enemies –
occasions when the nature of our response makes all the differ-
ence between harmony and unrest, even peace and war. Once
more, an ethics based on empathy alone won’t work. You need
the moral dimension, not just a study of feelings.
Fair is fair?
There’s a fi nal area of investigation that’s worth bringing into
our discussion since it highlights a wider issue too. It’s to do
with the study of fairness and an apparent aversion to inequal-
ity among primates.
Various experiments, involving monkeys and apes, appear
to have shown that a sense of fair play is innate – a product of
our evolution. One involves two capuchin monkeys who are
rewarded with different foods for performing the same task: the
fi rst gets some cucumber and the other a grape. But the grape is