Altruism and Empathy

Frans de Waal, is the director of Emory University's Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Georgia, USA that studies how our close primate relatives also demonstrate behaviors suggestive of a sense of morality and he is also the author of "The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates."


CNN: How would you say that ethics or morality is separate from religion?

De Waal: Well, I think that morality is older. In the sense that I find it very hard to believe that 100,000 or 200,000 years ago, our ancestors did not believe in right and wrong, and did not punish bad behavior, did not care about fairness. Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist. So I think religion came after morality. Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.

CNN: So do you believe that people are generally good?
De Waal: Yeah, my view is that you have two (kinds of) people in the world. You have people who think that we are inherently bad and evil and selfish, but with a lot of hard work we can be good, and you have other people like myself who believe that we are inherently good. There's a lot of evidence on the primates that I can use to support that idea that we are inherently good, but on occasion when we get too competitive or frustrated, we turn bad.

CNN: So when the stakes are higher for survival, we're more individualistic than group-oriented?

De Waal: Oh no, we very much survive by group life. Humans are not able to survive alone. For example, solitary confinement is one of the worst punishments we can give. We are not really made to live alone, we would not survive, and so when things get tough we would actually come together more and be more social when things get tough.

Full Interview here