I think denying that "higher" animals are capable of empathy is willfully perverse and borderline insane. One might as well deny that they are capable of sight. "Well, we do not actually know that they are seeing anything. They can't tell us about it after all. They may act like it, but that is just behavior and tells us nothing about their subjective state."
--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Miles:
>
> The way that most psychologists finesse this is by
> assuming that
> people can accurately report their psychological
> states. In empathy
> studies with children, researchers show them a
> scenario and ask them
> what the person in the scenario is feeling or
> experiencing. If the
> child provides a meaningful report ("someone said
> something mean to
> her, so she's sad"), then most psychologists will
> say the child has
> empathy.
>
>
> [WS:] So what makes you think that animals are
> incapable of experiencing
> emotional states similar to those reported by
> children? You seem to fall
> into the fallacy of interpreting the absence of
> evidence as the evidence of
> absence.
>
> Consider the following:
>
> http://www.avam.org/exhibitions/home.html
>
> "CHIMPS, BONOBOS & US
>
>
> We humans share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees and
> bonobos. It turns out,
> chimps and bonobos are even more closely related to
> humans than they are to
> gorillas. Christian Bernard, M.D., the great pioneer
> in human-to-human heart
> transplant, had an encounter with lab-housed
> chimpanzees that was to forever
> change his life:
>
> I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony
> in Holland. They lived
> next to each other in separate cages for several
> months before I used one as
> a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his
> cage in preparation for the
> operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We
> attached no significance
> to this, but it must have made a great impression on
> his companion, for when
> we removed the body to the operating room, the other
> chimp wept bitterly and
> was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep
> impression on me. I
> vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive
> creatures. "
>
> Wojtek
>
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