The moral sense of a golden retriever

On empathy, the weaponization of fear, and why society needs to guard itself from people who dehumanize others

Any decent moral framework for living among other people must start with the premise that humanity isn’t a solo enterprise: Our individual experiences of the world are unique, but none of us is unique for having the human experience in a bigger sense. Nobody’s life is more or less valuable, nobody’s joys and pains are more or less real, nobody’s intrinsic worth as a person is greater or less than another’s. All are enormously valuable.

■ Our worst atrocities as a species have resulted from the practice of dehumanization. A chattel slave-keeper is only enabled to see another person as “property” when they cease to see that other person as human. Empathy discourages us from inflicting pain and suffering on others.

■ Some people obviously lack the basic aspects of empathy, whether by disorders of the mind, by intoxication, or by choice. And while that doesn’t diminish their own intrinsic value as human beings, it does mean that they should be kept far away from the tools that would allow them to inflict pain on others, at least to the best of society’s ability to police such things.

■ Cruelty, sociopathy, sadism, and other pathologies that rely upon treating others as less human, or their sufferings as less real, must be addressed as real moral defects. Even dogs can sense emotions in people and regulate their own behaviors accordingly. Many dogs even show real signs of empathy for the humans around them.

■ People need to be at least as willing to have concern for others, lest they show themselves to be less morally sophisticated than a golden retriever. It is wrong to inflict suffering or to weaponize fear against other people -- no matter how far away or how different they might seem. We are all equally human, and to recognize and behave according to that simple (but too often elusive) understanding is a moral requisite.