[thret]

Why do we show any empathy towards animals? You can't kill and eat something you empathise with. Empathy towards humans makes sense but I don't see the evolutionary advantage of treasuring all life.

That said, I can't even kill spiders. It doesn't make any sense but I've an unavoidable feeling of guilt if I don't release them outside unharmed. Yet I have no problem eating meat. My empathy is irrational.

[brmj]

I take issue with the viewpoint that behavior is best understood by treating all involved minds as if they were perfect Bayesian reasoners motivated only by increasing the frequency of their alleles in the gene pool. Evolution doesn't work like that. Evolved minds are just a pile of kludges that were good enough.

Instead of the way you've been thinking about this, suppose instead that empathy is a straightforward consequence of mirror neurons, which essentially try to model the mental state of others based on their behavior. That might be most useful when dealing with the others in the ancestral social group, but it might also be useful to figure out that that bear over there is probably just protecting her cub, while the tiger last week was probably just hungry, for example. Of course, it would have to be possible to override empathy fairly easily, even in the context of one's own social group, but in the absence of any particular reason to do so empathy might in large part guide one's behavior. Stick people in an environment where food comes from the store, nothing wants to kill and eat you and the animals you encounter most are domesticated or mostly acclimated to humans and one can see how empathy might be applied to all kinds of things it wouldn't be under other circumstances.

This is just a half-baked hypothesis by an amateur, but you get the idea. Brains end up just being good enough, not optimal. If anything, it's a wonder that ours aren't even worse than they are at general purpose computation.

[icebraining]

"When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it's statistics." - Stalin (not confirmed).

Empathy is irrational, since it relies on identification with the other being. It's always easier to identify oneself with a living being than to a piece of meat.

On the other hand, it's also very rational; it's a much better strategy than if it was guided by pure knowledge, since it optimizes cooperation: otherwise, you'd either be completely indifferent to someone you can actually help (e.g. injured person near you) or live in mental anguish by the fact that you know that thousands are constantly being killed by wars, curable diseases, etc.

[rcthompson]

The only actual source I've ever seen for that Stalin quote was the fictional Stalin from the computer game Command and Conquer: Red Alert. Is this quote actually attributed to the real Stalin? Has the quote been floating around since before 1995 or so, when that game was released?

[ctchocula]

Wikiquotes has a segment on this quote.[1] It's uncertain whether Stalin said it to Truman at the Potsdam conference, or whether the quote was actually said by someone else and misattributed to Stalin, but it is certain that the game designers didn't make it up for C&C: Red Alert.

[1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Misattributed