Darwin on Empathy

Letters to the editor

Darwin on Empathy

Andy Sinats, Victoria, BC

Volume 40  Issue 10, 11, & 12 | Posted: January 21, 2026

In Darwin’s words:

“As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.

This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. [If they appear different] experience unfortunately shews us how long it is before we look at them as our fellow creatures.

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions…
This virtue [concern for lower animals], one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they extend to all sentient beings.” (from Darwin’s Descent of Man.)

“This virtue [concern for lower animals], one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they extend to all sentient beings.”

Ekman: During a series of discussions, I read this last Darwin quote to the Dalai Lama about emotions and compassion.

The Dalai Lama’s translator exclaimed, “Did he use that phrase ‘all sentient beings’”? The translator was surprised because this phrase is the exact English translation of the Tibetan and Sanskrit description of the highest extension of compassion by a bodhisattva (a Buddhist saint). A concern for the welfare of all living beings is not found in the Abrahamic religions ( Judaism, Christianity, Islam), which focus upon a concern for all human beings. A concern for other animals exists in only a limited fashion in Hinduism. Among the world’s major religions, embracing with compassion all living beings is unique to Buddhism.

The remarkable similarity between Darwin’s and the Buddhist view of the highest moral virtue (all sentient beings), and the origins of compassion (both attribute it to reducing one’s own empathetic distress, and both note it is strongest in a mother’s feelings toward her infant) raises the possibility that Darwin might have derived his views from Buddhist writings. However, the origin of Darwin’s ideas on morality and compassion appear in his 1838 notebooks, 2 years after his return from the voyage of the Beagle, when Darwin was 29 years old, 5 years before he was to learn about Buddhism from his close friend J. D. Hooker.

   

Andy Sinats, Victoria, BC