It's in our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards, and it helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We have to be aware of our fragilities as human beings - when we see cruelty, to understand that in certain conditions, we could be cruel, too.
In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.
Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.
In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.
Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.
We, as human beings, have the capacity for extreme cruelty.
When we can lay down our fear and anger and choose responses other than aggression, we create the conditions for bringing out the best in us humans.
When we are confronted with extreme situations, we forget about moral issues; we simply act and must then accept the consequences.
Given appropriate social conditions, decent, ordinary people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things.
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