Compassion and empathy are treated as the most human of human qualities. I think that these aren't particularly human traits, though, and aren't all that common. It seems otherwise because we keep [i]talking[/i] about how we embody those qualities! We belong to the only intelligent species on the planet (unless we're wrong about that), without any other verbal species around to dispute our claim to be so wonderful and compassionate and noble that these are our defining characteristics. We do love to go on and on about that. And we love to talk!
I can't wait for real First Contact, where we might meet aliens who can disllusion us of all this... I'm not saying people are "bad", but that there's a great mass of people in the middle of the spectrum, hovering in the middle of the scale, at around zero: not especially good, not especially bad. A lot of evil gets done by people who are just doing their jobs and don't really care...
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