But try this thought experiment.

The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news through history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value, put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today.

That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ration of kindness to cruelty will be always be positive. (The news, however, come to us as though that ratio was reversed.)

Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. "Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness, and envy and to be rude, aggressive, or violent," Kagan notes, "they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture - especially toward those in need." This in-built ethical sense, he adds, "is a biological feature of our species."

With the discovery that our neural wiring tips toward putting empathy in the service of compassion, neuroscience hands philosophy a mechanism for explaining the ubiquity of the altruistic impulse. Instead of trying to explain away selfless acts, philosophers might contemplate the conundrum of the innumerable times that cruel acts are absent.

- Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence