What everyone in this discussion seems to be missing is that the number one source of moral failures is not trying. The inborn human conscience provides so much ignored guidance that trying to help it out with books is pointless. Instead, we need to be thinking about how to get people to put some effort and sacrifice into having morals. It doesn't matter if you know one ethical truth or ten billion if you are not willing to sacrifice anything.

Empathy is not inborn, it is taught. Ask anyone with a toddler. Also people must be taught to broaden their circle of empathy to include foreigners, animals, etc. The capacity may be innate but it must be shaped by education, formal or otherwise.

> Empathy is not inborn, it is taught.

I remember when I was a kid, around 6, I was out hiking with my dog and had gotten on top of this huge boulder and fell off. I fell pretty far, got scraped up bad, probably a concussion and I was laying on the ground moaning. My dog scampered down and he started whimpering and licking my face. He then ran a couple miles to get help, which he brought back.

Cats though don't do this sort of thing.

Is it taught, or does it "grow in?" Toddlers don't get empathy training.

I can't say whether it's what makes the difference or it's a natural development, but they 100% for sure do. Both direct instruction and example behavior.

There are many parent who never instruct their kids to care about other people, and those kids turn out fine. The vast majority of what you have to tell a todller is variants of "don't put that in your mouth," and sometimes "stop hitting your sister." I've never heard of an admonition to "be more caring." (Note: that sounds like a heartwarming idea unless you have met a toddler before)

Fairy tales, urban legends, myths and stories have been used to teach morality and ethics probably since humans were capable of abstract thought and language. Fantasy fiction is just a commercialized version of the same. To me there's little difference between finding moral lessons in the Beatitudes versus the Jedi Code, which some people do.

Steven Pinker also makes an interesting case that widespread reading of fiction has made people in general more empathetic as they put themselves into a greater variety of shoes.

This was claimed long before Pinker. But the general proposition brings with it one huge (moral? / ethical?) problem: at its heart its the argument that feeling sad for fictitious entities helps us to in some way interface better with non-fictitious entities. Terry Eagleton argues against the idea of considering fictitious people as in any way relating to real people, but I think he's wrong. The argument needs to be expanded and reversed. In reality, we regard all or almost all) other entities as fictitious. So in this way such a Humanities / Pinker argument but correct in the sense that we are as much inventing entities. However, then, a potential (moral? / ethical?) dilemma arises in that we will then expose this conceptualization on these entities to whatever degree is possible, giving us a panoply of common cultural practices such as --- but not limited to --- the attempted elimination of homosexuality, the confinement of women to the home, etc. So that which claims to liberate instead provides a superstructure for oppression.

The human brain seems not to experience or process reality so much as simulate it, since we know there are myriad ways that memories and perception don't match literal reality. I wouldn't doubt that deep, deep down at whatever amounts to the "bare metal" there isn't a recognized distinction between "fictional" and "real" entities, or even between those and the self.

Perhaps only at higher levels of abstraction that these distinctions are meaningful.