A recent article in the Harvard Business review offers some good responses to AT: K args about human selfishness:

The biology of cooperation draws our attention because it speaks with the authority of the most reliable way we know how to know: science. If we simply say the word empathy, it sounds mushy. If a scientist like Tania Singer shows, using fMRI scans, that women’s brains light up in three places when they get electric shocks, and that when their partners are shocked, their brains light up in two of the same three places, we understand empathy not as a hard-to-define feeling but as something that people experience in a physical sense. This phenomenon was originally discovered by neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti, who also found that our brains mirror not only pain and motor movements but pure emotions as well. When Rizzolatti and his colleagues showed subjects videos in which people were expressing disgust on their faces, the same neurons fired in the subjects’ brains as the ones that had been activated when they themselves were exposed to disgusting smells. Cognitively and emotionally, we may be able to “feel” what others are feeling.