Our singular embodiment places a kind of paradox at the very centre of our existence. On the one hand, feelings, and our unique awareness of them, are where our individual lives are lived. On the other, it is experience of our feelings which forms the very basis of the possibility of putting ourselves in the place of ‘the other’. It is the experience of pain and pleasure (and anxiety and dread, anticipation, excitement and joy, and so on...) which makes my life important to me, which shapes and defines my mortality. But it is also the recognition that I share these feelings with all those others who are built the same way that extends the meaning of my existence beyond myself and makes me first and foremost a moral creature.
David Smail, The Experience of Self
