 The central argument of Grouchy’s Letters is that virtue, moral or political, is born out of sympathy, the ability and propensity to feel others’ pain and to want to relieve it. Grouchy claims that we first experience sympathy as an infant in the arms of a nurse, and that we learn progressively to feel sympathy for the physical and mental pain that any other person experiences, whether or not we are close to them. But in order for this to be possible, we do need to see the suffering other as a human being, as someone just as capable of experiencing pain as we are. Extreme inequality means that this does not happen: the very rich and the very poor do not regard each other as being part of the same species, so that they cannot sympathize with each other and will not apply the laws of morality and justice in their dealings with each other (Letter VIII).