In a sense, this is quite the opposite of self-consciousness. It looks like we are systematically misrepresenting our self to ourselves. How can we be both deceiver and deceived? Von Hippel and Trivers argue that self-deception evolved out of more ordinary deception between people. We have not eradicated the problems of free riding and cheating, but have come up with ways of coping with them. We look for signs of deception and enforce honest cooperation. To cheat, people in turn explore new avenues to exploit others’ trust. These two pressures have created an arms race between deceiver and deceived. Self-deception is simply another layer of complexity, improving one’s chances of deceiving others while maintaining a facade that enforces cooperation. Rumsfeld might have called this phenomenon “unknown misleading.” That is to say, we sometimes do not appear to know that we are misleading others (even if deep down we may have an inkling of the truth10). And if you believe your own deception, you are not going to show the telltale signs of lying—making it harder for others to detect your cheating. Furthermore, if you do get caught, punishment is likely to be reduced. Moral judgment and retribution for willful deception is harsher than for unintentional “mistakes.”11
Thus, even concentration camp guards may have had a moral perspective that allowed them to believe in subhumans, the Aryan master race, and the moral leadership of the führer. Most evil in this world is perpetrated by people who think, at some level, that they are doing the right thing. The fight of good versus evil, when examined from both sides, is often the fight between two definitions of what is good. People can behave outrageously badly in the name of good. Just think of the Spanish Inquisition or modern suicide bombers. Whatever we do, we tend to find reasons for thinking we are right.
However, our self-reflective capacities allow us to recognize when we are wrong, as much as we do not like to admit it. Our nested thinking enables us to examine our choices, evaluate our evaluations, and question our morality. We can acknowledge our inner demons and develop strategies to keep them in check. Scientists conduct double-blind experiments to avoid tricking themselves. We can identify our own hypocrisies and strive toward ideals. We can change our mind based on a new analysis of the facts. We can feel remorse and try to make amends for our mistakes. We can beg for forgiveness. We can venture to be the change we want to see in this world.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
—MARK TWAIN
WHEN YOUR DOG DEFECATES ON the carpet, it may look guilty. You hope it understands that it has done wrong, as you do not want a repeat of the mess. The dog may fear punishment, but does that mean it has a conscience or a moral sense? Do nonhuman animals show signs of any of the three levels of morality de Waal distinguished?
Our closest animal relatives certainly appear to have qualities reminiscent of both our demonic and angelic sides. They can act in profoundly prosocial and antisocial ways, helping or hurting others. Following World War II it was widely held that only humans were capable of the atrocities of war. Animal conflicts with members of the same species are typically restrained and do not cause serious injury. However, as noted earlier, Jane Goodall found that our closest living relatives go on raids and brutally kill other chimpanzees. The strong bonds between adult males and the hostility toward individuals from other groups led Goodall to argue that chimpanzees are at the threshold of the human capacity for destruction and cruelty. What differentiated these chimpanzee raids from human war, Goodall submitted, was planning and language.
Like humans, chimpanzees sometimes violently take what they want. And they may violently defend what they have. Thus they have at least two of Hobbes’s reasons for human quarrels—although I do not know of evidence that they plot preemptive strikes and deploy credible deterrence strategies.12 Note that females can be as merciless as males, as the following observation by Goodall illustrates:
At 1710 Melissa, with her three-week-old female infant, Genie, clinging in the ventral position, and followed by her six-year-old daughter, Gremlin, climbed to a low branch of a tree. . . . Passion and her daughter [Pom] cooperated in the attack; as Passion held Melissa to the ground, biting at her face and hands, Pom tried to pull away the infant. . . . At one point Passion snatched the baby away but Melissa seized it back, biting Passion’s hands. Passion, leaping around, seized Melissa from the rear and bit her deeply into her rump (the wound actually penetrated the rectum just above the anus). Melissa, ignoring this savaging, struggled with Pom. Passion then grabbed one of Melissa’s hands and bit the fingers repeatedly, chewing on them. Simultaneously Pom, reaching into Melissa’s lap, managed to bite the head of the baby. Melissa still held on, and Passion seemed to try to turn her over. Then, using one foot, Passion pushed at Melissa’s chest while Pom pulled at her hands. Melissa, still clinging to the baby, bit Passion’s foot while Pom held and bit one of her hands. During the entire fight all the participants screamed loudly. Finally, Pom managed to run off with the infant. At this point Gremlin—who had been trying to help her mother throughout the fight, but had been repeatedly pushed out of the way—hurled herself at Pom, and Melissa managed to retrieve the infant; but almost at once Pom got it back and ran off. Pom climbed a tree with the corpse (for the baby is thought to have died when Pom first bit into its forehead) . . . Melissa tried to climb also, but fell back, seemingly exhausted, as a small dead branch broke. She watched from the ground as Passion took the body and began to feed.
Fifteen minutes after the loss of her infant, Melissa again approached Passion. The two mothers, in silence, stared at each other; then Melissa reached out and Passion touched her bleeding hand. As Passion . . . continued to feed on the infant, Melissa began to dab her wounds. Her face was badly swollen, her hands lacerated, her rump bleeding heavily. At 1830 Melissa again reached Passion, and the two females briefly held hands.
This passage brought tears to my eyes the first time I read it. Passion and Pom’s behavior was absolutely appalling; moreover this was not an isolated incident. Over a four-year period the pair was responsible for killing at least two, possibly six, other infants. Such acts contradict all our notions about cooperative group living. Yet there exist countless examples of human murderers who, in spite of their gruesome disregard for others, did not destroy otherwise cooperative societies. Chimpanzee infanticide may happen to about 5 percent of infants. It has also been observed in other animals, such as lions and hyenas. Cannibalism is a behavior that stirs particularly strong moral disgust, but it has been reported in human tribes across the globe. Baboons and gorillas, like chimpanzees, have been known to feed on killed infants. However, Goodall’s anecdote illustrates not only horrible aggression toward a group member but also the resumption of nonviolent relations. Chimpanzees tend to reconcile soon after conflicts end. Passion embraced Melissa at 1842.
Chimpanzees are capable of extensive prosocial behavior, even though they do not have the Hobbesian remedy of governments that monopolize violence to enforce laws and civilize its citizens. They have been observed acting in ways that look like attempts to comfort others who are suffering. Researchers analyzed spontaneous aggressive incidents and found that bystanders frequently kissed, hugged, and groomed victims of aggression. Victims were more likely to receive such attention than other animals, especially immediately after serious (as opposed to mild) fights. Chimpanzees, like humans, reassure and console the distressed. Macaques, on the other hand, showed no such signs of compassion.
When we mentally picture scenarios such as Melissa’s struggle, we have emotional responses. Seeing another’s emotion can also trigger a similar or related emotion. Chimpanzees’ physiological responses to seeing negative emotions in video suggest that they experience negative emotional arousal as well. There is some evidence that chimpanzees read emotions in facial expressions.13 For example, they could spontaneously match pictures of positive and negative emotional ex
pressions to relevant video scenes depicting a favorite food or a veterinary procedure. The consoling of distressed chimpanzees, then, may be driven by a sympathetic concern for their emotional experience.
There is evidence that other species feel sympathy. Various classic experiments suggest that rodents are sensitive to pain of their cage mates. Rats have been found to press a lever to lower a distressed rat from a harness. In recent studies, rats have shown prosocial behavior that is difficult to explain without invoking empathy. For instance, rats freed a cage mate from a restrainer even when social contact was prevented and there was no direct reward for the liberator. They even did this when there was chocolate enticing them in another container.
Sympathetic concern may help explain some widely publicized feel-good stories of animals helping humans in distress. For example, when a three-year-old boy fell into the gorilla enclosure of Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo, a female gorilla cradled the child and brought him to an entrance twenty meters away where keepers could retrieve him. However, often there are also lean alternative interpretations. In this example, the gorilla was hand-reared because her mother had neglected her, and the zookeepers had trained her to avoid neglecting her own offspring. During this process they had used a doll and rewarded the gorilla for bringing it to them for inspection. Such training, rather than empathy, might plausibly explain why she brought the unconscious child to keepers, but we do not know for certain.
There are a few other stories of helping, such as Washoe, the sign-language–trained chimpanzee, acting as a lifesaver, which may not be that readily explained in lean ways. A female chimpanzee had been introduced to a small island enclosure but became distressed. In an attempt to jump the moat she landed right in it. Washoe, although hardly knowing the newcomer, is said to have instantly come to the rescue. She jumped an electric fence, held onto a post to step securely into the water, and extended her hand to pull the drowning chimpanzee to safety. This is one of the most extraordinary anecdotes of animal heroics.14
Frans de Waal has made the case that our primate relatives are fundamentally good-natured. There are signs that they have the basic moral sentiments, sympathy and reciprocity, which he associates with level 1 morality. Recall that many primates groom each other and so build alliances. They may subsequently help each other in different contexts. Chimpanzees form long-term affiliative relationships that one might call friendships. Recent laboratory experiments have shown that chimpanzees can be very helpful. For instance, in one study chimpanzees were found to unlock the cage door for another chimpanzee, especially when the caged chimpanzee had done the same for them in the past. Chimpanzees also help humans, for example, by picking up and returning things that were accidentally dropped, as human infants do. Chimpanzees can be kind.
In contrast, when it comes to food chimpanzees are often unhelpful, sharing only occasionally and haphazardly. Mothers rarely give their offspring food, and when they do they usually only offer leftovers such as fruit peels. Humans consider such behavior selfish. We feed our children for many years after they have been weaned. We are often polite and offer guests the best we have. Chimpanzees do not show any such hospitality. At times they collaboratively hunt for monkeys, bush pigs, and other prey and may share spoils. However, the sharing is usually not fair.15 Generally chimpanzees are competitive over food and share because they are harassed by beggars—that is, they share to avoid having to defend the food.
In some studies, chimpanzees failed to help other chimpanzees obtain food even when it was at absolutely no cost to them. Presented with an apparatus with two choices—a food reward for itself and the same for a familiar other, or the food reward for self and no reward for the other—they showed no concern for their neighbor’s welfare. However, a recent study reported some prosocial choices. Similar research with marmosets, tamarins, and capuchin monkeys demonstrated helping. Some primate species, including bonobos, also share food sources more readily in the wild than common chimpanzees.
Limits to sharing severely restricts what kind of cooperation chimpanzees can accomplish. Two chimpanzees may pull together on a device to obtain food that they could not have gotten by themselves, and then share the reward if it is available in two distinct places. However, when the reward is lumped together on one plate, the more dominant animal is likely to eat most, if not all, of the reward. Cooperation subsequently breaks down.16 Interestingly, three-year-old human children were found to share more with others in a collaborative task than in other circumstances, whereas chimpanzees did not share preferentially with those with whom they collaborated.
Sharing of information is another form of helping. As we have seen repeatedly, humans are driven to link up their minds, whereas nonhuman primate communication does not seem to work this way. There are two common exceptions to the lack of informing: food and alarm calls. At first glance, in these circumstances the informing of group members appears to benefit the others and not so much the caller. The caller may lose food or attract the predator. However, when examined more closely, such calls may be beneficial to the caller because by attracting others to a food source, one may gain protection against predators while feeding. Similarly, alarm calls may recruit others for potential defense. Curiously, food and alarm calls tend to be given even if all the other group members are already present, somewhat undermining the otherwise tempting conclusion that they intend to actively inform the others.
Given the apparent limits in mind reading, language, mental time travel, and reasoning, we have already encountered various restrictions to the kind of help animals may be able to offer. It has become clear, however, that parallels to the human building blocks of morality (level 1) exist in other primates. Chimpanzees can be brutal, but they can also be kind. They exhibit signs of sympathy, helping, and sensitivity to reciprocity.
Does this evidence not suffice to conclude that nonhuman animals can live moral lives? The psychologist and activist Marc Bekoff has argued that it does. When morality is defined as “a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups,” various animals may indeed qualify as moral. It may be appealing to embrace nonhumans as moral equals, but this romantic perspective sets the bar very low. Morality, as we have seen, is more than a suite of behaviors. To humans, the same behavior can be right or wrong depending on intentions, control, and the relevant norms.
SOCIAL ANIMALS HAVE TO GET along with their group members. But does this mean that they demonstrate elements of level 2 morality? Recent work on rhesus macaques suggests they evaluate photos of in-group members more positively than photos of out-group members. So perhaps intergroup biases have ancient roots, and there may be diverse social pressures to facilitate group cohesion. Even without laws, courts, and police, animals may need to act in certain ways to reward conformity to norms and punish violations.
Yet can animals be said to have social norms at all? Some prominent researchers think not. Michael Tomasello argues that agreeing on norms requires “shared intentionality,” as discussed in Chapter 6, and therefore is limited to humans. Without a drive to link minds and share goals, it is indeed unclear animals could establish social norms.17 Children derive and enforce social norms not only because of others’ authority or knowledge of their benefits, but because they have a sense of belonging to a group with certain norms: “We do it like this, and not like that.” When children are shown one way to play a game and are later confronted with someone else doing it differently, they tend to protest.
However, other researchers believe social norms exist in some nonhuman animals. The anthropologist Shirley Strum argues that baboons have social norms that are enforced by the group. When an immigrant male frightens an infant, the troop will reliably mob him. They do this again and again until he stops. Strum believes that this is evidence for the norm that adults “ought” not to frighten infants. Given the serious risk of infanticide, there is a leaner interpretation available. The other baboons may simply be
protecting the infant.
Another prominent case argues that primates operate with social norms of fairness. Capuchin monkeys were trained to exchange a pebble for a slice of cucumber. When another monkey received a grape—a much more desirable reward—in this exchange, the first monkey started to refuse to work for cucumber. Does this mean capuchins have a sense of fairness and refused to cooperate because they felt shortchanged? Killjoy skeptics suggested that the primates may refuse to work out of frustration from not getting a grape, rather than because of inequity. Subsequent experiments found that merely seeing a grape makes the cucumber less attractive, regardless of whether there is another animal around. Other studies have found some support for the fairness explanation in chimpanzees and dogs. The debate continues.
Chimpanzees do not show any overt signs of guilt and shame, such as facial blushing, that would signal that they had violated their own conscience.18 There is also little evidence to suggest that animals police others’ conformity to norms (if indeed they have them) and punish transgressions. There are some reports of high-ranking primates breaking up fights, but it is difficult to establish whether they did so because of “community concern” or because they simply wanted an end to the disturbing raucous. In one study rhesus monkeys that suppressed food calls were subject to increased aggression from group members. This apparent punishment could be interpreted as enforcement of a social norm. However, the punishing individuals may have been directly affected. There are few signs that any bystanders (those not directly affected) reward and punish obligatory and forbidden acts. Nor do I know of any evidence that animals like Washoe, after rescuing the young chimpanzee, reap status and respect from group members acknowledging their bravery. (However, this may reflect absence of evidence, rather than evidence of absence.) As we saw, in humans third-party reinforcement and promotion of moral norms are critical. Given the limits of communication and intentional teaching in the animal kingdom, it is difficult to see how animals could pontificate and moralize.
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