It remains possible that chimpanzees and other social animals have precursors of social norms, but there is little reason to believe that they have anything like human moral codes.
A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation, is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals.
—CHARLES DARWIN
EVEN IF WE ACCEPT VARIOUS parallels in the building blocks of morality, de Waal argues that level 3 clearly sets humans apart from animals. Even Bekoff agrees. Humans engage in self-reflective moral reasoning and judgment. We assess the intentions and beliefs that underlie actions, and there appears to be no evidence that animals do anything remotely similar.
Moral self-reflection requires the capacity for flexible mental scenario building, which we have seen is essential for many of the traits discussed so far. We can reason about our past, present, and future motives, beliefs, and actions. This reflection allows us to direct our actions, and even our thoughts and desires, in deliberate ways. As the philosopher Christine Korsgaard noted, only humans have the capacity for normative self-government. And, I might add, only humans have created real governments with powers to pass new laws, judges that assess violations, and prison guards that execute the verdict.
Yet methods for testing human moral reasoning and judgment are not easily transferred to animal subjects. To probe the conscience of young men who claimed to be conscientious objectors to the military draft, German authorities used to ask them to imagine situations such as: What would you do if your girlfriend was raped in the woods and you were carrying a gun? These assessments require language as well as an explicit capacity to build and reflect on mental scenarios. There is no evidence that other animals ponder counterfactuals about what they would do if they were confronted with a certain dilemma. In courts, as in gossip, humans regularly reconstruct past events to determine guilt and responsibility. The limits we have discussed so far would appear to make self-reflective moral reasoning impossible for animals.
The only potential sign of moral value judgment comes from the ape language projects. A recent detailed analysis of a database from over eleven years documented the use of the lexigrams “good” and “bad” by two bonobos (Kanzi and Panbanisha) and one chimpanzee (Panpanzee). The symbol “good” was used a few hundred times over this period and “bad” was used even less (24 times by Kanzi, 174 times by Panbanisha, and 83 times by Panpanzee). For example, on one occasion when asked, “Do you know how you’ve been acting?” the chimpanzee replied, “Bad.” Does this indicate self-reflective moral reasoning? Without further elaboration and careful testing it remains unclear what they are really saying. A lean interpretation could suggest the ape may have simply associated the sign with certain actions, as the human caregivers frequently use these expressions in specific circumstances (e.g., “Panzee’s being bad”). On a different occasion one of the bonobos was eating a plum and then pressed the “good” lexigram, presumably commenting on the taste, rather than on a moral question. The occasional appropriate use of these symbols suggests that one could perhaps study judgment in these human-reared apes. The researchers interpret their finding as evidence for precursors of morality, not as a sign of self-reflective moral reasoning.
In sum, the evidence for morality in animals declines as we move from de Waal’s level 1 to level 3. At level 1 there is reasonably good evidence that other animals may have something like compassion, and there are examples of reciprocal cooperation between unrelated individuals. At level 2, there are a few signs that our closest relatives exert pressures that support cooperative group living, but there is no compelling case for animals moralizing explicit norms and third parties punishing/rewarding moral violations/virtuous acts. At level 3, there is as yet no evidence that nonhuman animals engage in self-reflective moral reasoning.
THE ANIMAL RIGHTS LAWYER STEVEN Wise has made the case that chimpanzees and bonobos should be given legal personhood. Animal law is now taught at several esteemed universities. Personally, I think it is about time that we explicitly extend our moral concern to include consideration for the suffering of our closest surviving animal relatives. But should great apes be given the rights of a person?
We saw that personhood usually entails notions of self-consciousness and control. Great apes might recognize themselves in mirrors, but given the reviewed evidence they do not seem to be (self-)conscious about their own knowledge and intentions or about the long-term consequences of their actions.
There is, however, some evidence that they have the executive control to (at times) suppress immediate urges and delay gratification. We saw in Chapter 5 that chimpanzees, unlike most other animals, can delay receiving a small reward in favor of a much greater reward for a few minutes. In one study chimpanzees waited longer when they could distract themselves by playing with toys, and they played more with the toys during periods in which they could have taken the smaller immediate reward than during periods in which they could not. These results suggest that chimpanzees may be able to gain some control over their urges. However, does this mean they can take responsibility for their choices?
A group called the Great Ape Project, headed by the philosopher Peter Singer and others, has strongly argued for the inclusion of great apes into our community of equals, in which we accept legally enforceable rights. In particular, they argue for the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture. In 1999, New Zealand banned experimentation on great apes as a result, and other countries are now in the process of following suit. Yet to give rights entails more, because with rights come responsibilities—such as respecting others’ rights. Although I am sympathetic to anything that would improve the treatment of captive apes and protect apes in the wild, given the evidence there is little hope that they could become full members of our moral community.
Though we may be perfectly happy to extend the right to life, liberty, and freedom from torture to apes (and so would be willing to prosecute someone who kills an ape), would we be equally happy with the other side of the coin? Would we be willing to put an ape on trial for murder? In 2002, Frodo, a twenty-seven-year-old chimpanzee studied by Jane Goodall, snatched and killed a fourteen-month-old human toddler, Miasa Sadiki, in Tanzania. I do not remember calls for a trial. Moreover, should we police ape-ape rights violations? There would be little point in prosecuting male orangutans for rape or a chimpanzee for infanticide. During the European Middle Ages, animals were in fact frequently put on trial for immoral acts such as murder or theft. They were given lawyers and penalties that matched those given to humans for similar crimes. For instance, in 1386 a court in Falaise, France, tried and convicted a sow for murdering an infant. The hangman subsequently hung the pig in the public square. Her piglets had also been charged but, upon deliberation, were acquitted because of their youth.
Without compelling evidence that animals can reflect on their choices and consider the moral consequences of their actions, we cannot seriously bind them into a social contract. They are not persons according to the law and should not be held accountable.19 I would advocate new laws that charge us with clearer obligations to better treat, protect, and respect animals, because we can derive a moral principle according to which it is wrong to mistreat other animals. We can expand our circle of sympathy to include other creatures and take their needs and preferences into account.
The last few hundred years have seen dramatic changes as a result of people reflecting on rights, cruelty, empathy, and the greater good. Steven Pinker has documented how violence has drastically decreased from our everyday lives, even taking the extraordinary brutality of the world wars or the Rwandan genocide into account.20 In recent times, people have placed greater value on compassion; they increasingly reflect on their choices and recognize the advantages of peace and civility. We now cooperate globally, and ou
r moral assessments are communicated and enforced more swiftly and effectively than ever. Slavery, torture, rape, dueling, and executions are no longer common aspects of most people’s lives. In spite of the many terrible things humans do, we seem to have become a lot nicer.
We care. We extend rights not only to all humans but increasingly to life more generally. Animal cruelty has only recently become widely frowned on and is, thankfully, on the decline. Animal husbandry and slaughter are increasingly regulated. Animal ethics committees check research proposals, including whether the research question and approach justify the means. Blood sports, from cock fights to fox hunting, are becoming extinct. Wild animals are increasingly attracting tourism rather than hunters. Whale watching is bigger business than whaling. Many are increasingly feeling morally responsible for the fact that our actions, from pollution to deforestation, are causing the destruction of animal habitats and the extinctions of species. Once we are aware of the consequences of our actions, we become morally obliged to take them into account. Our self-awareness and attitudes to life on Earth have changed drastically in recent decades. It is quite likely that we have to change them a lot more if we want our closest wild animal cousins to be around in the future. I leave you to draw your own moral conclusions. I know you can.
1Soldiers in the German army marching east, for instance, may have thought they were bringing God back to the godless Bolsheviks. After all, Hitler had signed a concordat with the pope, and Germans paid tax to the Vatican (and still do so to this day).
2Within their group and at the time, such people could have had a reputation for high morals. As Alfred North Whitehead observed, “What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.”
3In psychopaths lack of sympathy and remorse is associated with specific neurological problems (e.g., lesions in the orbitofrontal cortex). Some concentration camp guards may well have been psychopaths.
4Adultery, breaking promises, causing pain, and incest are other usually forbidden acts. Note that most cultures also specify exceptions to these rules. For example, causing pain may be acceptable when it is done to help another—such as when a dentist extracts your rotten tooth.
5Extensive research on cooperative games has examined the strategies that lead to cooperation or collapses. Game theory has identified “tit for tat” as one potentially evolutionarily stable strategy. Individuals that follow this strategy are nice to begin with, retaliatory when the other fails to cooperate, but also forgiving, as they reengage in cooperation as soon as the other person does. This approach encourages cooperation without there being too much risk of being taken advantage of. Because it is not always clear whether another cooperated or not (e.g., they may claim that they tried), a strategy that allows the other person one slip-up before one stops cooperation is even more friendly and sustainable. But at some point people stop cooperating with those who do not cooperate—most people do not let themselves get burned three times in a row.
6It is even in a selfish individual’s interest to posture for altruism—which explains much hypocrisy.
7These draw in part on ancient emotional assessment systems. Disgust, for instance, has been co-opted to drive us not only to avoid pathogens but also to avoid violation of sexual and other moral norms. Note that many of the more complex emotions, such as gratitude and guilt, may have evolved reasonably recently in the context of cooperation regulation. Anger toward cheaters, for instance, ensures that we punish or deter those who violate cooperative rules and moral conduct.
8Darwin wrote: “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
9Some legal systems place more emphasis on outcome rather than intention. Scholars of jurisprudence, of course, continue to debate the philosophy of law, personhood, and responsibility.
10To call this self-deception, rather than just a bias, we need to postulate that somewhere the person does know both the truth and the lie. One may call this an unknown known, to add another permutation, when one ignores or suppresses available information. There is some experimental evidence that supports this by showing that under certain circumstances—for example, through distraction—people do demonstrate access to the truth even if they seemed to have been convinced by their own lies.
11A similar social explanation might also account for the systematic biases in our affective forecasting. In order to elicit cooperation on a future-directed project, one may benefit from exaggerating the positive consequences of success or the negative consequences of failure. You may be a lot better at recruiting help if you believe your own claims about future affect. In cases in which your prediction turns out to be wide of the mark, you will attract less punishment if you seem to have believed your own predictions than if you appear to have intentionally misled others.
12The human strategy, if based on reason (rather than somehow on an innate predisposition), would seem to require some foresight and mind reading.
13Chimpanzees seem to use such expressions to signal to others, to beg from them, to show submission or dominance, or to request reconciliation. There are parallels in human and great ape emotional facial expressions, as is evident in numerous photographic comparisons between human and chimpanzee available on the internet. Note, however, we often mistake a chimpanzee fear response, showing both upper and lower teeth, with happiness.
14Washoe also infamously bit neurosurgeon Karl Pribam’s finger off (and then signed, “Sorry.”)
15One study suggests that a male that does share meat with a female improves the likelihood of later copulation.
16Social carnivores, such as hyenas, rely more heavily on cooperative hunting than primates do. This may expose them to stronger selective pressure favoring cooperation and sharing.
17In one study, for example, chimpanzees cooperated in tasks that involved concrete goals but not social goals. Even in the tasks with concrete goals they made no attempts at reengaging a human when she stopped cooperating. Children, however, try to communicate to get the adult to recommit to the shared concrete or social goal.
18Darwin already noted that only humans blush. Blushing may reflect awareness of how we appear to others and has been argued to be a remedial display for one’s own inadequacies, reducing chances of social ostracism.
19This is not to say that they should be considered legal “things.” Laws may indeed require a radical overhaul to go beyond the dichotomy of persons and things. Should sentient beings be considered the same as a chair?
20At least proportionally the number of violent deaths have fallen.
TEN
Mind the Gap
[Man] owes his success to certain things which distinguish him from other animals: speech, fire, agriculture, writing, tools, and large-scale cooperation.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL
LIKE MANY A SCHOLAR BEFORE and since, Bertrand Russell confidently asserts that certain traits set humans apart from animals. Although we appear to excel in many domains, such claims are not typically founded in any thorough comparison. In fact, if you set the bar low, you can conclude that parrots can speak, ants have agriculture, crows make tools, and bees cooperate on a large scale. We need to dig deeper to understand to what we owe our unique success. In the previous six chapters I have described what current evidence suggests separates us from other animals in the domains of language, mental time travel, theory of mind, intelligence, culture, and morality. In each domain, various nonhuman species have competences, but human ability is special in particular respects—and these have much in common.
FIGURE 10.1.
Grossly simplified illustration of the conjunction of two foundational capacities stepping across the gap from ape to human minds.
In all six domains we repeatedly find two major features that set us apart: our open-ended ability to imagine and reflect on different situations, and our deep-seated drive to link our scenario-building minds
together. It seems to be primarily these two attributes that carried our ancestors across the gap, turning animal communication into open-ended human language, memory into mental time travel, social cognition into theory of mind, problem solving into abstract reasoning, social traditions into cumulative culture, and empathy into morality.
Humans are avid scenario builders. We can tell stories, picture future situations, imagine others’ experiences, contemplate potential explanations, plan how to teach, and reflect on moral dilemmas. Nested scenario building refers not to a single ability but to a complex faculty (recall my theater metaphor), itself built on a variety of sophisticated components that allow us to simulate and to reflect.
A basic capacity to simulate seems to exist in other animals. When rats are in a well-known maze, the sequential firing of so-called place cells in the hippocampus suggest that the rats can cognitively sweep ahead, considering one path and then the other, before making a decision about where to go. Appropriate place-cell sequences have also been recorded during sleep and rest, suggesting a neural basis for the learning of the maze layout and its options. The challenges of navigation may well have selected for the fundamentals of mental scene construction. Moreover, we saw that great apes have demonstrated several other relevant capacities. They can think about hidden movements, learn and interpret human symbols, solve some problems through mental rather than physical computation, have complex sociality and some traditions, console each other, recognize themselves in mirrors, and show signs of pretense in play and deception. Great apes have a basic capacity to imagine alternative mental scenarios of the world. In certain contexts their abilities are comparable to those of eighteen- to twenty-four-month-old human children.
The Gap Page 26
