Primates and Philosophers_How Morality Evolved

by Frans de Waal

  Capuchin monkeys thus seem to measure reward in relative terms, comparing their own rewards with those available and their own efforts with those of others. Although our data cannot elucidate the precise motivations underlying these responses, one possibility is that monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In humans, these emotions, known as “passions” by economists, guide an individual’s reactions to the efforts, gains, losses, and attitudes of others (Hirschleifer 1987; Frank 1988; Sanfey et al. 2003). As opposed to primates marked by despotic hierarchies (such as rhesus monkeys), tolerant species with well-developed food sharing and cooperation (such as capuchin monkeys) may hold emotionally charged expectations about reward distribution and social exchange that lead them to dislike inequity.

  Before we speak of “fairness” in this context it is good to point out a difference between this and human fairness, though. A full-blown sense of fairness would entail that the “rich” monkey share with the “poor” one, as she should feel she is getting excessive compensation. Such behavior would betray interest in a higher principle of fairness, one that Westermarck (1917 [1908]) called “disinterested,” hence a truly moral notion. This is not the sort of reaction our monkeys showed, though: their sense of fairness, if we call it that, was rather egocentric. They showed an expectation about how they themselves should be treated, not about how everybody around them should be treated. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the full-blown sense of fairness must have started someplace and that the self is the logical place to look for its origin. Once the egocentric form exists, it can be expanded to include others.

  MENCIUS AND THE PRIMACY OF AFFECT

  There is never much new under the sun. Westermarck’s emphasis on the retributive emotions, whether friendly or vengeful, reminds one of the reply of Confucius to the question whether there is any single word that may serve as prescription for all of one’s life. Confucius proposed “reciprocity” as such a word. Reciprocity is of course also at the heart of the Golden Rule, which remains unsurpassed as a summary of human morality. To know that some of the psychology behind this rule may exist in other species, along with the required empathy, bolsters the idea that morality, rather than a recent invention, is part of human nature.

  A follower of Confucius, Mencius, wrote extensively about human goodness during his life, from 372 to 289 BC. Mencius lost his father when he was three, and his mother made sure he received the best possible education. The mother is at least as well known as her son: to the Chinese, she still serves as a maternal model for her absolute devotion. Called the “second sage” because of his immense influence, second only to Confucius, Mencius had a revolutionary, subversive bent in that he stressed the obligation of rulers to provide for the common people. Recorded on bamboo clappers and handed down to his descendants and their students, his writings show that the debate about whether we are naturally moral or not is ancient indeed. In one exchange, Mencius (n.d. [372–289 BC]: 270–71) reacts against Kaou Tsze’s views, which are reminiscent of Huxley’s gardener and garden metaphor:

  “Man’s nature is like the ke willow, and righteousness is like a cup or a bowl. The fashioning of benevolence and righteousness out of man’s nature is like the making of cups and bowls from the ke willow.”

  Mencius replied:

  “Can you, leaving untouched the nature of the willow, make with it cups and bowls? You must do violence and injury to the willow, before you can make cups and bowls with it. If you must do violence and injury to the willow, before you can make cups and bowls with it, on your principles you must in the same way do violence and injury to humanity in order to fashion from it benevolence and righteousness! Your words alas! would certainly lead all men on to reckon benevolence and righteousness to be calamities.”

  Mencius believed that humans tend toward the good as naturally as water flows downhill. This is also evident from the following remark, in which he seeks to exclude the possibility of the Freudian double agenda between presented and felt motives on the grounds that the immediacy of the moral emotions, such as sympathy, leaves no room for cognitive contortions:

  When I say that all men have a mind which cannot bear to see the suffering of others, my meaning may be illustrated thus: even nowadays, if men suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, they will without exception experience a feeling of alarm and distress. They will feel so, not as a ground on which they may gain the favor of the child’s parents, nor as a ground on which they may seek the praise of their neighbors and friends, nor from a dislike to the reputation of having been unmoved by such a thing. From this case we may perceive that the feeling of commiseration is essential to man. (Mencius n.d. [372–289 BC]: 78)

  This example from Mencius reminds us of Westermarck’s epigraph (“Can we help sympathizing with our friends?”) and the quotation from Smith (“How selfish soever man may be supposed …”). The central idea underlying all three statements is that distress at the sight of another’s pain is an impulse over which we exert little or no control: it grabs us instantaneously, like a reflex, without time to weigh the pros and cons. All three statements hint at an involuntary process such as PAM. Remarkably, the possible alternative motives brought up by Mencius also feature in the modern literature, usually under the heading of reputation building. The big difference is, of course, that Mencius rejected these explanations as too contrived, given the immediacy and force of the sympathetic impulse. Manipulation of public opinion is entirely possible at other times, he said, but not at the very instant that a child falls into a well.

  I could not agree more. Evolution has produced species that follow genuinely cooperative impulses. I don’t know if people are, deep down, good or evil, but to believe that each and every move is selfishly calculated, while being hidden from others (and often from ourselves), seems to grossly overestimate human intellectual powers, let alone those of other animals. Apart from the already discussed animal examples of consolation of distressed individuals and protection against aggression, there exists a rich literature on human empathy and sympathy that, generally, agrees with the assessment of Mencius that impulses in this regard come first and rationalizations later (e.g., Batson 1990; Wispe 1991).

  COMMUNITY CONCERN

  In this essay, I have drawn a stark contrast between two schools of thought on human goodness. One school sees people as essentially evil and selfish, and hence morality as a mere cultural overlay. This school, personified by T. H. Huxley, is still very much with us even though I have noticed that no one (not even those explicitly endorsing this position) likes to be called a “veneer theorist.” This may be due to wording, or because once the assumptions behind Veneer Theory are laid bare, it becomes obvious that—unless one is willing to go the purely rationalist route of modern Hobbesians, such as Gauthier (1986)—the theory lacks any sort of explanation of how we moved from being amoral animals to moral beings. The theory is at odds with the evidence for emotional processing as driving force behind moral judgment. If human morality could truly be reduced to calculations and reasoning, we would come close to being psychopaths, who indeed do not mean to be kind when they act kindly. Most of us hope to be slightly better than that, hence the possible aversion to my black-and-white contrast between Veneer Theory and the alternative school, which seeks to ground morality in human nature.

  This school sees morality arise naturally in our species and believes that there are sound evolutionary reasons for the capacities involved. Nevertheless, the theoretical framework to explain the transition from social animal to moral human consists only of bits and pieces. Its foundations are the theories of kin selection and reciprocal altruism, but it is obvious that other elements will need to be added. If one reads up on reputation building, fairness principles, empathy, and conflict resolution (in disparate literatures that cannot be reviewed here), there seems a promising movement toward a more integrated theory of how morality may have come about (see Katz 2000).

  It should further be noted that th
e evolutionary pressures responsible for our moral tendencies may not all have been nice and positive. After all, morality is very much an in-group phenomenon. Universally, humans treat outsiders far worse than members of their own community: in fact, moral rules hardly seem to apply to the outside. True, in modern times there is a movement to expand the circle of morality, and to include even enemy combatants—e.g., the Geneva Convention, adopted in 1949—but we all know how fragile an effort this is. Morality likely evolved as a within-group phenomenon in conjunction with other typical within-group capacities, such as conflict resolution, cooperation, and sharing.

  The first loyalty of every individual is not to the group, however, but to itself and its kin. With increasing social integration and reliance on cooperation, shared interests must have risen to the surface so that the community as a whole became an issue. The biggest step in the evolution of human morality was the move from interpersonal relations to a focus on the greater good. In apes, we can see the beginnings of this when they smooth relations between others. Females may bring males together after a fight between them, thus brokering a reconciliation, and high-ranking males often stop fights among others in an evenhanded manner, thus promoting peace in the group. I see such behavior as a reflection of community concern (de Waal 1996), which in turn reflects the stake each group member has in a cooperative atmosphere. Most individuals have much to lose if the community were to fall apart, hence the interest in its integrity and harmony. Discussing similar issues, Boehm (1999) added the role of social pressure, at least in humans: the entire community works at rewarding group-promoting behavior and punishing group-undermining behavior.

  Obviously, the most potent force to bring out a sense of community is enmity toward outsiders. It forces unity among elements that are normally at odds. This may not be visible at the zoo, but it is definitely a factor for chimpanzees in the wild, which show lethal intercommunity violence (Wrangham and Peterson 1996). In our own species, nothing is more obvious than that we band together against adversaries. In the course of human evolution, out-group hostility enhanced in-group solidarity to the point that morality emerged. Instead of merely ameliorating relations around us, as apes do, we have explicit teachings about the value of the community and the precedence it takes, or ought to take, over individual interests. Humans go much further in all of this than the apes (Alexander 1987), which is why we have moral systems and apes do not.

  And so, the profound irony is that our noblest achievement—morality—has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior—warfare. The sense of community required by the former was provided by the latter. When we passed the tipping point between conflicting individual interests and shared interests, we ratcheted up the social pressure to make sure everyone contributed to the common good.

  If we accept this view of an evolved morality, of morality as a logical outgrowth of cooperative tendencies, we are not going against our own nature by developing a caring, moral attitude, any more than civil society is an out-of-control garden subdued by a sweating gardener, as Huxley (1989 [1894]) thought. Moral attitudes have been with us from the start, and the gardener rather is, as Dewey aptly put it, an organic grower. The successful gardener creates conditions and introduces plant species that may not be normal for this particular plot of land “but fall within the wont and use of nature as a whole” (Dewey 1993 [1898]: 109–10). In other words, we are not hypocritically fooling everyone when we act morally: we are making decisions that flow from social instincts older than our species, even though we add to these the uniquely human complexity of a disinterested concern for others and for society as a whole.

  Following Hume (1985 [1739]), who saw reason as the slave of the passions, Haidt (2001) has called for a thorough reevaluation of the role played by rationality in moral judgment, arguing that most human justification seems to occur post hoc, that is, after moral judgments have been reached on the basis of quick, automated intuitions. Whereas Veneer Theory, with its emphasis on human uniqueness, would predict that moral problem solving is assigned to evolutionarily recent additions to our brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, neuroimaging shows that moral judgment in fact involves a wide variety of brain areas, some extremely ancient (Greene and Haidt 2002). In short, neuroscience seems to be lending support to human morality as evolutionarily anchored in mammalian sociality.

  We celebrate rationality, but when push comes to shove we assign it little weight (Macintyre 1999). This is especially true in the moral domain. Imagine that an extraterrestrial consultant instructs us to kill people as soon as they come down with influenza. In doing so, we are told, we would kill far fewer people than would die if the epidemic were allowed to run its course. By nipping the flu in the bud, we would save lives. Logical as this may sound, I doubt that many of us would opt for this plan. This is because human morality is firmly anchored in the social emotions, with empathy at its core. Emotions are our compass. We have strong inhibitions against killing members of our own community, and our moral decisions reflect these feelings. For the same reasons, people object to moral solutions that involve hands-on harm to another (Greene and Haidt 2002). This may be because hands-on violence has been subject to natural selection, whereas utilitarian deliberations have not.

  Additional support for an intuitionist approach to morality comes from child research. Developmental psychologists used to believe that the child learns its first moral distinctions through fear of punishment and a desire for praise. Similar to veneer theorists, they conceived morality as coming from the outside, imposed by adults upon a passive, naturally selfish child. Children were thought to adopt parental values to construct a superego: the moral agency of the self. Left to their own devices, children would never arrive at anything close to morality. We know now, however, that at an early age children understand the difference between moral principles (“do not steal”) and cultural conventions (“no pajamas at school”). They apparently appreciate that the breaking of certain rules distresses and harms others, whereas the breaking of other rules merely violates expectations about what is appropriate. Their attitudes don’t seem based purely on reward and punishment. Whereas many pediatric handbooks still depict young children as self-centered monsters, it has become clear that by one year of age they spontaneously comfort others in distress (Zahn-Waxler et al. 1992) and that soon thereafter they begin to develop a moral perspective through interactions with other members of their species (Killen and Nucci 1995).

  Instead of our doing “violence to the willow,” as Mencius called it, to create the cups and bowls of an artificial morality, we rely on natural growth in which simple emotions, like those encountered in young children and social animals, develop into the more refined, other-including sentiments that we recognize as underlying morality. My own argument here obviously revolves around the continuity between human social instincts and those of our closest relatives, the monkeys and apes, but I feel that we are standing at the threshold of a much larger shift in theorizing that will end up positioning morality firmly within the emotional core of human nature. Humean thinking is making a major comeback.

  Why did evolutionary biology stray from this path during the final quarter of the twentieth century? Why was morality considered unnatural, why were altruists depicted as hypocrites, and why were emotions left out of the debate? Why the calls to go against our own nature and to distrust a “Darwinian world”? The answer lies in what I have called the Beethoven error. In the same way that Ludwig van Beethoven is said to have produced his beautiful, intricate compositions in one of the most disorderly and dirty apartments of Vienna, there is not much of a connection between the process of natural selection and its many products. The Beethoven error is to think that, since natural selection is a cruel, pitiless process of elimination, it can only have produced cruel and pitiless creatures (de Waal 2005).

  But nature’s pressure cooker does not work that way. It favors organisms that survive and reproduce, pure and simple. How they accomplish this is left
open. Any organism that can do better by becoming either more or less aggressive than the rest, more or less cooperative, or more or less caring, will spread its genes.

  The process does not specify the road to success. Natural selection has the capacity of producing an incredible range of organisms, from the most asocial and competitive to the kindest and gentlest. The same process may not have specified our moral rules and values, but it has provided us with the psychological makeup, tendencies, and abilities to develop a compass for life’s choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality.

  Appendix A

  Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial

  Often, when human visitors walk up to the chimpanzees at the Yerkes Field Station, an adult female named Georgia (figure 8) hurries to the spigot to collect a mouthful of water before they arrive. She then casually mingles with the rest of the colony behind the mesh fence of their outdoor compound, and not even the best observer will notice anything unusual about her. If necessary, Georgia will wait minutes with closed lips until the visitors come near. Then there will be shrieks, laughs, jumps, and sometimes falls, when she suddenly sprays them.

  This is not a mere “anecdote,” as Georgia does this sort of thing predictably, and I have known quite a few other apes good at surprising naive people—and not just naive people. Hediger (1955), the great Swiss zoo biologist, recounts how even when he was fully prepared to meet the challenge, paying attention to the ape’s every move, he nevertheless got drenched by an old chimpanzee with a lifetime of experience with this game.