Primates and Philosophers_How Morality Evolved

by Frans de Waal

I propose this as an answer to a question de Waal raises in Good Natured: “What is different about the way we act that makes us, and not any other species, moral beings?” But although I believe the capacity for autonomy is characteristic of human beings and probably unique to human beings, the question how far in the animal kingdom that capacity extends is certainly an empirical one. There is nothing unnatural, nonnatural, or mystical about the capacity for normative self-government. What it requires is a certain form of self-consciousness: namely, consciousness of the grounds on which you propose to act as grounds. What I mean is this: a nonhuman agent may be conscious of the object of his fear or desire, and conscious of it as fearful or desirable, and so as something to be avoided or to be sought. That is the ground of his action. But a rational animal is, in addition, conscious that she fears or desires the object, and that she is inclined to act in a certain way as a result.11 That’s what I mean by being conscious of the ground as a ground. She does not just think about the object that she fears or even about its fearfulness but about her fears and desires themselves. Once you are aware that you are being moved in a certain way, you have a certain reflective distance from the motive, and you are in a position to ask yourself “but should I be moved in that way? Wanting that end inclines me to do that act, but does it really give me a reason to do that act?” You are now in a position to raise a normative question about what you ought to do.

  I believe that, in general, this form of self-consciousness— consciousness of the grounds of our beliefs and actions—is the source of reason, a capacity that is distinct from intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to learn about the world, to learn from experience, to make new connections of cause and effect, and put that knowledge to work in pursuing your ends. Reason by contrast looks inward, and focuses on the connections between mental states and activities: whether our actions are justified by our motives or our inferences are justified by our beliefs. I think we could say things about the beliefs of intelligent nonhuman animals that parallel what I am now saying about their actions. Nonhuman animals may have beliefs and may arrive at those beliefs under the influence of evidence, but it is a further step to be the sort of animal that can ask oneself whether the evidence really justifies the belief, and can adjust one’s conclusions accordingly.12

  Both Adam Smith and, following him, Charles Darwin believed that giving an account of the capacity for normative self-government is essential to explaining the development of morality, because it is essential to explaining what Darwin describes as “that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance.”13 And interestingly, both of them explained it by appeal to our social nature.14 In Smith’s account, it is sympathy with the responses of others to ourselves that first turns our attention inward, creating a consciousness of our own motives and characters as objects to be judged. Sympathy, for Smith, is a tendency to put ourselves in the shoes of others and think about the way we would react if we were in their circumstances. We judge another’s feelings and the resulting actions to be proper if they are what we suppose we would feel in his place. If human beings were solitary, Smith argues, our attention would be focused outward: a human afraid of a lion would think about the lion, not about his own fear. Because we are social animals, sympathy leads us to consider how we ourselves appear from the point of view of others, and to enter into their feelings about us. Through the eyes of others we become the spectators of our own conduct, dividing internally, as Smith described it, into an actor and a spectator, and forming judgments about the propriety of our own feelings and motives. The internal spectator transforms our natural desire to be thought well of and praised into something deeper, a desire to be worthy of praise. For to judge that we are worthy of praise is to judge that it would be proper for others to praise us, and the internal spectator, who knows our inner motives, is in a position to make a judgment about that. In this way we develop the capacity to be motivated by thoughts about what we ought to do and what we ought to be like.15

  Darwin speculates that the capacity for normative self-government arose from a difference in the way we are affected by our social instincts and our appetites. The effect of the social instincts on the mind is constant and calm, while that of the appetites is episodic and sharp. Social animals will therefore be under frequent temptations to violate their social instincts for the sake of their appetites, as say when an animal neglects her offspring while mating. But it is a familiar experience that satisfying an appetite seems more important when you are actually in its grip than after you have satisfied it. So once a social animal’s mental faculties develop to the point where she can remember giving way to such temptations, they will seem to her not to have been worth it, and she will eventually learn to control such impulses. Our capacity to be motivated by the imperious word “ought,” Darwin suggests, has its origins in this kind of experience.16

  In an essay called “Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History,” Kant speculated that the form of self-consciousness that underlies our autonomy may also play a role in the explanation of some of the other distinctively human attributes—including culture, romantic love, and the capacity to act from self-interest. Other philosophers have noticed the connection of self-consciousness of this sort with the capacity for language. I can’t go into those arguments here, but if they are correct they would provide evidence that only human beings have this form of self-consciousness.17

  If that is right, then the capacity for normative self-government and the deeper level of intentional control that goes with it is probably unique to human beings. And it is in the proper use of this capacity—the ability to form and act on judgments of what we ought to do—that the essence of morality lies, not in altruism or the pursuit of the greater good. So I do not agree with de Waal when he says, “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, which is why we have moral systems and apes do not” (p. 54). The difference here is not a mere matter of degree.

  And it isn’t a small difference, that ability to be motivated by an ought. It does represent what de Waal calls a saltatory change. A form of life governed by principles and values is a very different thing from a form of life governed by instinct, desire, and emotion—even a very intelligent and sociable form of life governed by instinct, desire, and emotion. Kant’s story about the man deciding to face death rather than bear false witness is the stuff of high moral drama, but it has its constant analog in our everyday lives. We have ideas about what we ought to do and to be like and we are constantly trying to live up to them. Apes do not live in that way. We struggle to be honest and courteous and responsible and brave in circumstances where it is difficult. Even if apes are sometimes courteous, responsible, and brave, it is not because they think they should be. Even as primitive a phenomenon as a teenager’s efforts to be “cool” is a manifestation of the human tendency to live a life guided by ideals rather than merely driven by impulses and desires. We also suffer deeply from our self-evaluations and act in sick and evil ways as a result. This is part of what I had in mind earlier when I said that human beings seem psychologically damaged in a way that suggests a break with nature. But none of this is a way of saying that morality is a thin veneer on our animal nature. It’s the exact contrary: the distinctive character of human action gives us a whole different way of being in the world.

  My point is not that human beings live lives of principle and value and so are very noble, while the other animals don’t and so are ignoble. The distinctiveness of human action is as much a source of our capacity for evil as of our capacity for good. An animal cannot be judged or held responsible for following its strongest impulse. Animals are not ignoble; they are beyond moral judgment. I agree with de Waal that saying that a person who acts badly acts “like an animal” (“man is wolf to man”) can be very misleading in one way. B
ut in another way it is no more an insult to nonhuman animals than saying of a brain-damaged person that he has become a vegetable is an insult to plants. Just as the second remark means that the person has fallen away from his animate nature, the first means that he has fallen away from his human nature. In following his strongest impulse without question or reflection he has failed to exercise his capacity for the kind of intentional control over his movements that makes us human. That is not the only form of wrongdoing, but it is one.

  Earlier I said that we are likely to feel more comfortable about the various ways in which we use the other animals if we think they are very different from ourselves. So it is important for me to say that I do not think the difference that I have been describing should provide that comfort. Exactly the opposite is true. In Good Natured, de Waal tells a story about an angry capuchin hurling objects at a human observer. When he ran out of other things to throw, the capuchin picked up a squirrel monkey and threw her at the human. De Waal remarks, “Animals often seem to regard those who belong to another kind as merely ambulant objects.”18 But no species is more guilty of treating those who belong to other kinds as ambulant objects than we are, and we are the only species that knows it is wrong. As beings who are capable of doing what we ought and holding ourselves responsible for what we do, and as beings who are capable of caring about what we are and not just about what we can get for ourselves, we are under a strong obligation to treat the other animals decently, even at cost to ourselves.

  1 In Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 111.

  2 In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 88–89.

  3 Butler, in Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726), partly reprinted in Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and A Dissertation Upon the Nature of Virtue, edited by Stephen Darwall, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983; Sidgwick, in The Methods of Ethics (1st ed., 1874, 7th ed., 1907). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981); Nagel, in The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); and Parfit, in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). For a discussion of the problems with providing a normative foundation for this supposed rational principle, see my “The Myth of Egoism” published by the University of Kansas as the Lindley Lecture for 1999.

  4 “Men daily, hourly sacrifice the greatest known interest to fancy, inquisitiveness, love, or hatred, any vagrant inclination. The thing to be lamented is not that men have so great a regard to their own good or interest in the present world, for they have not enough, but that they have so little to the good of others.” Butler, Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and A Dissertation Upon the Nature of Virtue, p.21.

  5 I owe some of these points to Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, pp.82 ff. Nagel characterizes the condition as one of “practical solipsism.”

  6 Good Natured, p. 205.

  7 In An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699). I am quoting from D. D. Raphael’s British Moralists, vol. I, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991, pp. 173–174.

  8 In An Inquiry Concerning the Original of our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good (1726), Moralists, in ibid., vol. I, p. 295. In a later work, Hutcheson argued that it was confused to think that we can be motivated by moral considerations (Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728), ed. Bernard Peach, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 139–140). The primary source for Hume’s view is Book III of Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740, 2nd edition, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). The primary discussion of the role of moral motivation in moral thought is Book III, Part II, Section One, pp. 477–484.

  9 The Critique of Practical Reason(1788), translated by Mary Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 27.

  10 Although it may not seem at all obvious, the argument I have just given is a version of the argument that leads Kant, in the first section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), to the conclusion that “an action from duty has its moral worth not in the purpose to be attained by it but in the maxim in accordance with which it is decided upon.” I am quoting from the translation by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 13.

  11 Being conscious of the ground of your beliefs and actions as grounds is a form of self-consciousness because it involves identifying yourself as the subject of certain of your own mental representations.

  12 I pursue this argument in The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

  13 The Descent of Man, p. 70.

  14 Freud and Nietzsche also appeal to our social nature to explain the origin of morality. They think that our ability to command ourselves is the result of our internalizing our dominance instincts and turning them against ourselves. Psychologically, the phenomenon of dominance seems to me a promising place to look for the evolutionary origin of the ability to be motivated by an ought, as I proposed in The Sources of Normativity, pp. 157–160. For Freud’s account, see Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. James Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), especially chapter VII. For Nietzsche’s, see The Genealogy of Morals (trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1967), especially essay II.

  15 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982.

  16 The Descent of Man, pp. 87–93.

  17 “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History” (1786) can be found in Kant: Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Hans Reiss and trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

  18 Good Natured, p.84.

  Ethics and Evolution

  How to Get Here from There

  PHILIP KITCHER

  I

  With the possible exception of Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal has done more than any other primatologist to change our understanding of the social lives of our closest living evolutionary relatives. His painstaking observations and experiments have exposed capacities for identifying and responding to the needs of conspecifics, apparently most sophisticated in chimpanzees and bonobos, but present in other primates as well. His detailed accounts of the ways in which these capacities are manifested have broken the stranglehold of the fear, once common among primatologists, that postulating complex psychological states and dispositions is sentimental anthropomorphism. Any scholar who hopes to use primate social behavior as a lens for understanding aspects of our own practices should be profoundly grateful.

  In his Tanner Lectures, de Waal intends to build on his decades of careful research to elaborate the program Darwin envisaged in chapter 5 of The Descent of Man. Human morality, he suggests, stems from dispositions we share with other primates, particularly with those closest to us on the phylogenetic tree. Yet my formulation of his position, like his own, is vague in crucial respects: what exactly is meant by claiming that morality “stems from” traits present in chimpanzees, or that morality is “a direct outgrowth of the social instincts we share with other animals,” or that “deep down” we are truly moral, or that “the building blocks of morality are evolutionarily ancient”? I want to focus the position more precisely by articulating a particular version of what de Waal might have in mind. If this version is not what he intends, I hope it will prompt him to develop his preferred alternative with more specificity than he has done so far.

  In fact, I think de Waal’s own presentation is hampered by his desire to take a sledgehammer to something he conceives of as the rival to his own view. That rival, “Veneer Theory,” is to be demolished. The fact that the demolition is so easy should alert us to the possibility that the real issues have not been exposed and addressed.

  II

  Veneer Theory, as I understand it, divides the animal kingdom into two. There are nonhuman animals who lack any capacity for sympathy and kindness, and whose actions, to
the extent that they can be understood as intentional at all, are the expression of selfish desires. There are also human beings, often driven by selfish impulses to be sure, but capable of rising above egoism to sympathize with others, to curb their baser tendencies, and to sacrifice their own interests for higher ideals. Members of our species have the selfish dispositions that pervade the psychologically more complex parts of the rest of the animal world, but they have something else, an ability to subdue these dispositions. Our psyches are not just full of weeds; we also have a capacity for gardening.

  De Waal associates this position with T. H. Huxley, whose famous lecture of 1893 introduced the gardening metaphor. He accuses Huxley of deviating from Darwinism on this point, but it is not clear to me that, even if this is an adequate statement of Huxley’s view (which I doubt), the accusation is justified. A fully Darwinian Huxley might claim that human evolution involved the emergence of a psychological trait that has a tendency to inhibit another part of our psychological nature; it is not that something mysterious outside us opposes our nature, but that we come to experience internal conflicts of a kind that had not previously figured in our lives. It would be quite reasonable, of course, to ask this Darwinian Huxley to offer an account of how this new mechanism might have evolved, but, even if any answer proved to be speculative, Huxley would be innocent of assuming that morality is some sort of nonnaturalistic addition.

  The version of Veneer Theory I have sketched, and the one that occupies de Waal, takes a specific view of the starting point and the end point. Back in our evolutionary past, we had ancestors, as recent as the common ancestors of human beings and chimpanzees, who lacked any capacities for sympathy and altruism. Present human beings have ways of disciplining their selfish urges, and the theory thinks of morality as this collection of disciplinary strategies. The real objection to Veneer Theory in this form is that it has the starting point wrong. It is falsified by all the evidence de Waal has acquired about the other-directed tendencies of chimpanzees, bonobos, and, to a lesser extent, other primates.