Primates and Philosophers_How Morality Evolved

by Frans de Waal

  Chimpanzee societies show overt conflicts, resolved by elaborate peacemaking. There are also conflicts within the chimpanzees themselves. Sometimes a chimpanzee has a tendency to share that militates against a tendency to keep a food item for itself—the leafy branch is stiffly held out towards a beggar and the chimp in possession averts its face, half-turning away;10 the rigidity of the posture, the redirected gaze, and the expression of discontent make the inner conflict as clear as in the determined dieter who salivates as she resolutely passes the tempting food tray. The frequency of overt conflicts could be reduced if there were some device for resolving the inner conflicts in the right way. As things stand, however, chimpanzees are wantons (in Harry Frankfurt’s helpful terminology), vulnerable to whichever impulse happens to be dominant at a particular moment.

  Somewhere in hominid evolution came a step that provided us with a psychological device for overcoming wantonness. I am inclined to think of it as part of what made us fully human. Perhaps it began with an awareness that certain forms of projected behavior might have troublesome results and a consequent ability to inhibit the desires that would otherwise have been dominant. I suspect that it was linked to the evolution of our linguistic capacity, and even that one facet of the selective advantage of linguistic ability lay in helping us to know when to restrain our impulses. As I envisage it, our ancestors became able to formulate patterns for action, to discuss them with one another, and to arrive at ways of regulating the conduct of group members.11

  At this stage, I conjecture, there began a process of cultural evolution. Different small bands of human beings tried out various sets of normative resources—rules, stories, myths, images, and more—to define the way in which “we” live. Some of these were more popular with neighbors and with descendant groups, perhaps because they offered greater reproductive success, more likely because they made for smoother societies, greater harmony, and increased cooperation. The most successful ones were transmitted across the generations, appearing in fragmentary ways in the first documents we have, the addenda to law codes of societies in Mesopotamia.

  Most of this process is invisible because of the long period between the full acquisition of linguistic ability (50,000 years ago at the very latest) and the invention of writing (5,000 years ago). There are fascinating hints of important developments: the cave art and the figurines, for example. Most significant are the indications of greater ability to cooperate with individuals who don’t belong to the local band. From about 20,000 years ago on, the remains of some sites show an increase in the number of individuals present at a particular time, as if several smaller bands had come together there. Even more intriguing are finds of tools made of particular materials at considerable distances from the nearest natural source; perhaps these should be understood in terms of the development of “trading networks,” as some archeologists have proposed; or perhaps they should be viewed as indicators of the ability of strangers to negotiate their way through the territories of many different bands. Whichever alternative one selects, these phenomena reveal an increased capacity for cooperation and social interaction, one that becomes fully manifest in the large Neolithic settlements at Jericho and Çatal Hüyük.

  Whether or not we can ever do more than guess at the actual course of events, there is, I think, a possible evolutionary account of how we got here from there, one which sees the development of a capacity for normative guidance—perhaps understood in that enlargement and refinement of sympathy that gives rise to Smith’s impartial spectator—as a crucial step. Once that was in place, and once we had languages in which to engage in discussions with one another, the explicit moral practices, the compendia of rules, parables, and stories, could be developed in cultural lineages, some of which extend into the present. To revert to Huxley’s famous image, we became gardeners, having, as part of our nature, an impulse to root out the weeds that are parts of our psyche, and to foster other plants by adding a stake here or a trellis there. Moreover, with us, as with any garden, the project is never finished but continues indefinitely, as new circumstances and new varieties arise.12

  VI

  In returning to Huxley have I ended up with Veneer Theory? Surely not in the simple version de Waal aims to demolish. How then does it stand with the idea that our evolutionary relatives have the “building blocks” of morality, that our moral practices and dispositions are “direct outgrowths” of capacities we share with them? As I complained earlier, these phrases are too vague to be helpful. There are important continuities between human moral agents and chimpanzees: we share dispositions to psychological altruism without which any genuinely moral action would be impossible. But I suspect that between us and our most recent common ancestor with the chimps there have been some very important evolutionary steps: the emergence of a capacity for normative guidance and self-control, the ability to speak and to discuss potential moral resources with one another, and about fifty thousand years (at least) of important cultural evolution. As Steve Gould saw so clearly, in any evaluation of our evolutionary history you can emphasize the continuities or the discontinuities. I think little is gained by either emphasis. You do better simply to recognize what has endured and what has altered.

  Of course, de Waal might reject my speculations about how we got from there to here. Despite the fact that I think my story integrates insights he has developed at different stages of his career, he might prefer some alternative. The important point is that some account of this kind is needed. For central to my argument is the thesis that mere demonstration of some type of psychological altruism in chimpanzees (or other higher primates) shows very little about the origins or evolution of ethics. I am happy to consign Veneer Theory (though not Huxley’s insights!) to the flames. That, however, is only the start of making the many primatological insights de Waal has given us relevant to our understanding of human morality.

  1 See, for example, Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson, “Moral Philosophy as Applied Science,” Philosophy, 61,1986, 173–92. Although this essay takes a radically oversimplified view of the content of morality, I think it would be unfair to accuse Ruse and Wilson of going all the way to STCT. For discussion of the flaws of sociobiological ventures in ethics, see the last chapter of my Vaulting Ambition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) and “Four Ways of “Biologicizing’ Ethics” (most easily available in my collection In Mendel’s Mirror [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003]).

  2 This requires developing the approaches to cooperation pioneered by Robert Trivers, Robert Axelrod, and W. D. Hamilton, so as to take account of the underlying motivations. For one possible approach, see my essay “The Evolution of Human Altruism” (Journal of Philosophy 1993; reprinted in In Mendel’s Mirror).

  3 See “The Evolution of Human Altruism.” As noted there, the response can range from complete self-abnegation (give all) through “golden-rule altruism” (split evenly) to complete selfishness (give none).

  4 See Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

  5 It also seems to me that this example avoids the worry that Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson belabor in the final chapter of their excellent study of altruism, Unto Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). It’s very hard to suppose that Jakie was moved by desire for the glow that comes from recognizing that one has acted rightly (or as the community would approve), or by desire to avoid the pang that comes from recognition that one has not. These psychological hypotheses really do invite the charge of unwarranted anthropomorphism.

  6 At a conference at the London School of Economics, de Waal was inclined to present them in similar terms. The Tanner Lectures correctly back away from that interpretation. For, as many people at the LSE meeting pointed out, protests on the part of the aggrieved party don’t do much to demonstrate a sense of fairness. Of course, if the lucky capuchin were to throw down the grape until his comrade had a similar reward, that would be very interesting!

  7 It seems to me t
hat not only those in the Hume-Smith tradition, but also the strictest Kantians, can accept this point. An extreme Kantian might suppose that the psychologically altruistic response proceeds through the operation of reason, by “cold cognition” rather than by Humean or Smithian sympathy.

  8 I describe in more detail how this process of refinement is supposed to occur in “The Hall of Mirrors” (in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association November 1985, 67–84.). In that essay, I also argue that Smith’s procedure (like Hume’s much less developed version) cannot eradicate widely shared biases. Appreciating this point leads me to offer a modification of the ethical project along lines suggested by Dewey—instead of thinking of the enlargement of sympathy as providing a finished ethical system, we should view it as a device for going on from where we are.

  9 Dewey is especially clear on the fact that moral conflict is often not a matter of overcoming the selfish, but deciding which of two conflicting ideals has precedence.

  10 My account here is based on my own, highly limited, observations at the Wild Animal Park near San Diego; the animal I saw belonged to the celebrated bonobo colony there; I don’t think that the fact that it was a bonobo, rather than a common chimpanzee, makes any difference to the point.

  11 Here I am indebted to one of the philosophically most sophisticated attempts to set our moral practice in the context of human evolution, Allan Gibbard’s Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). I think Gibbard is right to emphasize the role of conversation about what to do in the history of moral thinking, from small bands of human beings to the societies of the present.

  12 This is the Deweyan version of the moral project, which I outline more fully in “The Hall of Mirrors.”

  Morality, Reason, and the

  Rights of Animals

  PETER SINGER

  My response to Frans de Waal’s rich and stimulating Tanner Lectures falls into two parts. The first and longer part raises some issues about the nature of morality, and specifically, de Waal’s critique of what he calls “morality as veneer.” The second part questions what de-Waal says in his appendix about the moral status of animals. On both these topics I will emphasize points on which I disagree with de Waal, so it is necessary to say here that the positions we share are more important than our differences. I hope that will become apparent in what follows.

  DE WAAL’S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY AS VENEER

  In The Expanding Circle, published in 1981, I argued that the origins of morality are to be found in the nonhuman social mammals from which we evolved. I rejected the view that morality is a matter of culture, rather than biology, or that morality is uniquely human and entirely without roots in our evolutionary history. The development of kin altruism and reciprocal altruism are, I suggested, much more central to our own morality than we recognize.1 De Waal shares these views, and brings to them a far richer store of knowledge of primate behavior than I could command. It is encouraging to have the support of someone so familiar with our primate relatives, and who affirms, on the basis of that knowledge, the view that there is a great deal of continuity between the social behavior of nonhuman animals and our own moral standards.

  De Waal criticizes social contract theory for assuming that there was once a time at which there were humans who were not social beings. Of course, it may be questioned whether any of the major social contract theorists believed they were putting forward a historical account of the origins of morality, but certainly many of their readers have come away with the impression that they did. We may also ask what can be learned from theories that take as their starting point a historically false postulate—that if it were not for the contract, we would be isolated egoists—even if they do not assume this to have actually been the case. Perhaps starting from that point has contributed to what de Waal refers to as the saturation of Western civilization “with the assumption that we are asocial, even nasty creatures.”

  De Waal rightly rejects the view that all of our morality is “a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding an otherwise selfish and brutish nature.” Yet because he fails to give sufficient weight to differences he himself acknowledges between primate social behavior and human morality, his dismissal of the Veneer Theory is too swift and he is too harsh with some of its advocates.

  To understand exactly what de Waal gets right and what he gets wrong, we need to distinguish two different claims:

  Human nature is inherently social and the roots of human ethics lie in the evolved psychological traits and patterns of behavior that we share with other social mammals, especially primates.

  All of human ethics derives from our evolved nature as social mammals.

  We should accept the first claim and reject the second. But at times de Waal appears to accept them both.

  Consider de Waal’s critique of T. H. Huxley, who he takes to be the originator of modern Veneer Theory. De Waal writes of “Huxley’s curious dualism, which pits morality against nature and humanity against all other animals.” As an initial comment, we might note that there is nothing really “curious” about a dualism that has been a standard refrain in one strand—arguably the dominant strand—of Western ethics ever since Plato distinguished different parts of the soul, and likened human nature to a chariot with two horses whom the charioteer must control and make to work together.2 Kant built the dualism into his metaphysics, suggesting that whereas our desires—including our sympathetic concern for the welfare of others—come from our physical nature, our knowledge of the universal law of morality comes from our nature as rational beings.3 It’s a distinction that has obvious problems, but as we shall see, it would be wrong to dismiss it too lightly.

  Perhaps de Waal thinks that Huxley’s position is curious because he is a defender of Darwin, and seems here to be departing from a truly evolutionary approach to ethics. But Darwin himself wrote, in The Descent of Man, that “The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals.” The differences between Huxley and Darwin on this issue are less clear-cut than de Waal suggests.

  That the problem “Veneer Theory” seeks to address is not to be dismissed lightly is perhaps best shown by de Waal’s own remarks on Edward Westermarck. De Waal rightly praises Westermarck, whose work is given insufficient attention today. De Waal describes him as “the first scholar to promote an integrated view including both humans and animals and both culture and evolution.” Perhaps “the most insightful part of Westermarck’s work,” in de Waal’s opinion, is that in which he tries to distinguish the specifically moral emotions from other emotions. Westermarck, de Waal tells us, “shows that there is more to these emotions than raw gut feeling” and explains that the difference between the moral feelings and “kindred non-moral emotions” is to be found in the “disinterestedness, apparent impartiality, and flavour of generality” shown by the former. De Waal himself elaborates on this thought in the following passage:

  Moral emotions ought to be disconnected from one’s immediate situation: they deal with good and bad at a more abstract, disinterested level. It is only when we make general judgments of how anyone ought to be treated that we can begin to speak of moral approval and disapproval. It is in this specific area, famously symbolized by Smith’s (1937 [1759]) “impartial spectator,” that humans seem to go radically further than other primates.

  From where, however, does this concern for judgments made from the perspective of the impartial spectator arise? Not, it appears, from our evolved nature. “Morality likely evolved,” de Waal tells us, “as a within-group phenomenon in conjunction with other typical within-group capacities, such as conflict resolution, cooperation, and sharing.” Consistently with this idea, de Waal notes that in practice we often fail to put the impartial perspective into practice:

  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 movemen
t 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.

  Consider what de Waal is saying in these passages. On the one hand, we have an evolved nature, which we share with other primates, that gives rise to a morality based on kinship, reciprocity, and empathy with other members of one’s own group. On the other hand, the best way of capturing what is distinctive about the moral emotions is that they take an impartial perspective, which leads us to consider the interests of those outside our own group. So central to our current notion of morality is this, that de Waal himself says, as we have just seen, that it is only when we make these general, impartial judgments that we can really begin to speak of moral approval and disapproval.

  The idea of this broadly impartial morality is not new. De Waal quotes Adam Smith, but the idea of a universal morality goes back as least as far as the fifth century before the Christian era, when the Chinese philosopher Mozi, appalled at the damage caused by war, asked: “What is the way of universal love and mutual benefit?” and answered his own question: “It is to regard other people’s countries as one’s own.”4 Yet, as de Waal points out, the practice of this more impartial morality is “fragile.” Doesn’t this conception come very close to saying that the impartial element of morality is a veneer, laid over our evolved nature?