Primates and Philosophers_How Morality Evolved

by Frans de Waal

  Kitcher and Korsgaard sharply distinguish animal behavior motivated by emotion from human morality, which they argue must be based on cognitive self-consciousness about the propriety of one’s proposed line of action. Kitcher draws the line by making Humean/Smithian “spectatorism” into a kind of self-consciousness requiring speech. Korsgaard appeals to the Kantian conception of autonomous self-governance as the necessary foundation for genuine morality. Both Kitcher and Korsgaard describe nonhuman animals as “wantons,” helping themselves to a concept developed in other contexts by the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Frankfurtian wantons lack a mechanism by which to discriminate in any consistent way among the various motivations that from time to time might prompt them to act. And thus wantons cannot be said to be guided by self-conscious reasoning on the propriety of their proposed actions. Yet at this point the question arises of whether Kitcher and Korsgaard are setting the bar of morality at a level that most human action fails to reach. Each philosopher offers a self-consciously normative account of morality as how people ought to act, rather than a descriptive account of how most of us actually do act most of the time. If most humans, in their actual behavior, act like wantons, it takes some of the sting out of the claim that all nonhuman animals act like wantons too.

  The same issue arises in Singer’s discussion of what moral philosophers call “trolley problems.” Singer’s consequentialist concern with aggregating interests leads him to claim that moral reason demands that, under the right circumstances, one ought to push another human being in front of a runaway trolley in order to save five others (the premise is that one’s own body is too light to stop the trolley, whereas the pushed individual is of sufficient mass). Singer alludes to studies of brain scans of individuals as they answer the question of how one should act in the “kill one to save five” situation. People who say that one should not kill in that situation make quick judgments and their brain activity at the moment of decision is concentrated in areas associated with emotion. Those who say that one ought to kill manifest increased activity in parts of the brain associated with rational cognition. Singer thus claims that what he regards as the morally correct answer is also the cognitively rational answer. Yet Singer also acknowledges that those giving the correct answer are in the minority: most people do not say that they would choose to act personally to kill one individual to save five others. Singer does not cite any cases of people actually pushing others in front of trolleys.

  The point is that de Waal’s evidence, quantitative and anecdotal, for primate emotional response is based entirely on observations of actual behavior. De Waal must base his account of primate morality on how primates do in fact act because he has no access to their “ought” stories about what moral reason might ideally demand of them, or to how they suppose they ought to act in a hypothetical situation. So there seems to be a risk of comparing apples and oranges: contrasting primate behavior (based on quantitative and anecdotal observation) with human normative ideals. Of course, de Waal’s critics can respond that the difference among comparanda is precisely the point: nonhuman animals have not got any ought stories, or for that matter stories of any kind, because they lack the capacity for speech, language, and reason.

  Nonhuman animals cannot enunciate normative ideals, to one another or to us. Does that fact require us to draw a bright line between the kinds of emotion-motivated “moral” behavior that de Waal and others have observed in primates and the “genuine” reason-based moral actions of humans? If the copy editor of this book knew the right answer to that question he or she would know which word in the previous sentence—“moral” or “genuine”—should have its scare quotes struck out. Much in our understanding of ourselves, and the other species with which we share the earth, rests on that choice. One goal of this book is to encourage each reader to think carefully about how he or she would choose to wield the imagined editorial pencil—to invite each of you to attend to this and other conversations among the set of scholars who think hard and care passionately about primate behavior and the set of those who think hard and care equally passionately about human morality. The existence of this book is proof that those two sets are partially overlapping. Part of its purpose is to advocate an increase in the extent of the overlap and to promote thoughtful discussion among all those concerned with goodness and its origins, in human and nonhuman animals alike.

  PART I

  MORALLY EVOLVED

  PRIMATE SOCIAL INSTINCTS, HUMAN MORALITY,

  AND THE RISE AND FALL OF “VENEER THEORY”

  Frans de Waal

  We approve and we disapprove because we cannot do otherwise. Can we help feeling pain when the fire burns us? Can we help sympathizing with our friends?

  —Edward Westermarck (1912 [1908]: 19)

  Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our “noble” traits as well?

  —Stephen Jay Gould (1980: 261)

  Homo homini lupus—“man is wolf to man”—is an ancient Roman proverb popularized by Thomas Hobbes. Even though its basic tenet permeates large parts of law, economics, and political science, the proverb contains two major flaws. First, it fails to do justice to canids, which are among the most gregarious and cooperative animals on the planet (Schleidt and Shalter 2003). But even worse, the saying denies the inherently social nature of our own species.

  Social contract theory, and Western civilization with it, seems saturated with the assumption that we are asocial, even nasty creatures rather than the zoon politikon that Aristotle saw in us. Hobbes explicitly rejected the Aristotelian view by proposing that our ancestors started out autonomous and combative, establishing community life only when the cost of strife became unbearable. According to Hobbes, social life never came naturally to us. He saw it as a step we took reluctantly and “by covenant only, which is artificial” (Hobbes 1991 [1651]: 120). More recently, Rawls (1972) proposed a milder version of the same view, adding that humanity’s move toward sociality hinged on conditions of fairness, that is, the prospect of mutually advantageous cooperation among equals.

  These ideas about the origin of the well-ordered society remain popular even though the underlying assumption of a rational decision by inherently asocial creatures is untenable in light of what we know about the evolution of our species. Hobbes and Rawls create the illusion of human society as a voluntary arrangement with self-imposed rules assented to by free and equal agents. Yet, there never was a point at which we became social: descended from highly social ancestors—a long line of monkeys and apes—we have been group-living forever. Free and equal people never existed. Humans started out—if a starting point is discernible at all—as interdependent, bonded, and unequal. We come from a long lineage of hierarchical animals for which life in groups is not an option but a survival strategy. Any zoologist would classify our species as obligatorily gregarious.

  Having companions offers immense advantages in locating food and avoiding predators (Wrangham 1980; van Schaik 1983). Inasmuch as group-oriented individuals leave more offspring than those less socially inclined (e.g., Silk et al. 2003), sociality has become ever more deeply ingrained in primate biology and psychology. If any decision to establish societies was made, therefore, credit should go to Mother Nature rather than to ourselves.

  This is not to dismiss the heuristic value of Rawls’s “original position” as a way of getting us to reflect on what kind of society we would like to live in. His original position refers to a “purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to certain conceptions of justice” (Rawls 1972: 12). But even if we do not take the original position literally, hence adopt it only for the sake of argument, it still distracts from the more pertinent argument that we ought to be pursuing, which is how we actually came to be what we are today. Which parts of human nature have led us down this path, and how have these parts been shaped by evolution? Addressing a real rather than hypothetical
past, such questions are bound to bring us closer to the truth, which is that we are social to the core.

  A good illustration of the thoroughly social nature of our species is that, second to the death penalty, solitary confinement is the most extreme punishment we can think of. It works this way only, of course, because we are not born as loners. Our bodies and minds are not designed for life in the absence of others. We become hopelessly depressed without social support: our health deteriorates. In one recent experiment, healthy volunteers deliberately exposed to cold and flu viruses got sick more easily if they had fewer friends and family around (Cohen et al. 1997). While the primacy of connectedness is naturally understood by women—perhaps because mammalian females with caring tendencies have outreproduced those without for 180 million years—it applies equally to men. In modern society, there is no more effective way for men to expand their age horizon than to get and stay married: it increases their chance of living past the age of sixty-five from 65 to 90 percent (Taylor 2002).

  Our social makeup is so obvious that there would be no need to belabor this point were it not for its conspicuous absence from origin stories within the disciplines of law, economics, and political science. A tendency in the West to see emotions as soft and social attachments as messy has made theoreticians turn to cognition as the preferred guide of human behavior. We celebrate rationality. This is so despite the fact that psychological research suggests the primacy of affect: that is, that human behavior derives above all from fast, automated emotional judgments, and only secondarily from slower conscious processes (e.g., Zajonc 1980, 1984; Bargh and Chartrand 1999).

  Unfortunately, the emphasis on individual autonomy and rationality and a corresponding neglect of emotions and attachment are not restricted to the humanities and social sciences. Within evolutionary biology, too, some have embraced the notion that we are a self-invented species. A parallel debate pitting reason against emotion has been raging regarding the origin of morality, a hallmark of human society. One school views morality as a cultural innovation achieved by our species alone. This school does not see moral tendencies as part and parcel of human nature. Our ancestors, it claims, became moral by choice. The second school, in contrast, views morality as a direct outgrowth of the social instincts that we share with other animals. In the latter view, morality is neither unique to us nor a conscious decision taken at a specific point in time: it is the product of social evolution.

  The first standpoint assumes that deep down we are not truly moral. It views morality as a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding an otherwise selfish and brutish nature. Until recently, this was the dominant approach to morality within evolutionary biology as well as among science writers popularizing this field. I will use the term “Veneer Theory” to denote these ideas, tracing their origin to Thomas Henry Huxley (although they obviously go back much further in Western philosophy and religion, all the way to the concept of original sin). After treating these ideas, I review Charles Darwin’s quite different standpoint of an evolved morality, which was inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment. I further discuss the views of Mencius and Westermarck, which agree with those of Darwin.

  Given these contrasting opinions about continuity versus discontinuity with other animals, I then build upon an earlier treatise (de Waal 1996) in paying special attention to the behavior of nonhuman primates in order to explain why I think the building blocks of morality are evolutionarily ancient.

  VENEER THEORY

  In 1893, for a large audience in Oxford, England, Huxley publicly reconciled his dim view of the natural world with the kindness occasionally encountered in human society. Huxley realized that the laws of the physical world are unalterable. He felt, however, that their impact on human existence could be softened and modified if people kept nature under control. Thus, Huxley compared humanity with a gardener who has a hard time keeping weeds out of his garden. He saw human ethics as a victory over an unruly and nasty evolutionary process (Huxley 1989 [1894]).

  This was an astounding position for two reasons. First, it deliberately curbed the explanatory power of evolution. Since many consider morality the essence of humanity, Huxley was in effect saying that what makes us human could not be handled by evolutionary theory. We can become moral only by opposing our own nature. This was an inexplicable retreat by someone who had gained a reputation as “Darwin’s Bulldog” owing to his fierce advocacy of evolution. Second, Huxley gave no hint whatsoever where humanity might have unearthed the will and strength to defeat the forces of its own nature. If we are indeed born competitors, who don’t care about the feelings of others, how did we decide to transform ourselves into model citizens? Can people for generations maintain behavior that is out of character, like a shoal of piranhas that decides to turn vegetarian? How deep does such a change go? Would not this make us wolves in sheep’s clothing: nice on the outside, nasty on the inside?

  This was the only time Huxley broke with Darwin. As Huxley’s biographer, Adrian Desmond (1994: 599), put it: “Huxley was forcing his ethical Ark against the Darwinian current which had brought him so far.” Two decades earlier, in The Descent of Man, Darwin (1982 [1871]) had unequivocally included morality in human nature. The reason for Huxley’s departure has been sought in his suffering at the cruel hand of nature, which had taken the life of his beloved daughter, as well as his need to make the ruthlessness of the Darwinian cosmos palatable to the general public. He had depicted nature as so thoroughly “red in tooth and claw” that he could maintain this position only by dislodging human ethics, presenting it as a separate innovation (Desmond 1994). In short, Huxley had talked himself into a corner.

  Huxley’s curious dualism, which pits morality against nature and humanity against other animals, was to receive a respectability boost from Sigmund Freud’s writings, which throve on contrasts between the conscious and subconscious, the ego and superego, Love and Death, and so on. As with Huxley’s gardener and garden, Freud was not just dividing the world into symmetrical halves: he saw struggle everywhere. He explained the incest taboo and other moral restrictions as the result of a violent break with the freewheeling sexual life of the primal horde, culminating in the collective slaughter of an overbearing father by his sons (Freud 1962 [1913]). He let civilization arise out of the renunciation of instinct, the gaining of control over the forces of nature, and the building of a cultural superego (Freud 1961 [1930]).

  Humanity’s heroic combat against forces that try to drag him down remains a dominant theme within biology today, as illustrated by quotes from outspoken Huxleyans. Declaring ethics a radical break with biology, Williams wrote about the wretchedness of nature, culminating in his claim that human morality is a mere by-product of the evolutionary process: “I account for morality as an accidental capability produced, in its boundless stupidity, by a biological process that is normally opposed to the expression of such a capability” (Williams 1988:438).

  Having explained at length that our genes know what is best for us, programming every little wheel of the human survival machine, Dawkins waited until the very last sentence of The Selfish Gene to reassure us that, in fact, we are welcome to chuck all of those genes out the window: “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (Dawkins 1976: 215). The break with nature is obvious in this statement, as is the uniqueness of our species. More recently, Dawkins (1996) has declared us “nicer than is good for our selfish genes,” and explicitly endorsed Huxley: “What I am saying, along with many other people, among them T. H. Huxley, is that in our political and social life we are entitled to throw out Darwinism, to say we don’t want to live in a Darwinian world” (Roes, 1997: 3; also Dawkins 2003).

  Darwin must be turning in his grave, because the implied “Darwinian world” is miles removed from what he himself envisioned (see below). What is lacking in these statements is any indication of how we can possibly negate our genes, which the same authors at other times have depicted as all-powerful. Like the views of Ho
bbes, Huxley, and Freud, the thinking is thoroughly dualistic: we are part nature, part culture, rather than a well-integrated whole. Human morality is presented as a thin crust underneath of which boil antisocial, amoral, and egoistic passions. This view of morality as a veneer was best summarized by Ghiselin’s famous quip: “Scratch an ‘altruist,’ and watch a “hypocrite’ bleed” (Ghiselin 1974: 247; figure 1).

  Figure 1 The popular view of morality among biologists during the past quarter of a century was summarized by Ghiselin (1974: 247): “Scratch an “altruist,’ and watch a “hypocrite’ bleed.” Humans were considered thoroughly selfish and competitive, with morality being no more than an afterthought. Summarized as “Veneer Theory,” this idea goes back to Darwin’s contemporary, Thomas Henry Huxley. It is visualized here tongue-in-cheek as human nature bad to its core.

  Veneer Theory has since been popularized by countless science writers, such as Wright (1994), who went so far as to claim that virtue is absent from people’s hearts and souls, and that our species is potentially but not naturally moral. One might ask: “But what about the people who occasionally experience in themselves and others a degree of sympathy, goodness, and generosity?” Echoing Ghiselin, Wright replies that the “moral animal” is essentially a hypocrite:

  [T]he pretense of selflessness is about as much part of human nature as is its frequent absence. We dress ourselves up in tony moral language, denying base motives and stressing our at least minimal consideration for the greater good; and we fiercely and self-righteously decry selfishness in others. (Wright 1994: 344)

  To explain how we manage to live with ourselves despite this travesty, theorists have called upon self-deception. If people think they are at times unselfish, so the argument goes, they must be hiding their true motives from themselves (e.g., Badcock 1986). In the ultimate twist of irony, anyone who fails to believe that we are fooling ourselves, and feels that genuine kindness actually exists in the world, is considered a wishful thinker, hence accused of fooling him-or herself.