Primates and Philosophers_How Morality Evolved

by Frans de Waal

  Because of this possible connection between empathy and ToM, the bonobo is a crucial species for further research, as it may be the most empathic ape (de Waal 1997a). Recent DNA comparisons show that humans and bonobos share a microsatellite related to sociality that is absent in the chimpanzee (Hammock and Young 2005). This may be insufficient to decide which of our two closest relatives, the bonobo or the chimpanzee, most resembles the last common ancestor, but it definitely calls for close attention to the bonobo as model of human social behavior.

  Appendix C

  Animal Rights

  After a narrow escape, the Thompson gazelle calls her lawyer, complaining that her freedom to graze wherever she wants has once again been violated. Should she sue the cheetah, or does the lawyer perhaps feel that predators have rights, too?

  Absurd, of course, and I certainly applaud efforts to prevent animal abuse, but I do have serious questions about the approach that now has led American law schools to start offering courses in “animal law.” What they mean is not the law of the jungle, but the extension of principles of justice to animals. Animals are not mere property, according to some, like Steven M. Wise, the lawyer teaching the course at Harvard. They deserve rights as solid and uncontestable as the constitutional rights of people. Some animal rights lawyers have even argued that chimpanzees deserve the right to bodily integrity and liberty.

  This view has gained some currency. For instance, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia gave a human zoo visitor the right to sue to get companionship for chimpanzees. And over the last decade, state legislatures have upgraded animal cruelty crimes to felonies from misdemeanors.

  The debate over animal rights is not new. I still remember some surrealistic debates among scientists in the 1970s that dismissed animal suffering as a bleeding-heart issue. Amid stern warnings against anthropomorphism, the then prevailing view was that animals were mere robots, devoid of feelings, thoughts, or emotions. With straight faces, scientists would argue that animals cannot suffer, at least not the way we do. A fish is pulled out of the water with a big hook in its mouth, it thrashes around on dry land, but how could we possibly know what it feels? Isn’t all of this pure projection?

  This thinking changed in the 1980s with the advent of cognitive approaches to animal behavior. We now use terms like “planning” and “awareness” in relation to animals. They are believed to understand the effects of their own actions, to communicate emotions and make decisions. Some animals, like chimpanzees, are even considered to have rudimentary politics and culture.

  In my own experience, chimpanzees pursue power as relentlessly as some people in Washington and keep track of given and received services in a marketplace of exchange. Their feelings may range from gratitude for political support to outrage if one of them violates a social rule. All of this goes far beyond mere fear, pain, and anger: the emotional life of these animals is much closer to ours than once held possible.

  This new understanding may change our attitude toward chimpanzees and, by extension, other animals, but it remains a big leap to say that the only way to ensure their decent treatment is to give them rights and lawyers. Doing so is the American way, I guess, but rights are part of a social contract that makes no sense without responsibilities. This is the reason that the animal rights movement’s outrageous parallel with the abolition of slavery—apart from being insulting—is morally flawed: slaves can and should become full members of society; animals cannot and will not.

  Indeed, giving animals rights relies entirely upon our good will. Consequently, animals will have only those rights that we can handle. One won’t hear much about the rights of rodents to take over our homes, of starlings to raid cherry trees, or of dogs to decide their owner’s walking route. Rights selectively granted are, in my book, no rights at all.

  What if we drop all this talk of rights and instead advocate a sense of obligation? In the same way that we teach children to respect a tree by mentioning its age, we should use the new insights into animals’ mental life to foster in humans an ethic of caring in which our interests are not the only ones in the balance.

  Even though many social animals have evolved affectionate and altruistic tendencies, they rarely if ever direct these to other species. The way the cheetah treats the gazelle is typical. We are the first to apply tendencies that evolved within the group to a wider circle of humanity, and could do the same to other animals, making care, not rights, the centerpiece of our attitude.

  APE RETIREMENT

  The discussion above (modified from an Op-Ed piece that appeared in the New York Times of August 20, 1999, under the title “We the People [and Other Animals]…”) questions the “rights” approach, but fails to indicate how I feel about invasive medical research.

  The issue is complex, because I believe that our first moral obligation is to members of our own species. I know of no animal rights advocate in need of urgent medical attention who has refused such attention. This is so even though all modern medical treatments derive from animal research: anyone who walks into a hospital makes use of animal research then and there. There seems a consensus, therefore, even among those who protest animal testing, that human health and well-being take priority over almost anything else. The question then becomes: What are we willing to sacrifice for it? What kind of animals are we willing to subject to invasive medical studies, and what are the limits on the procedures? For most people, this is a matter of degree, not of absolutes. Using mice to develop new cancer drugs is not put at the same level as shooting pigs to test the impact of bullets, and shooting pigs is not put at the same level as giving a lethal disease to a chimpanzee. In a complex gain-versus-pain calculation, we decide on the ethics of animal research based on how we feel about procedures, animal species, and human benefits.

  Without going into the reasons and incongruities of why we favor some animals over others and some procedures over others, I do personally believe that apes deserve special status. They are our closest relatives with very similar social and emotional lives and similar intelligence. This is, of course, an anthropocentric argument if there ever was one, but one shared by many people familiar with apes. Their closeness to us makes them both ideal medical models and ethically problematic ones.

  Although many people favor a logical moral stance, based on straightforward empirical facts (such as the oft-mentioned ability of apes to recognize themselves in a mirror), no reasoned moral position seems airtight. I believe in the emotional basis of moral decisions, and since empathy with creatures that bodily and psychologically resemble us comes easily to us, apes mobilize in us more guilty feelings about hurting them than do other animals. These feelings play a role when we decide on the ethics of animal testing.

  Over the years, I have seen the prevailing attitude shift from emphasis on the medical usefulness of apes to emphasis on their ethical status. We now have reached the point that they are medical models of last resort. Any medical study that can be done on monkeys, such as baboons or macaques, will not be permitted on chimpanzees. Since the number of ape-specific research questions is dwindling, we are facing a “surplus” of chimpanzees. This is the medical community’s way of saying that we now have more chimpanzees than needed for medical research.

  I consider this a positive development, and am all for it progressing further until chimpanzees can be phased out completely. We have not reached this point yet, but increasing reluctance to use chimpanzees has led the National Institutes of Health to take the historic step of sponsoring retirement for these animals. The most important facility is Chimp Haven (www.chimphaven.org), which in 2005 opened a large outdoor facility to retire chimpanzees taken off medical protocols.

  In the meantime, apes will remain available for noninvasive studies, such as those on aging, genetics, brain imaging, social behavior, and intelligence. These studies do not require harming the animals. The shorthand definition that I use for noninvasive research is “the sort of research we wouldn’t mind doing on h
uman volunteers.” This would mean no testing of compounds on them, nor giving them any disease they don’t already have, no disabling surgeries, and so on.

  Such research will help us continue to learn about our closest relatives in nonstressful, even pleasant, ways. I add the latter, because the chimpanzees I work with are keen on computerized testing: the easiest way to get them to enter our testing facility is to show them the cart with the computer on top. They rush into the doors for an hour of what they see as games and what we see as cognitive testing.

  Ideally, all research on apes should be mutually beneficial and enjoyable.

  PART II

  COMMENTS

  The Uses of Anthropomorphism

  ROBERT WRIGHT

  Frans de Waal’s carefully documented and richly descriptive accounts of nonhuman primate social behavior have contributed vastly to our understanding of both nonhuman primates and human ones. One thing that has made his accounts so intellectually stimulating is his willingness to use provocatively anthropomorphic language in analyzing the behavior and mentality of chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates. Not surprisingly, he has drawn some criticism for this anthropomorphism. Almost invariably, I think, the criticism is misguided. However, while convinced of the value of his use of anthropomorphic language, I do believe that de Waal is occasionally uncritical in the kind of anthropomorphic language he uses.

  I’d like to first flesh this point out and then argue that one benefit of fleshing it out is to expand our perspective on human morality. In particular: Clarifying the question of what kind of anthropomorphic language is appropriate for chimpanzees, our nearest relatives, sheds light on de Waal’s distinction between a “naturalistic” theory of human morality and a “veneer” theory of human morality—between the idea that morality has a firm foundation in the genes, and the idea that what we call “morality” is a mere “cultural overlay,” and often takes the form of a kind of moral posturing that masks an amoral if not immoral human nature. I think de Waal misunderstands the perspective of some people he labels “veneer theorists” (me, for example) and as a result misses something important and edifying that evolutionary psychology can bring to discussions about human morality, namely: evolutionary psychology suggests the value of a third kind of theory about human morality that— to adapt de Waal’s terminology—we might call “naturalistic veneer theory.” This third alternative will be easier to understand once we’ve pondered the question of what kind of anthropomorphic language is appropriate for chimpanzees, the question to which I’ll now turn.

  TWO KINDS OF ANTHROPOMORPHIC LANGUAGE

  It is almost impossible to read de Waal’s great book Chimpanzee Politics without being struck by the behavioral parallels between chimpanzees and humans. For example: In both species social status brings tangible rewards, in both species individuals seek it, and in both species individuals form social alliances that help them seek it. Given the close evolutionary relationship between human beings and chimpanzees, it is certainly plausible that these external behavioral parallels are matched by internal parallels—that is, that there is some inter-species commonality in the biochemical mechanisms governing the behavior and in the corresponding subjective experience. Facial expressions, gestures, and postures that accompany certain chimpanzee behaviors certainly reinforce this conjecture.

  But what is the exact nature of these commonalities? What particular subjective experiences, for example, might we share with chimpanzees? Here is where I take issue with an interpretive tendency of de Waal’s.

  There are two broad categories of anthropomorphic language. First, there is emotional language: We can say that chimpanzees feel compassionate, outraged, aggrieved, insecure, et cetera. Second, there is cognitive language, language that attributes conscious knowledge and/or reasoning to animals: We can say that chimpanzees remember, anticipate, plan, strategize, et cetera.

  It isn’t always clear from the behavioral evidence alone which kind of anthropomorphic language is in order. Fairly often, in both humans and nonhuman primates, a behavior could in principle be explained either as a product of conscious reflection and strategizing or as a product of essentially emotional reaction.

  Consider “reciprocal altruism.” In the case of both humans and chimpanzees we see what looks at the behavioral level like reciprocal altruism. That is, individuals strike up regular relationships with other individuals that feature the giving of goods such as food or the giving of services such as social support; and the giving is somewhat symmetrical over time: I scratch your back, you scratch mine.

  In the case of humans, we know through introspection that these relationships of mutual support can be governed at either of two levels—at the cognitive level or at the emotional level. (In real life there is typically a mixture of cognitive and emotional factors, but usually one predominates, and in any event I’ll consider “pure” examples of each for purposes of clarity in the thought experiment that follows.)

  Consider two scholars who work in the same field but have never met. Suppose you are one of the scholars. You are writing a paper that offers you an opportunity to cite the other scholar. The citation isn’t essential; the paper would be fine without it. But you think to yourself, “Well, maybe if I cite this person, this person will cite me down the road, and this might lead to a pattern of mutual citation that would be good for both of us.” So you cite this scholar, and the stable relationship of mutual citation that you anticipated—a kind of “reciprocal altruism”—indeed ensues.

  Now imagine an alternative path to the same outcome. While working on your paper, you meet this scholar at a conference. You immediately hit it off, warming to each other as you discuss your common intellectual interests and opinions. Later, while finishing the paper, you cite this scholar out of sheer friendship; you don’t so much decide to cite him/her as feel like citing him/her. He/she later cites you, and a pattern of mutual citation, of “reciprocal altruism,” ensues.

  In the first case, the relationship of mutual citation feels like a result of strategic calculation. In the second case, it feels more like a case of simple friendship. But to the outside observer—someone who is just observing the tendency of these two scholars to cite each other—it is hard to distinguish between the two kinds of motivation. It is hard to say whether the pattern of mutual citation is driven more by strategic calculation or by friendship, because either of those dynamics can in principle lead to the observed outcome: a stable relationship of mutual citation.

  Suppose the outside observer is now given an additional piece of information: these two scholars not only tend to cite each other; they tend to be on the same side of the great, divisive issues in their field. Alas, this doesn’t help much either, because both of the dynamics in question—strategic calculation and friendly feeling—are known to lead to this specific outcome: not just mutual citation, but mutual citation between intellectual allies. After all, (a) if you’re consciously choosing a partner in reciprocal citation, you’ll be inclined to choose someone who shares your strategic interests, namely the advancement of your position on major intellectual issues; (b) if you’re operating instead on the basis of friendly feelings, you’re still likely to wind up paired with an intellectual ally, since one of the primary contributors to friendly feelings is agreement on contentious issues.

  That the guidance of emotions—of “friendly feelings”— can lead to the same outcome as the guidance of strategic calculation is no coincidence. According to evolutionary psychology, human emotions were “designed” by natural selection to serve the strategic interests of individual human beings (or, more precisely, to further the proliferation of the individual’s genes in the environment of our evolution—but for purposes of this discussion we can assume the interests of the individual and of the individual’s genes align, as they often do). In the case of friendly feelings, we are “designed” to warm up to people who share our opinions on contentious issues because, during evolution, these are people it would have
been advantageous to form alliances with.

  This is the generic reason that it is often hard for an outside observer to say whether a given human behavior was driven more by strategic calculation or by emotions: because many emotions are proxies for strategic calculation.(As for why natural selection created these proxies for strategic calculation: these emotions evolved, presumably, either before our ancestors were very good at conscious strategic calculation or in cases where conscious awareness of the strategy being pursued was disadvantageous.)

  WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A CHIMP?

  Now, with this thought experiment in hand, we can return to the question of anthropomorphic language—in particular the question of when “emotional” anthropomorphism is in order and when “cognitive” anthropomorphism is in order. In analyzing chimpanzee dynamics, and trying to decide whether chimps are engaging in conscious calculation or simply being guided by emotions, we face the same difficulty we faced with the two scholars: because the emotions in question were “designed” by natural selection to yield strategically effective behavior, emotionally driven behaviors and consciously calculated behaviors may look the same to the outside observer.

  For example, if two chimpanzees are both frozen out of the power structure—that is, they are not part of the coalition that keeps the alpha male in power, and so don’t partake of the resources that the alpha shares with coalition partners—then they may form an alliance that challenges the alpha. But it’s hard to say whether the initial formation of the alliance is a product of conscious strategic calculation or merely of “friendly feelings” that were “designed” by natural selection as proxies for conscious strategic calculation. Therefore it’s hard to choose between “cognitive” anthropomorphic language (“the chimps saw that they shared a strategic interest and decided to form an alliance”) and “emotional” anthropomorphic language (“the chimps, upon dimly sensing their shared plight, developed friendly feelings, and attendant feelings of mutual obligation, that drew them into alliance.”)