Primates and Philosophers_How Morality Evolved

by Frans de Waal

  And yet even this is not the deepest thing wrong with Veneer Theory. Morality is not just a set of obstructions to the pursuit of our interests. Moral standards define ways of relating to people that most of us, most of the time, find natural and welcome. According to Kant, morality demands that we treat other people as ends in themselves, never merely as means to our own ends. Certainly we do not manage to treat all other people at all times in accordance with this standard. But the image of someone who never treated anyone else as an end in himself and never expected to be treated that way in return is even more unrecognizable than that of someone who always does so. For what we are then imagining is someone who always treats everyone else as a tool or an obstacle and always expects to be treated that way in return. What we are imagining is someone who never spontaneously and unthinkingly tells the truth in ordinary conversation, but constantly calculates the effects of what he says to others on the promotion of his projects. What we are imagining is someone who doesn’t resent it (though he dislikes it) when he himself is lied to, trampled on, and disregarded, because deep down he thinks that is all that one human being really has any reason to expect from any other. What we are imagining, then, is a creature who lives in a state of deep internal solitude, essentially regarding himself as the only person in a world of potentially useful things—although some of those things have mental and emotional lives and can talk or fight back.5 It is absurd to suggest that this is what most human beings are like, or long to be like, beneath a thin veneer of restraint.

  But it is also absurd to think that nonhuman animals are motivated by self-interest. The concept of what is in your own best interests, if it makes any sense at all, requires a kind of grip on the future and an ability to calculate that do not seem available to a nonhuman animal. Just as importantly, acting for the sake of your best interests requires the capacity to be motivated by the abstract conception of your overall or long-term good. The idea of self-interest seems simply out of place when thinking about nonhuman action. I am not at all inclined to deny that the other intelligent animals do things on purpose, but I would expect these purposes to be local and concrete—to eat something, mate with someone, avoid punishment, have some fun, stop the fight—but not to do what is best for themselves on the whole. Nonhuman animals are not self-interested. It seems more likely that they are, in Harry Frankfurt’s phrase, wanton: they act on the instinct or desire or emotion that comes uppermost. Learning and experience may change the order of their desires so that different ones come uppermost: the prospect of punishment may dampen an animal’s ardor to the point where the animal will refrain from satisfying its appetite, but that is a different matter than calculating what is in your best interests and being motivated by a conception of your long-term good. For all of these reasons Veneer Theory seems to me to be rather silly. I therefore want to set it aside, and talk about de Waal’s more central and interesting question, the question of the roots of morality in our evolved nature, where they are located and how deep they go.

  If someone asked me whether I personally believe that the other animals are more like human beings than most people suppose, or whether I believe there is some form of deep discontinuity between humans and the other animals, I would have to say yes to both alternatives. In thinking about this issue it is important to remember that human beings have a vested interest in what de Waal calls “anthropodenial.” We eat nonhuman animals, wear them, perform painful experiments on them, hold them captive for purposes of our own—sometimes in unhealthy conditions— we make them work, and we kill them at will. Without even taking up the urgent moral questions to which these practices give rise, I think it is fair to say that we are more likely to be comfortable in our treatment of our fellow creatures if we think that being eaten, worn, experimented on, held captive, made to work, and killed, cannot mean anything like the same thing to them that it would to us. And that in turn seems more likely to the extent they are unlike us in their emotional and cognitive lives. Of course the fact that we have a vested interest in denying the similarities between ourselves and the other animals does nothing to show that there are such similarities. But once you correct for that vested interest there seems little reason to doubt that observations and experiments of the sort de Waal does and describes, as well as our own everyday interactions with our animal companions, show exactly what they seem to show: that many animals are intelligent, curious, loving, playful, bossy, belligerent creatures in many ways very much like ourselves.

  But I don’t find a total gradualism very tempting either. To me human beings seem clearly set apart by our elaborate cultures, historical memory, languages with enormously complex grammars and refined expressive power, the practices of art, literature, science, philosophy, and of course of telling jokes. I would also add to this list something that doesn’t often appear on it but should—our startling capacity to make friends across the boundaries between species, and to induce the other animals who live with us to do so as well. I am also inclined to agree with Freud and Nietzsche— whose rather gaudier explanations of the evolution of morality don’t seem to tempt de Waal very much—that human beings seem psychologically damaged, in ways that suggest some deep break with nature. An old-fashioned philosophical project, dating back to Aristotle, attempts to locate the central difference that accounts for all these other differences between human beings and the other animals. As a very old-fashioned philosopher, I am tempted by that project. What I’d like to do now is talk about one piece of that project that bears on the question of the extent to which morality represents a break with our animal past.

  Moral standards are standards governing the way we act, and the question of the extent to which animals are moral or proto-moral beings arises because they unquestionably do act. De Waal’s conclusions are largely derived from considering what animals do. In his books, de Waal often canvases different possible intentional interpretations of animal behavior and actions, and describes experiments designed to find out which is correct. A capuchin rejects a cucumber when her partner is offered a grape—is she protesting the unfairness, or is she just holding out for a grape? Do the chimps share food because they are grateful to those who have groomed them, or is it just that the grooming has put them in a relaxed and beneficent mood? Sometimes what appear to be evolutionary explanations of animal behavior seem to bleed over into intentional interpretations of their actions, as when de Waal suggests in Good Natured that chimpanzees “strive for the kind of community that is in their own best interest.”6 For reasons I have already mentioned, it seems to me difficult to believe a chimpanzee has anything like this on his mind. But in other places de Waal carefully separates the question of the extent to which monkeys and apes do the things he talks about intentionally or deliberately from the question of what explains their tendency to do them. De Waal himself chastises veneer theorists for inferring the selfishness of our intentions from the “selfishness” of our genes.

  The question of intention is a question about how an episode in which an animal does something looks from the acting animal’s own point of view, whether it is plausible to think that the animal acts with a certain kind of purpose in mind. I think there is a temptation to think that the question whether we can see the origins of morality in animal behavior depends on how exactly we interpret their intentions, whether their intentions are “good” or not. I think that, at least taken in the most obvious way, this is a mistake. It seems to make some sense if you hold the kind of sentimentalist moral theory favored by Hutcheson and Hume, since according to these thinkers an action gets its moral character from the fact that onlookers or spectators would approve or disapprove of it. At least in the case of what Hume called “the natural virtues,” these thinkers believed that the agent who does a morally good thing need not be motivated by expressly moral considerations. In fact for this reason, some of the sentimentalists of the eighteenth century and their critics explicitly discussed the question whether according to their theories the other an
imals could be thought of as virtuous. Hutcheson’s immediate predecessor, Shaftesbury, had asserted that you could not count as virtuous unless you were capable of moral judgment, and that therefore we would not call a good horse virtuous.7 But since according to this sort of theory moral judgment need not play a role in moral motivation, it is not clear why not. Hutcheson therefore boldly asserted that it is not an absurdity to suppose that “creatures void of reflection” have some “low virtues.”8 Although de Waal praises sentimentalist theories, he denies that his case rests simply on the existence of animals with intentions we approve of: “whether animals are nice to each other is not the issue, nor does it matter much whether their behavior fits our moral preferences or not. The relevant question rather is whether they possess capacities for reciprocity and revenge, for the enforcement of social rules, for the settlements of disputes, and for sympathy and empathy.” (p. 16). But he seems to share an assumption with these early sentimentalists, which is that the morality of an action is a matter of content of the intention with which it is done.

  I think this is wrong, and to explain why, I want to take a closer look at the concept of acting intentionally or on purpose. This concept, I believe, does not mark off a single phenomenon, but a number of things that can be ranged on a scale. It is only at a certain point on the scale that the question whether actions have a moral character can arise.

  At the bottom of the scale, there is the idea of intentionally or functionally describable movement. The concept of intention in this form applies to any object whatever that has some sort of functional organization, including not only human beings and animals but also plants and machines. Within the economy of a functionally organized object, certain movements can be described as having certain purposes. The heart beats to pump the blood, the alarm rings to wake you up, your computer warns you against a misspelling, the plant’s leaves reach out towards the sun to collect its rays. There is no implication that the purposes served by these movements are before the minds of the objects that move, or even before the minds of someone who created those objects. Attributing purposes to these movements just reflects the fact that the object is functionally organized.

  In the case of living things, especially animals, including the so-called “lower” animals, some of these purposive or intentional movements are guided by the animal’s perception. A fish swims upwards towards a surface disturbance that may mean an insect; a cockroach runs under cover as you try to swat him with the newspaper; a spider crawls towards the moth that is caught in the middle of her web. Here we begin to be tempted to use the language of action, and it is clear enough why: when an animal’s movements are guided by her perceptions, they are under the control of her mind, and when they are under control of her mind, we are tempted to say that they are under the animal’s own control. And this, after all, is what makes the difference between an action and a mere movement—that an action can be attributed to the agent, that it is done under the agent’s own control. At this level, should we say that the animal acts intentionally, or on purpose? It depends how you understand the question. The animal is directing her movements and her movement are intentional movements—the movements have a purpose. In that sense the animal acts with a purpose, but at this stage there is no need to say that this purpose is somehow before the animal’s mind. Admittedly, when we try to look at the situation from the animal’s point of view, when we ask ourselves what exactly it is that the animal perceives that determines her movements, it is almost irresistible to describe it purposively. Why does the spider go towards the moth caught in her web unless there is some sense in which the spider sees the moth as food and therefore some sense in which she is trying to get food? But however exactly we understand the spider’s intention, we need not understand it as a matter of the spider’s entertaining thoughts about what she is trying to achieve.

  On the other hand, once we are dealing with an intelligent animal, there is no reason not to suppose that her purpose is before her mind. Furthermore, I see no reason why we should not suppose that there is a gradual continuum between whatever is going on when a spider’s perceptions direct her towards the moth and straightforward cognitive awareness of something as what you want. And when such cognitive awareness is in place, presumably the possibility of learning from experience about how to get what you want and avoid what you don’t is greatly enhanced. One can always learn from experience by conditioning, but when you are aware of your purpose you can also begin to learn from experience by thinking and remembering.

  But even if there is a gradual continuum, it seems right to say that an animal that can entertain his purposes before his mind, and perhaps even entertain thoughts about how to achieve those purposes, is exerting a greater degree of conscious control over his own movements than, say, the spider, and is therefore in a deeper sense an agent. There is now, as in some of de Waal’s cases, room for disagreement about what the proper intentional description of an action is, for it is at this level we become committed to keying the intentional description of the action to what is going on from the agent’s own point of view. (Freudian slips pose a problem for the claim I just made, but I want to leave that aside for now.) This is a difference from the earlier stage: when we do describe the spider as “trying to get food,” we don’t care whether that’s what the spider thinks she’s doing. At the level of the spider, it is natural for the intentional description of the movement and the explanation of it to run together in this way. But once purposes are consciously entertained, the intentional description of the action must capture something about the way it seems to the agent. It’s because at this level we key intentional description to the agent’s perspective that it makes sense to ask whether the capuchin is protesting the unfairness or merely angling for the grape. So all of this represents a deeper way in which an action may be said to be “intentional.”

  But some philosophers do not believe that this is the deepest level of intentionality. At the level of intentionality I have just been describing, the animal is aware of his purposes, and thinks about how to pursue them. But he does not choose to pursue those purposes. The animal’s purposes are given to him by his affective states: his emotions and his instinctual or learned desires. Even in a case where the animal must choose between two purposes—say a male wants to mate a female but a larger male is coming and he wants to avoid a fight— the choice is made for him by the strength of his affective states. He has learned to fear the larger male more strongly than he desires to mate. The end that the animal pursues is determined for him by his desires and emotions.

  Kantians are among the philosophers who believe that a deeper level of assessment and therefore choice is possible. Besides asking yourself how to get what you want most, you can ask yourself whether your wanting this end is a good reason for taking this particular action. The question is not merely about whether the act is an effective way to achieve your end, but whether, even given that it is, your wanting this end justifies you in taking this action. Kant of course famously thinks that raising this question about a proposed action takes a particular form: you formulate what he called a maxim—I will do this act in order to achieve this end— and you subject that maxim to the categorical imperative test. You ask whether you can will it as a universal law that everyone who wishes to achieve this sort of end should do this sort of act. In effect you are asking whether your maxim can serve as a rational principle. In some cases, Kant believed, you find you cannot will your maxim as a universal law, and then you have to reject the action described by that maxim as wrong. Even if you do judge the action to be justified and act, you are acting not merely from your desire but from your judgment that the action is justified.

  Why do I say this represents a deeper level of intentionality? In the first place, an agent who is capable of this form of assessment is capable of rejecting an action along with its purpose, not because there is something else she wants (or fears) even more, but simply because she judges that doing that sort of act
for that purpose is wrong. In a famous passage in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argued that we are capable of setting aside even our most urgent natural desires—the desire to preserve our own lives and to secure the welfare of our loved ones—to avoid performing a wrong action. Kant gives the example of a man who is ordered by his king, on pain of death for himself and suffering for his family, to bear false witness against an innocent person the king wants to get rid of. While no one can say for sure how he would act in such a situation, Kant argues, each of us must admit to himself that he is capable of doing the right thing.9 Now if we are capable of setting aside our purposes when we cannot pursue them by any decent means, then there is also a sense in which when we do decide to pursue a purpose, we can be seen as having adopted that purpose. Our purposes may be suggested to us by our desires and emotions, but they are not determined for us by our affective states, for if we had judged it wrong to pursue them, we could have laid them aside. Since we choose not only the means to our ends but also the ends themselves, this is intentionality at a deeper level. For we exert a deeper level of control over own movements when we choose our ends as well as the means to them than that exhibited by an animal that pursues ends that are given to her by her affective states, even if she pursues them consciously and intelligently. Another way to put the point is to say that we do not merely have intentions, good or bad. We assess and adopt them. We have the capacity for normative self-government, or, as Kant called it, “autonomy.” It is at this level that morality emerges. The morality of your action is not a function of the content of your intentions. It is a function of the exercise of normative self-government.10