Primates and Philosophers_How Morality Evolved

by Frans de Waal

  In The Expanding Circle I suggested that it is our developed capacity to reason that gives us the ability to take the impartial perspective. As reasoning beings, we can abstract from our own case and see that others, outside our group, have interests similar to our own. We can also see that there is no impartial reason why their interests should not count as much as the interests of members of our own group, or indeed as much as our own interests.

  Does this mean that the idea of impartial morality is contrary to our evolved nature? Yes, if by “our evolved nature” we mean the nature that we share with the other social mammals from which we evolved. No nonhuman animals, not even the other great apes, come close to matching our capacity to reason. So if this capacity to reason does lie behind the impartial element of our morality, it is something new in evolutionary history. On the other hand, our capacity to reason is part of our nature, and, like every aspect of that nature, is the product of evolution. What makes it different from the other elements of our moral nature is that the evolutionary advantages reason confers are not specifically social. The ability to reason gives very general advantages. It does have important social aspects—it helps us to communicate better with others of our species, and hence to cooperate in more detailed plans. But reason also helps us, as individuals, to find food and water, and to understand and avoid threats from predators, or from natural events. It enables us to control fire.

  Though a capacity to reason helps us to survive and reproduce, once we develop a capacity for reasoning, we may be led by it to places that are not of any direct advantage to us, in evolutionary terms. Reason is like an escalator—once we step on it, we cannot get off until we have gone where it takes us. An ability to count can be useful, but it leads by a logical process to the abstractions of higher mathematics that have no direct payoff in evolutionary terms. Perhaps the same is true of the capacity to take the perspective of Smith’s impartial spectator.5

  In keeping with this way of looking at the role of reasoning in morality, I differ from de Waal’s view of the lessons we should draw from J. D. Greene’s innovative work using neuroimaging techniques to help us to understand what happens in moral judgment. De Waal writes:

  Whereas Veneer Theory, with its emphasis on human uniqueness, would predict that moral problem solving is assigned to evolutionarily recent additions to our brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, neuroimaging shows that moral judgment in fact involves a wide variety of brain areas, some extremely ancient (Greene and Haidt 2002). In short, neuroscience seems to be lending support to human morality as evolutionarily anchored in mammalian sociality.

  To understand why we should not draw this conclusion, we need some more background on what Greene and his colleagues have done. They used neuroimaging to examine brain activity when people respond to situations known in the philosophical literature as “trolley problems.”6 In the standard trolley problem, you are standing by a railroad track when you notice that a trolley, with no one aboard, is rolling down the track, heading for a group of five people. They will all be killed if the trolley continues on its present track. The only thing you can do to prevent these five deaths is to throw a switch that will divert the trolley onto a side track, where it will kill only one person. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that you should divert the trolley onto the side track, thus saving a net four lives.

  In another version of the problem, the trolley, as before, is about to kill five people. This time, however, you are not standing near the track, but on a footbridge above the track. You cannot divert the trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the imperiled people, but you realize that you are far too light to stop the trolley. Standing next to you, however, is a very large stranger. The only way you can stop the trolley killing five people is by pushing this large stranger off the footbridge, in front of the trolley. If you push the stranger off, he will be killed, but you will save the other five. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that you should not push the stranger off the bridge.

  Greene and his colleagues see these situations as differing in the extent to which they involve an “impersonal” situation such as throwing a switch, or a “personal” violation such as pushing a stranger off a bridge. They found that when subjects were deciding about the “personal” cases, the parts of the brain associated with emotional activity were more active than they were when the subjects were asked to make judgments in “impersonal” cases. More significantly, the minority of subjects who came to the conclusion that it would be right to act in ways that involve a personal violation, but minimize harm overall—for example, those who say that it would be right to push the stranger off the footbridge— show more activity in parts of the brain associated with cognitive activity, and take longer to reach their decision, than those who say “no” to such actions.7 In other words, when confronted with the need to physically assault another person, our emotions are powerfully aroused, and for some, the fact that this is the only way to save several lives is insufficient to overcome those emotions. But those who are prepared to save as many lives as possible, even if this involves physically pushing another person to his death, appear to be using their reason to override their emotional resistance to the personal violation that pushing another person involves.

  Does this lend support for the idea of “human morality as evolutionarily anchored in mammalian sociality”? Yes, to a point. The emotional responses that lead most people to say it would be wrong to push a stranger off a footbridge can be explained in just the kind of evolutionary terms that de Waal develops in his lectures, and supports with evidence drawn from his observations of primate behavior. Similarly, it is easy to see why we would not have developed similar responses to something like throwing a switch, which may also cause death or injury, but does so at a distance. For all of our evolutionary history, we have been able to harm people by pushing them violently, but it is only for a few centuries— far too brief a time to make a difference to our evolved nature—that we have been able to harm people by actions like throwing switches.

  Before we take this as confirming de Waal’s point, however, we need to think again about the subjects of Greene’s research who, after some reflection, come to the conclusion that just as it is right to throw a switch to divert a train, killing one person but saving five, so too it is right to push one person off a footbridge, killing one but saving five. This is a judgment that other social mammals seem incapable of making. Yet it too is a moral judgment. It appears to come, not from the common evolutionary heritage we share with other social mammals, but from our capacity to reason. Like the other social mammals, we have automatic, emotional responses to certain kinds of behavior, and these responses constitute a large part of our morality. Unlike the other social mammals, we can reflect on our emotional responses, and choose to reject them. Recall Humphrey Bogart’s line in the closing moments of Casablanca, when, as Rick Blaine, he tells the woman he loves (Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman) to get on the plane and join her husband: “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Maybe it doesn’t take much, but it takes capacities that no other social mammals possess.

  Although I share de Waal’s admiration for David Hume, at this point I find myself developing a reluctant respect for the philosopher who is often seen as Hume’s great opponent, Immanuel Kant. Kant thought that morality must be based on reason, not on our desires or emotions.8 Undoubtedly, he was mistaken to think that morality can be based on reason alone, but it is equally mistaken to see morality only as a matter of emotional or instinctive responses, unchecked by our capacity for critical reasoning. We do not have to accept, as a given, the emotional responses imprinted in our biological nature by millions of years of living in small tribal groups. We are capable of reasoning, and of making choices, and we can re
ject those emotional responses. Perhaps we do so only on the basis of other emotional responses, but the process involves reason and abstraction, and may lead us, as de Waal acknowledges, to a morality that is more impartial than our evolutionary history as social mammals would—in the absence of that reasoning process—allow.

  Just as Kant is not so obviously wrong as de Waal suggests, so too Richard Dawkins has a point when—in a passage that de Waal appears to regard as a lamentable example of Veneer Theory—he writes that “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”9 Again, given what de Waal says about the impartial aspect of at least some human morality, it is hard to see why he objects to Dawkins’s statement. What Dawkins is saying is not all that different from Darwin’s comment, in The Descent of Man, that the social instincts “with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit naturally lead to the golden rule, “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise’: and this lies at the foundation of morality.”

  The issue, then, is not so much whether we accept the Veneer Theory of morality, but rather how much of morality is veneer, and how much is underlying structure. Those who claim that all of morality is a veneer laid over a basically individualistic, selfish human nature, are mistaken. Yet a morality that goes beyond our own group and shows impartial concern for all human beings might well be seen as a veneer over the nature we share with other social mammals.

  ANIMAL RIGHTS AND EQUAL CONSIDERATION

  FOR ANIMALS

  In 1993, together with the Italian animal advocate Paola Cavalieri, I cofounded the Great Ape Project, an international effort to gain rights for great apes. The project was simultaneously an idea, an organization, and a book. The book, The Great Ape Project: Equality beyond Humanity, includes essays by philosophers, scientists, and experts on the behavior of great apes, including Jane Goodall, Toshisada Nishida, Roger and Deborah Fouts, Lyn White Miles, Francine Patterson, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, and Marc Bekoff. The book begins with a “Declaration on Great Apes” that all the contributors agreed to support. The Declaration demands the extension to all great apes of what it calls “the community of equals,” which it defines as “the moral community within which we accept certain basic moral principles or rights as governing our relations with each other and enforceable at law.” Among these principles or rights, it asserts, are the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture.

  Since the launching of the Great Ape Project, several countries, including Britain, New Zealand, Sweden, and Austria, have banned the use of great apes in medical research. In the United States, though research using chimpanzees continues, it is no longer considered acceptable to kill great apes when their usefulness as experimental subjects is at an end. Instead, they are supposed to be “retired” to sanctuaries, although at present there are not enough sanctuaries to cope with the number of unwanted chimpanzees, and some continue to live in very poor conditions.

  My involvement with the Great Ape Project, and perhaps also my long-standing advocacy of “Animal Liberation,”10 make me, I assume, a target of de Waal’s criticism of animal rights advocates in his appendix C. Again, however, it is important to see how much common ground de Waal and I share. He has a strong sense of the reality of animal pain. He firmly rejects those who claim it is “anthropomorphic” to attribute such characteristics as emotions, awareness, understanding, and even politics or culture, to animals. When this rich sense of an animal’s subjective experiences is combined with support for “efforts to prevent animal abuse,” as it is in de Waal’s case, we have come very close to the animal rights position. Once we recognize that nonhuman animals have complex emotional and social needs, we begin to see animal abuse where others might not see it—for example, in the standard method of keeping pregnant sows in modern intensive farms: on bare concrete, without bedding, isolated in a metal crate, unable to move freely, to manipulate their environment, to interact with other pigs, or to build a nest in anticipation of giving birth. If everyone shared de Waal’s views, the animal movement would swiftly achieve its most important goals.

  After agreeing that animals should not be abused, de Waal adds, “it remains a big leap to say that the only way to insure their decent treatment is to give them rights and lawyers.” I’d prefer to separate the issues of whether animals should be granted rights, and whether they should be given lawyers. I entirely agree with de Waal that people today—and Americans in particular—are far too ready to go to court to advance their aims. The result is a colossal waste of time and resources, and a tendency for every institution to think defensively about how best to guard itself from a lawsuit. But recognizing that all animals should have some basic rights does not necessarily involve bringing in the lawyers. We could, for example, legislate to protect the rights of animals, and enforce those laws adequately. Many laws are highly effective because they set standards that virtually everyone is ready to comply with, without anyone being dragged off to court. For example, some years ago Britain banned the keeping of sows in the crates described above. As a result, hundreds of thousands of sows have significantly better lives. I have yet to hear, however, of any British sows having been given lawyers, or indeed of any need by the authorities to prosecute farmers for continuing to keep sows in crates after the prohibition came into effect.

  De Waal objects to the idea of animal rights on the ground that “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 master’s walking route. Rights selectively granted are, in my book, no rights at all.” But giving rights to severely intellectually disabled human beings also relies entirely on our good will. And all rights are selectively granted. Babies don’t have the right to vote, and people who, as a result of mental illness or abnormality, have a tendency to violent antisocial behavior, may lose the right to liberty. This doesn’t mean that the rights to vote, or to liberty, are “no rights at all.”

  Nevertheless, I don’t really disagree with de Waal when he suggests that instead of talking of the rights of animals, we could talk of our obligations to them. In the political arena, claims about rights make wonderful slogans, for they are rapidly understood to be assertions that someone or some group is being denied something of importance. It is in that sense that I support the Declaration on Great Apes, and the rights for great apes claimed in it. Speaking as a philosopher rather than an activist, however, whether it is humans or animals who are the subject of our concern, I find claims about rights unsatisfactory. Different thinkers have produced varying lists of supposedly self-evident human rights, and arguments for one list rather than another turn rapidly to assertion and counter-assertion. When rights clash, as they inevitably do, debates about giving one right greater weight than another usually make little headway. That’s because rights are not really the foundation of our moral obligations. They are themselves based on concern for the interests of all those affected by our actions—a basic principle that can be reached by taking the perspective of Smith’s “impartial spectator,” some refinement on Kant’s idea of ensuring that the maxim of your action can be willed as a universal law, or even the more ancient “golden rule.”

  Taking this perspective of obligation, rather than rights, still requires us to say what weight we will give to the interests of animals. De Waal writes: “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.” Definitely, we should do at least that. But to acknowledge that human interests are “not the only ones in the balance” is vague. De Waal also writes: “I believe that our first moral obligation is to members of our own species.” That is less vague, but it is mere assertion. De Waal does also point out that animal advocates accept medical procedures developed by res
earch on animals, but this is, at best, an ad hominem argument against people who may not be morally strong enough to refuse medical assistance when they need it. In fact there are some animal rights advocates who refuse medical treatment developed on animals, although admittedly not many. One might equally well say that we should reject the idea of human equality because one knows of no advocates of this idea who have reduced themselves to penury in order to assist people in other countries who are starving to death. (Again, there are a few—Zell Kravinsky comes very close.11) Indeed, the link between the ideal and the suggested action is stronger in the case of human equality and giving to the poor than in the case of animal rights and refusing medical treatment developed through research on animals, because the money we give to the poor would actually save the lives of some people who, we say, are equal in worth to ourselves, whereas it is not clear how a few people refusing to accept medical treatment would benefit any existing or future animals.

  Why should the fact that nonhuman animals are not members of our species justify us in giving less weight to their interests than we give to the similar interests of members of our own species? If we say that moral status depends on membership of our own species, how is our position different from that of the most blatant racists or sexists—those who think that to be white, or male, is to have superior moral status, irrespective of other characteristics or qualities? De Waal finds the animal movement’s parallel between the abolition of animal abuse and the abolition of slavery to be “outrageous” because, unlike blacks or women, nonhuman animals can never become full members of our community. That difference does exist, but if animals cannot be full members of our society, neither can humans with severe intellectual disabilities. Yet we don’t regard that as a reason for being less concerned about their pain and suffering. In the same way, the fact that animals cannot be full members of our society does not count against giving equal consideration to their interests. If an animal feels pain, the pain matters as much as it does when a human feels pain—if the pain hurts just as much, and will last just as long, and will not have further bad consequences for the human that it does not have for the nonhuman animal. Thus there remains a core of truth in the parallel between human slavery and animal slavery. In both cases, members of a more powerful group arrogate to themselves the right to use beings outside the group for their own selfish purposes, largely ignoring the interests of the outsiders. Then they justify this use by an ideology that explains why members of the more powerful group have superior worth and the right, sometimes god-given, to rule over the outsiders.