When Lucy was nine, she had worked with sign language her whole juvenile life and firmly controlled one hundred signs. At this time, the single sign that was really suggestive of moral connotation was SORRY, for GOOD and BAD hadn’t been added to her vocabulary at that time. There was also DIRTY, which presumably had played a major role in her toilet training. During this period, psychologist Roger Fouts was visiting to tutor Lucy in signing, and shortly before a language lesson, when no one else was in the room, Lucy had defecated right in the middle of the Temerlins’ living room floor. When Fouts noticed the “crime,” he turned to Lucy, and here’s their conversation in ASL, “verbatim.” Fouts begins with a moralistic, accusatory confrontation.
RF: What is that?
Lucy: Lucy not know.
RF: You do know. What’s that?
Lucy: Dirty, dirty.
RF: Whose dirty, dirty?
Lucy: Sue’s (a graduate student, not present).
RF: It’s not Sue’s. Whose is it?
Lucy: Roger’s!
RF: No! It’s not Roger’s. Whose is it?
Lucy: Lucy dirty, dirty. Sorry Lucy.54
Lucy’s efforts at “tactical deception” in placing responsibility for the mess elsewhere might be seen in the same category as pretending to find the buried fruit or covering up a fear grin,55 and though her attempt was clumsy, the intention was obvious enough. In theory Lucy’s initial try at blaming someone else might have worked because Sue wasn’t present. Her second try, in its ridiculousness, suggests that a stressed young chimpanzee was getting confused and running out of likely scapegoats.
Temerlin recounts other instances of Lucy’s attempts to deceive her masters, as when she “fails to understand” a sign that she knows extremely well. Indeed, LUCY NOT KNOW was the first line of defense when Roger came after her. It’s clear that Lucy did understand what was going on in that she realized that she was being held accountable for a past misdeed. Sensing that she had broken the rules, with her lies and subsequent “apology” apparently Lucy was trying to get herself off the hook with a major authority figure. But was there some unobservable element of negative self-judgment or shame in this symboled apology? I very much doubt it.
If we compare Lucy’s nonmoral response to the equally nonmoral reactions of highly trainable domesticated dogs, a similar capacity to learn rules from humans is evident. But Lucy’s reactions betray an understanding that a past action goes against the rules, which involves a capacity to understand ex post facto punishment that dogs don’t seem to possess. Of course, when disapproving human groups sanction deviants, they often do so long after the fact, and to good effect, for the deviants understand exactly what is going on. Likewise, chimpanzee Lucy not only understood her past culpability but also was able to connect it with future punishment. She was even sophisticated enough to try for a “cover-up,” or so it would seem.
The same may be true of bonobos. As a young bonobo male, Kanzi was taught to use a computer keyboard (instead of sign language) by psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh in her laboratory in Atlanta, where I had the opportunity to observe him over several days. Singlehandedly, Kanzi has shown that bonobos have at least as much linguistic capacity as chimpanzees, and with respect to the questions of “morals,” Kanzi’s trainer writes:
When the lexigrams GOOD and BAD were first placed on Kanzi’s keyboard, I did not think he would use them frequently, or with intent. I put them on so everyone would have a clear way of indicating to Kanzi when we felt that he was being good or bad. To my surprise, Kanzi was intrigued with these lexigrams and soon began using them to indicate his intent to be GOOD or BAD, as well as to comment on his previous actions as GOOD or BAD. When he was about to do things that he knew we did not want him to do, he started saying BAD, BAD, BAD before he did them, as though threatening to do something he was not supposed to do. He would, for example, announce his intent to be bad before biting a hole in his ball, tearing up the telephone, or taking an object away from someone.56
Sue also relates how Kanzi labeled his treatment of another researcher:
One day, when Kanzi was supposed to be taking a nap with Liz, who was exhausted and went to sleep, Kanzi refused to lie down. After she had been asleep about fifteen minutes, she suddenly realized that the blanket she was using as a pillow had been rudely jerked out from under her head. She sat up to look over at Kanzi who commented on his action, saying BAD SURPRISE. Another time, when he was supposed to take a nap, he did not want to do so. He asked to play CHASE WATER instead, and when told he could not do so, he commented BAD WATER and proceeded to take the water hose and spray it all over things.57
It’s apparent that this bonobo was able to place labels humans will take as moralistic on his own behavior, with some degree of understanding, and he did so not only with respect to past behavior but also with respect to future behavior. However, using human labels does not necessarily mean that he experienced our own type of moral feelings. Indeed, there is no hint that Kanzi was feeling remorse or shame when he announced the BAD SURPRISE or when he signaled that he was going to do something BAD and then went ahead and did it. The difference between knowing you’ve previously misbehaved in someone else’s eyes, which may involve some anticipated sanction or punishment, and feeling inside that you’ve behaved immorally and deserve to be punished is profound.
Lucy was literally a second child in the Temerlin household. Washoe, the first chimpanzee to be taught ASL, was raised less intimately by humans. Comparing Washoe and Lucy, Fouts writes:
Whenever Washoe’s antics tested my patience, I used to conjure up an imaginary BLACK DOG to scare her into cooperating. Maury Temerlin, ever the psychotherapist, would manipulate Lucy with guilt. This was remarkably effective. If Lucy was refusing to eat her dinner, Maury would plead, “For God’s sake, Lucy, think of the starving chimps in Africa.” She’d then take just a bite or two. Unsatisfied, he’d beg, “Take at least three more bites for your poor suffering father who loves you.” Lucy would eat with a little more enthusiasm. Finally, when Maury whined, “Lucy, how could you do this to me?” she became putty in his hands. After a few years, Lucy developed a guilty expression that immediately gave her away whenever she was hiding a key, smuggling a cigarette lighter, or committing some other household crime.58
We must ask immediately whether Lucy had the slightest idea what her clinical psychologist father figure meant when he referred to her own species starving in Africa. Cross-fostered chimpanzees do pick up some spoken English in the sense of passive understanding, but such complex concepts would not be represented in that vocabulary. Surely what was affecting Lucy, as an empathetic, rule-responsive being like ourselves, was simply Temerlin’s tone of voice.
Temerlin was, in fact, actively trying to make Lucy feel guilty. And chimpanzees, wild or captive, are very sensitive socially. They certainly understand the difference between another’s positive or negative feeling toward them. More specifically, they understand the difference between a significant and dominant other’s approval or disapproval of how they are behaving or have behaved recently. Lucy probably understood that Temerlin disapproved of her not eating, but did his tone of voice actually evoke something like a pang of conscience—in the form of self-recrimination?
In his book about Lucy, psychotherapist Temerlin reported that this “humanized” chimpanzee would appear furtive when she was breaking rules even if she were unaware of the observer, with the implication that guilt feelings might be present. However, a conservative scientific interpretation would be that all Lucy was doing was reacting politically to an awareness that powerful people she was bonded to would disapprove of her behavior and be angry or punish her if she got caught. At Gombe, I saw simple furtiveness all the time. For instance, an estrous female would sneak into a ravine to meet an adolescent male there and copulate with him when the alpha male was feeding nearby. They both knew that the alpha was likely to threaten or attack any lower-ranking rival if he saw him consorting with a female tha
t really interested him, so they were taking their brief pleasure (averaging all of eight short seconds) safely out of sight.
In this context the furtive looks were eloquently fearful—but I’d be willing to bet that they weren’t “guilty” in the sense of moralistic self-censure over having broken internalized rules. Indeed, if the same male and female were alone when they met, the furtive body language would be totally absent. My belief is that Lucy’s “guilty looks” were similarly motivated; they came from a fear of being discovered in the face of predictable negative reactions. So when Temerlin tried to guilt-trip Lucy into eating her food, by complying she was merely trying to accommodate the feelings of a closely bonded significant other. Empathy, most likely, but guilt, no.
As for gorillas, psychologist Penny Patterson’s very imaginative work with the well-known female Koko and Koko’s male counterpart, Michael, suggests that these apes have a similar capacity for self-conceptualization, similar signing capacities, and a comparable ability to use signs for GOOD and BAD in labeling their own behaviors.59 After I began my work with Jane Goodall, I was taken one day by a mutual friend to meet Penny and Koko, and because Koko liked to play “cover-up” games, we brought along an old sheet as a treat for this huge young female. Penny set me up face to face with Koko and quickly taught me two signs. One was PICK UP, and the other was BLANKET.
As I gazed into enormous gorilla eyes, I moved my hands to ask Koko to pick up the sheet. I could see that Koko was watching my hands and that afterward she seemed to be thinking for a time. Then she surprised me. She placed a sizable gorilla forefinger in her enormous, wide-open mouth, rested it on one of her teeth, and held it there while looking more or less in my direction. Being an ASL ignoramus, I was bewildered. Penny explained that apparently Koko wasn’t in the mood to play cover-up games, but she was fascinated by people’s fillings and was signing the equivalent of SHOW TOOTH.
I must confess to more than a normal share of shiny amalgam fillings, and I obliged her request. Considerately, I tilted my head so that Koko could see the lower left quadrant, where the ravages of youthful sugar consumption were particularly prominent. Koko looked and looked, and finally I decided to close my mouth and get back to business. Our next exchange went like this:
CB: PICK UP BLANKET.
Koko: SHOW TOOTH.
CB: PICK UP BLANKET.
Koko: SHOW TOOTH.
Again I conceded. This time it was the upper left quadrant, which fascinated Koko just as much as the lower left even though it was a bit healthier. Again, after what seemed to me to be a very long time, I closed off what obviously was a magnificent vista and went back to signing.
CB: PICK UP BLANKET.
Koko: SHOW TOOTH.
CB: PICK UP BLANKET.
Koko: SHOW TOOTH.
This time we did the lower right, which had only a single filling. But unfortunately this modest exhibit didn’t dampen Koko’s interest, so again it was I who terminated the inspection. And again, I made my request:
CB: PICK UP BLANKET.
Koko: SHOW TOOTH.
This time I caved in immediately, and unfortunately the upper right quadrant proved to be at least as fascinating as the others. I submitted to pongid scrutiny for an even longer period, hoping that Koko would get tired of teeth, but her interest showed no sign of flagging. Again I closed my jaws, but this time I was determined to stand my ground.
CB: PICK UP BLANKET.
Koko: SHOW TOOTH.
CB: PICK UP BLANKET.
Koko: SHOW TOOTH.
CB: PICK UP BLANKET.
Koko: SHOW TOOTH.
CB: PICK UP BLANKET.
Koko:————!
Koko had made a much more rapid sign that I didn’t understand, and at this point Penny Patterson burst out laughing so hard that it was moments before she could tell me that Koko had just called me a—TOILET!
Koko and I had not only had a conversation; we’d also had a running, back-and-forth argument, and in the end, when I firmly stood up for my point of view, I was rewarded with an insult. At least, that’s how I felt. Maybe I deserved this nasty epithet for giving a poor, dentally curious, signing gorilla a hard time, but here’s the important question: In her use of the symbol TOILET, was Koko merely expressing anger and disapproval at my behavior? Or was there a moral element to her name-calling that made me and my antisocial behavior shamefully bad?
To figure this out for sure may require a brilliant experiment such as those devised by Gordon Gallup to probe self-recognition. But I doubt that Koko’s intentions went beyond angrily associating me with a toilet, an object that her interactions with hygiene-conscious humans surely had told her had strong negative connotations. In this connection, Penny Patterson says, “Koko’s basic nature is fastidious. She has always hated stepping in dirt: outdoors she will insist that she be carried over puddles—if she can find someone to carry her—and indoors she will scrub and clean her quarters with a vigor that suggest more than mere imitation. Interestingly, the word dirty, which she first used at about age three, and which we use to refer to her feces, became one of Koko’s favorite insults. Under extreme provocation she will combine dirty with toilet to make her meaning inescapable.”60 Apparently, my nasty behavior was an extreme provocation, for it qualified me to receive one of Koko’s worst epithets. In human terms, she’d at least called me a “shithead.”
Based on all these examples, two things can be said about the fascinating communication behaviors we’ve seen here. First, chimpanzees and bonobos can take symbols that for us have moral connotations and regularly use them in ways that suggest they do understand something about rules and rule breaking when they are dealing with us as authority figures. However, for a scientist it’s very difficult to read a humanlike internalization of moral values, or more generally anything like a conscience and a sense of shame, into the behaviors of these apes. In fact, Kanzi seems to have cognitively understood his rules very well—without identifying with them emotionally.
This suggests that the responses of apes may be something like those of human psychopaths in that psychopaths understand rules but cannot identify with them—they don’t emotionally bond, as it were, with the group standards they grew up with. Another similarity is that both apes and psychopaths are prone to dominate and control. What makes the apes unlike psychopaths, however, is that the apes are capable of sympathetic feelings for others, based on understanding how emotions work. Full-blown psychopaths aren’t, and unlike the rest of us, they’re simply born that way. Apes too are born nonmoral, it appears, but in my opinion they are definitely capable of understanding another’s internal state by emotionally identifying with it.
SUMMING UP: ANCESTRAL HEAD STARTS
Overall, in home-raised captive apes the evidence for anything very much like moral feelings as we know them is tenuous at best. If we combine what has been discussed here with what can be observed in the wild, in the absence of ingenious experiments I think we may assume that the CA did not have a moralistic sense of right and wrong as we know it today. This ape did gang up to exert social control, but my assumption is that it did so because a bully’s actions could stir simple but strong resentment and active hostility among subordinates. That is quite different from moral indignation that arises when an antisocial behavior, considered to be shamefully deviant by local mores, arouses a human group. And when premoral ancestral individuals responded to such group hostility, it was fear—and not internalized rules combined with an individual sense of shame—that made them responsive.
Yet as Jessica Flack and Frans de Waal have argued with respect to empathy and perspective taking,61 it’s also clear that many other building blocks useful to the evolution of a conscience were firmly in place ancestrally, and that they persisted over evolutionary time because they served the reproductive interests of individuals. These advantages ranged from the capacity to differentiate oneself from others, to the perspective-taking potential that permitted ancestral apes to get into th
e heads of other apes sufficiently to understand, in many contexts, what they were feeling and intending.
This highly social type of psyche made it possible to both follow and impose rules, and if angry, when rebellious subordinates lacked the power to impose rules on their own, they could still join in with others, and wield dominant collective power. At the very least, the result was a primitive form of group social control, which had significant fitness consequences because it could result in wounding, expulsion from the group, and, surely, the occasional death. Such antihierarchical behavior comes very naturally to chimpanzees and bonobos as well as to humans, and basically it can be attributed to resentment of being subordinated, pure and simple.
These various head starts suggest that Ancestral Pan had plenty of preadaptive wherewithal for evolving a conscience if the right environmental changes came along, but this doesn’t mean that evolving a conscience was inevitable—or even very likely. As I’ve pointed out, the bonobo and chimpanzee lineages have shared this ancestral behavioral potential continuously over the past 6 million years and yet, despite their keen awareness of social rules and the existence of united attacks by angry subordinate coalitions, and in spite of their ability to recognize themselves in mirrors and understand the intentions of others, not one of them has ever been seen to self-judgmentally blush with shame.
Moral Origins Page 14