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<\/a>A couple weeks back \u2013 or more by now, Mark left me a massive (huge thanks!) comment<\/a> regarding a prior post of mine and I promised a prompt response. Being a fellow Montanan, Mark urged me to enjoy the glorious MT summer and let the response wait, which I definitely appreciate. Here, now, I\u2019ll try to address some of Mark\u2019s points. This will have to be mostly off the top of my head, but it\u2019s better than nothin\u2019.<\/p>\n
Justin,<\/p>\n
Back on May 28th the topic was \u201cmoral connectedness.\u201d<\/a> [JW: my link]<\/span> Here are the notes I took on the book you expressed an interest in.<\/p>\n
I read Frans de Waal\u2019s Primates and Philosophers. How Morality Evolved <\/a> De Waals contribution to the book consists of the online 2003 Tanner Lecture on Human Values titled Morality and the Social Instincts: Continuity with the Other Primates<\/a>. The rest of the book consists of comments on de Waal\u2019s paper by Robert Wright, Christine M. Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Quite a cast of characters:<\/p>\n
\n
- Robert Wright<\/a> (hopefully the right one!) on TED<\/a><\/li>\n
- Christine Korsgaard<\/a>, Harvard Philosopher (a Kantian, no less!)<\/li>\n
- Philip Kitcher<\/a>, Columbia Professor and acclaimed science writer<\/li>\n
- Peter Singer<\/a>, the great contemporary consequentialist\/animal rights author]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
In your blog we were thinking about recent work in science and personal experiences with animals that showed how animals were helpful, faithful, caring, capable of empathy and how their whole way of being in the world was distorted when they were viewed as Descartes viewed them as merely machines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yep. Descartes is credited with creating the great chasm between humanity and the rest of the animals, but he was just clarifying Catholic\/Christian and Aristotelian notions that had been around for a long time. <\/span> For Christianity there is Genesis, which clearly <\/span>describes humanity as superior to animals and them actually made (in the second story) after man, for him. And in Aristotle, the great categorizer, humanity simply had to be differentiated in some clear way from animals, and his distinction was reasoning. <\/p>\n
Both of these ancient distinctions have been demonstrated as wrong, but they\u2019ve left an indelible impression on most people today. Cartesian Dualism<\/a>, the view that we are made up of two distinct and separate substances \u2013 body & mind \u2013 is said to be the view of the man on the street. <\/span> Buddhism<\/a>, as we know, sometimes sounds dualistic in this sense \u2013 speaking of name (n\u0101ma<\/b>) and form (r\u016bpa<\/b>)<\/a>. Yet while Western traditions have sought to place our true self<\/span> in nama \u2013 sometimes translated as \u2018mind\u2019; Buddhism affirms an\u0101tman<\/a>\/anatta<\/a> \u2013 the teaching of ultimate selflessness. <\/p>\n
You were also thinking that these science papers showing ethical behavior extending to nonhuman animals might be useful to advance a paper of yours on ethics and evolution. You were troubled about the chasm that opened up between humans and other living things when people attributed ethical behavior only to humans and assumed other animals lacked this capacity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yes. It seems to only make sense that once we see that such distinctions are false, then we should (however cautiously) attribute ethical capacity to non-human animals as well. I say \u2018cautiously\u2019 because there is always danger of anthropomorphising<\/a> behaviors in non-human animals.<\/p>\n
The concerns of your blog are central to de Waals book. He argues that some of the components of ethical behavior found in humans are in place in nonhuman primates. Science just doesn\u2019t\u2019 support the more commonly held view that he calls the \u201cVeneer Theory\u201d of the origins of human ethical behavior. According to Veneer Theory, evolution has equipped humans to be only selfish, individually oriented, aggressive. This is our human nature. When the planet became so crowded that our selfish, individual, aggressive, behavior, our biology, became more trouble than it was worth, we organized ourselves into communities where our behavior was artificially shaped by social contracts involving ethics and laws. However, this ethical behavior, since it is socially constructed, has a different ontological status than the underlying human nature that it is designed to reign in. Most fundamentally we are what evolution equipped us to be, mean, selfish, brutish individuals who are constrained by a weaker, artificially designed set of ethical rules and laws.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A bit more on Veneer Theory: \u201c\u2018Veneer Theory,\u2019 \u2026 sees morality as a thin layer barely disguising less noble tendencies. Veneer Theory is contrasted with the position of Charles Darwin, who saw human morality as a natural outgrowth of the social instincts and as continuous with the sociality of other animals.\u201d (from here<\/a>) Sounds like Hobbes<\/a> all over again. It answers some superficial questions about our behavior, especially when we act selfishly or submissively; but it very much fails to grasp the richness and depth of cooperative behavior, love, and altruism. Hobbes would likewise ascribe these as \u2018coming out of\u2019 external necessities, and not our \u2018true nature.\u2019<\/p>\n
This Veneer Theory of the origins of human morality is contrasted by de Waal with Darwin\u2019s view of how human morality evolved. The evolutionary view says that primate ancestors of humans and primitive humans evolved in groups. Because the early human ancestors lived in groups the evolutionary success of the groups really depended on components or predispositions for ethical behavior like empathy and helping to be in place. Since modern humans \u201cdescended with modifications\u201d from these earlier social primates, the earliest modern humans must have had these components of ethical behavior and not mysteriously produced ethical behavior by some unknown cultural mechanism outside of our biology in the last 10,000 years or so.<\/span> [JW: emphasis mine, here and below] So all of the social thinking that underlies so much of our political and economic thinking that envisions an evolutionary past with humans struggling only selfishly against one another but flourishing in egoistic lives in some primitive state of nature just doesn\u2019t fit the scientific picture. According to de Waal, evolution equipped us to look out for ourselves AND be caring and empathetic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yes. This gets us beyond mere ethical behavior and points to the structures (the human brain, human communities) that give rise to moral behavior. Brilliant! It\u2019s about time \ud83d\ude42 <\/p>\n
So the Veneer Theory opens up a wide dualistic chasm between human and nonhuman animals. According to Veneer Theory, humans by some mysterious cultural process developed morality or a capacity to reign in their biology based human nature and that\u2019s what makes humans different from other animals. The author says no, there isn\u2019t a chasm between humans and the rest of their primate ancestors because our mammal and primate ancestors show components of ethical behavior.<\/span> Here are a couple of interesting examples:<\/p>\n
Church, R. M. 1959. Emotional Reactions of Rats to the Pain of Others. Journal
of Comparative & Physiological Psychology52: 132\u201334.<\/p>\nWechkin, S., J. H. Masserman, and W. Terris. 1964. Shock to a Conspecific as an
Aversive Stimulus. Psychonomic Science 1: 47\u201348.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nExcellent, thanks for the citations. Here\u2019s a good story with some of our characters from the NY Times:<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\nMarch 20, 2007, Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior<\/span> <\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/span><\/p>\n
By NICHOLAS WADE<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/a><\/div>\n\u2026<\/p>\n
These studies found that the rats and monkeys refused to press the button that resulted in delivery of food to themselves if doing so shocked a nearby companion. One monkey stopped pressing the button and obtaining food for 12 days, essentially starving itself, after obtaining food then witnessing a shock delivered to a companion. I think these animal studies are thought-provoking especially in light Stanley Milgram\u2019s work. Milgram found that college students in experimental situations could be talked into administering shocks to human subjects rather easily. Sigh\u2026\u2026..<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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