Morality in primate behaviour

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Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior By *NICHOLAS

WADE*<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/nicholas_wade\

/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

 

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others.

Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save

others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also

deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve

themselves for several days.

 

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of

human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral

rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or

theologians, to say what these rules are.

 

Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists' bid to annex

their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and

have started an academic conversation with them.

 

The original call to battle was sounded by the biologist Edward O. Wilson

more than 30 years ago, when he suggested in his 1975 book " Sociobiology "

that " the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands

of the philosophers and biologicized. " He may have jumped the gun about the

time having come, but in the intervening decades biologists have made

considerable progress.

 

Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his

book " Moral Minds " that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for

acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural

machinery for learning language. In another recent book, " Primates and

Philosophers, " the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher

critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social

behavior of monkeys and apes.

 

Dr. de Waal, who is director of the Living Links Center at Emory

University<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/e\

mory_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,

argues that all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior

in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints,

evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human

inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human

morality has been shaped.

 

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and

indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality.

But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain

emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey

societies.

 

Dr. de Waal's views are based on years of observing nonhuman primates,

starting with work on aggression in the 1960s. He noticed then that after

fights between two combatants, other chimpanzees would console the loser.

But he was waylaid in battles with psychologists over imputing emotional

states to animals, and it took him 20 years to come back to the subject.

 

He found that consolation was universal among the great apes but generally

absent from monkeys — among macaques, mothers will not even reassure an

injured infant. To console another, Dr. de Waal argues, requires empathy and

a level of self-awareness that only apes and humans seem to possess. And

consideration of empathy quickly led him to explore the conditions for

morality.

 

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine

ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and

the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this

lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a

sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.

 

Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees,

as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of

ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de

Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often

bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community

worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off

a fight by taking stones out of the males' hands.

 

Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good

of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a

significant precursor of morality in human societies.

 

Macaques and chimpanzees have a sense of social order and rules of expected

behavior, mostly to do with the hierarchical natures of their societies, in

which each member knows its own place. Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly

how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as

punishment. Other primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness.

They remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. Chimps are more

likely to share food with those who have groomed them. Capuchin monkeys show

their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for

performing the same task, like a piece of cucumber instead of a grape.

 

These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow

social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality.

 

Dr. de Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality,

but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society's

moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation

building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there

are no parallels in animals.

 

Religion can be seen as another special ingredient of human societies,

though one that emerged thousands of years after morality, in Dr. de Waal's

view. There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no

precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans

evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. " I

look at religions as recent additions, " he said. " Their function may have to

do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to

them, which is what religions really do. "

 

As Dr. de Waal sees it, human morality may be severely limited by having

evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral

restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders.

" The profound irony is that our noblest achievement — morality — has

evolutionary ties to our basest behavior — warfare, " he writes. " The sense

of community required by the former was provided by the latter. "

 

Dr. de Waal has faced down many critics in evolutionary biology and

psychology in developing his views. The evolutionary biologist George

Williams dismissed morality as merely an accidental byproduct of evolution,

and psychologists objected to attributing any emotional state to animals.

Dr. de Waal convinced his colleagues over many years that the ban on

inferring emotional states was an unreasonable restriction, given the

expected evolutionary continuity between humans and other primates.

 

His latest audience is moral philosophers, many of whom are interested in

his work and that of other biologists. " In departments of philosophy, an

increasing number of people are influenced by what they have to say, " said

Gilbert Harman, a Princeton University

<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/princeton_u\

niversity/index.html?inline=nyt-org>

philosopher.

 

Dr. Philip Kitcher, a philosopher at Columbia University

<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_un\

iversity/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,

likes Dr. de Waal's empirical approach. " I have no doubt there are patterns

of behavior we share with our primate relatives that are relevant to our

ethical decisions, " he said. " Philosophers have always been beguiled by the

dream of a system of ethics which is complete and finished, like

mathematics. I don't think it's like that at all. "

 

But human ethics are considerably more complicated than the sympathy Dr. de

Waal has described in chimps. " Sympathy is the raw material out of which a

more complicated set of ethics may get fashioned, " he said. " In the actual

world, we are confronted with different people who might be targets of our

sympathy. And the business of ethics is deciding who to help and why and

when. "

 

Many philosophers believe that conscious reasoning plays a large part in

governing human ethical behavior and are therefore unwilling to let

everything proceed from emotions, like sympathy, which may be evident in

chimpanzees. The impartial element of morality comes from a capacity to

reason, writes Peter

Singer<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/peter_singer\

/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,

a moral philosopher at Princeton, in " Primates and Philosophers. " He says,

" Reason is like an escalator — once we step on it, we cannot get off until

we have gone where it takes us. "

 

That was the view of Immanuel Kant, Dr. Singer noted, who believed morality

must be based on reason, whereas the Scottish philosopher David Hume,

followed by Dr. de Waal, argued that moral judgments proceed from the

emotions.

 

But biologists like Dr. de Waal believe reason is generally brought to bear

only after a moral decision has been reached. They argue that morality

evolved at a time when people lived in small foraging societies and often

had to make instant life-or-death decisions, with no time for conscious

evaluation of moral choices. The reasoning came afterward as a post hoc

justification. " Human behavior derives above all from fast, automated,

emotional judgments, and only secondarily from slower conscious processes, "

Dr. de Waal writes.

 

However much we may celebrate rationality, emotions are our compass,

probably because they have been shaped by evolution, in Dr. de Waal's view.

For example, he says: " People object to moral solutions that involve

hands-on harm to one another. This may be because hands-on violence has been

subject to natural selection whereas utilitarian deliberations have not. "

 

Philosophers have another reason biologists cannot, in their view, reach to

the heart of morality, and that is that biological analyses cannot cross the

gap between " is " and " ought, " between the description of some behavior and

the issue of why it is right or wrong. " You can identify some value we hold,

and tell an evolutionary story about why we hold it, but there is always

that radically different question of whether we ought to hold it, " said

Sharon Street, a moral philosopher at New York

University<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/n\

ew_york_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.

" That's not to discount the importance of what biologists are doing, but it

does show why centuries of moral philosophy are incredibly relevant, too. "

 

Biologists are allowed an even smaller piece of the action by Jesse Prinz, a

philosopher at the University of North

Carolina<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/uni\

versity_of_north_carolina/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.

He believes morality developed after human evolution was finished and that

moral sentiments are shaped by culture, not

genetics<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthto\

pics/geneticsandheredity/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.

" It would be a fallacy to assume a single true morality could be identified

by what we do instinctively, rather than by what we ought to do, " he said.

" One of the principles that might guide a single true morality might be

recognition of equal dignity for all human beings, and that seems to be

unprecedented in the animal world. "

 

Dr. de Waal does not accept the philosophers' view that biologists cannot

step from " is " to " ought. " " I'm not sure how realistic the distinction is, "

he said. " Animals do have 'oughts.' If a juvenile is in a fight, the mother

must get up and defend her. Or in food sharing, animals do put pressure on

each other, which is the first kind of 'ought' situation. "

 

Dr. de Waal's definition of morality is more down to earth than Dr. Prinz's.

Morality, he writes, is " a sense of right and wrong that is born out of

groupwide systems of conflict management based on shared values. " The

building blocks of morality are not nice or good behaviors but rather mental

and social capacities for constructing societies " in which shared values

constrain individual behavior through a system of approval and disapproval. "

By this definition chimpanzees in his view do possess some of the behavioral

capacities built in our moral systems.

 

" Morality is as firmly grounded in neurobiology as anything else we do or

are, " Dr. de Waal wrote in his 1996 book " Good Natured. " Biologists ignored

this possibility for many years, believing that because natural selection

was cruel and pitiless it could only produce people with the same qualities.

But this is a fallacy, in Dr. de Waal's view. Natural selection favors

organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided

people, he writes in " Primates and Philosophers, " with " a compass for life's

choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which

is the essence of human morality. "