8

Ethics

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.

—Abraham Lincoln

For all animal life there must be a system of value—even for single-celled organisms. Motion itself is related to value and is the primary reason we have a brain—to direct us toward good or bad—toward that which will keep us healthy and away from that which will do us harm. The complexity of how values are assessed, of course, accelerates in creatures with the development of a central nervous system and brain. When we arrive at social animals, and eventually ourselves, the notion of value becomes multi-dimensional, no longer just a matter of movement for the individual, but the organism must take into consideration the regulation of actions affecting the political concerns of an entire society of other individuals of which it is a part. As we shall see when examining the trickster stories, at heart this is what they explore: how should one behave amongst a world of others.

From the time of the first myth, we humans have speculated as to our condition, asking, “Who are we, and why do we do what we do?” Implied in those questions is this one: “How are we are supposed to act?” In tribal society the myths themselves present these dilemmas in a covert and literary fashion, and “laws” for behavior are not expressed formally. With the advent of state-level society, writing led to the codification of behavior in laws transcribed into stone (instead of being just loose and unspecified societal norms), such as the Code of Ur-Nammu, king of Ur (ca. 2050 BC), the Laws of Eshnunna (ca. 1930 BC) the codex of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin (ca. 1870 BC), the Code of Hammurabi (1760 BC), as well as others. The later Jewish Mosiac Code is the one most of us know as the Ten Commandments. Number seven of the Code of Hammurabi serves as an example of these legal proclamations: “If any one buy from the son or the slave of another man, without witnesses or a contract, silver or gold, a male or female slave, an ox or a sheep, an ass or anything, or if he take it in charge, he is considered a thief and shall be put to death.”1 The societies that developed these laws were theocracies—church and state aligned—so that the ultimate authority was seen as having come from the gods—and through the gods to their divine emissaries on earth—the sons of gods—the monarchs. Western tradition saw this as part of the “natural order” in that these laws (in Christian and Jewish tradition—the Mosiac) derived from the very gods who created the natural world.

However, such laws were also seen as reasonable (whether the antecedent for them be divine or mortal), in that they kept order and maintained fairness in the sense that a legal precedent was established that theoretically would apply to all for whom justice must be administered. Aristotle wrote that human happiness depended upon reason and that to be virtuous was a logical result of a reasoned (logos) life.

Following Aristotle in Western tradition, “reason” became the primary assumptive force for calculating ethical value; therefore, philosophers have worked diligently to create prescriptions for morality under the assumption that reasonable people will adhere to reasonable arguments and act accordingly. Reason became that element within us that could vanquish our animal nature, taming us into submission so societies of rational order might follow. Reason, as a creation of the gods, was also natural, as humans were endowed with this property.

I will come back to address aspects of Aristotelian ethics, but first I would like to turn to Thomas Hobbes (1651), the first to really challenge the Aristotelian view, for Hobbes saw human beings as both amoral and asocial, and perceived that values were either “natural” or “artificial,” and the two were cataclysmically separate. Hobbes took umbrage with the idea that nature provided any kind of moral foundation. There was nothing naturally good in nature that could constitute a system for human morality. Hobbes believed that it was only in the world of artifice that mankind could succeed, for the world of nature would lead to chaotic despotism, ignorance, and danger, with “no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”2 As James Rachels explains Hobbes’s position,

to escape the state of nature, then, people must agree to the establishment of rules to govern their relations with one another, and they must agree to the establishment of an agency—the state—with the power necessary to enforce those rules. . . . This agreement is called the social contract.3

John Locke’s (1632–1704) political theory was founded in opposition to Hobbes, for Locke saw reason and tolerance as attributes of human nature, though like Hobbes, Locke also saw selfishness as an essential human trait, from which he developed the supply and demand theory of economic structure. Locke also believed that when born, the human mind was a “tabula rasa,” a blank slate. Ethical Egoism, the belief that society runs best by the fulfillment of each individual’s personal desires, is also linked to Locke—a system that has become the bedrock of capitalistic belief as articulated in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), where he states than an “invisible hand” guides an economic policy based on personal greed that will maintain a perfect equilibrium. The term laissez-faire has often been used in association with this position, one which admonishes the deregulation of the private sector while abhorring any governmental incursion into the economy for the “public” good (as good in this sense is always seen as private). Humans were reasonable actors, who when acting reasonably (in their own interests) would create societies that would approach reasonable perfection.

In Western tradition, another important philosophical position is the deontological argument initiated by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). This position states that mankind needs rules by which to live (in close relationship to social contract theory), with the caveat being that those rules should be followed under all circumstances. Rules, in Kant’s philosophy, do not depend upon religious decree; they stem from reason alone. As James Rachels says of Kant’s philosophy, “The only way moral goodness can exist is for rational creatures to apprehend what they should do and, acting from a sense of duty, do it. . . . Thus if there were no rational beings, the moral dimension of the world would simply disappear.”4

Utilitarianism, the other major Western philosophical argument (from the name of a book written by John Mill in 1861) advocates the moral position that in any circumstance the correct form of action is the one that leads to the greater good for the greater number of people, once again a prescriptive position based on reason: “According to the Greatest Happiness Principle . . . the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable (whether we are considering our own good or that of other people), is an existence exempt as free as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments.”5 Interestingly enough, Mill advances that moral decisions based upon Utilitarian principles should also extend to “the whole of sentient creation” (Rachels), a position that the West has never seriously considered.

The Fallacy of the Naturalistic Fallacy: Is-Ought

Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) was secular in his thinking and demanded empirical evidence in the determination of truth. Yet, he realized that inductive reasoning, making inferences based upon observable data, was not reliable. Just because we perceive constancy in nature, one could not logically infer that such would be the case once you took your eyes off of the subject at hand. It is “consistent and conceivable” that nature would change. Instead of reason being the dominant power that allows us to make determinations of constancy, Hume postulated that it was natural instinct that allowed us to make inductive inferences, stating that “the lives of men depend upon the same laws as the lives of all other animals.”6 It is our animal nature that allows us to proceed in the world and to make the necessary decisions for survival, and that allows for reason itself: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”7 Morality then, in Hume’s estimation depends primarily upon emotion, and does not derive from logic: “Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.”8

Hume’s interpretation is strikingly similar to what neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown in his research—that there is no such thing as pure logic devoid of emotion. Yet, ironically, another of Hume’s advances, which has become known as Hume’s law, seems to say the opposite. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Hume famously closes the section of the Treatise that argues against moral rationalism by observing that other systems of moral philosophy, proceeding in the ordinary way of reasoning, at some point make an unremarked transition from premises linked only by “is” to propositions linked by “ought” (expressing a new relation)—a deduction that seems to Hume “altogether inconceivable” (T3.1.1.27). Attention to this transition would “subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.”9

The Is-Ought argument is usually assumed to mean that regarding ethical judgments, nothing that occurs in nature can be assumed to be prescriptive regarding how one ought to behave. This essentially harkens back to Hobbes—the notion that nature is brutish and offers no template for human ethics—hence the term Naturalistic Fallacy. But this interpretation contradicts Hume’s entire thesis: that ethics are not derived from reason but are emotive. Hume answers the one question that those who continue to believe in the Naturalist Fallacy fail to see: From whence did “ought” arrive? (This is especially true in light of the fact that we find the same basic repetition of human moral codes throughout our species—which I will return to in the discussion on cultural relativism). As Larry Arnhart states in Darwinian Natural Right,

If we accept the common view of Hume as having argued that we cannot infer what ought to be from what is the case, then it would seem that he contradicts himself by deriving morality from the natural inclinations of human beings. The contradiction disappears, however, once we see that the dichotomy between is and ought falsely attributed to Hume was actually first formulated by Immanuel Kant, who used it as an argument against the kind of ethical naturalism developed by Hume! Furthermore, once this point is understood, it becomes clear that while the proponents of Darwinian naturalism are Humeans, their critics are Kantians.10

As Arnhart states, “Kant’s separation of is and ought treats morality as an autonomous realm of human experience governed by its own internal logic with no reference to anything in human nature such as natural desires or nature.”11 Darwin saw that instead of there existing a dualism between nature and ethics, the entire realm of emotions which derive from the fact of social interactions between animals of the same species constitutes the very basis of moral being:

It has, I think, now been shewn that man and the higher animals, especially the Primates, have some few instincts in common. All have the same senses, intuitions, and sensations—similar passions, affections, and emotions, even the more complex ones, such as jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude, and magnanimity; they practise deceit and are revengeful; they are sometimes susceptible to ridicule, and even have a sense of humour; they feel wonder and curiosity; they possess the same faculties of imitation, attention, deliberation, choice, memory, imagination, the association of ideas, and reason, though in very different degrees. The individuals of the same species graduate in intellect from absolute imbecility to high excellence. They are also liable to insanity, though far less often than in the case of man.12

This brings us back to Aristotle, who derived his system of ethics from biology. He said, “Thought by itself moves nothing,” and that choice involves “desiring reason” or “reasoning desire.” Aristotle saw that politics (social attachment and construct) was a natural part of human behavior, and in the root of this natural political desire, stemming from biology, arose moral sensibility. His Virtue ethics are based on the proposition that any prescriptive system of ethical rules will always fail, as ethical behavior, rooted in biology, is always a complicated matter involving a multiplicity of instincts, as well as cultural and historical influences and concerns. In other words, goodness can never be determined by a Deontological or Universalist argument, both of which are simplistic in design and impossible in application. To say one should not kill is meaningless when someone is coming at you with a knife and it’s you or him. Likewise, the Social Contract theory, based on rules, is meaningless without some basic social sense imbued in the species in the first place. We could never have enough law enforcement officers to control the population, and then again they’d all be corrupt and in need of supervision themselves.

Darwin believed that it was in the realm of attachment between parents and offspring that feelings of empathy and “love” arose in various species, and that these served as the backbone for the further development of human emotions that led to a more highly refined sensibility of ethical behavior. This is exactly what Aristotle believed nearly 2500 years earlier: that the prolonged requirement for parental care is what led to social love and it was precisely the same sentiment described by Hume: “that the natural moral sentiments that bind people in families can expand to embrace larger groups.”13 Of course, none of these thinkers knew anything of genes, but as Robert Wright says in The Moral Animal, they play an essential part in the story:

Genes don’t magically sense the presence of copies of themselves in other organisms and try to save them. [Here discussing kinship theory of reciprocity]. Genes aren’t clairvoyant, or even conscious; they don’t “try” to do anything. But should a gene appear that happens to make its vehicle behave in ways that help the survival or reproduction prospects of other vehicles likely to contain a copy of that gene, then the gene may thrive, even if prospects for its vehicle are lowered in the process. . . . This logic could apply, as in this case, to a gene that inclines a mammal to produce a warning call when it sees a threat to its home burrow, where relatives reside. The logic could also apply to a gene that leads an insect to be sterile, so long as the insect spends its life helping fertile relatives. . . . [and to genes that help humans] sense early on who their siblings are and thereafter share food with them, give guidance to them, defend them, and so on—genes, in other words, leading to sympathy, empathy, compassion: genes for love.14

The fallacy of the Naturalistic Fallacy is quite apparent in lieu of the past twenty years of the Darwinian renaissance in all aspects of science, which has revolutionized our approach to answering the oldest questions we have about ourselves. Whereas the entire tradition of philosophy has been purely speculative, with the advent of neuroscience we finally have tools available that can scientifically answer some of the most perplexing questions of our species that philosophy had previously tried to address. Now we have a vast amount of technological resources, such as MRI scans, DNA research, and more, yielding empirical evidence, which shows many of the old answers to have been wrong. More has been gleaned about the nature of the human brain in the last ten years than in all previous time. For this reason, scientists such as E. O. Wilson have been calling for the coming together of Science, Philosophy, and Ethics:

For much of this century, moral philosophy has been constrained by the supposed absolute gap between is and ought, and the consequent belief that the facts of life cannot of themselves yield an ethical blueprint for future action. For this reason, ethics has sustained an eerie existence largely apart from Science. Its most respected interpreters still believe that reasoning about right and wrong can be successful without a knowledge of the brain, the human organ where all the decisions about right and wrong are made. Ethical premises are typically treated in the manner of mathematical propositions: directives supposedly independent of human evolution, with a claim to ideal, eternal truths.

While many substantial gains have been made in our understanding of the nature of moral thought and action, insufficient use has been made of knowledge of the brain and its evolution. Beliefs in extrasomatic moral truths and in an absolute is/ought barrier are wrong. Moral premises relate only to our physical nature and are the result of an idiosyncratic genetic history—a history which is nevertheless powerful and general enough within the human species to form working codes. The time has come to turn moral philosophy into an applied Science because, as the geneticist Hermann J. Muller urged in 1959, 100 years without Darwin are enough.15

Fairness and Justice in the Animal World

Trickster stories, in which taboos are constantly broken, can only exist if there are rules in place before Trickster has arrived (and keep in mind—Trickster is usually a god). The very fact Trickster exists as a universal phenomenon, as a character who deals with moral concerns, goes to prove that our human sense of morality is, at base, extremely similar across the globe. Actions that mitigate toward justice can only occur if something in the brain is wired for fair play. What may be a surprise to some is the fact that we humans are not the only animals who have compassion, empathy, and social codes of behavior.

Besides having social codes, animals by nature also exhibit protean behavior, meaning they are flexible and can do the unexpected (this is an important aspect that defines Trickster). Animals can make unpredictable choices, which often are the very choices that allow them to escape predation or find food. Choice is inherent in the notion of fairness. Justice can only develop in a behavioral system that allows for different kinds of actions. Of course choice is not unlimited (Darwin saw right away that his theory of evolution was problematic for free will) but choice at some level defines what it is to be an animal—to go here or go there. Some of these choices for higher animals involve the behavior of affection and courteous treatment of others. Of course in social animals, like primates, with mirror cells and awareness of others’ intentions, an individual’s behavioral choices often determine his or her rank in society. To survive, one needs friends.

There are numerous examples of animals exhibiting “caring behavior” within their own species, and there are cases even of such between species. Marc Bekoff, a biologist who studies emotions in animals, relates cases such as these: a troop of a 100 rhesus monkeys in India that brought “traffic to a halt after a baby monkey was hit by a car”:

A teenage female elephant nursing an injured leg is knocked over by a rambunctious hormone-laden teenage male. An older female sees this happen, chases the male away, and goes back to the younger female and touches her sore leg with her trunk.

Eleven elephants rescue a group of captive antelope in KwaZula-Natal; the matriarch elephant undoes all of the latches on the gates of the enclosure with her trunk and lets the gate swing open so the antelope can escape.

A rat in a cage refuses to push a lever for food when it sees that another rat receives an electric shock as a result. A male Diana monkey who learned to insert a token into a slot to obtain food helps a female who can’t get the hang of the trick, inserting the token for her and allowing her to eat the food reward.16

Anyone who has ever owned two or more dogs knows that perceptions of fairness play a huge part in their social interactions. This concept of fairness has been found to exist in a number of species:

Imagine the following situation. Nancy loves cucumbers, and will always eat them if given an opportunity. However, one day she sees Winnie getting a grape (which they both like better than cucumbers) and then she is only given a cucumber! Nancy immediately throws the cucumber on the ground and turns away. Does this sound like anyone you know? Substitute chocolate for vegetables and the answer is probably yes. However, Nancy and Winnie are both capuchin monkeys showing a species normal response to distributional inequity (Brosnan and de Waal, 2003a). Capuchin monkeys are not the only ones who react to inequity, either. Chimpanzees throw temper tantrums if their expectations are violated. Social canids (e.g. wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs) have a set of social rules regarding how rough play among juveniles can be, and if these rules are violated, the offending individual is excluded from play sessions. These are only a few examples in a relatively new field of study, but even from these it seems that animals do react when they feel that they have been treated inequitably.17

Social justice in species has a correlation to order, and order with status/hierarchy, which itself stems from the struggles over mating and food preferences, the dominant aspects of animal’s lives.

In one of the most astounding studies of primate behavior ever, neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky made an incredible discovery about aggression when studying stress in the lives of olive baboons. Sapolsky found that hierarchy and stress have an exact correlation, with those at the bottom experiencing most stress, leading to severely adverse health. The male baboons at the top are virtually free of stress—but they are aggressive bullies, sadistic, and antagonistic to others below their rank. In the troop Sapolsky was studying there was a bizarre occurrence in which the high-ranking males were all killed after accidentally eating some poison. To Sapolsky’s astonishment, the troop continued on without them but with a complete change in behavior. The aggression and bullying ended with the death of the most dominant males, and a new way of being baboon for the troop came into being, that has continued now for decades, even after other male baboons from different troops moved in. This study shows clearly that different ways of establishing hierarchy can emerge in primates through a shift in group dynamics, and that elements of culture can arise that can continue to ameliorate brutal male behavior.18

Studies by Caroline Zink have shown that hierarchy is wired into the human brain just as it is in other primates/mammals, and most species. In humans one’s status is constantly being calculated against that of others. As Zink says, hierarchy is “influential in everything we do, whether it’s boss-employee, teacher-student, coach-athlete.”19 Three brain regions appear to be involved in the establishment of hierarchical status:

the anterior cingulate, an area that has been shown to monitor conflict and resolve discrepancies; the medial prefrontal cortex, which processes thoughts about other people; and the precuneus, a newly discovered region that some scientists think may be the seat of self-consciousness, the brain’s ability to think about itself.20

Recent studies in envy have also corroborated the brain’s pre-wired ability to react to hierarchical social conditions:

Now researchers are gleaning insights into the neural and evolutionary underpinnings of envy, and why it can feel like a bodily illness or a physical blow. They’re also tracing the pathway of envy’s equally petty foil, the sensation of schadenfreude—taking pleasure when those whom you envied are themselves brought down low.

Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan and their colleagues described brain-scanning studies of subjects who were told to imagine themselves as protagonists in social dramas with characters of greater or lesser status or achievement. When confronting characters that the participants admitted to envying, brain regions involved in registering physical pain were aroused: the higher the subjects rated their envy, the more vigorously flared the pain nodes in the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and related areas.

Conversely, the researchers said, when subjects were given a chance to imagine the golden one’s downfall, the brain’s reward circuits were activated, again in proportion to the strength of envy’s sting: the subjects who felt the greatest envy the first time around reacted to news of their rival’s misfortune with a comparatively livelier response in the dopamine-rich pleasure centers of, for example, the ventral striatum. “We have a saying in Japanese, ‘The misfortunes of others are the taste of honey,’” said Hidehiko Takahashi, the first author on the report. “The ventral striatum is processing that ‘honey.’”21

That our trickster brains have been programmed through evolution to detect fairness and unfairness should not be a surprise, as one’s being depends upon correctly interpreting one’s place within the greater social network and negotiating one’s status through a maze of relationships; in the end this has everything to do with determining if an organism’s genes will live or die. Life in a group has tremendous benefits (one-celled organisms pairing up into two-celled, then many-celled organisms, began this process billions of years ago), yet there are also tremendous stresses. Trickster stories portray these conflicts of hierarchy and status, fairness and deceit, as well as the emotions of envy and jealousy, lust, and hate. In the stories, we often see both the egalitarian/democratic spirit and the feudal/monarchial one, sometimes existing side by side. Both are represented in our group politics and both stem from the very structures of our brains. The themes in trickster stories tell of a moral code, shaped by culture to be sure, but essentially universal and innate. The trickster stories, just as in the story about the baboons, also show that we primates are capable of acting in a variety of ways, with “ethical” behavior a part of who we are.