In the Tanner Lectures on Human Values that became the lead essay in this book, Frans de Waal brings his decades of work with primates, and his habit of thinking deeply about the meaning of evolution, to bear upon a fundamental question about human morality. Three distinguished philosophers and a prominent student of evolutionary psychology then respond to the way de Waal’s question is framed, and to his answer. Their essays are at once appreciative of de Waal’s endeavor and critical of certain of his conclusions. De Waal responds to his critics in an afterword. While there is considerable disagreement among the five essayists about both the question and how to answer it, they also share a good deal of common ground. First, all contributors to this book accept the standard scientific account of biological evolution as based on random natural selection. None suggests that there is any reason to suppose that humans are different in their metaphysical essence from other animals, or at least, none base their arguments on the idea that humans uniquely possess a transcendent soul.
A second important premise that is shared by de Waal and all four of his commentators is that moral goodness is something real, about which it is possible to make truth claims. Goodness requires, at a minimum, taking proper account of others. Badness, by the same token, includes the sort of selfishness that leads us to treat others improperly by ignoring their interests or treating them as mere instruments. The two basic premises of evolutionary science and moral reality establish the boundaries of the debate over the origins of goodness as it is set forth in this book. This means that those religious believers who are committed to the idea that humans have been uniquely endowed with special attributes (including a moral sense) by divine grace alone are not participants in the discussion as it is presented here. Nor are social scientists committed to a version of rational agent theory that regards the essence of human nature as an irreducible tendency to choose selfishness (free-riding, cheating) over voluntary cooperation. Nor, finally, are moral relativists, who believe that an action can be judged as right or wrong only locally, by reference to contingent and contextual considerations. So what we offer in this volume is a debate among five scholars who agree on some basic issues about science and morality. It is a serious and lively conversation among a group of thinkers who are deeply committed to the value and validity of science and to the value and reality of other-regarding morality.
The question that de Waal and his commentators seek to address is this: How, given that there are strong scientific reasons to suppose that selfishness (at least at the genetic level) is a primary mechanism of natural selection, did we humans come to be so strongly attached to the value of goodness? Or, to put it a bit differently, why don’t we think it is good to be bad? For those who believe that morality is real, but that it cannot be explained or justified simply by resort to the theological assumption that a unique human propensity to goodness is a product of a divine grace, this is a hard problem, and an important one.
De Waal’s aim is to argue against a set of answers to his “whence morality?” question that he describes as “Veneer Theory”—the argument that morality is only a thin veneer overlaid on an amoral or immoral core. De Waal suggests that Veneer Theory is (or at least was until recently) quite widely held. His primary target is Thomas Huxley, a scientist dubbed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his fierce defense of Darwin’s theory of evolution against its late-nineteenth-century detractors. De Waal argues that Huxley betrayed his own core Darwinian commitments in advocating a view of morality as “garden tending”—a constant battle against the luxuriant weeds of immoralism that perennially threaten to take over the human psyche. De Waal’s other targets include some social contract theorists (notably Thomas Hobbes) who begin with a conception of humans as fundamentally asocial or even antisocial, and some evolutionary biologists who, in his view, tend to overgeneralize from the established role of selfishness in the natural selection process.
None of the five essayists in this volume identifies him- or herself as a “veneer theorist” in de Waal’s sense. Yet, as the essays show, Veneer Theory can be conceived in various ways. It may therefore be useful to describe a sort of ideal type of VT, even if this risks setting up a straw man. Ideal-type Veneer Theory assumes that humans are by nature bestial and therefore bad—that is, narrowly selfish—and thus should be expected to act badly—that is, to treat others improperly. Yet it is an observable fact that at least sometimes humans treat each other well and properly, just as if we were good. Since, by the argument, humans are basically bad, their good behavior must be explained as the product of a veneer of morality, mysteriously laid over the bad natural core. De Waal’s primary objection is that VT cannot identify the source of this veneer of goodness. The veneer is something that apparently exists outside nature and so must be rejected as a myth by anyone committed to scientific explanation of natural phenomena.
If the Veneer Theory of moral goodness is based on a myth, the phenomenon of human goodness must be explained in some other way. De Waal begins by reversing the initial premise: Humans are, he suggests, by nature good. Our “good nature” is inherited, along with much else, from our nonhuman ancestors through the ordinary Darwinian process of natural selection. In order to test this premise, he invites us to join him in looking carefully at the behavior our closest nonhuman relatives—first at chimpanzees, and then at other primates more distantly related to ourselves, and ultimately at non-primate social animals. If our closest relatives do in fact act as if they were good, and if we humans also act as if we were good, the methodological principle of parsimony urges us to suppose that the goodness is real, that the motivation for goodness is natural, and that the morality of humans and their relatives has a common source.
While human behavioral goodness is more fully developed than nonhuman behavioral goodness, the simpler nonhuman morality must, according to de Waal, be regarded, in a substantial sense, as the foundation of more complex human morality. The empirical evidence for de Waal’s “anti-veneer” theory linking human and nonhuman morality consists of careful observations of the behavior of humanity’s relatives.
De Waal has spent a long and extremely successful career minutely observing primate behavior and he has seen and recorded much goodness. In the process he has developed immense respect and fondness for his subjects. One part of the pleasure of reading de Waal on primates, a pleasure that radiates in each of the commentators’ essays, is his evident joy in his years of working with chimpanzees, bonobos, and capuchins, and his sense of them as his collaborators in a momentous undertaking.
De Waal concludes that the human capacity to act well at least sometimes, rather than badly all the time, has its evolutionary origins in emotions that we share with other animals—in involuntary (unchosen, pre-rational) and physiologically obvious (thus observable) responses to the circumstances of others. A fundamentally important form of emotional response is empathy. De Waal explains that the empathetic reaction is, in the first instance, a matter of “emotional contagion.” Creature A identifies directly with the circumstances of creature B, coming, as it were, to “feel his or her pain.” At this level, empathy is still in a sense selfish—A seeks to comfort B because A has “caught” B’s pain and is himself seeking comfort. At a more advanced level, however, emotional empathy can yield sympathy— that is, the recognition that B has situationally specific wants or needs that are different from those of A. De Waal offers the lovely and telling example of a chimpanzee trying to help an injured bird to fly away. Since flying is an action the chimpanzee herself obviously could never perform, the ape is responding to the bird’s particular needs and its distinctive way of being in the world.
Emotional contagion is commonly observed in many species; sympathy is only observed among certain of the great apes. Related emotional responses conducive to good behavior include reciprocal altruism and perhaps even a sense of fairness—although this last remains disputed (as Philip Kitcher points out). Once again, the most complex and sophisticated forms of these emotion-motivated (as de Waal argues) behaviors are uniquely observed among apes and a few other species—elephants, dolphins, and capuchins.
Emotional responses are, de Waal argues, the “building blocks” of human morality. Human moral behavior is considerably more elaborate than that of any nonhuman animal, but, in de Waal’s view, it is continuous with nonhuman behavior—just as sympathy in chimpanzees is more elaborate than but continuous with emotional contagion in other animals. Given this continuity of good nature, there is no need to imagine morality being mysteriously added to an immoral core. De Waal invites us to imagine ourselves, not as solid clay garden trolls covered by a thin veneer of gaudy paint, but as “Russian dolls”—our external moral selves are ontologically continuous with a nested series of inner “prehuman selves.” And all the way down to the tiny little figure in the very center, these selves are homogeneously “good-natured.”
As the vigor of the four responses demonstrates, de Waal’s conception of the origins and nature of human morality is a challenging one. Each of the commentators agrees with de Waal that ideal-type Veneer Theory is unattractive on the face of it, although they disagree on exactly what VT is, or whether any reasonable person could subscribe to it, at least in the robust form sketched above. Yet at the end of the day each of the commentators has developed something that might be described as a distant cousin of Veneer Theory. Robert Wright is forthright about this, calling his position “naturalistic Veneer Theory.” Indeed, as Peter Singer points out (p. 145), de Waal himself at one point speaks of how “fragile” is the human effort to expand the “circle of morality” to outsiders—a locution that seems to invite imagining at least certain extended forms of human morality as a sort of veneer.
De Waal’s concern for how far the “circle of morality” can be expanded without becoming untenably fragile underlines the issue that leads his commentators to draw a bright line between human morality and animal behavior. This is their firm conviction that “genuine” (Kitcher) morality must also be universalizable. This conviction excludes animals from the ambit of genuinely moral beings. It places them “beyond moral judgment,” in Korsgaard’s words, because nonhuman animals do not universalize their good behavior. The tendency towards partiality for insiders is a constant among nonhuman social animals. Admittedly, the same partial tendency may be endogenous to humans, as de Waal believes. And it may be an endemic threat to human morality, as Robert Wright argues. But, as Kitcher, Korsgaard, and Singer all point out, the universalization of the set of beings (all persons, or, with Singer, all creatures with interests) to which moral duties are owed is treated as conceptually feasible by humans (and as conceptually essential by some human philosophers). And it is at least sometimes put into practice by them.
Each commentator asks a similar question, albeit in quite different philosophical registers: If even the most advanced nonhuman animals ordinarily limit their good behavior to insiders (kin or community members), can we really speak of their behavior as moral? And if the answer is no (as each concludes), then we must assume that human beings have some capacity that is discontinuous with the natural capacities of all nonhuman species. De Waal acknowledges the issue, noting (as Singer again points out, p. l44) that “It is only when we make general, impartial judgments that we can really begin to speak of moral approval and disapproval.”
The most obvious capacity discontinuity between humans and nonhuman animals is in the area of speech, and the self-conscious employment of reason that we associate strongly with the uniquely human use of language. Speech, language use, and reason are obviously connected to cognition. So what can we say about nonhuman cognition? No one participating in this collection supposes that any nonhuman species is the cognitive equal of human beings, but the question remains whether humans are uniquely capable of moral reasoning.
This is the point in the debate at which defining anthropomorphism becomes a lively issue; Wright in particular focuses on the importance of the anthropomorphism question. De Waal is an ardent and thoughtful advocate of a critical and parsimonious version of scientific anthropomorphism— which he sharply distinguishes from the scattershot sentimental anthropomorphism typical of much (albeit delightful) popular writing about animals. None of the four commentators can fairly be characterized as an advocate of “anthropodenial”—de Waal’s term for the practice of those who, perhaps out of an aesthetic horror of nature, refuse to acknowledge the continuities between humans and other animals. Much of the debate among philosophers and animal behaviorists over human uniqueness has centered on the question of whether any nonhuman animal is capable of developing anything like a real Theory of Mind (ToM)—that is to say, whether or not the capacity to imagine the contents of another being’s mind as different from one’s own is uniquely human. There is some experimental data that may lend support to both sides of this question. De Waal answers doubters by noting that individual chimpanzees can recognize themselves in a mirror (thus demonstrating the self-consciousness often supposed as an antecedent condition for ToM). He pointedly draws our attention to the stark anthropocentrism of demanding that ape subjects be able to formulate a theory of human minds. But the question of nonhuman ToM remains undecided; clearly more research on this area is called for.
Kitcher and Korsgaard sharply distinguish animal behavior motivated by emotion from human morality, which they argue must be based on cognitive self-consciousness about the propriety of one’s proposed line of action. Kitcher draws the line by making Humean/Smithian “spectatorism” into a kind of self-consciousness requiring speech. Korsgaard appeals to the Kantian conception of autonomous self-governance as the necessary foundation for genuine morality. Both Kitcher and Korsgaard describe nonhuman animals as “wantons,” helping themselves to a concept developed in other contexts by the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Frankfurtian wantons lack a mechanism by which to discriminate in any consistent way among the various motivations that from time to time might prompt them to act. And thus wantons cannot be said to be guided by self-conscious reasoning on the propriety of their proposed actions. Yet at this point the question arises of whether Kitcher and Korsgaard are setting the bar of morality at a level that most human action fails to reach. Each philosopher offers a self-consciously normative account of morality as how people ought to act, rather than a descriptive account of how most of us actually do act most of the time. If most humans, in their actual behavior, act like wantons, it takes some of the sting out of the claim that all nonhuman animals act like wantons too.
The same issue arises in Singer’s discussion of what moral philosophers call “trolley problems.” Singer’s consequentialist concern with aggregating interests leads him to claim that moral reason demands that, under the right circumstances, one ought to push another human being in front of a runaway trolley in order to save five others (the premise is that one’s own body is too light to stop the trolley, whereas the pushed individual is of sufficient mass). Singer alludes to studies of brain scans of individuals as they answer the question of how one should act in the “kill one to save five” situation. People who say that one should not kill in that situation make quick judgments and their brain activity at the moment of decision is concentrated in areas associated with emotion. Those who say that one ought to kill manifest increased activity in parts of the brain associated with rational cognition. Singer thus claims that what he regards as the morally correct answer is also the cognitively rational answer. Yet Singer also acknowledges that those giving the correct answer are in the minority: most people do not say that they would choose to act personally to kill one individual to save five others. Singer does not cite any cases of people actually pushing others in front of trolleys.
The point is that de Waal’s evidence, quantitative and anecdotal, for primate emotional response is based entirely on observations of actual behavior. De Waal must base his account of primate morality on how primates do in fact act because he has no access to their “ought” stories about what moral reason might ideally demand of them, or to how they suppose they ought to act in a hypothetical situation. So there seems to be a risk of comparing apples and oranges: contrasting primate behavior (based on quantitative and anecdotal observation) with human normative ideals. Of course, de Waal’s critics can respond that the difference among comparanda is precisely the point: nonhuman animals have not got any ought stories, or for that matter stories of any kind, because they lack the capacity for speech, language, and reason.
Nonhuman animals cannot enunciate normative ideals, to one another or to us. Does that fact require us to draw a bright line between the kinds of emotion-motivated “moral” behavior that de Waal and others have observed in primates and the “genuine” reason-based moral actions of humans? If the copy editor of this book knew the right answer to that question he or she would know which word in the previous sentence—“moral” or “genuine”—should have its scare quotes struck out. Much in our understanding of ourselves, and the other species with which we share the earth, rests on that choice. One goal of this book is to encourage each reader to think carefully about how he or she would choose to wield the imagined editorial pencil—to invite each of you to attend to this and other conversations among the set of scholars who think hard and care passionately about primate behavior and the set of those who think hard and care equally passionately about human morality. The existence of this book is proof that those two sets are partially overlapping. Part of its purpose is to advocate an increase in the extent of the overlap and to promote thoughtful discussion among all those concerned with goodness and its origins, in human and nonhuman animals alike.