Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.
—Immanuel Kant1
Can we help feeling pain when the fire burns us? Can we help sympathizing with our friends? Are these phenomena less necessary or less powerful in their consequences, because they fall within the subjective sphere of experience?
—Edward Westermarck2
At Tama Zoo, in Tokyo, I witnessed a surprising ritual. From the rooftop of a building, a caretaker spread handfuls of macadamia nuts among fifteen chimpanzees in an outdoor area. The macadamia is the only commercially available nut that most female chimps cannot crack with their teeth. The colony lacked adult males (I visited a small shrine with fresh flowers for Joe, their longtime alpha male, who had died a few weeks earlier), who do possess the jaw power to crack even this tough nut. The chimps rushed about collecting as many macadamias as they could in their mouths, hands, and feet. Then they sat down at separate locations in the enclosure, each with a neat little pile of nuts, all oriented toward a single place known as the “cracking station.”
One chimp walked up to the station, which consisted of a big rock and a smaller metal block attached to it with a chain. She then placed a nut on the rock’s surface, lifted the metal block, and hammered until the nut gave up its kernel. This female worked with a juvenile by her side, whom she allowed to profit from her efforts. Having finished her pile, she then made room for the next chimp, who placed her nuts at her feet and started the same procedure. The zookeeper explained that this was a daily ritual that always unfolded in the same orderly fashion until all nuts had been cracked.
I was struck by the scene’s peacefulness, but not fooled by it. When we see a disciplined society, there is often a social hierarchy behind it. This hierarchy, which determines who can eat or mate first, is ultimately rooted in violence. If one of the lower-ranking females and her offspring had tried to claim the cracking station before their turn, things would have gotten ugly. It is not just that these apes knew their place; they knew what to expect in case of a breach of rule. A social hierarchy is a giant system of inhibitions, which is no doubt what paved the way for human morality, which is also such a system.
Impulse control is key.
The Elusive Wanton
When a Frenchwoman accused “DSK” (Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a prominent politician) of sexual assault, she couldn’t resist adding that he had behaved like a “randy chimpanzee.”3 As soon as humans lose control over their impulses, we feel the need to compare them to animals. It was a terrible insult . . . to the chimpanzee!
In academic circles, too, it is impossible to avoid the popular image of out-of-control animals. This is critical in relation to moral evolution, because the opposite of morality is that we just do “what we want,” the underlying assumption being that what we want is not good. An otherwise great philosopher of naturalized ethics, Philip Kitcher, once labeled chimpanzees “wantons,” defined as creatures vulnerable to whichever impulse strikes them. The maliciousness and lasciviousness associated with this term was not part of his definition, which focused on a disregard of behavioral consequences. But the message was the same as that of the Frenchwoman: like some despicable men, animals lack any and all emotional control. Kitcher went on to speculate that somewhere in our evolution we overcame this wantonness, which is what made us human. This process started with the “awareness that certain forms of projected behavior might have troublesome results.”4
Did Kitcher mean to imply that every cat who spots a mouse will blindly go after it? Would cats have no choice but to follow their hunting urge? Why, then, does she slink down with her ears pressed against her head, hide behind the trash can, and stalk the object of her desire slowly, inch by inch? Why does she waste precious minutes sneaking forward only when the mouse can’t see her? Could it be that she realizes that it’s better to pounce at the right moment than prematurely? I often feel like encouraging philosophers to take a pet. Learned consequences are powerful shapers of behavior.
Those zoo chimps, too, demonstrated a firm barrier between impulse and action. They obviously all wanted to crack their nuts right away, but were prevented from doing so. Or, imagine a mother chimp whose infant has been picked up by a well-meaning adolescent. The mother will follow, whimpering and begging, trying to get her offspring back from the kidnapper, who keeps evading her. The mother suppresses an all-out pursuit for fear that the adolescent will escape into a tree and endanger her precious baby. She needs to stay calm and collected. Once the infant is safely back on her belly, however, everything changes. I have seen mothers turn on the adolescent, chasing her over long distances with furious barks and screams, releasing all their pent-up frustration. Similarly, a young male not allowed to mate in view of others will stealthily sit near a sexually attractive female, making subtle signals visible only to her, spreading his legs to show off his erection and making beckoning hand gestures. He invites her to follow him to a quiet spot. One time, a young male dropped his hands over his penis as soon as an older one came around the corner, quickly hiding his intentions.
High rankers, too, benefit from impulse control. For example, an alpha male may receive a pointed challenge from a younger male, who throws rocks in his direction or makes an impressive charging display, with all his hair on end, a bit too close to the boss. This is a way of testing his nerves. Experienced alphas totally ignore the din, as if they barely notice, after which they take their time doing the rounds grooming their allies before launching a counteroffensive later in the day. By then, the young hothead will be outgunned.
How inhibited male chimps are was brought home to me when a fieldworker told me that he had never realized that male chimps could crack each other’s bones. I had never thought of this either, but it makes perfect sense for an animal that can crack macadamia nuts with its teeth (which takes 300 pounds of pressure per square inch). Having recorded hundreds of encounters between members of different communities in the forest, Christophe Boesch noticed that when chimp males grab a leg and bite a stranger one can literally hear bones breaking.5 I myself have never witnessed anything like it in fights among chimps familiar to each other, however bad these fights might seem. This means that most of the time, at least within their group, male chimps restrain their violent potential.
The beauty of an emotional response system over an instinctual one is that its outcome isn’t set in stone. The term “instinct” refers to a genetic program that tells animals, or humans, to act in a specific way under specific circumstances. Emotions, on the other hand, produce internal changes along with an evaluation of the situation and a weighing of options. It is unclear whether humans and other primates have instincts in the strict sense, but there is no doubt about their having emotions. Klaus Scherer, a German expert, calls emotions “an intelligent interface that mediates between input and output on the basis of what is most important to the organism at a particular time.”6
This may seem counterintuitive since it depicts emotions as intelligent, but keep in mind that the whole distinction between emotion and cognition is under debate. The two are intertwined. Furthermore, their interplay is probably very similar in humans and other primates. The prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate emotions, is often assumed to be exceptionally large in our own species, but this is an outdated view. The human cerebral cortex holds 19 percent of all neurons in the brain, just like any typical mammalian brain. For this reason, our brain has been called a “linearly scaled-up primate brain.” It may be large overall, but the way its various parts relate to each other is unexceptional.7
Most of us have seen the hilarious videos of children sitting alone at a table desperately trying not to eat a marshmallow—secretly licking it, taking tiny bites from it, or looking the other way so as to avoid temptation. It is one of the most explicit tests of impulse control. The children have been promised a second marshmallow if they leave the first one alone. Such “deferred gratification” has also been tested in our primate relatives. For example, monkeys will leave a slice of banana alone if they know that by doing so they may get a larger one later on. Or, a chimp patiently stares at a container into which falls a candy every thirty seconds. At any moment, he can disconnect the container and swallow its contents, but then the candy flow will stop. The longer he waits, the more candies he will get. Apes do about as well as children on this task, delaying gratification for up to eighteen minutes. They wait longer if they have toys to take their mind off the candy machine. Like children, they seek distraction to better fight temptation. Does this mean that they’re aware of their own desires, and deliberately curtail them? If so, we seem to be getting rather close to free will!8
Clearly, Kitcher’s “wantons” are a nonexistent species. Primates offer great insight into group life based on both emotions and emotional control. Tightly embedded in society, they respect the limits it puts on their behavior and are ready to rock the boat only if they can get away with it or if so much is at stake that it’s worth the risk. Otherwise, like the chimpanzees at Tama Zoo, they await their turn and control their urges. We come from a long line of ancestors with well-developed hierarchies for whom social inhibition was second nature. If doubters need proof of how much we owe to this history, they need only consider how much we invest moral rules with authority. Sometimes the authority is personal, like a super alpha male, as when we claim that God handed us the rules on a mountaintop. At other times, we fall for the authority of reasoning, claiming that certain rules are so logically compelling that it would be silly to disobey them. Humanity’s reverence for the moral law betrays the mindset of a species that likes to stay on good terms with higher-ups.
Nothing is more telling than how we react after a transgression. We lower our face, avoid the gaze of others, slump our shoulders, bend our knees, and generally look diminished in stature. Our mouth droops and our eyebrows arch outward in a distinctly unthreatening expression. We feel ashamed and hide our face behind our hands or “want to sink into the ground.” This desire for invisibility is reminiscent of submissive displays. Chimpanzees crawl in the dust for their leader, lower their body so as to look up at him or turn their rump toward him to appear unthreatening. Dominant apes, in contrast, make themselves look larger and literally run or walk over a subordinate, who ducks into a fetal position. Daniel Fessler, an anthropologist who has studied shame in human cultures, compares its universal shrinking appearance to that of a subordinate facing an angry dominant. Shame reflects awareness that one has upset others, who need to be appeased. Whatever self-conscious feelings go with it, they are secondary to the much older hierarchical template.
A dominant chimp, his hair bristling, walks bipedally while carrying a big rock. He looks larger than his rival, who evades him with pant grunts, a sign of submission. It all comes down to ritual, however, because in reality these two males are of equal weight and size.
The only uniquely human expression, as Darwin already noted, is blushing. I don’t know of any instant face reddening in other primates. Blushing is an evolutionary mystery that must be particularly perplexing for those who believe that exploitation of others is all that humans are capable of. If this were true, wouldn’t we be better off without blood uncontrollably rushing to our cheeks and neck, where the change in skin color stands out like a light tower? Such a signal makes no sense for a born manipulator. The only advantage of blushing that I can imagine is that it tells others that you are aware how your actions affect them. This fosters trust. We prefer people whose emotions we can read from their faces over those who never show the slightest hint of shame or guilt. That we evolved an honest signal to communicate unease about rule violations says something profound about our species.
Blushing is part of the same evolutionary package that gave us morality.
One-on-One Morality
Morality is a system of rules concerning the two H’s of Helping or at least not Hurting fellow human beings. It addresses the well-being of others and puts the community before the individual. It does not deny self-interest, yet curbs its pursuit so as to promote a cooperative society.
This functional definition sets morality apart from customs and habits, such as eating with knife and fork versus chopsticks or one’s bare hands. People may disapprove of my eating with my hands, at least in my current culture, but their disapproval is not of a moral nature. Even young children distinguish etiquette (boys go the boys’ toilet and girls to the girls’ toilet) from moral rules (don’t pull at ponytails). Rules related to the two H’s are taken far more seriously than conventions. Toddlers believe in the universality of the former. If you ask them whether they can imagine a culture where everyone goes to the same toilet, they can, but ask them whether there may be cultures where it is perfectly fine to hurt someone else unnecessarily, they refuse to believe so. As the philosopher Jesse Prinz has explained, “Moral rules are directly grounded in the emotions. When we think about hitting, it makes us feel bad, and we cannot simply turn that feeling off.”9 Moral understanding develops astonishingly early in life. Infants under one year of age already favor the good guy in a puppet show. The puppet who nicely rolls a ball back and forth with another is preferred over one who steals the ball and runs off with it.
Empathy is critical. At a young age, the child learns that slapping or biting a sibling produces a screaming reaction with a range of negative consequences. Apart from those few children who will grow into psychopaths—whose childhood is marked by animal torture, excessive violence, and lack of remorse—the vast majority doesn’t enjoy the sight of a crying sibling. Second, hurting your sibling brings all fun and games to an abrupt halt. No one wants to play with someone who lashes out all the time. Finally, an angry parent or teacher is likely to enter the scene and yell at the hitter or make him feel guilty by pointing out his victim’s tears. All of these emotional consequences discourage hurting a playmate. Empathy teaches children to take the feelings of others seriously.
Not that we should be surprised by such early development. It is only because of the prevalence of Veneer Theory that it was believed that goodness is not part of human nature, and that we need to work hard to teach it to our children. Children were seen as selfish monsters, who learn to be moral from teachers and parents despite their natural inclinations. They were seen as reluctant moralists. My view is the exact opposite. The child is a natural moralist, who gets a huge helping hand from its biological makeup. We humans automatically pay attention to others, are attracted to them, and make their situation our own. Like all primates, we are emotionally affected by others. And not just like primates. The reason a big dog will stop gnawing on a smaller playmate as soon as the latter utters a sharp yelp is the same: hurting another is aversive.
Dogs are more hierarchical than us, so have additional reasons to fear consequences. This may explain the strong reaction of Bully, a dog owned by Konrad Lorenz, to a rule violation. In this case, the victim was not a vulnerable other but the master himself. Bully accidentally bit the famous ethologist’s hand when the latter tried to break up a fight. Even though Lorenz did not reprimand him and immediately reassured him, Bully suffered a complete nervous breakdown. He was virtually paralyzed for days and uninterested in food. He would lie on the rug breathing shallowly, occasionally interrupted by a deep sigh coming from deep inside his tormented soul. He looked as if he had come down with a deadly disease. Bully remained subdued for weeks, prompting Lorenz to speculate about his having a “conscience.” Bully had never bitten any person before, and so he could not have relied on previous experience to decide that he had done something wrong. Perhaps he had violated a natural taboo on inflicting damage upon a superior, which could have the worst imaginable consequences, including expulsion from the pack.10
As a student, I followed the behavior of a group of macaques in the presence or absence of the alpha male. As soon as alpha turned his back, other males began to approach females. Normally, they’d get into trouble for doing so. When this principle was put to the test, low-ranking males refused to approach females so long as the dominant looked on from inside a transparent box, yet dropped all inhibitions as soon as he was removed. They felt free to copulate. The same males also performed bouncing displays and walked around with their tails in the air, which is typical of high-status males. Upon the boss’s return, however, they were excessively nervous, greeting him with wide submissive grins on their faces. They seemed to realize they had done something wrong.11
When-the-cat-is-away situations are always amusing to watch since the cat is never far from the mice’s minds. In another macaque group, a longtime alpha male, Mr. Spickles, would sometimes get tired of keeping an eye on half a dozen restless males during the breeding season. Or, perhaps he just wanted to warm his old bones indoors. He would disappear for half an hour at a stretch, leaving the others plenty of opportunities to mate. The beta male was very popular with the ladies, but so obsessed with Mr. Spickles that he was irresistibly drawn to the door to peek inside through a crack. Perhaps he wanted to make sure Mr. Spickles stayed where he was. Rhesus monkeys being multiple-mount-ejaculators (requiring several mounts before the male ejaculates), the young male would race back and forth a dozen times between his partner and the door before completing a mount series.
Social rules are not simply obeyed in the presence of dominants and forgotten in their absence. If this were true, low-ranking males wouldn’t need to actively check on alpha or be overly submissive following their exploits. They internalize rules to some degree. A more complex expression occurred once in the Arnhem chimpanzee colony following the first time the beta male, Luit, had physically defeated Yeroen, the alpha. The fight had occurred while both males were alone together in their night quarters. The next morning, the colony was released onto its island only to notice the shocking evidence:
When Mama discovered Yeroen’s wounds she began to hoot and look around in every direction. At this, Yeroen broke down, screaming and yelping, whereupon all the other apes came over to see what was the matter. While the apes were crowding around him and hooting, the “culprit,” Luit, also began to scream. He ran nervously from one female to the next, embraced them, and presented himself to them. He then spent a large part of the day tending Yeroen’s wounds. Yeroen had a gash in his foot and two wounds in his side, caused by Luit’s powerful canines.12
Luit’s situation resembled that of Bully, the dog, in that he had broken the spell of the hierarchy by biting alpha. What a terrible thing to do, the group’s reaction seemed to convey, and Luit did his best to make amends. But not by giving up his strategy to dominate Yeroen, because in the weeks that followed he kept the pressure on, and in the end forced Yeroen into retirement from the top spot. His grooming of the old male’s injuries shouldn’t surprise anyone, for it is part of normal chimpanzee relations, but such behavior is even more typical of bonobos. During reunions among adversaries, I have seen aggressors unhesitatingly pick up the foot or reach for the arm of the other where they had placed their teeth. This suggested not only a precise recall of the fight but also regret. Biting is so rare in bonobos that it makes sense for them to be concerned about its consequences, licking up every drop of blood spilled as a result of their intemperate behavior.
Empathy probably played a role in these incidents, and also in Luit’s reaction to Yeroen’s injuries. Even though superficial by chimpanzee standards, they were the first gashes Yeroen had suffered in years. In general, primates are keen on keeping good relations even in the face of discord and strife. That they are well aware of the undermining effects of pain and distress is also visible in their play. When youngsters are far apart in age, games often get too rough for the younger partner, as when its leg gets twisted or a gnaw turns into a bite. At the slightest peep of distress, its mother will break up the game. Normally, play is entirely silent except for the hoarse panting laughs that sound like human laughter. Recording hundreds of wrestling bouts, we found that juveniles laugh especially when the mother of a younger playmate is watching. They laugh more in her presence than while alone with the same infant. It’s almost as if they seek to reassure the mother: “Look how much fun we’re having!”13
In sum, two great reinforcers support the social code by which primates and children live. One comes from within and the other from without. The first is empathy and a desire for good relations leading to the avoidance of unnecessary distress. The second is the threat of physical consequences, such as penalties meted out by higher-ups. Over time, these two reinforcers create an internalized set of guidelines, which I will call one-on-one morality. This kind of morality permits partners of disparate abilities and strength to get along, such as males with females and adults with juveniles, binding them together in a mutually agreeable modus vivendi. Sometimes these guidelines are suspended—for instance, when two rivals compete over status—but generally primates strive for peaceful coexistence. Individuals unable or unwilling to abide by the social code become marginalized. The ultimate driver of the whole process, in an evolutionary sense, is the desire for integration, since its opposite—isolation or ostracism—drastically diminishes an individual’s chances at survival.
In her 1985 book Sex and Friendship in Baboons, Barbara Smuts was the first to apply the term “friendship” to animals, a term fiercely contested at the time. Some considered it overly anthropomorphic. But with increasing knowledge of the bonds between animals, the skepticism dissipated, and the term became commonplace. Two old male chimpanzees in Kibale Forest, in Uganda, for example, traveled together most of the time, hunting side by side, sharing meat, and calling to each other to stay in touch whenever they were separated by thick foliage. These males also backed each other in fights against third parties. They were trusted partners for many years despite being unrelated. John Mitani, a primatologist who followed them for years, relates how upon the death of one of them, his buddy became far less sociable, isolated himself, and seemed to go into mourning. Many such relationships have been documented, and DNA analysis supports the claim that they often are between nonrelatives. The friendship label is no exaggeration, therefore, and is also applied to bonds among elephants, dolphins, and other animals. Field studies on baboons have shown that females with friendships outlive those without them, and raise more offspring. There are excellent evolutionary reasons, therefore, to value close relationships.14
The social code to stay on good terms with everyone covers, among other things, who can mate with whom, how to play with infants, whom to defer to, and under what circumstances to appropriate another’s food or await your turn. Chimpanzees and bonobos respect each other’s possessions, so that even the top male may have to beg for his food. It is rare for dominant individuals to take another’s food by force, and code violators meet with fierce resistance. The community attack on Volker, described in chapter 3, illustrates how wild bonobos handle those who break the rules. There is no shortage of similar examples, such as the following scene in the chimp colony under my observation window. Jimoh, the previous alpha male, once punished a younger male for a suspected mating. Normally, Jimoh would merely chase the culprit off, but for some reason—perhaps because the same female had refused to mate with himself that day—he went full tilt after his rival and did not relent. The young male had diarrhea for fear, and it looked unlikely that things would end well. Before Jimoh could get his hands on him, however, females gave loud “woaow” barks in protest. This swelled into a deafening chorus when the alpha female joined in. Once the protest reached a climax, Jimoh broke off his attack with a nervous grin on his face: he got the message.
I felt I was witnessing public opinion at work.
When “Is” Meets “Ought”
What is so fascinating about the social code is that it is prescriptive. The code has teeth. I’m not just talking here about how animals behave, but how they are expected to behave. It all boils down to the distinction between “is” and “ought.” This may sound like an odd grammatical aside, but the is/ought divide happens to be a major topic for philosophers. In fact, it is impossible to discuss the origin of morality without getting embroiled in this distinction. The “is” describes how things are (social tendencies, mental capacities, neural processes), while the “ought” relates to how we want things to be and how we are supposed to behave. The “is” is about facts and the “ought” about values. Animals living by a prescriptive code have made a transition from “is” to “ought.” And they have done so, I might add, blithely unaware of the ocean of academic ink spilt over this particular transition.
The Scottish philosopher who gave us the is/ought distinction, David Hume, wrote almost three centuries ago that we should be careful not to assume that the two are the same, adding that “a reason should be given” for how we argue from the facts of life to the values we strive for.15 In other words, morality is not simply a reflection of human nature. Just as one cannot infer traffic rules from the description of a car, one cannot infer moral norms from knowing who or what we are. Hume’s point is well taken, but a far cry from the exaggeration by later philosophers, who turned his appeal for caution into “Hume’s guillotine,” claiming an unbridgeable chasm between “is” and “ought.” They went on to wield this guillotine to kill off any and all attempts, even the most cautious ones, to apply evolutionary logic or neuroscience to human morality. Science cannot tell us how to construe morality, they said. While that is true, science surely can help us explain why certain outcomes might be favored over others, hence why morality is the way it is. For one thing, there would be no point in designing moral rules that are impossible to follow, just as there would be no point in making traffic rules that cars can’t obey, such as ordering them to jump over slower cars. Among philosophers, this is known as the “ought implies can” argument. Morality needs to fit the species it is meant for.
“Is” and “ought” are like the yin and yang of morality. We have both, we need both, they are not the same, yet they are also not totally separate. They complement each other. Hume himself ignored the “guillotine” named after him by stressing how much human nature matters: he saw morality as a product of the emotions. Empathy (which he called sympathy) was at the top of his list. He considered it of immense moral value. This opinion represented no contradiction on his part, since all he urged was caution in moving from how we are to how we ought to behave. He never said that such a move was prohibited. We should also keep in mind that the tension between the two is felt much less clearly in real life than at the conceptual level at which most philosophers like to dwell. They feel that we cannot reason ourselves from one level to the other, and they are right, but who says that morality is or needs to be rationally constructed? What if it is grounded in emotional values, as Hume thought?
Values are embedded in the way we are. It is sometimes thought that biology falls entirely on the “is” side of the moral equation, but every organism pursues goals. Survival is one, reproduction is another, but there are also more immediate goals like keeping rivals out of one’s territory or avoiding extreme temperatures. Animals “ought” to feed themselves, escape predators, find mates, and so on. While having a full belly is obviously not a moral value, the distinction becomes harder when we get to the social domain. Social animals “ought” to get along. Human morality develops out of sensitivity to others and out of the realization that in order to reap the benefits of group life we need to compromise and be considerate of others.
Not all animals share this sensitivity. Even if they were as smart as us, piranhas or sharks would never acquire our social code, given that hurting others—except for the risk of retaliation—doesn’t bother them in the least. Emotionally, we are radically different, which explains why we assign the two H’s of helping or (not) hurting special status. Rather than reaching us from the outside or through logic, these values are deeply embedded in our brainstem. In her book Braintrust, Patricia Churchland inserts is/ought language to explain how evolution predisposed us for morality:
From a biological point of view, basic emotions are Mother Nature’s way of orienting us to do what we prudently ought. The social emotions are a way of getting us to do what we socially ought, and the reward/punishment system is a way of learning to use past experiences to improve our performance in both domains.16
The tension between what we are and what we should be leads to intriguing debates, such as one I had with a blogger who claimed that people with a natural altruistic drive are less deserving of our esteem than those who have no such drive, yet still show altruism. One of the most influential moral philosophers, Immanuel Kant, thought this way. He saw about as much worth in human kindness as Dick Cheney saw in energy conservation. Cheney mocked conservation as “virtuous” yet irrelevant, whereas Kant called compassion “beautiful” yet without moral use. Who needs tender feelings if duty is all that matters?
Another blogger, in contrast, preferred people with a spontaneous impulse to help to those who help only on the basis of a calculation of what is the right thing to do. He thus favored felt kindness over altruism out of obligation. It is an interesting dilemma, comparable to the question whom you’d wish to marry: someone who loves you or someone who gives exactly the same support but only because she considers it her duty? The latter spouse is surely putting in more effort, and deserves much admiration, but I’d rather be married to the former. I may be hopelessly romantic, but I don’t expect a solid a commitment out of duty. In the same way, morality will be far more reliable if genuine prosocial feelings constitute its driving force.
Hell on Earth
The second driving force is our hierarchical nature and fear of punishment. This is an old theme, especially for those who claim that morality can’t exist without God. We needn’t agree with their gloomy assessment, but there is no denying the role of authority and social pressure. As opposed to prosocial tendencies, which play a role early in life, rule enforcement appears rather late. Even the notoriously hierarchical rhesus macaque shows incredible tolerance of the young. In the 1980s, I conducted experiments by depriving a large monkey troop of water for a few hours, after which I’d fill up their basin. All adults came to drink in hierarchical order, not unlike the nut-cracking scene at Tama Zoo, but infants under one year of age showed up whenever they wanted. They drank with the highest-ranking males and freely mingled with the top matriarch’s family. Punishment came into play only in their second year, when they quickly learned their place.
Since apes develop more slowly than monkeys, youngsters go virtually unpunished for the first four years of life. They can do nothing wrong, such as using the back of a dominant male as a trampoline, pulling food out of the hands of others, or hitting an older juvenile as hard as they can. Not even their own mother will correct them. Her main strategy is distraction. If her infant crawls toward an adult in a foul mood or is close to fighting with a playmate, the mother will tickle him, lead him away, or pick him up for some nursing. One can imagine the shock when a youngster is rejected or punished for the first time. The most dramatic punishments are those of young males who have ventured too close to a sexually attractive female. Until this time, they were allowed to hang around these females and even mate with them insofar as they were capable. Inevitably, however, the day would come that the competitive atmosphere among adult males would spill over in an impromptu attack on a youngster. One of the males, with all his hair on end, would storm at the unsuspecting Don Juan, grab him, and hurl him wildly about with his foot in his mouth, drawing blood. Young males need only one or two such lessons. From then on, every adult male can make them jump away from a female by a mere glance or a step forward.
Youngsters thus learn to control their sexual urges, or at least to become circumspect about them. Human children learn social rules in the same way. We are far more accepting of a three-year-old, whose misbehavior mostly amuses us, than of a teenager, whose transgressions deeply upset us. The learning process is the same as in other primates, from anything goes to an ever narrower range of acceptable behavior. No wonder that punishment figures prominently in our moral systems, from law enforcement to the shunning of those who have cheated us, and from an “eye for an eye” to the eternal burning in hell that awaits sinners.
To instill fear of punishment is no minor task, and both religion and society work hard on it. This is where Bosch’s paintings occupy a special place. If Bosch is known for anything, it is as the painter of hell, reminding us what terrible things will befall those attracted to vice. His scenes of torture and annihilation play on our deepest fears of rejection, suffering, and death. It isn’t surprising that his paintings were copied over and over, the way images are nowadays spread over the Internet. An entire art factory in Antwerp copied Bosch scenes. Yet, those who believe that Bosch must have been a deeply religious man to paint all those images should look more closely. The Garden’s right-hand panel was unparalleled in that Bosch omitted God, leaving everything in human hands. In the same way that Buddhism lacks a punitive God, but does have the concept of “Karma” for payback to those who lead immoral lives, Bosch painted literally a hell on earth. It is filled with so many day-to-day scenes, even though bizarre ones, that it looks like a most unpleasant way to end one’s life rather than the traditional fiery pit of the afterlife. We can see fire on the horizon, but it is earth itself that is burning. Bosch’s hell even includes a frozen lake with naked humans and fantasy animals skating on it, the way the Dutch skate on anything that freezes over. Certainly not your typical inferno!
An important figure is a bird-headed monster, known as the Prince of Hell, with a cauldron on his head. The monster sits on a throne-like toilet, feasting on damned humans, which he defecates into a transparent bag or amniotic sac hanging underneath. We also see two giant disembodied ears with a knife between them, the interpretation of which ranges from the knife being an alchemist’s tool of purification to the ears symbolizing humanity’s deafness to the New Testament, to the whole set symbolizing a canon on wheels or a phallus with a scrotum. Combined with the many outsized musical instrument in Bosch’s hell (including the first accurate depiction of the hurdy-gurdy), the large ears also hint at musical torture by means of a never-ending cacophony.
Bosch leaves us mortals alone with our fate, our terror. Trying to connect this earthly hell with other elements of his triptych, I was struck by the abundance of fruits in the other two panels and their absence in hell. I have already mentioned that Bosch’s paradise lacks forbidden fruits, suggesting that Adam and Eve never went through the trauma of gaining forbidden knowledge and its dire consequences. He made up for this absence by giving the masses of nudes in the central panel more fruits than they can handle. They are fed fruits by birds, feed each other, and carry giant strawberries around, including a man whose head has turned into a grape, a possible reference to a Middle Dutch expression about the glans penis.17 Whereas the central panel is full of unforbidden fruits, however, hell is devoid of them, so one gets the impression that Bosch was making a point.
Foolishly, I thought the answer might be found in a novel entitled Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. I took it along on a trip to California. Sitting among nude bathers in a sulfurous spring did connect me with The Garden, and Big Sur was obviously magnificent, but I had great trouble getting through the book. I have rarely read a more self-indulgent author than Henry Miller, and quickly discovered that he knew next to nothing about Bosch. Miller’s book mentions Bosch’s triptych The Millennium, which is the new name a German art historian, Wilhelm Fränger, had bestowed upon The Garden.18 Fränger claimed that Bosch belonged to a heretical sect, an oft-repeated speculation despite the utter lack of support for it. It belongs with other fantasy claims, such as that Bosch was a closet homosexual afraid of castration or a raging schizophrenic. Miller is enthusiastic about the depiction of an orange grove, noticing how realistic Bosch’s oranges appear (“far more delectable, far more potent, than the Sunkist oranges we daily consume”).19 It is unlikely, though, that Bosch even knew what an orange was. Northern Europeans learned about this fruit only in the sixteenth century and started growing it in “orangeries” in the seventeenth century. Dutch painters, most famously Pieter Mondrian, typically feature apple trees or other northern fruits. The Garden, too, seems to show an apple orchard.
The skewed fruit distribution across the triptych is easily explained: fruits symbolize pleasure, both gustatory and erotic, and hell is a place where all pleasure is extinguished. This still leaves the absence of God, however. Since God is present in Bosch’s other hell painting, The Last Judgment, where he prominently presides over the anguished masses, there must be a reason why The Garden leaves him out. Did Bosch have a secular message? Was he suggesting that being immoral was deserving of hellish punishment independent of divine judgment? Was he hinting at Socrates’s famous question whether we need the gods to tell us what is moral? Is an action moral because the gods love it, or do the gods love an action because it is moral? Socrates asked Euthyphro.
The Garden invites us to imagine a world in which we carry out our daily business without divine instructions about right and wrong and without God’s oversight. Such a world would still require morality, Bosch seems to be saying, and would still punish those who fail to lead decent lives even if, instead of going to hell, they’d be visited by it on earth.
The apocalyptic right-hand panel of Bosch’s Garden includes two ears pierced by an arrow. The ears carry a sharp knife between them. Riding roughshod over doomed souls, the ears have baffled generations of art critics.
Community Concern
A child of the Renaissance, Bosch lived in a time that came to value reason over piety. Humanity began to dream of a rationally justified morality, culminating centuries later in Kant’s elevation of “pure reason” to its foundation. The prevailing approach was that eternally valid moral truths were somewhere “out there,” held together by a compelling logic that is ours to uncover. Philosophers offered their expertise to do so.
How did such an odd idea arise? It recalls the argument from design in the evolution debate, which takes the eye as example. The eye’s complex functionality could never have arisen by chance, so the argument goes, so we must assume an intelligent designer. Most biologists disagree, and point at intermediate stages, from the light-sensitive pigment spots of the flatworm to the “pinhole” eye of the nautilus. Given enough time, natural selection can produce enormously complex structures in small incremental steps, acting like a “blind watchmaker,” in Dawkins’s felicitous phrase. No plan is needed. So, why treat the moral law like another eye? True, it is complex and sophisticated, but that doesn’t imply a logical design. What else in nature has one? The idea that morality can be argued from first principles is a creationist myth, and a poorly supported one at that, since no one has done so in any convincing manner. All we have are approximations.
Normative ethics carries the stamp from a previous era. The whole idea of a moral “law” suggests an enforced or enforceable principle, which makes one wonder who the enforcer might be. In the past the answer was obvious, but how to apply this idea without invoking God? For a philosophical take on this issue, I recommend Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project, which expresses skepticism:
Theorizing about the ethical project has been hampered by assuming there must be some authority in ethics, some point of view from which truth can be reliably discerned. Philosophers have cast themselves as enlightened replacements for the religious teachers who previously pretended to insight. But why? Ethics may simply be something we work out together.20
Although we live in an age that celebrates the cerebral and looks down upon emotions as mushy and messy, it is impossible to get around the basic needs, desires, and obsessions of our species. Made of flesh and blood, we are driven to pursue certain goals—food, sex, and security foremost among them. This makes the whole notion of “pure reason” seem like pure fiction. Did you hear about the study showing that court judges are more lenient after lunch than before lunch?21 For me, this is human reasoning in a nutshell. It is virtually impossible to disentangle rational decision making from mental predispositions, subconscious values, emotions, and the digestive system. According to cognitive science, rationalizations are mostly post hoc. We have a dual mentality that immediately suggests intuitive solutions, well before we’ve thought about the issue at hand, followed by a second, slower process that vets these solutions for quality and feasibility. While the second process helps us justify decisions, it is a gross sleight of hand to present these justifications as the actual reasons. We do this all the time, however, like the slave owner who says he’s doing slaves a favor, or the warmonger who says all he wanted to do is free the world of a tyrant. We are good at finding reasons that suit our purposes. Jonathan Haidt exposed this tendency in moral arguments, aptly comparing it to the tail wagging the dog. The grounds we offer for our behavior poorly reflect actual motives. In Pascal’s elegant phrasing: “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.”22
I am in fact so skeptical of the explanations people offer for their behavior that I feel immensely lucky to work with subjects unable to fill out questionnaires. Yet, the prevailing opinion remains that thinking precedes behavior. I have heard philosophers talk of the “idea” of forgiveness and the “concept” of fairness, even claiming we owe the latter to the French Revolution. Are they implying that before Marie-Antoinette lost her head, humans were oblivious to fairness? While we are great at translating preexisting tendencies into concepts, this doesn’t prevent primates and young children, who have never heard of them, from kissing and embracing after a fight or vociferously objecting to unequal rewards or Christmas presents. Let me therefore return to my bottom-up account, which puts emotions in the driver’s seat. It assumes two basic levels to morality, one regarding social relationships and the other regarding the community. The first level is what I have called one-on-one morality, which reflects an understanding of how one’s own behavior affects others. We share this level with other social animals, which develop similar inhibitions and codes of conduct. Failure spells disharmony, which is why we feel an obligation, an “ought,” to consider the interests of others. Reasoning is not at its root, even though it is not hard to come up with reasons why others would object to poor treatment or why a male chimp would punish a younger rival hanging around a female. The reactions are entirely emotional, however, such as one male’s jealousy at another, or the appreciation that in order to enjoy the company of friends you’d better act like one.
One-on-one morality is rather narrow, though. We need a second level, which I call community concern. It doesn’t deny personal interests, but it is a radical step up in that the goal is harmony within the larger community. This is the level at which human morality begins to depart from anything else encountered thus far, even though some animals show rudimentary forms of community concern.
I have already mentioned the law-and-order role of Phineas and other high-ranking primates, who break up fights among others. The same impartial “policing” is known from wild chimps, and a recent study comparing it across various groups concluded that it stabilizes social dynamics.23 There are also the intercessions by older females, who bring warring males together, literally tugging at their arm to get them to approach their adversary. Females pry heavy rocks from violent males’ hands. They do so even if they are not directly involved themselves and could easily have stayed on the sidelines. Chimpanzees thus ameliorate the social atmosphere around them, promoting peace not just for themselves but for everyone else as well. Or take the way females react to attempts by males to sexually force themselves onto one among them. In nature, males may succeed, because they can distance themselves from the group by taking a female on “safari” to avoid third-party intrusions. They may even wield branches as weapons to bully reluctant females into intercourse. In captivity, however, it is impossible to get away from the rest, and I have often seen how males whose sexual advances were too insistent triggered a screaming protest by the female in question, upon which a mass of females would help her chase off the offender. Since female solidarity is not a general rule in chimpanzees, their unanimous objection to attempted rape is remarkable. Have they reached a tacit agreement? Do females realize that if everyone assists anyone in need, all of them will be better off in the long run?
Human community concern is driven by enlightened self-interest. We strive for a well-functioning whole because this is what we thrive in. If I see a burglar breaking into a house in my street, even though it is not my house and none of my business, I will follow the rules of society and call the police. If something equivalent were to happen in an ancestral settlement, we’d mobilize everyone to stop the person who has trouble telling mine from thine. Moral transgressions, even those that don’t directly affect us, are bad for everyone. There are great descriptions in the anthropological literature of how this operates in preliterate societies, such as Colin Turnbull’s story of a Mbuti pygmy hunter, Cephu, who had set up his net in front of that of other families. Mbuti hunters stretch long nets in the jungle, after which women and children drive animals, like forest antelopes and forest pigs, toward the nets, making lots of noise. The trapped animals are then speared by the hunters. By placing his net ahead of the rest, Cephu made an exceptionally good catch, but unfortunately for him, the others had noticed his cheating ways. Upon return to camp, the mood was somber, and negative remarks about Cephu began to trickle in. According to Turnbull, Cephu’s infraction was truly outrageous in the eyes of the usually gentle pygmies. At camp, the other hunters began ridiculing and mocking Cephu. Younger men refused to get up to offer him a seat, while others told him they’d love to see him fall on his spear. Cephu burst out in tears and soon saw all his meat being distributed to others, even the meat his wife had tried to hide under the roof of their hut. Cephu learned an important lesson, and the community enforced a rule that is the lifesaver of all hunter-gatherers. Cooperation guarantees a steady food supply for everyone, so individual hunting success needs to be downplayed and sharing to be made a deeply felt obligation.
I think of such events each time I see chimpanzee “public opinion” at work, such as when females confront an overly aggressive male. Do they oversee the supra-individual consequences, the way the Mbuti surely do? And do individuals who take the lead gain prestige from doing so? Prestige and reputation are a critical part of why humans act morally even when they don’t directly gain from it. Others are more willing to follow the lead of an upstanding citizen than of someone who lies, cheats, and always puts his own interests first. Glimmers of reputation can be seen in the apes. For example, if a major fight gets out of control, bystanders may wake up the alpha male, poking him in the side. Known as the most effective arbitrator, he’s expected to step in. Apes also pay attention to how one individual treats another, as in one experiment in which they preferred to interact with a human who had been nice to others. This was not about how they themselves had been treated but about the reputation the human had gained by sharing food with other apes.24 In our own studies, we found that if we let the colony watch two chimpanzees who demonstrate different but equally simple tricks to get rewards, they prefer to follow the higher-status model. Like teenagers copying the hairstyle of Justin Bieber, they imitate prominent members of their community rather than bottom rankers.25 Anthropologists call this the prestige effect.
But despite the various hints of individual reputation and sensitivity to communitywide issues in apes, humans go well beyond this. We are far better at calculating how our own actions and those of others impact the common good, and at debating among ourselves which rules to implement and what kind of sanctions to apply. We realize that even a small infraction needs to be nipped in the bud, lest the same individual proceed to more serious ones. We also have the advantage of language, which allows us to relay events that occurred distantly in time and place, so that the whole community knows about them. If one chimp mistreats another, his victim may be the only one to know. In humans, everyone will know the colorful details the next morning, including people in surrounding villages. We are incredible gossipers! Language allows us to keep memories alive and bring up certain infractions time and again. Our reputations are cumulative, stored in collective memory. Cephu’s infraction will not be forgotten during his lifetime, and even his children may be reminded of it. Humans have taken reputation building and community concern to a level unmatched by anything seen in the apes, thus tightening the moral net around each individual.
Community-level thinking also explains our interest in generalizable rules. One way in which the moral emotions differ from ordinary ones is “by their disinterestedness, apparent impartiality, and flavor of generality,” as Edward Westermarck put it.26 Emotions such as gratitude and resentment concern only our personal interests—how we have been treated or how we want to be treated—whereas moral emotions go beyond this. They deal with right and wrong at a more abstract level. It is only when we make judgments of how anyone under the circumstances ought to be treated that we speak of moral judgment. To get the same point across, Adam Smith asked us to imagine what an “impartial spectator” would think of our behavior. What would be the opinion of someone who was not involved? This is human morality at its most complex: an opinion about right or wrong regardless of what’s in it for ourselves.
I have trouble with the impartiality of the impartial spectator, however. After all, he is human and either belongs to our community or can at least imagine that he does. Smith never proposed that he was an extraterrestrial. To get some perspective on this, take a story related by Westermarck in one of his books on Morocco. It was about a vengeful camel that had been excessively beaten on multiple occasions by a fourteen-year-old “lad” for loitering or turning the wrong way. The camel passively took the punishment, but a few days later, while finding itself unladen alone on the road with the same conductor “seized the unlucky boy’s head in its monstrous mouth, and lifting him up in the air flung him down again on the earth with the upper part of the skull completely torn off, and his brains scattered on the ground.”27 This horrible scene lends itself to moral interpretation, especially given the boy’s previous behavior. Still, most of us will judge it in nonmoral terms, except that we don’t think domestic animals should kill humans (in medieval times, animals were put on trial for acts that went against God’s directive of “human dominion”). Let’s push the distinction a little further, therefore, by assuming that the camel attacked not a boy but a dog. Such an incident is even less likely to arouse moral emotions. Why? Aren’t we perfectly impartial?
The problem is that we are too impartial. We’re so impartial, in fact, that we don’t deeply care about the incident. We may be appalled and feel for the dog, but the incident doesn’t activate moral approval or disapproval anymore than a rock hitting another rock. In contrast, as soon as we see two people interact, even people we don’t know, we cannot help comparing their behavior with how we think humans ought to treat each other. If one slaps the other in the face, we immediately have an opinion: was it deserved, excessive, or cruel? Partly, this is because we ascribe intentions more easily to humans than to animals, but the main reason is that a human scene automatically activates community concern. Is this the sort of behavior, we ask ourselves, that we’d like to see around us, such as helpfulness and mutual support? Or does it undermine the common good, as does lying, stealing, or brutality? We are very conscious of the consequences, and have trouble staying neutral. None of these concerns are triggered by what happens between a camel and a dog.
Chris Boehm, an American anthropologist who has worked with both humans and apes, has insightfully written about the way hunter-gatherer communities enforce the rules. He believes it may lead to active genetic selection similar to that of a breeder who picks animals on appearance and temperament. Some animals are allowed to reproduce, others aren’t. Not that hunter-gatherers explicitly think about human genetics, but by ostracizing or killing persons who violate too many rules, or breach one that’s too important, they do remove genes from the gene pool. Boehm describes how criminal bullies or dangerous deviants may be eliminated by a member of the community, who has been delegated by the rest to shoot an arrow through their heart. Applied systematically over millions of years, such morally justified executions must have reduced the number of hotheads, psychopaths, cheats, and rapists, along with the genes responsible for their behavior. There are still plenty of such people left, one might object, but this doesn’t deny the possibility that there has been selection against them.28
It is a fascinating thought that humanity may have taken moral evolution in its own hands, with the result that ever more members of our species are prepared to submit to the rules.
Prozac in the Water
Hunter-gatherer societies don’t even allow a hunter to mention what he has killed. According to Richard Lee, the !Kung San hunter arrives in camp without a word, sits down at the fire, and waits for someone to come up and ask what he has seen that day. He then calmly replies something like this: “Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all (pause) . . . just a little tiny one.” Such words make the listener smile to himself, though, for they signify that the speaker must have caught something big.29 Hunter-gatherer cultures revolve around community and sharing, and stress humility and equality. They frown on anyone with a big mouth. Western society, in contrast, celebrates individual achievement and permits successful individuals to hold on to their gains. In such an environment, humility can be hazardous.
Lamaleran whale hunters, in Indonesia, roam the open ocean in large canoes, from which a dozen men capture whales almost bare-handed. The hunters row toward the whale, the harpoonist jumps onto its back to thrust its weapon into it, after which the men stay nearby until the leviathan dies of blood loss. With entire families tied together around a life-threatening activity, their men being literally in the same boat, distribution of the food bonanza is very much on their mind. Not surprisingly, the Lamalera are more sensitive to fairness than most cultures tested by anthropologists, who have played the Ultimatum Game all over the world. This game measures preferences for equitable offers. The Lamalera are the champions of fairness, in contrast to societies with greater self-sufficiency, such as horticulturalists in which every family tends its own plot of land.30
If there is such a thing as the moral law, therefore, it is unlikely to be identical everywhere. It can’t be the same for the !Kung San, the Lamalera, or a modern Western nation. Our species does possess invariant characteristics, and all of human morality is preoccupied with the two H’s of helping and (not) hurting; hence some degree of universality is to be expected. Yet, the details of how fairly resources are divided or how much humility is desirable cannot be captured in a single law. Morality also changes over time within every society, so the hot issues of today may have meant little to previous generations. Sexual mores offer a good example. The Celtic tribes that the Romans encountered while invading northern Europe are said to have been ruled by free-loving queens with scandalous sexual attitudes, at least in the eyes of the patriarchies that followed. Even though this remains hard to substantiate, there is no doubt that the products of these patriarchies were in for a shock centuries later, when Captain Cook landed on the coast of Hawaii. Knowing few sexual constraints, the islanders were characterized as “licentious” and “promiscuous.” This scornful terminology is questionable, however, given that there are no signs that anyone got hurt, which for me would be the only reason to reject a given lifestyle. In those days, Hawaiian children were trained through massage and oral stimulation to enjoy their genitals. According to the sexologist Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii, “The concepts of premarital and extramarital sexual activities were absent, and as in much of Polynesia, no people in the world indulged themselves more in their sensual appetites than these.”31
Female sexual autonomy is considerably greater in matriarchal than in patriarchal societies, and humanity has experimented with myriad reproductive arrangements. We may have adopted strict monogamy only after the agricultural revolution, about ten thousand years ago, when men began to worry about passing on their daughters and their wealth. Reproductive obsessions with fidelity and virginity may have arisen only at that time. At least, this is the suggestion in Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, who provocatively take the bonobo as ancestral model of human sex life. In a chapter entitled “Who’s Your Daddies?” they explain how in certain cultures a child benefits from having multiple fathers. Their argument rests on Sarah Hrdy’s pioneering work on the survival value of multiparental families, including her rejection of the dogma that men will care only for children certain to be their own. Some tribes practice “partible paternity” in which the growing fetus is supposedly nourished by semen of all the men a woman sleeps with. Every potential father claims a piece and is expected to help support the child. This arrangement, which is common in tribes in lowland South America and which guarantees support in an environment with high male mortality, implies reduced sexual exclusivity. A woman’s sexual choices outside the marriage are respected rather than punished. On the day of marriage, bride and groom are told to take care of their children, but also to rein in their jealousy of each other’s lovers.32
Sexual jealousy may well be universal, but its encouragement or discouragement is entirely up to society. So much for universal moral norms. Rather than reflecting an immutable human nature, morals are closely tied to the way we organize ourselves. Nomadic cattle herders cannot be expected to have the same morality as large-game hunters, who cannot be expected to have the same morality as industrialized nations. We can formulate all the moral laws we want; they will never apply everywhere to the same degree. Whether the Ten Commandments are an exception, as is often assumed, is doubtful. Do these commandments even help much with moral decision making? When a conservative politician on a comedy show, The Colbert Report, claimed that the Ten Commandments should remain on public display since “without them we may lose a sense of our direction,” the host simply asked him to cite them. The politician was taken aback. To the hilarity of the audience, he was unable to comply, except for saying, “Don’t lie, don’t steal.”33
Most of the commandments have nothing to do with morality, though, as was pointed out by Christopher Hitchens. They are about respect. In the first five commandments, God insists on exclusive loyalty (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me”) as well as respect for our elders. Only after this, does he move on to the “thou shalt not” commands everyone knows. In Hitchens’s words:
It would be harder to find an easier proof that religion is man-made. There is, first, the monarchial growling about respect and fear, accompanied by a stern reminder of omnipotence and limitless revenge, of the sort with which the Babylonian or Assyrian emperor might have ordered the scribes to begin a proclamation. There is then a sharp reminder to keep working and only to relax when the absolutist says so. A few crisp legalistic reminders follow. . . . But . . . it is surely insulting to the people of Moses to imagine that they had come this far under the impression that murder, adultery, theft, and perjury were permissible.34
The sixth commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”) sounds straightforward enough, but if a foreign army were to invade my country or if someone were to abduct my child, I’d have plenty of justification for ignoring this command. The Bible itself lists many exceptions. Capital punishment by legitimate authorities, for example, doesn’t seem to fall under it. Clearly, the Ten Commandments were not intended to be taken literally.
The two most popular secular moral laws don’t fare much better. Much as I like the sound and spirit of the golden rule—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—it has a fatal flaw. It assumes that all people are alike. To give a rather crude example, if at a conference I follow an attractive woman whom I barely know to her hotel room and jump into her bed uninvited, I can pretty well guess how she’d react. If I explain that I am just doing to her what I would love her to do to me, I’m afraid my appeal to the golden rule won’t fly. Or, let’s assume that I knowingly serve pork sausages to a vegan. Liking meat myself, I am just following the golden rule, but the vegan will consider my behavior obnoxious, perhaps even immoral. Churchland offers another example, this one of well-meaning Canadian bureaucrats, who removed children from native Indian families to let them be raised by whites. They might have wanted this for themselves, had they been living in camps in the bush, but—like the one that led to the Australian “lost generation” of indigenous children—forced integration policies are now considered grossly immoral. The golden rule doesn’t help resolve most dilemmas, such as whether the death penalty is moral or immoral, or whether Jean Valjean, in Les Misérables, was right to steal food for his starving niece, or not. The golden rule has a very limited reach, and it works only if all people are of the same age, sex, and health status with identical preferences and aversions. Since we don’t live in such a world, the rule really isn’t as useful as it sounds.
The second popular secular rule is the greatest happiness principle, also known as utilitarianism, which was recently chosen by Sam Harris as the “scientific” bedrock of morality.35 Philosophers tumbled over each other to point out that there is nothing scientific about a proposal that came from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, two nineteenth-century British philosophers, and goes all the way back to Aristotle. The idea that morality ought to increase “human flourishing” (from the Greek eudaimonia), and that good moral decisions will make the maximum number of people happy, is not based on any empirical evidence: it is a value judgment. Value judgments are always up for debate, and the flaws of utilitarianism have been known for a long time. Even though the desire to increase the sum total of happiness in the world will generally nudge us in the right direction, it is far from foolproof. Let’s say, I live in an apartment building in which a single man makes over one hundred people miserable by playing the tuba all night, every night. Having failed to dissuade him from producing his din, one of us simply shoots him in his sleep. He never knew what happened. Given how much collective suffering was relieved, what could be wrong with our decision? And if you don’t like the shooting part, let’s say we gave him a lethal injection. Yes, it deprived one man of his life and possible happiness, but the total amount of well-being in the building clearly went up a notch. In utilitarian terms, we did the right thing.
Other problems with this approach have been pointed out, such as the solution to put Prozac in the water. What a great way to produce a society of happy fools! Or we could follow the North Korean example, and manipulate the media to make everyone feel good about how things are going in the nation, creating a Brave New World of ignorant bliss.36 All of this would raise the happiness barometer, yet doesn’t sound particularly moral. But my own problem with the utilitarian premise goes deeper, and is more serious, because I feel that it runs totally counter to basic biology. I cannot imagine any society, human or animal, without loyalties. All of nature is built around the distinction between in-group and out-group, kin and nonkin, friend and foe. Even plants recognize genetic kinship, growing a more competitive root system if potted together with a stranger rather than a sibling.37 There is absolutely no precedent in nature of individuals that indiscriminatingly strive for overall well-being. The utilitarian proposal ignores millions of years of family bonding and group loyalty.
One might argue that we would be better off without these allegiances, that we shouldn’t worry about who benefits from our behavior and who doesn’t. We should simply override our biology in the service of a more perfect general morality. This may sound great, until we consider the flip side of this coin, which is the loss of any kind of commitment and group solidarity. “Family comes first” is not a utilitarian slogan. On the contrary, utilitarianism asks us to subordinate our family to the greater good. I find this impossible to swallow. If all the children in the world have exactly the same value for everyone, who is going to stay up all night next to a sick one, or worry about their doing their homework? Had Valjean been utilitarian, he would have had no pressing reason to bring his loaf of bread home. He might just as well have handed it out to hungry children in the street. The utilitarian position raises shocking questions, such as why I should stay married if another woman needs me more, or why I should help my parents if other seniors are worse off? There would also be nothing wrong with my selling my nation’s military secrets, especially not if to a populous nation. If the number of people I’d make happy in the other country would exceed the number I’d make unhappy in my own, I’d be doing the right thing. If my own country doesn’t share this opinion, is this just because it is excessively sensitive? I personally don’t think so, since for me loyalties are not just morally inconvenient, as utilitarians might call them, but very much part of the moral fabric. We expect them, and are appalled by their absence, such as parental neglect, refusal to pay child support, or treason. We despise the last so deeply that our answer is the firing squad.
I once publicly debated these issues with Peter Singer, the philosopher who is so utilitarian that he feels not even our own species deserves special loyalty.38 The suffering and happiness of humans and animals are entered into a single equation that covers varying degrees of sentience, dignity, and capacity for pain. The math is mind-boggling. Is one person equivalent to a thousand mice? Is an ape worth more than a Down syndrome human baby? Does a patient with severe dementia have any value at all? After much back and forth, Singer and I found common ground, namely, that humans ought to treat other animals as well as they can. A message of compassion is far more appealing to me than any cold calculation. Singer was forced to concede the drawbacks of his own approach when it came out in the media that he was paying private aides to take care of his mother with advanced Alzheimer’s. Asked why he didn’t channel his money to more deserving people, at least according to his own theories, he reacted, “Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it’s your mother.”39 The world’s best-known utilitarian thus let personal loyalty trump aggregate well-being, which in my book was the right thing to do.
This brief excursion into the Ten Commandments, the golden rule, and the greatest happiness principle, shows my skepticism that moral dos and don’ts can be captured in simple unassailable rules. Attempts to do so follow the same top-down logic of religious morality that we are trying to leave behind. It is also not free of danger, since it risks leading us down the wrong path, putting principles before people. In an extreme reaction, the normative quest has been labeled “morally irresponsible.”40 Reading Kitcher, Churchland, and other philosophers, one can see an alternative movement underway that tries to ground morality in biology without denying that its specifics are decided by people.41 This is also my view. I don’t believe that watching chimpanzees or bonobos can tell us what is right or wrong, nor do I think that science can do so, but surely knowledge of the natural world helps us understand how and why we came to care about each other and seek moral outcomes. We do so because survival depends on good relations as well as a cooperative society.
Moral laws are mere approximations, perhaps metaphors, of how we should behave. That the underlying values can be internalized to the point that we end up with an autonomous conscience, is something that, as Kant observed, should fill us with wonder, because how this happens is barely understood.
Toeing the Line
Let me close with two more stories about one-on-one morality and community concern in our close relatives. I am not claiming that apes are moral in the sense that we are, but they do show both of these critical ingredients. The first story echoes my earlier remark that bonobos remember where exactly they bit someone and that they show concern, perhaps even regret, about what they did. Instead of a situation among the apes themselves, however, here we consider their reaction to a veterinarian at the Milwaukee County Zoo. While still living in Wisconsin, decades ago, I visited these bonobos many times. They showed all sorts of remarkable expressions of empathy, especially their alpha male, Lody. He was very protective, for example, of an aging female, Kitty. Being blind as well as deaf, Kitty risked getting lost in a building full of doors and tunnels. In the morning, Lody would gently bring her to her favorite sunny spot outside in the grass and by the end of the day wake her up to guide her back indoors, taking her by the hand. If Kitty had one of her epileptic attacks, Lody would refuse to leave her side.42
One time, however, Lody was less than empathic, biting the finger of the veterinarian while she was handing out vitamins through the mesh. She tried to pull her hand away, but he bit down. Hearing a crunching sound Lody looked up, seemingly surprised, and released the hand minus a digit. In the hospital, doctors were unable to reattach it. Within days, however, the victim visited the zoo again and, noticing Lody, held up her bandaged left hand, and said, “Lody, my man, do you know what you did?” Lody took one glance at the hand and went to the farthest corner of the exhibit, where he sat head down with his arms wrapped around himself.
In the ensuing years, the veterinarian moved away and rarely stopped by, but fifteen years after the incident, she made an impromptu visit. While she stood among the public, Lody could easily have ignored her, but immediately came running over. He tried to look at her left hand, which was hidden below the railing where he couldn’t see it. He kept looking left, insisting to see the hand he had bitten, until the veterinarian held it up. He looked directly at the incomplete hand, her face, and at the hand again. “He knew,” she concluded, suggesting that bonobos are quite aware of the consequences of their behavior. This is also my impression, although it is hard to verify, since no one sets up experiments with a fifteen-year time lag. If true, it confirms how deeply these apes care about their relationships, showing the sort of concern that underlies human moral tendencies.
The second story took place at the Arnhem Zoo while I was still there. One balmy evening, we called the chimps inside. But because the weather was superb two adolescent females refused to come in. They enjoyed having the island to themselves. The rule at the zoo being that none of the apes would get dinner until all of them were inside, the obstinate females caused a grumpy mood. When they finally did enter, hours late, they were assigned a separate bedroom so as to prevent reprisals. By the next morning, when all of us had forgotten about the incident, the chimps showed they had not. Once out on the island, the whole colony vented its frustration about the delayed meal by a mass pursuit ending in a physical beating of the two culprits. Admittedly, the rule they had violated was human imposed, but perhaps this is what helped us appreciate its enforcement. The colony seemed to grasp the benefits of having everyone toe the line.
That evening, the two teenagers were the first to come in.