There’s an amusing article in The New York Times about an ostensible conflict between biologists and philosophers, sparked by findings of the beginnings of morality in primates. The stuff about the primates is quite interesting: all about chimpanzees drowning in efforts to save each other and other such noble behaviour. But I was getting ready to read what I thought might be an interesting challenge to my philosophical views, given promises early in the article about talk of biologists taking over the philosophers’ domain and so on. I thought the article might even be reasonably well-done, given that it’s by Nicholas Wade, a well-respected science reporter who specializes in precisely this sort of stuff. But either the reporting isn’t done very well or the biologists need to learn something about philosophy before they go making grand claims.
Permit me to pick on a few points. Primatologist Frans de Waal is apparently one of the biologists who conceives of himself as being in conflict with philosophers. One of the things he says that is supposed to somehow be a threat to philosophers is that ‘human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies’. I quake in my ethicist’s boots. Heaven forbid that something necessary to human morality be found elsewhere! And here I thought that all sorts of things were necessary to human morality (at least as we know it): brains, bodies, desires, environments, … wait, those are things that can be found all over the place. Alright, so I have absolutely no idea what the argument here is supposed to be. I can’t see how the fact that certain things present in monkeys are also necessary for human morality could possibly pose a threat to anything I believe.
Then, of course, there is the (in)famous is/ought gap. Judging from the article, all philosophers think that it is impossible to get from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’. I thought quite a few philosophers had doubts about this. But never mind that for now. Here’s Dr. de Waal’s response to it: ‘I’m not sure how realistic the distinction is. Animals do have “oughts.” If a juvenile is in a fight, the mother must get up and defend her. Or in food sharing, animals do put pressure on each other, which is the first kind of “ought” situation’. (Sydney scratching his head here.) Again, how is this a response? How is pointing out that animals have oughts show that one can derive an ought from an is? Why shouldn’t I just thank Dr. de Waal for his intriguing information about primates and then move on my merry way, philosophizing as before?
I could point to some more responses that seem to have no relevance to the thing to which they are supposed to be responses, but I’ll quit boring you. Though I will note, that I was also puzzled by the report of a big conflict between biologists and philosophers. I thought Anglo-American philosophers were the most scientistic people on the planet, significantly more prostrate at the altars of science than scientists themselves (though philosophers generally seem to prefer the First Church of Physics to the Third Church of Quasi-science Biology). Some evidence of a weakened faith would strike me as good news.
Sydney
Alan Schmierer
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I haven’t read much on the animal morality literature, but I’ve read a bit of de Waal’s work, as well as Marc Hauser’s. I think the part that they think will be problematic for philosophers/religious people/easily offended passersby, is that morality is considered to be one of these things that separates Man as being different from other animals/primates, and if we show that monkeys/rats/kittens/whatever also have “morals”, then how are we special?
One issue I take with this kind of research, is that it’s difficult to assess “morality” in the nonverbal animal. Are the mice starving themselves because they think it is morally wrong to eat at the expense of having another mouse shocked? Or perhaps mice starve themselves because the sound of another mouse screaming is very aversive to them… we can’t ask them the reason.
In general, I think this research generally falls more under psychology (animal cognition, etc.) than under biology, so I’m kind of surprised it’s being presented that way.
-L
Hmm, if that’s what they think will be considered problematic by philosophers, then I think they completely misunderstand contemporary philosophy. I don’t know how much sense it makes to speak of dominant philosophical positions, given how far from a consensus philosophers tend to be, but certainly many prominent philosophers are die-hard naturalists who would have no interest at all in using morality as a way of making humans special. It’s just that they think that there is something special about evaluative claims such that they can’t be derived from normal descriptive claims. Some of them find this gap so convincing but at the same time are so committed to only accepting naturalistic facts that they conclude that there are no true moral claims at all. If one gives up on morality altogether, one is certainly not using it to give humans some special place!
Having said that, there are undoubtedly many philosophers who would think that morality does distinguish humans from other animals. But this would just be a result of some other difference. For example, you might think that morality only applies to creatures that have certain sorts of rational capacities and that of the creatures we have seen so far only humans have these capacities. But then it would be more accurate to say that it is these rational capacities that separates humans from other animals, rather than saying that it’s morality.
As for the difficulty in assessing why nonverbal animals did or did not do something, I think what you said is exactly right. Sometimes it’s difficult enough trying to assess this in the case of verbal humans!
Sydney