Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved

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.

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.

Hobbes and Rawls create the illusion of human society as a voluntary arrangement with self-imposed rules assented to by free and equal agents. Yet, there never was a point at which we became social: descended from highly social ancestors—a long line of monkeys and apes—we have been group-living forever. Free and equal people never existed. Humans started out—if a starting point is discernible at all—as interdependent, bonded, and unequal.

For a human characteristic, such as empathy, that is so pervasive , develops so early in life, and shows such important neural and physiological correlates as well as a genetic substrate, it would be strange indeed if no evolutionary continuity existed with other mammals. The possibility of empathy and sympathy in other animals has been largely ignored, however.

If human morality could truly be reduced to calculations and reasoning, we would come close to being psychopaths, who indeed do not mean to be kind when they act kindly.

It should further be noted that the evolutionary pressures responsible for our moral tendencies may not all have been nice and positive. After all, morality is very much an in-group phenomenon. Universally, humans treat outsiders far worse than members of their own community: in fact, moral rules hardly seem to apply to the outside.

Morality likely evolved as a within-group phenomenon in conjunction with other typical within-group capacities, such as conflict resolution, cooperation, and sharing.
The first loyalty of every individual is not to the group, however, but to itself and its kin. With increasing social integration and reliance on cooperation, shared interests must have risen to the surface so that the community as a whole became an issue.

Obviously, the most potent force to bring out a sense of community is enmity toward outsiders. It forces unity among elements that are normally at odds. This may not be visible at the zoo, but it is definitely a factor for chimpanzees in the wild, which show lethal intercommunity violence. In our own species, nothing is more obvious than that we band together against adversaries. In the course of human evolution, out-group hostility enhanced in-group solidarity to the point that morality emerged. Instead of merely ameliorating relations around us, as apes do, we have explicit teachings about the value of the community and the precedence it takes, or ought to take, over individual interests. Humans go much further in all of this than the apes, which is why we have moral systems and apes do not.

There are two broad categories of anthropomorphic language. First, there is emotional language: We can say that chimpanzees feel compassionate, outraged, aggrieved, insecure, et cetera. Second, there is cognitive language, language that attributes conscious knowledge and/or reasoning to animals: We can say that chimpanzees remember, anticipate, plan, strategize, et cetera.

There are a number of problems with Veneer Theory. In the first place, despite its popularity in the social sciences, the credentials of the principle of pursuing your own best interests as a principle of practical reason have never been established. [...]
In the second place, it is not even clear that the idea of self-interest is a well-formed concept when applied to an animal as richly social as a human being.[...]
So the idea that we can clearly identify our own interests as something set apart from or over against the interests of others is strained to say the least.
And yet even this is not the deepest thing wrong with Veneer Theory. Morality is not just a set of obstructions to the pursuit of our interests. Moral standards define ways of relating to people that most of us, most of the time, find natural and welcome.[...]
It is absurd to suggest that this is what most human beings are like, or long to be like, beneath a thin veneer of restraint.
But it is also absurd to think that nonhuman animals are motivated by self-interest. The concept of what is in your own best interests, if it makes any sense at all, requires a kind of grip on the future and an ability to calculate that do not seem available to a nonhuman animal.

The question of intention is a question about how an episode in which an animal does something looks from the acting animal’s own point of view, whether it is plausible to think that the animal acts with a certain kind of purpose in mind. I think there is a temptation to think that the question whether we can see the origins of morality in animal behavior depends on how exactly we interpret their intentions, whether their intentions are “good” or not. I think that, at least taken in the most obvious way, this is a mistake.

Once we recognize that nonhuman animals have complex emotional and social needs, we begin to see animal abuse where others might not see it [...]

So, we need to distinguish intentional selfishness and intentional altruism from mere functional equivalents of such behavior. Biologists use the two almost interchangeably, but Philip Kitcher and Christine Korsgaard are correct to stress the importance of knowing the motives behind behavior. Do animals ever intentionally help each other? Do humans?
I add the second question even if most people blindly assume a affirmative answer. We show a host of behavior, though, for which we develop justifications after the fact.