Abstract
This essay draws on Adam Smith’s moral sentimentalism to critique primatologist Frans de Waal’s gradualist theory of human morality. De Waal has spent his career arguing for continuity between primate behavior and human morality, proposing that empathy is a primary moral building block evident in primate behavior. Smith’s moral sentimentalism—with its emphasis on the role of sympathy in moral virtue—provides the philosophical framework for de Waal’s understanding of morality. Smith’s notion of sympathy and the imagination involved in sympathy is qualitatively different from animal sympathy. I argue that Smithian sympathy includes the ability to represent propositional attitudes and take into account multiple perspectives which are then synthesized into a singular impartial perspective. Furthermore, Smithian moral judgment requires the capacity for emotion regulation and moral self-cultivation, or the ability to shape and control one’s reactive attitudes. Taken together, these capacities far outstrip the capacities of animals, disrupting de Waal’s gradualism.
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Notes
Korsgaard defines Normative Self-Governance as “the ability to form and act on judgments of what we ought to do” (116). The intentional action that undergirds NSG requires "a certain form of self-consciousness: namely, consciousness of the grounds on which you propose to act as grounds” (113).
Kant’s categorical imperative is the most obvious example here. But any system that emphasizes rules or duties will be out of reach for any non-human animal. Similarly, a system based on maximizing well-being for all humans (and possibly all creatures) will require a developed rational capacity and the ability for abstraction. As Peter Singer states in his response to de Waal’s Stanford lectures, human morality requires that we be able to “reflect on our emotional responses and (sometimes) choose to reject them” (2006, p. 149). In her examination of Aristotle’s virtue theory, Nancy Sherman says this about rational choice (or prohairesis): “A prohairetic choice for Aristotle is supported by reasons for supposing an action A best on balance in light of the overall ends of character” (1989, p. 79). She later states, “prohairetic capacities discover means and revise ends of the basis of efficiency, the arrangement of ends with other ends, coherence with warranted beliefs, attention to consequences, and the like” (p. 93). All of these formulations bar non-human animals from moral agency.
Some of de Waal’s clearest articulations of his gradualism come in interviews and popular writings. For instance, in a New York Times op-ed he notes, “Apart from our language capacity, no uniqueness claim has survived unmodified for more than a decade since it was made” and, “The problem is that we keep assuming that there is a point at which we became human. This is about as unlikely as there being a precise wavelength at which the color spectrum turns from orange into red.” De Waal 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/opinion/who-apes-whom.html?_r=0.
Quoted in Dixon 2008, p. 98. De Waal agrees with Darwin that the relationship between human morality and animal sociality is disjunctive: either a difference in degree, or a difference in kind, and since evolution is true, it must be the former.
See Carron 2017. De Waal argues that Bonobos are capable of emotion regulation: I deal with this objection in the last section.
Castro 2017.
Abstraction requires the possession of “the representational processes necessary for systematically reinterpreting first-order perceptual relations in terms of higher-order, role-governed relational structures…,” what Povinelli and colleagues refer to as the “relational reinterpretation hypothesis” (Penn et al. 2008). One implication here is that since the application of moral norms requires the ability to abstract oneself from one’s particular position and consider how a general principle—the common underlying explanation—may apply to any person in a different situation that has certain features in common—yet is perceptually disparate—from the current situation, non-human animals could not intentionally conform to moral norms.
De Waal often notes that the one possible exception is language, that we are “primates with language.” However, he still insists that this is not a unique capacity necessary for morality, but rather simply an expansion of the intellectual capacity that we share with other social mammals.
One might object at this point that I have not adequately defined what a "qualitative difference" is in this context—or why such a qualitative difference is sufficient for showing that apes can't have morality. This is especially problematic given that, on its most natural usage, 'qualitative difference' does not imply difference in kind. For two things to be 'qualitatively different' just means that they don't share all the same qualities. Two apples can have different qualities—color—yet they are both the same kind of thing—apples. But a human is a different kind of thing than a chimp—they belong to different categories—even though they share many qualities and can both be referred to as primates. So, humans and chimps are more like apples and oranges than granny smith and red delicious apples. Apples and oranges share many important qualities, enough in fact to call them both fruits. But, they are different kinds of things. In the case of apples and oranges, one can focus on the similarities that makes them fruits, or the differences that make them different kinds of fruits, but to focus only on the similarities obscures the important differences that make them different kinds of things. This is what de Waal does with primates and humans; he doesn’t illuminate the differences along with the similarities. Or, more precisely, he doesn’t admit discontinuities or unique human characteristics needed for moral agency. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this point.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines empathy as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner…” For a history of the evolution of the term, see Gallese (2003).
It should also be noted that the definition of emotions varies greatly by discipline, but there are often disagreements even within disciplines. See Cabanac (2002) for an overview.
I find Robert C. Roberts definition of emotions persuasive: emotions are “concern-based construals.” They are ways of perceiving the world, and those perceptions are shaped or informed by the agent’s cares, concerns, attachments, etc. So, when I wake up to a loud, unexpected noise in my house, I feel fear. I feel fear because I care about my own safety and the safety of my family, and thus I perceive the unexpected noise as threatening those objects of concern. I also experience physiological changes such as increased heart rate, blood pressure, heightened awareness, etc. Since many animals have concerns and attachments, this definition of emotions can be extended to at least some animals. See Roberts (2003). Other philosophers argue that emotions are not representational or perception-like. Michael Brady posits that emotions are attention-grabbers that follow the perception. So, after I hear an unexpected noise, I have an evolutionarily adapted response mainly composed of the physiological changes, and this feeling tells me that I should really pay attention to the sound and react. See Brady (2011).
For a more detailed account of elephant grief, see chapter six of Morell (2014).
The connection between self-recognition and empathy has been recognized in developmental psychology, as there is a strong correlation between the emergence of self-recognition in young children (around two years old) and their helping tendencies. See for example de Waal (2006, p. 36); Warneken and Tomasello (2006).
This is the analogy de Waal uses in the PBS special The Human Spark: So Human, So Chimp. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/humanspark/uncategorized/program-two-so-human-so-chimp-description/22/.
Note that empathy and sympathy are often confused in scientific literature. The rat empathy I discuss is actually sympathy.
de Waal does not think that this challenges his gradualist position. After all, the heart of de Waal’s argument is that the most intelligent non-human animals such as Bonobos and Chimpanzees can understand each other’s mental states and respond appropriately, and that they enforce what de Waal labels “natural norms.” For instance, when young chimps venture too close to a sexually attractive female, they are punished by an elder, quickly learning their lesson (de Waal 2014, p. 189). When several chimps all want to mate with the same female, rather than engaging in a vicious battle for her, they sometimes sit around for hours grooming each other and calming themselves down before one approaches her (de Waal 2014, p. 194–95). These natural or communal norms are sometimes enforced by a chimp playing what de Waal calls an “impartial control role”: this chimp appears to enforce these roles without favoring allies or kin. de Waal describes this control role: “While most group members favored their relatives, friends, and allies when interfering in a dispute, control males were exceptional in that they placed themselves above the conflicting parties. They seemed to interfere on the basis of how best to restore peace rather than how best to help friends” (de Waal 1996, p. 129). Given these capacities, one might conclude that de Waal’s total gradualism remains unscathed.
I am grateful to Lauren Townsend for raising this objection in her response to an earlier draft of this paper I presented at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress in August, 2017. For one discussion of these sorts of criticisms, see Snarey (1985).
Other experiments further support their hypothesis. Experiments 19–23 measured the impact of weight. In one variation, the chimps had to choose one of two balls and roll it down an incline. Only the heavy ball would push an apple through a hinged door toward the bottom of the incline. If the chimp chooses correctly, then she gets the apple. Again, this takes hundreds of trials for the chimp to learn. In both of these studies (as well as in many others conducted by Povinelli and his team), the chimps’ ability to sort based on weight drops to mere chance (186). Alternatively, experiment 30 tested the ability of 3–5 year old human children to sort and understand the impact of weight, and found that nearly 100% performed the tasks correctly. In fact, children often pass it on the first try “without assistance from the main experimenter” (255). Children demonstrate the ability to understand an abstract concept such as weight that chimps apparently lack.
See for example, Berkowitz et al. 2007.
The reader should note that these experiments on emotion regulation are not “one-off” studies. The evidence is well-documented and robust. Gross and colleagues been conducting experiments for over 20 years that focus on both basic and more advanced cognitive strategies. For instance, see Gross (2007). For a related overview, see Beauregard (2007).
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Carron, P. Ape imagination? A sentimentalist critique of Frans de Waal’s gradualist theory of human morality. Biol Philos 33, 22 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9632-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9632-4