Abstract
Empirical studies of the social lives of non-human primates, cetaceans, and other social animals have prompted scientists and philosophers to debate the question of whether morality and moral cognition exists in non-human animals. Some researchers have argued that morality does exist in several animal species, others that these species may possess various evolutionary building blocks or precursors to morality, but not quite the genuine article, while some have argued that nothing remotely resembling morality can be found in any non-human species. However, these different positions on animal morality generally appear to be motivated more by different conceptions of how the term “morality” is to be defined than by empirical disagreements about animal social behaviour and psychology. After delving deeper into the goals and methodologies of various of the protagonists, I argue that, despite appearances, there are actually two importantly distinct debates over animal morality going on, corresponding to two quite different ways of thinking about what it is to define “morality”, “moral cognition”, and associated notions. Several apparent skirmishes in the literature are thus cases of researchers simply talking past each other. I then focus on what I take to be the core debate over animal morality, which is concerned with understanding the nature and phylogenetic distribution of morality conceived as a psychological natural kind. I argue that this debate is in fact largely terminological and non-substantive. Finally, I reflect on how this core debate might best be re-framed.
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Notes
One important area of disagreement concerns the type of empathetic capacity present in various species. This is linked with disagreement about the putative link between the type of empathy taken to be important for morality and mind-reading, and disagreement about the mind-reading capacities of animals (see foot note 3 for further discussion). Some researchers have also disputed whether social norms can actually exist in animals with limited mind-reading and social learning capacities (see Andrews 2009; Tomasello 2016).
Though they do appear open to the possibility of group selection playing a role in the evolution of some aspects of morality, as they define it, Bekoff and Pierce lean towards the view that the evolution of mechanisms that produce pro-social behaviours can be explained without necessarily having to invoke selection at the level of groups (see also, Joyce 2006; de Waal 2006a).
Though the terms “sympathy” and “empathy” are sometimes used interchangeably, Bekoff and Pierce recognize a distinction between empathy as a type of emotional mimicry (feeling what another is feeling) and sympathy as having an emotion on behalf on another (feeling for the other) (see also Prinz 2011). They also take empathy to come in various degrees of complexity, ranging from low-level emotional contagion, where an emotion is triggered in an individual as result of merely observing a behavioural cue from another (such as a distressed or fearful facial expression), to cognitive empathy, where the individual is able to fully adopt the emotional perspective of another and understand the reasons for it (e.g., understanding that another individual is fearful and what has caused this). The latter requires a rich mind-reading capacity, while lower levels of empathy needn’t require any ability to represent others’ mental states. Sympathy is similarly taken to come in varying degrees of complexity, reflecting the extent to which individuals are able to put themselves in another’s situation.
Following de Waal (2006a), Bekoff and Pierce regard cognitive empathy as the type of empathy most relevant to morality, since it involves genuine recognition and understanding of another’s emotional state, and are willing to attribute full-blown cognitive empathy to several species (de Waal restricts this capacity to apes). Others are much more sceptical about cognitive empathy in animals, largely because of doubts about their mind-reading capacities. Andrews and Gruen (2014; see also Gruen 2015) provide an account of empathy and its putative connection with morality in apes that tries to carve some space between emotional contagion and full cognitive empathy. Monsó (2015) argues that even emotional contagion can be viewed in moral terms; hence, the debate over animal morality can be fully separated from the debate over animal mind-reading.
Bekoff and Pierce take these social norms to exist in the form of implicit expectations about appropriate and inappropriate behaviour: animals respond to norm violating behaviour with protests (e.g., “waa” barks in chimpanzees), or with punitive behaviours of their own (e.g., refusing to play with animals that have played too roughly), but needn’t have any conscious or reflective understanding of the relevant norm itself. Much of human thinking about social norms has been claimed to be like this (e.g., Nichols 2004; Sripada and Stich 2006; Haidt 2012). In many, perhaps most, cases, human social norms are unconsciously internalized early in development, and all the individual typically has conscious access to are the agonistic emotional states (like anger) that accompany their observing norm violating behaviour and the intrinsic motivation to punish norm violators.
Though Bekoff and Pierce tend to talk about “patterns” and “clusters” of “moral behaviours”, their focus is really on the internal psychological mechanisms that drive these behaviours. It is the possession of these mechanisms that make animals moral beings, on their view, not the behaviours per se (Musshenga 2013). For instance, they emphasize the following “threshold requirements” for being a moral animal:
[A] level of complexity in social organization, including established norms of behaviour to which attach strong emotional and cognitive cues about right and wrong; a certain level of neural complexity that serves as a foundation for moral emotions and for decision making based on perceptions about the past and the future; relatively advanced cognitive capacities (a good memory, for example); and a high level of behavioural flexibility (2009, p. 83).
Moreover, when discussing instances of pro-social and altruistic behaviour, they emphasize that merely acting to help another individual at cost to oneself is insufficient for the behaviour count as moral behaviour. What matters is the underlying motivation—i.e., whether the behaviour is the product of a desire to help that is itself other-regarding. Hence, when they talk about altruism as an instance of moral behaviour, what they mean is psychological altruism, not just so-called “biological” altruism, which is defined exclusively in terms of reproductive fitness, without reference to underlying motivation.
In this respect, Darwin seems to have viewed the human moral sense as a by-product of the evolution of sophisticated reasoning capacities, rather than a specific psychological adaptation in its own right (Ayala 2010). He also suggested that the development of human moral norms (i.e., the content of specific moral belief systems, rather than the psychological mechanisms that underlie the capacity to have such systems) was shaped by a process of cultural group selection:
It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another (1871, p. 159).
Modern theorists of the evolution of morality disagree about the extent to which human moral capacities are themselves psychological adaptations or by-products of adaptations for other functions, and about the extent to which the specific content of human moral codes and judgments have been shaped by genetic rather purely cultural evolution (for a survey, see Machery and Mallon 2010).
There is strong evidence that many animals are capable of anticipating the future and predicting the likely outcomes of their actions (e.g., Clayton and Dickinson 1998; Martin-Ordas et al. 2010). However, Ayala seems to have something more sophisticated than mere causal reasoning and anticipation in mind—something more like what is often referred to as “mental time travel”, which involves the ability to mentally project oneself backward or forward in time, and is widely held to be uniquely human, largely because it is thought to require a particularly rich form of self-consciousness (e.g., Suddendorf 2013; though see Clayton and Dickson 2010). The type of mental time travel he regards to be most important for morality also involves being able to project oneself into someone else’s situation in time—for instance, being able to anticipate what their emotional state would be.
Andrews and Gruen (2014) argue that this recognition and concern for others needn’t require particularly rich mind-reading capacity. Hence, cognitive empathy needn’t be necessary for moral empathy.
Rowlands does not regard this as the only route to moral action. Hence, he departs from a strict sentimentalism by allowing for the possibility of moral action being produced by “cold” reasoning processes, without affective states having to play a necessary role. However, he thinks that such cognitive forms of moral motivation are probably unique to humans.
Monsó (2015) points out that Rowlands’ externalist account of what it is to track moral considerations allows that animals that lack the capacity for full cognitive empathy may still possess, and be motivated by, moral emotions. Even emotions produced by emotional contagion can count as moral.
For their part, Bekoff and Pierce (2009 pp. 144–145) express scepticism about the traditional philosophical concept of moral agency and argue that its application to animals is “likely to promote philosophical confusion and should ultimately be avoided”. However, they do suggest that animal behaviour can be morally evaluated within the context of animal communities, such that the behaviour of a wolf towards a fellow wolf is morally evaluable, but “predatory behaviour of a wolf towards an elk is amoral”.
Stich and colleagues also talk about a third type of approach: Oxford-style linguistic analysis. This would involve studying how people use moral terms in ordinary language. I won't discuss that sort of approach here, since I don't think that any of the protagonists to the debate over animal morality would see themselves as engaging in such a project.
The introduction to Wallace and Walker (1970; cited by Stich and colleagues) provides a nice summary of various conceptual analyses of moral rule that can be extracted from the literature in moral philosophy and the problems that they face. Stich is a longstanding critic of conceptual analysis in philosophy, and thus Stich (2009) expresses much scepticism about this approach to defining “morality”.
Stich and colleagues suggest that, if Turiel and colleagues are right, then moral judgments would constitute something like a homeostatic property cluster (HPC) kind (Boyd 1999). HPC kinds are individuated by clusters of typically co-occurring properties, where this clustering can be explained in terms of a shared underlying casual (homeostatic) mechanism. In this instance, the homeostatic mechanism would presumably be the particular psychological processes that underlie moral as opposed to conventional judgments. Crucially, unlike on classical essentialist accounts of natural kinds, members of HPC kinds needn’t share sets of properties that are both necessary and sufficient for kind membership, which is why the HPC account has become popular as an account of biological and psychological kinds, which tend to exhibit significant internal variability, but nonetheless display stable clusterings of properties—in virtue, for instance, in the case of biological species, of a shared evolutionary history.
Rowlands (2017) makes the same sort of argument in the case of the notorious real life 10-year-old killers of Jamie Bulger. Intuition suggests that 10-year olds lack full moral responsibility, but also that these boys were motivated by (bad) moral reasons—for instance, they reported planning on killing a child that day.
I don't mean to imply that Rowlands thinks that the capacities that underlie what it is to be a moral being cannot be understood in biological terms. He does hold these capacities to be a product of evolution by natural selection. Korsgaard appears similarly open to evolutionary explanations for normative self-government. The issue is about how we are to determine which evolved capacities are moral capacities.
It is worth noting that this appeal to function requires a different conception of natural kinds to the HPC account that Stich and colleagues appeal to when making sense of the claims of Turiel and colleagues, since that account has difficultly in accommodating function (rather than clustering of properties in virtue of an underlying causal mechanism) as a criterion for kind membership (Ereshefsky and Reydon 2015). Other theories of natural kinds are friendlier to such functional kinds (e.g., Ereshefsky and Reydon 2015; Slater 2015).
It would be too strong to say that Korsgaard and Rowlands regard the debate over animal morality as entirely conceptual. For instance, Korsgaard would be forced to abandon her view if empirical research established that normative self-government was in fact beyond the psychological capacity of human beings or that our reflective capacities never played a role in our putatively moral behaviour. The same would hold for Rowlands if cognitive science established that other-directed emotions play no motivational role in human or animal behaviour. Hence, both would accept that empirical research could show that the conditions of their respective analyses of what it is to be a moral creature fail to be met by prototypically moral creatures (i.e., human beings) and thus should be abandoned or modified. Both also regard it to be an empirical question as to which species actually turn out to be moral creatures, given whatever analysis is finally accepted. However, that is quite different from seeing empirical research as the primary tool for determining what morality is, which is the position of the natural kind approach.
It is important to note that standing in this relationship shouldn't require that one must have the correct moral beliefs or attitudes, otherwise this might rule out the possibility of someone like the neo-Nazi possessing a moral psychology.
Although claims about the supposedly unique place of human beings in the world of the normative have often been used to justify our using animals for food and other purposes, Korsgaard (2006, p. 119) actually views the implications of what she believes to be our normative uniqueness quite differently: “As beings who are capable of doing what we ought and holding ourselves responsible for what we do, and as beings who are capable of caring about what we are and not just about what we can get for ourselves, we are under a strong obligation to treat the other animals decently, even at cost to ourselves”.
That kind of strategy seems to be particularly central to the Kantian tradition. As I read the Groundwork, Kant starts from the presupposition that morality can't be universal and rationally compelling unless we view it as springing from the dictates of reason and thus based on a priori rather than a posteriori foundations. This leads to an account of what it is to engage in moral cognition and action. Hence, epistemic and metaphysical concerns about the grounds of morality drive Kant’s account of what moral cognition and action are. Similarly, Korsgaard's (1996) response to what she calls “the normative problem” and her concerns about traditional forms of metaphysical moral realism, drive her account of what normative thinking consists in. Rowlands is less guilty of this, regarding his sentimentalist account of moral motivation as at least partly motivated by empirical evidence about the role of emotions in human moral behaviour. After raising problems for reflection-based accounts of normativity, Rowlands (2012, chapter 9) takes seriously the possibility that normativity might be an illusion, but he still seems to think that understanding the nature of moral motivation and whether animals can act for moral reasons requires that we have an account of moral normativity in place.
The notion of natural kinds is, of course, itself a contested one, with many different accounts of what natural kinds are (see Bird and Tobin 2015; Slater 2015)—so many, in fact, that Hacking (2007, p. 238) doubts whether there is “a precise [or] vague class of classifications that may usefully be called the class of natural kinds”. There is also controversy about what account of natural kinds is best for cognitive science. As noted earlier, the HPC account (Boyd 1999) is popular, but faces its problems (see, e.g., Ereshefsky and Reydon 2015). I don’t want to commit to any particular account of natural kinds or psychological natural kinds, but I will take it for granted that there do exist psychological natural kinds that can, at least partly, be understood in terms of their function. Hence, I will not take the more radical approach to critiquing the core debate over animal morality, which would be to challenge the very legitimacy of talking about natural kinds in general or specifically in cognitive science.
Once again, the assumption seems to be that if Turiel and colleagues are right, moral judgment would constitute something like an HPC kind. Hence, Stich and colleagues’ argument is that moral and conventional normative judgments don’t display sufficiently stable clusterings of properties to constitute different psychological kinds. Kelly and Stich (2007) also argue that the psychological processes that underlie the two putative types of judgment are likely the same, which would threaten the idea of there being two different homeostatic mechanisms. Stich and colleagues do, however, regard the more general category of normative judgment as a genuine natural kind.
Sinnott-Armstrong and Wheatley (2014) make a different type of argument for a similar conclusion: the category, moral judgment, is dis-unified in a similar manner to memory, so fails to constitute a genuine natural kind.
Although Bekoff and Pierce (2009, p. 83) include “established norms of behaviour” under their threshold requirements for being a moral creature, their original definition of “morality” actually seems to leave open the possibility of there being moral behaviours in animals (e.g., instances of pro-social and altruistic behaviour) that aren’t necessarily guided by psychologically internalized norms, since, when describing which behaviours are moral, it says only that “norms of right and wrong attach to many of them” (2009, p. 7).
Kitcher (2011) uses this descriptive definition to build a form of pragmatic ethical naturalism, where a notion of ethical truth (and with it a normative standard for assessing ethical propositions) is constructed from this conception of the adaptive function of morality (for discussion, see Joyce 2014).
It might, of course, turn out that similar problems exist with respect to other terms in this debate. “Empathy”, in particular, has also been the subject of terminological disagreement (e.g., what is real empathy? Is emotional contagion really empathy?), as has “social norm” (e.g., can there really be social norms without mindreading and language?). If that is the case, then similar conclusions should follow: what matters is the nature of the relevant psychological capacities and associated behaviours possessed by humans and animals, not the terms used to describe them.
For instance, one sometimes hears it said that rights can only be extended to members of a moral community, or that only creatures that are themselves capable of participating in moral deliberation can have direct ethical status.
As noted earlier, Rowlands also argues that attributing morality to particular species should lead us to treat them with greater respect. However, his argument is based not so much on the erosion of a putative psychological difference between them and us, but on the idea that these animals are capable (like some human beings) of being motivated by the good-making features of an action and of doing good. Again, this requires not just an account of the psychological states and capacities of these animals, but also an account of their metaphysical relationship to moral properties.
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Thanks to two anonymous reviewers and to participants in the Are You A Romantic Or A Killjoy? Issues In Comparative Psychology session at ISHPSSB 2015 in Montréal. Research for this paper was supported by a Grauel Faculty Fellowship from John Carroll University.
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Fitzpatrick, S. Animal morality: What is the debate about?. Biol Philos 32, 1151–1183 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9599-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9599-6