“Can Animals Be Ethical?”

Sachs, Carl
UNT Philosophy and Religion Studies
Presented to Dallas Philosophers Forum
03/10/2009

It is by now a familiar question as to whether or not animals have “rights,” that is, whether animals have any moral status, and how this status should be conceptualized (i.e. whether in terms of ‘rights’ or not).  The debates that have taken shape around this question are animated by the assumption that it is we who must decide whether or not to extend ethical status to non-human animals, and if so, on what basis.  Without presuming any correct way of answering that question, I wish to take up a related question that has thus far been almost completely neglected: the question as to whether or not any animals ought to be regarded properly as ethical beings in their own right.   In examining this question, I want to take careful notice of the pictures that stand in the way of thinking clearly about this question – in particular, pictures about what an “animal” is and pictures about what “ethics” is.   All I hope to do here is critically examine some “pictures”, esp. in light of recent scientific findings, and have an interesting discussion with you all in light of this. 

The picture of “animals” and of “ethics” that, I think, we naively presume is governed by what I call a problematic of discontinuity.   By “problematic,” I mean that it is not so much a particular theory or doctrine, but rather a family of deeply held assumptions in light of which a variety of different theories or doctrines come to seem unreasonable or unreasonable, plausible or implausible.   The “discontinuity” I refer to is, of course, the discontinuity between human beings and all other animals – or between “Man” and “Nature,” words that must be pronounced in the mind’s eye with their proper capitalization.  An exhaustive discussion of the history of the concept of this discontinuity would require nothing less than the history of Western philosophy itself, and we do not have the time for that.  But we can get somewhere, I think, if we begin with a particular version of the problematic of discontinuity, according to which the distinctive trait of human beings, that which sets human beings apart from all other animals, is rationality. 

“Rationality” is, of course, a heavily loaded word, and much depends on how rationality is itself conceptualized.   In the Western tradition, particularly since the 17^th century, the concept of rationality has been expressed through the spatial metaphor of “taking a step back” – that is, taking a step back from one’s immediate situation, even from one’s own beliefs, in order to criticize them from a more abstract, more disengaged, more decontextualized, or more universal perspective.   (Historically speaking, the demand to take up a rational perspective goes together with a demand to see things from a cosmic and/or divine perspective – “under the aspect of eternity,” as Spinoza put it – but for our purposes I shall simply assume that the notion of rationality is detachable from its initial theological, or otherwise metaphysical, context.[1])  

I have said that rationality involves the capacity to take a step back and critically examine one’s beliefs, but the same applies to one’s desires, and in this way, the modern Western tradition has made rationality central to all serious philosophical examination of ethics.  For to be ethical, on this picture, consists in one’s ability to examine whether or not one ought to act on the basis of one’s desires.   And on this picture, then, animals are considered amoral – not, it is crucial to note, immoral – but amoral – because they are, supposedly, mere prisoners to their immediate desires, acting on whichever desires happen to be strongest, but unable to consider which of their desires ought to command them.  Thus animal behavior is typically described using such terms as “innate” or “instinctual”.   

In taking up this vocabulary of “the problematic of discontinuity,” I am taking a cheerfully indifferent attitude towards a whole host of traditionally important questions, such as the debate between Kantian ethics and utilitarian ethics, or the debate over whether free will is compatible with determinism.   For the debate between Kantianism and utilitarianism is, for my purposes here, a debate between different ways of making the problematic of discontinuity look intellectually respectable.  This is, of course, explicit throughout Kant’s philosophy, both the theoretical philosophy and the practical philosophy, but it is no less evident in utilitarian ethics.  Although the utilitarian is presumably “friendlier” to animals, insofar as the pleasure and pain of animals enters into the utilitarian’s calculations, utilitarianism conceives of ethics itself as the exercise of cognitive faculties which animals do not possess.  Likewise the debate between “compatibilists” and “incompatibilists” – that is, over the compatibility between free will and determinism – could be resolved either way without disturbing the deeper commitment to the problematic of discontinuity.

I want to set this picture alongside what might be called, very loosely, “Darwinism.” In taking on this term, I wish to avoid taking a side in ongoing debates about various mechanisms that produce evolutionary change.  Instead I wish to appeal to “Darwinism” as issuing in a ‘problematic of continuity’.   As Richard Rorty once put it, “as good Darwinians, we want to introduce as few discontinuities as possible into the story of how we got from the apes to the Enlightenment.”[2]   So we can call this the problematic of continuity – on this picture, the claim that there are no dichotomies, oppositions, or fundamental differences of kind that make a genuine contribution to the intelligibility of human experience.  Hence there are no differences of kind, only differences of degree; no absolute dichotomies, only multiple, partial, and overlapping distinctions; no fixed essences, only evolving variations. It follows that the various dualisms that have played a prominent role in traditional Western metaphysics and epistemology – such as appearance vs. reality, mind vs. matter, reason vs. instincts (or: reason vs. passions), truth vs. metaphor, humanity vs. nature, fact vs. value, objective vs. subjective – must be subjected to a sophisticated analysis through which they are modified or rejected. 

In light of these two problematic – of discontinuity and of discontinuity – I want to share with you research recently undertaken by Frans de Waal, a primatologists at Emory University in Georgia, who works extensively with captive populations of chimpanzees and monkeys:

“I am not arguing that non-human primates are moral beings but there is enough evidence for the following of social rules to agree that some of the stepping stones towards human morality can be found in other animals,” said Frans de Waal, professor of psychology at Emory University in Georgia. 

In one recent experiment:

The animals were asked to perform a set of simple tasks and then rewarded with food or affection. The rewards were varied, seemingly at random. De Waal found the animals had an acute sense of fairness and objected strongly when others were rewarded more than themselves for the same task, often sulking and refusing to take part any further.

Another study looked at altruism in chimps - and found they were often willing to help others even when there was no obvious reward. “Chimpanzees spontaneously help both humans and each other in carefully controlled tests,” said de Waal.

Other researchers, said de Waal, have found the same qualities in capuchin monkeys, which also show “spontaneous prosocial tendencies”, meaning they are keen to share food and other gifts with other monkeys, for the pleasure of giving.

“Everything else being equal, they prefer to reward a companion together with themselves rather than just themselves,” he said. “The research suggests that giving is self-rewarding for monkeys.”

Related research found primates can remember individuals who have done them a favour and will make an effort to repay them.

 

Now, the philosophical question that I wish to address here is this: what light does this sort of research shed on the problematic of discontinuity and the problematic of continuity?   How should we think about animals, and about ethics, in light of this research?   The question is difficult because concepts are already at work in the decision to carry out the experiment, in how the experiment is carried out, and in how the results of the experiment are interpreted.  So there is, unfortunately, no question of being able to take the results of science naively, at face value. 

Now, it must of course be acknowledged that chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys do not reflect on their own ideals and have discussions about them; the question is, however, about the significance of the absence of that capacity.  As Ober and Macedo put it in their introduction to a recently published lecture by de Waal:

Nonhuman animals cannot enunciate normative ideals, to one another or to us.  Does that fact require us to draw a bright line between the kind of emotion-motivated “moral” behavior that de Waal and others have observed in primates and the “genuine” reason-based more actions of humanity?  If the copy editor of this book knew the right answer to that question he or she would know which word in the previous sentence – “moral” or “genuine” – should have its scare quotes struck out.[3]

To foreshadow: on my view, the question as to which word should have its scare quotes struck out loses its force if we take fully on-board an Aristotelian, rather than a Kantian or utilitarian, understanding of ethical life.  But what happens if we take the chance of considering what happens to our self-image when we consider that human beings are not the only animals on this planet whose behavior properly counts as ethical? 

These questions need a bit more tidying up, for two reasons.  Firstly, there is an unfortunate tendency to assume without critical examination what is meant by “animal”; secondly, there are reasons to be suspicious of the picture of ethics.  In both cases – in our picture of what it is to be an animal and in our picture of what it is to be ethical – we should be on guard against letting the problematic of discontinuity do our thinking for us. 

For one thing, we should be wary of operating with a simplistic picture of what it is for something to be an “animal” in the first place.   The danger of operating with such a simplistic category is that it may lead us to neglect the massive differences between, say, chimpanzees and dolphins on the one hand, and earthworms and crabs on the other.   To say that these are all ‘animals’ in the biological sense is, of course, quite true – but in the biological sense, of course, so are we.  But we draw the sharp bright line only between ‘humans’ and ‘animals’, we obscure the massive discontinuities to be found throughout the animal world.  We should say, rather, to quote Jay Bernstein, “gorillas live out their experience of pain differently than cats, and cats differently than mice, and mice differently than spiders.  The sameness and differences are analogical but objective all the way down”.[4]  Of course one might object that we simply cannot know that gorillas, let alone cats, mice, and spiders, feel anything like pain.  In one sense this is true – true in roughly the same sense that one cannot know that another person is in pain. If one wishes to swallow the poisoned pill of skepticism, then one should swallow it whole.  And that means not rejecting skepticism about human mind while retaining skepticism about animal minds.

And while earthworms and crabs, it seems reasonably clear, have nothing even remotely analogous to ‘ethics,’ the same cannot be said for “the type of nonhuman animal” which “discriminates particulars, recognizes individuals, notices their absences, greets their returns, and responds to them as food or as source of food, as partner or material for play, as to be accorded obedience or looked to for protection and so on”.[5]  For animals of that type, there “are goods internal to the form of life of dolphins, gorillas, and so forth as distinct natural species—that is, because there are more or less determinate conditions under which a dolphin (etc.) will or will not flourish—we can also see the behaviour of individual dolphins, when directed towards the relevant goods, as exemplifying after all the phenomenon of action for a reason.”[6]

In thinking along these terms – the goods that internal to a form of life, the conditions under which a being can flourish, directedness towards such goods as furnishing a being with a reason for its actions – I am hoping to take on board the ethics of Aristotle.   For unlike Kantianism and utilitarianism, the Aristotelian tradition of ethics does not think of ethics as the exercise of abstract, disengaged, reflective rationality.   Instead, Aristotle distinguishes between theoretical reason and what he calls phronesis, the exercise of practical reason, which is situation-specific, responsive to concrete particularities, and which is embedded within the practices and judgments of particular communities.  I suggest that if we think of ethics in Aristotelian terms rather than in Kantian or utilitarian terms, and if we introduce into our thoughts about animals a much more pluralistic, fine-grained categorization that takes into account the massive discontinuities between gorillas, cats, mice, and spiders, then we will no longer think of ethics as a uniquely human province – as something that distinguishes us humans from those animals – but instead think of ethics as what is necessary for any large-brained social animal whose way of life depends on navigating relationships of cooperation and competition.  And perhaps it is only the problematic of discontinuity which requires us to think that there must be some hard and fast dichotomy to be drawn between ethics on the one hand, and mammalian social behavior on the other.