Interesting related study


Eric Schwitzgebel (UC-Riverside) and Josh Rust (Stetson)

"If philosophical moral reflection tends to improve moral behaviour, one might expect that professional ethicists will, on average, behave morally better than non-ethicists. One potential source of insight into the moral behaviour of ethicists is philosophers’ opinions about ethicists’ behaviour. At the 2007 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, we used chocolate to entice 277 passers by to complete anonymous questionnaires without their knowing the topic of those questionnaires in advance. Version I of the questionnaire asked respondents to compare, in general, the moral behaviour of ethicists to that of philosophers not specializing in ethics and to non-academics of similar social background. Version II asked respondents similar questions about the moral behaviour of the ethics specialist in their department whose name comes next in alphabetical order after their own. Both versions asked control questions about specialists in metaphysics and epistemology. The majority of respondents expressed the view that ethicists do not, on average, behave better than non-ethicists. While ethicists tended to avoid saying that ethicists behave worse than non-ethicists, non-ethicists expressed that pessimistic view about as often as they expressed the view that ethicists behave better."

I believe that de Waal has a point that our genetic roots have led up to our morality. Perhaps, the arguement can be made that an absolute Truth or an absolute morality is passed on genetically, but the capacity to learn truths and be moral are passed on genetically.

Humans have these genes because they helped us learn to work together to survive in this world. We needed community, like primates. However, our community evolved much further than theirs did/has. We have evolved into speaking beings with intentionality which qualifies us for morality.

However, in the end, this capacity for morality came from the evolution of genes in the human make up.

Moral behavior is used here in a completely different context. It is practically unrelated to what you were suggesting. First and foremost the article presupposes an already established ethics!! Not just an ethic the professional ethic!! I don't believe we have yet, in our current discussion, covered ethical thought.

Grim, go respond to all the questions I posed to you before that you conveniently ignored. And support your claims for once! You make so many unsupported claims, thinking that a related quote by some past philosopher counts. All the Neitzsche quotes you provided were related, but only one had even a hint of support toward your claim.

Krys: "However, in the end, this capacity for morality came from the evolution of genes in the human make up."

I'd be hesitant to call it a capacity, like the capacity for language. It's more of a mechanism that influences us to behave morally. The difference is minor in any case.

There's a lot of emphasis on empathy, but I think guilt has a lot to do with moral behavior and has been overlooked. Shermer goes into this a bit in "The Science of Good and Evil", but I've forgotten a lot of it. With all these posts on morality, perhaps we should break open some of the older booktalk selections that had to do with morality. Discussing multiple books on the same topic would be helpful.

Now why in the world would I want to do that?

Just suggestive, of course, but interesting. From a common sense standpoint, it's about what most people would expect, I think. I would also expect that if a similar study could be done on members of the clergy, they would not be found to be any more morally upright than the general population.

It might have occurred to people reading the book that an alternative title could be "The Primatologist Vs. the Philosophers." The book is essentially a contrast between the newer, biological approach to defining human nature and the older, philosophical one. De Waal doesn’t propose throwing the philosophers out of the discussion, but it's clear throughout that he feels strongly that when it comes to morality, philosophy hasn’t absorbed even the full implications of Darwin, much less the discoveries of ethnologists like himself, and the neuroscientists.

I hope we’ll be moving on soon to the philosophers’ responses to de Waal and de Waal’s rebuttal of them. This is an interesting format for a book, by the way, offering multiple points of view in a single, brief volume. Before we do that, I want to take inventory of some of the topics de Waal covers and the points he has made, some of which we’ve already discussed and some we haven’t yet mentioned. These are not listed in any order of importance. Please tell me if you disagree with anything about this summary, or add anything to it.

1. Emotion and cognition. De Waal thinks that a full appreciation of the relevance of primate studies leads to placing emotion—including emotionally-triggered automatic cognitions—ahead of conscious reasoning as the driver of our behavior.

2. The continuity/discontinuity of our morality vis-à-vis the apes. De Waal appears to think that what we share with the apes is more significant than the differences, and that we have inherited from ape-like ancestors the “building blocks” of morality we see in them.

3. When we observe people being kind, generous, empathetic, cooperative, that is not the result of our strenuous efforts to overcome innate selfishness and asociality. That is thanks to our natural endowment and our nature as social beings.

4. Where people—especially those de Waal labels “Veneer Theorists”—go wrong in their thinking about natural selection is to anthropomorphize it as a cruel and pitiless process, by which only organisms the best adapted to propagate succeeding generations can survive. From such a process, we would expect to get creatures that care about only their own survival, as we see in human beings. Or so goes the fallacious thinking of the VT people.

5. The impulse to help others has clear survival value for the helper. But de Waal importantly says that “the impulse became divorced from the consequences that shaped its evolution. This permitted its expression even when payoffs were unlikely, such as when strangers were beneficiaries.”

6. What makes an emotion moral is, after Westermarck, its quality of “disinterestedness, apparent impartiality, and flavour of generality.” Empathy and reciprocity are not necessarily moral emotions, but they are necessary prerequisites to moral emotions.

7. Top-down vs. bottom-up. Biologists prefer bottom-up accounts, which “assume continuity between past and present, child and adult, human and animal, even between humans and the most primitive animal.” De Waal is certain that empathy & sympathy is “the original, pre-linguistic from of inter-individual linkage that only secondarily has come under the influence of language and culture.”

8. Until just recently, discussion of animal emotion was taboo.

9. Perception-action mechanisms are at the basic level of empathy (or innermost Russian Doll. Higher levels of empathy build on PAMs . Empathy is not all-or-nothing, but includes a range of responses from nearly automatic to cognitively mediated.

10. Morality (doing to others as you would like them to do to you) is still very much an in-group phenomenon. In fact, “out-group hostility enhanced in-group solidarity to the point that morality emerged...so, the profound irony is that our noblest achievement—morality—has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior—warfare.”

11. Community concern is seen only in humans, but its beginnings are evident in the great apes.

12. “We celebrate rationality, but when push comes to shove, we assign it little weight….This is because human morality is firmly anchored in the social emotions, with empathy at its core.”

I have some responses I'll add tomorrow or the next day to your previous post. But first, have you read "On Being Certain" by Burton?

Interbane wrote:


This is the second time you have mentioned this, sounds like it has made an impact, I'm going to check it out. Do you think it would make for a good non fiction discussion read?

Read that back when it was a non-fiction selection here. I'll dust it off if you want to talk about it in relation to de Waal. I'm curious what you have to say about it.

Hi Bill, thanks for the excellent summary of the issues between de Waal and philosophy. I think part of the confusion in the terms of the debate is that his real target is religion, but he frames it by a discussion about philosophy. In approving Hume’s view that reason is the slave of the passions, de Waal notes that philosophy has offered a range of sceptical accounts of the nature of morality which align with his views. But religion conventionally claims that morality is revealed by God, a view that aligns with veneer theory in seeing a higher rational spiritual nature as in conflict with a lower irrational material nature. Hume and his successors in logical positivism have seen science as the centre of philosophy, and so have interpreted morality against a scientific frame, opening the path to de Waal’s hypothesis of a veneer theory of morality. It seems to me that de Waal is closer to mainstream philosophy than your comment suggests, and that his real target is religious morality which claims to be based on access to higher truth.Here goes with some comments. I find it surprising that de Waal does not discuss the concept of instinct. Perhaps it has connotations he does not like? It seems to me that ape behaviour is instinctive, reflecting how many moral genes are adaptive, for example our instincts for community, loyalty, empathy, etc. Taking his view of the primacy of emotion over reason to extremes could lead to the claim that humans have no access to objective absolute facts to guide decision process, but that all decision is instead a power struggle between competing emotions. I find this argument to be reductive and relativist. Rational morality, in seeking objective fairness, strives to define justice against reason, comparing consequences and evidence. Of course, much morality fails in this aim, and is irrational. The goal of a rational morality, it seems to me, should draw from de Waal’s observations on the biological instinctive foundations of behaviour, while using philosophy to articulate a moral code. I think his point is that efforts to ground morality in transcendental reason have been flawed, and that setting such transcendent ideals against the evidence derived from comparison with apes provides a useful explanatory criterion. Much of conventional morality is in fact instinctive, and our instincts are often rational, based on deeper wisdom than is readily apparent. For example the importance of parents caring for children can conflict with the self-actualisation of the parent, providing an example of where instinct conflicts with ratiocination. I agree selfishness is not innate, but it has been elevated as a virtue by capitalist society. Adam Smith argued that self interest is the driver of productivity. A conflict exists between the growth paradigm of capitalism and the ethical paradigm of ape biology. Homo economicus is grounded in the war of all against all, and the incentives of autonomous pleasure. Hence de Waal perceives a disconnect between the ideas of the good derived from economic and biological frameworks. As our economy departs from our biology, he implies that alienation and suffering are produced by an atomistic consumerist culture that fails to see and meet its true social needs.I find this ‘Veneer Theory’ concept really confusing. You could say that Kant promoted a veneer theory with his claim that duty is the foundation of morality. The moral code inherent in law is equally a veneer, premised on the observation that public morality requires agreed objective standards that are subject to change through cumulative precedent in law. The modern world absolutely needs this ‘veneer’, and any idea of a return to a golden age of trust and belonging is unrealistic. Yet, where I think de Waal has a great point is that such golden age thinking, as in his depiction of the bonobo paradise in Our Inner Ape, presents a useful goal – that our morality should be grounded in our biology. But the moral problem is that people generally do not help strangers, and confine their empathy to their friends. Here is where I think comparing de Waal’s ideas to Biblical morality is very useful. I think he would find the Sermon on the Mount a useful framework for assessing the survival value of moral codes. Jesus seems to argue that the fallen condition of the world of his time required a fundamental revaluation of values, away from the clan model of Mosaic law and the imperial model of Rome towards a universal empathy and love. The extreme hostility this suggestion induced is shown by the story that Christ was nailed to a tree as punishment for suggesting such impossible ethics. This is a key issue. Criminal gangs apply empathy and reciprocity within their group, but often these qualities are directed to ends that are not moral. Similarly, the media promotes empathy for some causes and not for others, without strong moral analysis in terms of evidence and consequences. The trouble here, as Singer notes, is that impartiality, the factor that gives empathy its moral content, is a veneer, a logical process derived from reason alone. Our moral instincts are bottom-up, but need to be evaluated against top-down rational criteria. The top-down view can support the bottom-up sentiment, or can critique it. Bottom-up morality taken to extreme can validate emotional feelings which have major negative consequences. For example, apes engage in fighting and rape in ways that our top-down law based morality needs to prevent. Again, a really important point. Descartes thought that animals are machines, expressing a modern soulless perspective that served the interests of economic expansion. De Waal is engaging with the deep-seated prejudice here which sees the difference between humans and animals as one of type rather than degree. The source of this prejudice, the belief that humans had souls and animals did not, is a religious claim which lacks any basis in evidence. However, I personally think that there are differences of type between animals and humans, exemplified in the human capacity to use language for objective reasoning. When it comes to emotion there is strong continuity between humans and animals. De Waal is very helpful in using this continuity to inform a reassessment of the nature of human identity. This Russian Doll model of morality seems flawed to me. It suggests that our innermost desires should ground our ethics. De Waal shows that some of these desires are admirable, but equally some are detestable. Morality needs to come from a higher source than the validation of perception-action mechanisms.This is precisely the problem identified in the Christian New Testament. The Old Testament provided an in-group morality for Judaism, but Christ said a universal morality was needed, grounded on love for enemies, forgiveness and works of mercy. A community functions as a single organism, with the larger and more efficient group tending to out-compete the smaller and more disorganised. Humans have the capacity for concern, both to safeguard social stability and to provide for basic needs of the indigent. The morality of concern is not self-evident, as helping others can have perverse consequences, especially dependence on the helper. I think it is obvious that human empathy is grounded in our genetic continuity with the apes, but the morality of empathy is a much more complex problem than de Waal indicates. An example of this syndrome is the religious practice of deference to authority. The institution has an internal empathy which assigns greater value to its historic views than to those of external challengers. This is a serious problem for the morality of empathy, as for example the empathy of priests for each others abets assault of innocent victims. ‘Assigning weight to rationality’ is what we call the demand that institutions be transparent and accountable.

I think that a lot of this has to do with the concept of in-group/out-group. de Waal spends a bit of time talking about how an individual’s first loyalty is to his kin and themselves. Then, it extends to the group, and only from there, does it extend to other individuals.



However, isn’t morality supposed to be universal?

This is the only part of your post where I have any significant disagreement, Robert. My point was simply that de Waal approves to some degree of E.O. Wilson's statement that it is time to temporarily take morality out of the hands of the philosophers. Wilson thought that biology was the field that would produce progress in this area, as opposed to the endless around-and-around of philosophy. The philosophers tend to be top-down rather than bottom-up in their approach, and de Waal, as a scientist, is likely to favor the reductionistic approach. I don't think his target is really religion. This whole discussion is a-religious; it illustrates that divinity is not necessary in arguments about natural selection.

I'd like to comment on some of your other points in a later post.

Kry: "However, isn’t morality supposed to be universal?"

Morality isn't universal. Cultures have a different sense of what constitutes a moral act. Neither is it absolute. Even killing can be considered a moral act in some(extreme) circumstances.