In his 1881 book, Daybreak, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote,

 

We do not regard the animals as moral beings.  But do you suppose the animals regard us as moral beings? –An animal which could speak said, ‘Humanity is a prejudice of which we animals at least are free’.[1] 

 

This passage expresses Nietzsche’s belief that animals do not judge human actions as morally good or bad.   Only humans think in moral terms, Nietzsche believes –a prejudice of which “animals at least are free”.  That is, animals do not believe in morality; and modern philosophers, as well as behavioral biologists, would have to agree.  Nobody suspects their dog of trying to maximize utility, follow categorical imperatives, or do penance for his sins.  Moral agency is uniquely human in this respect; only we maintain that our actions have some greater—moral—significance. 

Ethical theories try to provide us with a coherent and rational account of precisely this moral aspect of human thought and action.  But no matter how coherent and rational a given moral system may be, if it becomes too detached from our regular deliberations and actions, we do not consider it a correct account of our normal moral reasoning.  But what exactly constitutes this “normal moral reasoning” that humans allegedly possess?

In this paper, I argue that human “moral reasoning” is actually a normal biological phenomenon that we share with the rest of the animal community, most noticeably with our closest primate relatives.  I demonstrate this by using the standards provided by a normative moral theory to evaluate the actions of one of our animal relatives –Pan Troglodytes, or the African chimpanzee, illustrating the fact that these animals behave like moral agents.  After showing that human moral reasoning and behavior, as we know it, are actually part of the animal kingdom’s normal behavioral repertoire, the second part of this paper examines the implications of this finding on both the moralist’s and the moral skeptic’s conception of morality

 

Several moral systems try to provide us with an account of human moral reasoning and behavior—systems such as utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and deontological ethics.  In trying to make explicit those actions that we deem morally significant, it is best to use the theory that attempts to stay true to our normal behavior—that is, a normative theory that is descriptively strong.  Such a theory will provide us with the most rigorous standards for accounting for behavior that we already recognize as moral.  This is important for this analysis because we are not trying to find out when animals act morally or immorally (i.e. how often they deviate from one moral standard or another), we are trying to see how their normal behavior compares with what we identify as normal moral behavior in humans.  One moral system that is both normative and descriptively strong is virtue ethics.  In fact, virtue ethicists pride themselves on being able to provide an account of normal human reasoning and behavior where other theories—such as deontological and utilitarian—fail[2].

 

Virtue ethics is an ethical system that defines right action in terms of that which a virtuous agent—one who possesses virtues and puts them to practice—would choose to do[3].  In the conventional Aristotelian scheme, virtues are defined as those character traits that promote human flourishing.  For example, if we understand human flourishing to include the maintenance of one’s physical well-being, then the virtues are those character traits that work to bring this state about. 

          Identifying the expression of a particular virtue in an individual is not as straightforward as it may initially seem, but there are two basic components that constitute the core of the analysis.  First, we must know the emotional state of the agent at the time of action, because in order for a particular act to be deemed virtuous it must be accompanied by proper feelings.  For example, we do not consider courageous someone who is running into battle bloodthirsty and revengeful.  Second, in order to know whether someone possesses a particular virtue, we must identify his motives or reasons for acting, and determine whether or not they are right.  Someone who gives half their fortune to an orphanage for no reason other than to improve their own image, for example, is not deemed charitable from this moral perspective.      

 

We now need to consider a particular situation in which the non-human animal of our choice—the chimpanzee—behaves in a way we intuitively deem moral.  Once this has been presented, we can analyze this primate’s actions in the same way that Aristotle would analyze the actions of a human moral agent.  If the actions are still deemed moral with respect to these critical standards, we would be right in asking what sets human moral agency apart from the behavior of other animals given that our actions, in this case, are morally indistinguishable.

          The following passage is a behavioral biologist’s description of an event in which he believes he witnessed an act of courage on the part of a chimpanzee.

 

Chimpanzees have a natural fear of water—they sink like stones because they don’t have enough body fat to swim—so an island is the perfect way to contain them without using bars or cages[4]. …

One morning we introduced a new female, named Penny, onto the island.  That same afternoon, while playing by the shoreline, I suddenly heard Penny screaming in terror from the other side of the island.  She must have panicked at being left alone with the other chimps.  The next thing I heard was a loud splash, the sound of Penny hitting the water in the moat.  She had taken a running start and vaulted over the electric fence.

I took out my wallet, threw it on the ground, and started racing toward the pond, intent on diving in to save her.  As I ran it occurred to me that this rescue attempt could turn into a double disaster.  Trying to save a panicked chimp in deep water is dangerous business.  She could easily pull me down with her.

As I neared the fence I was surprised to see Washoe [the chimpanzee] sprint ahead of me and leap over the two electric wires.  She landed, thank heaven, on the narrow dirt ledge that dropped sharply off into the pond.  After sinking like a stone, Penny had now surfaced near the island’s shore and was thrashing about wildly.  Then she submerged again.  With one hand grasping the bottom of an electric fence post, Washoe stepped out onto the slippery mud at the water’s edge.  She reached out her other long arm, grabbed one of Penny’s flailing arms, and pulled her to the safety of the bank. … 

While Penny was calming down, I had time to gather my wits, and to let the enormity of what I’d just seen sink in.  Washoe had risked her own life to save another chimpanzee—one she had known for only a few hours.[5]     

         

The first important thing to note here is that this is not an isolated event enacted by some rare chimpanzee wonder.  Rather, incidents like this one are relatively common to the species, as Jane Goodall, the respected chimpanzee biologist, points out.

 

At Lion Country Safaris in Florida a number of rescues or attempted rescues have been observed.  Two involved mothers and their own infants.  One adult male rescued an infant; a second male is thought to have drowned during an unsuccessful attempt to rescue another infant.  Once two adult males made a dramatic effort to pull a third who was drowning from the moat[6].

 

Now, in order to determine if this is, in fact, a virtuous act on the part of a chimpanzee, we must consider this action with respect to the two main standards of evaluation developed by virtue ethics, as mentioned above.  That is, we must look at 1) the emotional state of the actor vis-à-vis the situation, and 2) the actor’s motives or reasons for acting. 

          First, let us look at the actor’s emotional state.  According to Aristotle, a courageous act is performed when one’s emotional state is in the mean with respect to the feeling of fear and that of confidence.  That is, a brave individual cannot lack fear or confidence, but also cannot be overly fearful to the point of cowardliness or overly confident to the point of recklessness.  Although Aristotle does not consider all bad or hurtful things worthy of fear, he does explicitly note that, “he will be called brave who is fearless in face of…all emergencies that involve death”[7].  In the case of the chimpanzee, Washoe, it is clear that she is risking her life in attempting to rescue Penny out of the water; were she to fall in, she would be physiologically barred from saving herself.

‘Confidence’ can be understood as a belief in one’s own ability to succeed, while over-confidence makes for hasty and careless action.  Undoubtedly, chimpanzees that attempt drowning rescues have some faith in their ability to succeed, for they actively avoid situations that, to them, look hopeless.  On the question of over-confidence, Washoe shows no signs of recklessness; rather, she remains cautious throughout the whole operation.

          According to Aristotle, a virtuous act must also be brought about suddenly, without long and serious preliminary deliberations.  That is, one must not choose to act virtuously by “calculation and rule”[8] because only a virtuous act done on impulse reflects the true character of the individual.  Washoe’s attitude fits this description quite well; not only did she act on a moments notice, but once in action, she did not take time to reconsider, no matter how many obstacles in her path.     

          Also, in order for an action to be deemed virtuous, the motives or reasons for acting must be proper.  One of the ways in which Aristotle uncovers the proper reasons for action is by noting those that are improper.  For example, he writes “those creatures are not brave…which are driven on to danger by pain or passion.”[9]  That is, we cannot consider Washoe’s action ‘courageous’ if she was simply acting in blind passion—such as in anger—or in reaction to pain or the threat of pain.  In this case, Washoe’s actions were not initiated by pain or carried out in anger; but other passions include envy, hatred, pity, joy, appetite (such as hunger or sexual desire), fear, confidence, and friendly feeling.[10]  We may dismiss joy, envy, appetite, fear, confidence and hatred right away as implausible motives for Washoe’s action.  That is, none of these forces alone make sense as motivating Washoe to act, considering the context she acted in.  We are left with pity and friendly feeling.  First, for Washoe to have jumped an electrical fence and risked her life because of an intense feeling of friendliness toward an unrelated stranger seems extremely unlikely.  Aristotle does not even consider such a motivational force with respect to human acts of courage, and chimpanzees, we must note, form weaker social bonds than humans do.  Aristotle also does not consider the possibility of a courageous deed done in a blinding bout of pity.  But it might be helpful here to consider whether or not we would characterize the situation any differently by putting a human in Washoe’s place.   When a man risks his life to rescue a stranger from drowning, we understand that sympathy plays a part in his actions, but we would never say that he “acted out of pity”, even knowing the general human being’s immense capacity for empathy.  It would make even less sense to identify pity as the sole factor motivating Washoe’s actions. 

          An act also cannot be considered courageous if it is performed simply because the agent is ignorant of the dangers involved.  As already discussed above, this is not the case with Washoe who is a fully competent chimpanzee, otherwise terrified of water. 

          The proper motive for acting courageously, Aristotle writes, is for the sake of an honorable goal—a goal that promotes and maintains the good life, which in turn promotes human flourishing.  Now, clearly Washoe did not act in promotion and maintenance of human flourishing, but it is not at all difficult to see her actions as sustaining the preservation and development of her own species. To get at this more exactly, it must be noted that a true act of courage is done in pursuit of both an internal and external goal[11].  An example of an external goal would be a victory in battle or the saving of another individual’s life.  Washoe’s action is the latter.  For a virtuous act to have an internal goal simply means that one does it for its own sake.  That is, all virtuous deeds are supposed to contain some intrinsic element of self-satisfaction.  Now, to know whether or not a human is acting courageously for the sake of simply acting virtuously is a difficult task in itself.  The best we can do is take note of the situations in which an individual chooses to act courageously when the external rewards are not easily seen or anticipated.  These situations may serve as evidence of an internal goal at work.  This inference is imperfect however, because in many cases it is possible for a person to be unconsciously expecting some rewards or attention for his heroism.  This does not set us back when considering chimpanzees however, because they are not rewarded for “heroic” actions in any obvious ways that they may anticipate ahead of time.  The fact is that we have to make fewer assumptions in order to believe that a heroic act has “intrinsic value” for a chimpanzee than we do in coming to that same conclusion for a human.

          Using the criteria of virtue ethics to evaluate Washoe’s actions, we see that there is nothing keeping us from identifying this chimpanzee’s deed as courageous, and thus virtuous.  In other words, we have demonstrated that even though chimpanzees are not considered moral agents like ourselves, there are times when chimpanzee behavior must be identified as moral in accordance with our own standards.  That is, with respect to some observed moral behavior, humans are actually quite indistinguishable from their primate relatives.    

 

The fact that some human actions, which we deem moral, are no different from the regular actions of a chimpanzee reveals something about human moral reasoning in these particular circumstances.  Namely, we have grounds to believe that the reasoning process underlying a moral action is, in fact, similar for both humans and chimpanzees.  (I use “reasoning” in a very broad sense here, having it include the forces of emotion, instinct, drives, and other psychological and physiological powers.)  Rather than speculate what particular forces are active in the primate mind and body, and which of these compel us, e.g., to pull drowning individuals out of water, I wish only to note that these forces not only have almost identical effects across the human and chimpanzee species, but that they are, as we have shown, philosophically indistinguishable.

         

Armed with this knowledge, we may now take a closer look at our conception of moral reasoning, looking critically at the different forms moral judgments tend to take with respect to humans and chimpanzees.

Take again, for instance, the situation of rescuing a drowning individual.  Were a human to perform this act, we would undoubtedly deem him a good person.  On the other hand, no matter how impressive Washoe’s actions are, we do not consider her morally superior to other chimpanzees.  In order to better understand why this is the case, let us focus on, what moralists understand to be, the two most fundamental properties of morality—the seemingly objective nature of moral judgments and our insistence that moral standards be recognized by all.       

Many people hold that the truth of a moral judgment does not depend on our subjective ideas or perspectives.  If I look at a marble and say that it is round, I believe it to have the property of roundness independent of what I think or feel about it.  Whether I’m there to look at it or not, it will still be round (assuming I have defined what I mean by “round”).  Likewise, when I say, “it is wrong to torture children” I do not imagine that torturing children is wrong in the presence of people who disapprove of it; rather, I believe that it is wrong independent of what we think or how we act.  Curiously though, we do not believe that chimpanzee behavior has any element of objectivity in it.  No matter how many mother chimps care lovingly for their infants, I would not consider a female chimp who does not care for her baby morally corrupt in some universal and absolute sense; rather, I would simply judge her a bad mother.   

          The second property of moral judgments involves their associated moral feelings.  When I consider a particular act as ‘good’ or ‘right’, I approve of this act, and will promote the occurrence of it in myself as well as in others.  This is different than simply liking or disliking something because in liking we do not consider it crucial to see that others feel the same way as we do.  In contrast, if I were to claim “killing innocent people is wrong”, I do not mean “I think killing innocent people is wrong, but you may do as you please”, rather, I mean that nobody has the right to kill innocent people.  In observing chimpanzee social groups, however, we do not see any individuals forcing or pleading with others to judge things in the same way they do.  Likewise, in observing chimps, we do not infer from the incident of Washoe rescuing Penny the fact that all chimpanzees must or should have a desire to protect other individuals from drowning.   

 

 Interestingly, the two features that set our conception of morality apart from the behavior of chimpanzees are related.  Both the apparently objective nature of moral judgments and the urgency of their adoption seem to allude to an authoritative presence.  Whether conscious or unconscious, the belief in a higher judge over humanity would explain why we consider that certain moral codes of conduct not only apply to all human beings, but are absolutely necessary for them. 

Many philosophers have warned us of the damage a “law conception of ethics” may cause on humanity and human thought[12].  Morality understood as an authority gives us little flexibility to understand our true moral natures, and no room to change our lifestyle accordingly if called for.  By showing how similar human moral behavior is to the normal behavioral patterns in other animals, we provide a good foundation for questioning our unique law-like conception of morality.  I will not pursue this line of thought here, however; I only wish to point out its neglect. 

 

Moral skeptics do not consider moral judgments objective or absolute, but they often take a position that is equally problematic from a behavioral perspective.  For example, John Mackie argues that moral judgments are, in fact, not objective but that there is a psychological explanation of why we believe them to be so.[13]  Mackie explains that every individual community has a working social system that functions in a particular way, and individual members of a society must work to uphold their community’s social structure so it remains intact.  In order to do this, individuals need to conform to a particular set of behaviors that work to sustain the community and its respective system.  Mackie claims that this is, in fact, what people do; that is, individuals desire to conform to the set of behaviors that support their social structure, and they approve when others do the same.  This results in the situation where a whole society desires and approves of the same things.  From here, Mackie argues, it is a small psychological step to infer that what you and all the people around you believe is objectively true. 

The idea that humans objectify their subjective thoughts and feelings is not improbable.  In fact, modern studies in psychology and neurobiology are providing evidence that the human brain is disposed to do just that[14].  Human history is full of examples in which large groups of well-educated people believed their personal ideas had objective validity.  For example, the idea that women are, by nature, less intelligent than men was considered a fact by the greatest thinkers for over two thousand years—practically all of recorded human history.  This belief turned out to be false, but the individual agreement to its truth supported its “objective validity” for millennia.  This example serves to illustrate the fallibility of the human mind and its ability to believe in the objective truth of something that has strong support only by way of human consensus.

Mackie goes on to explain that moral feelings and judgments are determined by the social organizations we commit ourselves to.  In other words, what I approve and disapprove of is determined by the particular social structure I am a part of and must conform to.  Therefore, moral feelings and judgments vary from one social structure to the next, and there are no moral principles to which all humans subscribe.  Mackie believes this conclusion is supported by the fact that “there is just as little agreement about principles as about particular judgments”[15]   

John Mackie’s account of the origin of our moral feelings supports his claim that there are no moral principles that all humans might endorse, but there is another possible origin of moral feelings that has been brought to light by our cross-species comparison of morality, and which Mackie does not discuss.  Human beings, like chimpanzees, are biological creatures, and there are some needs we all share, such as hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep.  Human beings are also social creatures (again, like chimpanzees), and it is very likely that there are some social needs we also share—perhaps companionship, love, approval, acceptance, maybe a feeling of safety.  One could argue that some moral feelings and judgments are determined by psychological desires that all humans, or possibly all primates, share. 

For example, if all people were to have a psychological desire to feel safe, then they would disapprove of someone killing people at random; and the claim, “killing people at random is wrong” would be endorsed across cultures, and considered objectively true with respect to human beings.  In other words, under this account of the origin of our moral feelings, there would be no reason to deny the existence of moral principles that all humans support.   

Also under this view, Mackie’s claim that “it is more and more strongly suggested that ways of working [of a society] and institutions have their own laws of growth, and that the desires or moral views of individuals do not so much control the history of society as arise out of it”[16] is put into question.  If human beings do have certain social needs or desires in common, then we might suppose that central to every social system is a means to having these psychological ends met.  So rather than moral values arising out of arbitrary social systems and customs, social structures would be determined by basic moral principles, or rather, psychological desires objectified as moral truths.

Many people have tried to argue that the human mind is too complex and human behavior too diverse for us to ever consider a principle of behavior to be deeply rooted in the human psyche and thereby common to us all.  But, by demonstrating that some of our moral actions are behaviorally and philosophically indistinguishable from those of our chimpanzee relatives, we hold some evidence that this is simply not the case.  If there are patterns of action that hold constant across species, there is no reason to think that there are no patterns to human thought and behavior.    

 

In this essay, I have demonstrated that the moral and immoral acts humans observe in each other are behaviorally very similar to the actions we observe in other animals.  When animals from two closely related species react similarly in similar circumstances, behavioral biologists often find that the parallel runs quite deep; in other words, they find that the “reasoning” behind the action—whether instinctual, psychological, hormonal, etc.—can successfully be compared.  I believe it is absolutely necessary to keep this in mind when examining human moral thought and behavior, recognizing the inevitable bias involved in being ones own subject of study. 

I have also aimed to show that human moral thought and behavior, as conventionally understood in non-contingent, abstractly objective, and absolute terms, is false.  Real “moral” behavior can be observed in our primate relatives, and is psychological and physiological in nature.  Morality, in this sense, is determined by the needs shared among individuals in a culture, a species, a genus… one cannot tell how far it may or may not stretch until we have, at least, thrown off our bridle of human prejudices from which “animals at least are free”.