While I was reading Tom Heneghan’s new post at FaithWorld, the apartment cat curled up on the desk between my arms. It’s really cute. Fittingly:

Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, a new book by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, presents a persuasive case for some animals being much more intelligent than generally believed. The authors show how these animals have emotions, exhibit empathy, mourn for their dead and seem to have a sense of justice. They draw interesting parallels to similar human behaviour that many people think stems from our moral codes and/or religious beliefs rather than some evolutionary process. All this is fascinating and their argument for open-mindedness about recognising animals’ real capabilities is strong.

Heneghan is big-time skeptical that it’s useful to talk about “morality” in animals. He observes that, in order to do so, the authors have to downgrade human morality. Indeed, this sort of move is a common one among scientists these days; against the proud abstractions of philosophy, they explore how people actually behave and argue that we don’t really live by our abstractions so much as an amalgam of instincts, habits, and cognitive biases. Heneghan accepts that there’s truth to this, but thinks that, taken to extremes, it can cause us to lose sight of something important:

Human morality includes complex rational abstraction, ongoing debate and changing opinions mediated through language. Some animals have a certain level of intelligence, but not that much. The authors minimise this by deflating the human side of the gap, saying that “Western philosophical accounts of morality are outdated in important respects, for example in ascribing too much volition and intentionality to moral behaviour.” Sure, neuroscience is showing that the “too much” part of that statement is true. But this argument ascribes too little importance to volition and intentionality. Human intelligence allows us to express moral codes in words, debate their merits and change them if we find them insufficient. Without these abilities, we would probably still have “pro-social” reactions described in Wild Justice but not the wider systems known as morality or ethics.

Anyone who spends all day at a desk with a friendly cat knows that the standard account of animal emotion, intelligence, and consciousness is plainly inadequate—concocted, of course, in order to justify their exploitation. And there is plenty of mounting evidence that, in practice, what seems to guide human morality isn’t so altogether different.

But Heneghan isn’t making stuff up. When we discuss moral questions, we engage in something that, as far as we know, really has no parallel among other animals. The discursive quality of morality is the key here. It’s less helpful to ask whether humans and/or animals possess morality as such, as if it were a particular department in our brains (or, if you prefer, our disembodied souls), than to ask the social and linguistic question: how do norms of thought and behavior operate and change in a society?

Posing the matter that way, perhaps, sidestepps a messy inter-species thumb war over who’s got “morality.”

FaithWorld » Blog Archive » Do animals have moral codes? Well, up to a point… | Blogs |.

| RSS | trackback