Consider these cases. A young elephant with an injured leg is knocked over by a boisterous male. An older female elephant chases the male away. She then goes to the injured elephant and touches the sore leg with her trunk.
Elsewhere, a matriarch elephant helps a group of captured antelope to freedom by unlatching the gates with her trunk.
Further afield, a male diana monkey who has learned to get food rewards with a token assists a female monkey who can’t do it, by inserting the token and allowing her to take the food.
Charles Darwin said that “besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts, which in us would be called moral”. So we might ask: were these animals behaving morally?
The question will surely raise eyebrows. Yet an affirmative answer to this question is given by the authors of a book from which the above examples were taken. In Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce argue that some animals have their own kind of “moral intelligence”.
The authors, a scientist and a philosopher, want to establish a new field of research: the moral behaviour of animals. They stress the need for an interdisciplinary approach, combining the insights of ethology, social neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, and also philosophy.
What prompted this “new synthesis”, Bekoff and Pierce report, was not a pre-existing desire to establish the conclusion of the book but rather an immersion in the animal behaviour literature and research, and later the dawning realisation that, as they argue, humans are not alone in being moral creatures.
The central argument in Wild Justice is that morality in animals can be appreciated as a cluster of inter-related features and capacities. Obviously, animals exhibit altruism, care for their offspring and kin, and can sound alarm calls. Animals can and do often show affiliative and prosocial behaviour rather than agonistic and competitive behaviour. These and other behavioural terms have biological definitions. Even ants and bees can be “altruistic” (or “selfish”) in this sense, as when the bee dies for the hive by stinging the intruder.
Needless to say, this is not what the authors mean by animal “morality”. Morality, they contend, requires social groups in which animals can exhibit certain other-regarding behaviours that cultivate and regulate social relationships. Morality enhances group cohesion. Relatively complex emotional and cognitive abilities plus behavioural flexibility are prerequisites of moral behaviour. So moral behaviour is especially found in the social mammals.
Bekoff and Pierce identify three rough clusters of behaviour which together comprise their idea of moral behaviour. The first relates to cooperation. It includes behaviour like play, communal care of young, and alliance formation. The second suite of behaviours turns on empathy, or the ability to perceive, feel, share, and respond to the emotion of another. Animals like monkeys, for example, may refuse to accept rewards when doing so observably involves pain – such as an electric shock – to another monkey.
In another captive animal example, researchers have noticed how differently chimpanzees have treated a debilitated chimp with cerebral palsy. This chimp, called Knuckles, is often exempted from aggressive dominance attacks and is gently groomed even by the alpha male. He is treated with empathy, the authors claim.
Conversely, animals with traumatic early experiences can behave abnormally. Young male elephants who had been orphaned after their mothers were culled have been observed to go on atypical aggressive rampages, deliberately killing rhinos.
The third cluster is that of justice. Beckoff and Pierce do not mean to say that animals can grasp principles of justice, but rather that some of them appear to have a sense of fairness. Animals show indignation and retribution when others take more than their “fair share”, and reciprocity when they are given a favour. They can judge whether an individual is typically generous or selfish.
The authors acknowledge that fairness is the least studied of the three clusters. Moreover, they realise that their entire case is yet to be thoroughly developed and explored. Nonetheless, they try to counter some of the inevitable scepticism in several ways.
Important to their case is the well-founded notion of evolutionary continuity. That is, in nature we expect to see continuities and overlap rather than sharp breaks. After all, humans are animals and our moral behaviour, however complex, must be an evolved trait. Therefore, we would expect to see abundant evidence of similar behaviour in some other species. Naturally, human pride may make us slow to recognise the degree of continuity.
Our authors admit that human morality is more sophisticated than its animal counterpart, involving such things as language, reasoned judgment, and an advanced conscience. Human morality is unique. But at the same time, they argue, this is not an all or nothing game, and what counts as moral behaviour is in a sense species-specific.
So: can animals behave morally?
Beckoff and Pierce claim that when wolves hunt elk their behaviour is not assessable in moral terms. The wolves are not to be condemned or praised for their hunting. Such hunting is “amoral”, whereas the behaviour of a wolf who violates the group norm by hunting and killing a fellow wolf is another matter. This is an instance of the idea of morality as species-relative.
Many philosophers would say that moral behaviour at least implies the ability to recognise, for example, whether one case is similar to or different from another. If wolves can behave morally, doesn’t that mean that they should at least be able to consider whether this (hunting elk) is right or wrong, good or bad?
Is this objection fair? Or is it setting too high a standard? And what about the claims that owners make about their animals (“Jasper knows when he has been bad”; “Jazzy sometimes looks guilty”; “Molly is a very good dog”)?
Tell us, all you observers of animal behaviour, what you think.
SIMON COGHLAN