Why Can't We Be Different?

"It is self-serving, anthropocentric speciesism to claim that we are the only moral beings in the animal kingdom." - Marc Bekoff, "Wild Justice, Cooperation, and Fair Play," in Sussman and Chapman (eds), The Origins and Nature of Sociality (2004), p. 75

I just came across this remark tonight, in an earlier Bekoff piece on "Wild Justice" that I've assigned to my animal minds class.

But the question is: why is it "self-serving, anthropocentric speciesism" to make that claim? It might be an uninformed or incorrect claim, but before we can even decide that, don't we need to define "moral" and "morality" and "moral agent"--definitions not offered in Bekoff's paper?

Bekoff puts a premium on what seems like moral (fair, cooperative, etc.) behavior. This makes a certain amount of sense, although we might also want to know about the motivations, intentions, and reasoning that are behind the behavior. Because he focuses on what he calls "social morality," one might complain that he is really only dressing up the obvious in moral language: that canids (wolves, coyotes, and dogs) are social animals, and social animals play--literally, for Bekoff--by various rules. Following rules runs deep in social life (whether this rule-following is more or less conscious, propositional or non-propositional in the mind of the agent, self-articulated or not, etc.). Of course, this is true of humans, too--they follow social rules, and often derive their sense of right and wrong from social norms--and so Bekoff's suggestion has plenty of merit when "morality" is under discussion in a purely descriptive sense--and in which the rules are by and large given to one by one's society/group.

The problem is that this is not all that morality--or to use the broader term, ethics--turns out to be for humans. Sometimes it is not moral--in the normative, ideal sense--to follow the group rule. Are there moral critics in animal societies? Reformers? There are, surely, very good animals (by our own standards, and by their own--and these may of course be different: we could recognize that an animal is a virtuous one by the apparent standards of her species but not think that we should read off a human ethic from her virtue! And we could also see behavior in animals that reflects our own virtues and be inspired and moved by that).

Bekoff says (after the above) that, "Humans also aren't necessarily morally superior to other animals." But this is just another ambiguous claim. It hints at why he makes the frantic remark above: because too often (a) people claim that we are better behaved than other animals (which seems false) and (b) people claim that our ability to be moral gives our lives some kind of superior worth in comparison to animal lives. But as I noted in a previous post, (b) is problematic even if animals are not "moral" or "moral agents." (I just discovered an essay on this point that I need to read.)

I just don't see how it can be "self-serving, anthropocentric speciesism" to claim that only humans are moral beings (or moral agents, etc.) unless that claim is itself part of a self-serving, anthropocentric, and speciesist agenda. If we were to agree that abilities x, y, and z were the criteria for moral agency, and it turned out that other animals had those abilities, then I would better understand Bekoff's point. But the implicit conception of morality that he works with is so pared down that one can respond to him, "Of course other animals have those abilities, but the sense of morality (or ethics, or virtue, etc.) with which I am concerned requires more than those abilities and covers more ground. The morality (or ethics) I am interested in amounts to more than 'herd morality.'"

Animals and Moral Agency: What is the Question?

"Can animals be moral?" Well, as opposed to what? To being immoral? Or simply amoral? Are we asking whether animals sometimes do things that have good consequences for others? (Can animals be good utilitarians?!) Or whether they reflect upon the universalizability of their own principles? Or whether they have principles (utilitarian or otherwise)? Is the question whether other animals can do what’s truly right (or moral)—at least what we take to be the truth? Or just whether other animals have a sense of right and wrong (which might be more or less correct in comparison to the ideal, or our, moral standard)? How different could their sense of right and wrong be from our own before we could no longer recognize their “code of conduct” as a moral system of which they are the agents? Or is any code of conduct that regulates social interactions a moral system (descriptively speaking)? What kind of a grip must their morals (or norms) have upon them, in order for them to count as agents, rather than, say, instruments, of the system? That is, to what extent must they understand what they themselves are doing? How much autonomy is necessary? How much reflection? Is it actions that count, or intentions? Reason or emotions? Does moral agency require a “theory of mind”? Does it require a theory at all? Do we require more of potential animal moral agents than we do of the proverbial virtuous peasant? (Or do the virtuous peasant and some animals happen to share the clearly lamentable fate of not living up to our highest rationalistic conceptions of moral agency?)

That, from a paper I am working on, for this. No wonder philosophers have generally preferred just to say that animals are not "moral agents" or "moral beings," etc. That's just a whole lot easier than trying to answer all (or even some) of those questions!

Mark Twain on "The Moral Sense"

I just came across Mark Twain's essay "Man's Place in the Animal World" (discussed in David Livingstone Smith's Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. (You can find Twain's essay in this collection.) This is the essay in which he famously wrote, "man is the Animal that Blushes. He is the only one that does it--or has the occasion to."

As you might guess, the essay is a send-up of the idea that humans are the "highest" of the animals, or the highest of earthly beings on the Great Chain of Being. By contrast with other animals, Twain finds us avaricious, quarrelsome and cruel, and not nearly as "reasoning" as we like to think. ("Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute....His record is the fantastic record of a maniac.")

Twain traces our various questionable characteristics to the ultimate Defect of our being endowed with "The Moral Sense":

He is the only animal that has it. It is the secret of his degradation. It is the quality which enables him to do wrong. It has no other office. It is incapable of performing any other function. It could never have been intended to perform any other. Without it, man could do no wrong...

Twain goes on to compare the moral sense to having rabies, to suggest that it, too, is a disease, but a worse one:

Rabies is bad, but it is not so bad as this disease. Rabies enables a man to do a thing which he could not do when in a healthy state: kill his neighbor with a poisonous bite. No one is the better man for having rabies. The Moral Sense enables a man to do wrong. It enables him to do wrong in a thousand ways. Rabies is an innocent disease, compared to the Moral Sense. No one, then, can be the better man for having the Moral Sense.

Is this a sound argument? One could accuse Twain of ignoring the counterpoint that the "moral sense" also enables one to do good. Nevertheless, he concludes:

What, now, do we find the Primal Curse to have been? Plainly what it was in the beginning: the infliction upon man of the Moral Sense; the ability to distinguish good from evil; and with it, necessarily, the ability to do evil; for there can be no evil act without the presence of consciousness of it in the doer of it.

Unless Twain thinks there's an asymmetry between doing good and doing evil, it seems like we should say the same thing about doing good--that there can be no good act "without the presence of consciousness of it in the doer of it." Twain certainly doesn't appear to be an internalist about moral motivation; that seems to be implicit. So, the good is not internally motivating. He suggests that our ability to distinguish good and evil enables us to consciously choose evil. Given his inattention to the converse point--that we could also consciously choose to do good--I take it that he finds the converse point to be of little consolation.

Twain's point may simply be that the "moral sense" alone does not make us good, or "better" than other animals. The ability to distinguish between good and evil, in the way Twain characterizes it, is itself a morally neutral capacity, like sight or echolocation. Sure, we have the capacity to do good, but we also have the capacity to do great evil. Animals, by contrast, are not "vicious" (as I have discussed before), though animals do engage in violence and killing. The difference, for Twain, appears to be that they do not choose it for its own sake, nor do they rationalize their violence by dehumanizing their victims, or by claiming metaphysical/theological license for their acts. Animals do not make excuses. I wonder whether anyone has made that suggestion: that what distinguishes humans from other animals is that we make excuses. (If not, then you heard it here first!)

Or, to follow Twain's form: humans are the only animals that can apologize, or need to.

I Must...

(A little something I've been musing over; compare, for example, to the view of morality and desire that DR discusses here.)

“I absolutely must.” How did it ever get into anyone’s head that anything absolutely must be done? Some of the things I must do are things that must be done in order to satisfy other desires and goals I have. I must go to work if I want to get paid. I must take care of my children if I don’t want them to suffer. I must love my wife, and show her that love, if I am to reasonably expect that she love me in return.

Is every must thus relative to some other desire? Suppose I say that there is something I must do, even if it gets me fired, or causes my children to suffer, or alienates me from my wife so that she is unable to love me any more. Does that show that there is something I desire more than a paycheck, happy children, and my wife’s love? If I am acting out of moral conviction, then one might say that what I desire more than these other things is to do what I think is right, cost what it may, and that I have put my desire to be moral (as I see it) ahead of my desires about my livelihood and family.

If that were the right way to characterize my judgment, then we would have to say that the phrase “I must” is no more than a variation of the form, “I want,” and that it expresses what I really, or most deeply, want. But I do not think this analysis will do. I may not want to do what I believe I must do, but I must do it anyway. “But what you want in that case,” so the retort goes, “is to realize the object of your judgment.” Perhaps what I want is to be a moral person, or to preserve my integrity. Or more directly: I want to do what I believe is the right thing to do (to blow the whistle on a vicious colleague or boss, or to advocate for an unpopular cause at the risk of danger to myself and my family, or so on).

Here is the trouble with the attempt to reduce all judgments of what one must do to expressions of desire: if I believe that something must be done because it is the right thing to do—and not simply to achieve some other desire of my own—then what drives the judgment that I must do it is not so much the desire to be moral as the belief that something is required of me and that I must do it. This is because I can believe that something is the right thing to do, even if I wish—to the bottom of my heart—that it wasn’t. I might wish that I was not put in this situation, or that I could talk myself into a way of believing that would relieve me of the judgment that I must do something that may bring great pain to myself or to those I love. A person who has this kind of conviction is not expressing a mere desire: what I desire is not relevant to what I must do in such cases. To believe that there is something I absolutely must do is to believe that I must do it, even if I don’t want to. If I also want to do it, all the better. But my wanting to do it is not what makes it—in my own judgment—something I absolutely must do. What I must do, in this sense, comes from outside of me. Coming from outside the self, it cannot simply be a desire, which arises from within.

(To be continued...)

"I'd do anything for my children."

Anything?

Today I discussed Crito with my two summer classes. Lively discussion. Most of those sympathetic to Crito's view that Socrates should escape are most impressed by Crito's complaint that if Socrates refuses to escape, he is betraying his children.

Beyond the considerations raised in the dialogue--including that Socrates could have his friends care for his children--I tried to get the students to think about this from the future perspective of Socrates' children: if he escapes, might his children lose respect for him, to think that he is a hypocrite? Might they learn from him that doing what one thinks is right isn't important when there's a threat of punishment?

What about cases where a person does something shameful, or even abhorrent, because "the children must eat"? At least one person in class suggested that those children should, when they grow out of their "childlike views," be grateful that they are alive and that their parents did what was necessary to feed and support them. Is that true? Would it be wrong to resent what one's parents did, or to feel that one's own life is tainted by the shame of what they did. Suppose a child says: "I cannot bear to live with the fact that I am only alive because of the terrible things you did." Is that unreasonable? Must one be grateful? (One might understand, but understanding is not acceptance.)

Of course, some people seem to take the position that there isn't anything shameful about doing what is necessary to care for one's children. What might be shameful if done for other reasons isn't so if done out of love for one's children. No doubt there can be dilemmas, but should we believe that doing the thing for one's children automatically removes the shamefulness? If nothing else, I doubt that in every case it is psychologically possible to buy into this, unless one has no sense of shame at all. (That is, there will be something which, even if done for one's children, will leave one with a sense of shame.)

Someone might say: "Then you must not really love your children." I recall this response being made on a comment thread about the possible parole of Michael Woodmansee (who committed a terrible murder)--that the person who does not see the point of killing Woodmansee (as the father of the victim said he would, were Woodmansee to be paroled), of exacting that revenge on him (were he to have killed one's own child), fails to have true love for his children. (I discussed this briefly here.) This strikes me as completely wrong, and perhaps a bit hysterical. It at least begs the question against the person who rejects revenge as a matter of moral principle. Apply this to Socrates' case: "you must not really love your children if you refuse to escape."

This seems like an attempt to make Socrates' principled stand seem merely selfish. Wouldn't that make taking any moral stand, at the cost of incurring risks to oneself, merely selfish (if one has children to care for)? That can't be right. This idea that we should do absolutely anything for our children seems absolutely dangerous. And it points to an important way in which love for one's children can be a source of great temptation.

In a way, I'm tempted to think that just as Gaita says he has never met anyone he credits with actually believing that "meat is murder" (even if they say it), that anyone who says, "I would do anything for my children," has not really thought about what "anything" includes, and so can't be credited with believing what they have said. But I'm not so sure. Maybe some people do believe it and understand exactly what it entails. Is that love? Or: is that the kind of love we should teach our children? Is it not simply to teach them that, deep down, anything goes?

Eating Stupid Things

Jonathan Balcombe, a popular science writer and animal activist, author of Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals, gave a Chautauqua Lecture at EKU this evening. He gave a very nice, accessible presentation of the various ways in which animals can perceive, recall, communicate, and enjoy things in ways that rival and often exceed human capacity. The aim of this was to demonstrate that animals have inner lives that are meaningful and that matter--points well made. But the framing of the talk seemed off. In the beginning, he warned us of our tendency toward "intellicentrism": the moral favoring of more intelligent beings. He clarified in the Q&A that he really meant this as a bad sort of "ism" like racism and (presumably) speciesism. But I pointed out to him that if intellicentrism is bad, then his very effort to convince us that animals deserve moral consideration in their own right by showing us that animals really are smarter than we often think simply plays into the very intellicentrism that seems morally problematic.

His response: guilty as charged. But people respond well to this information; it makes them think more carefully about animals. I don't disagree that that's a good thing.

I'm just not convinced his response is acceptable. That is, it seems a bit intellectually dishonest. I do think what he's doing in the main part--educating the public about animals--is important and good. And it may be right that it is psychologically easier to identify with a being when there's some kind of graspable common ground. Interestingly, when I asked him this question, I gave him an easy way out: I asked whether he meant that people are intellicentric simply in thinking that humans are more intelligent than animals, or if it involved the moral bias mentioned above. He opted for the latter. But his talk really only addresses the former. And that's really enough, given the general ignorance about animals.

He also claimed over and over again that sentience is the foundation of all ethics. Argh. If that's right, then we should all go dancing atop human corpses for Halloween...and eat a few innocently killed cadavers, too. And if you happen to come across any anencephalic infants, you should crush them beneath your utilitarian boot. No pain, no foul.

(Interesting side-note: J.M. Coetzee wrote the preface to Balcombe's book. There's a nice paragraph where Coetzee notes the general hesitation of scientists to attribute complex mental states or traits to animals, or to trust anecdotes ascribing such traits, but that the one place where scientists fail to apply their usual skepticism is to their own "ethos" of skepticism.)

The Source of Morality

There have been several conversations in the blogosphere (sorry, I'm too lazy to link) about the source and foundation of morality, and specifically about whether morality has a divine or a naturalistic source. I just can't get interested in this (despite this post), perhaps because this strikes me as a false dichotomy. Certainly, evolutionary biology may offer interesting accounts about the natural history of our social norms and gut reactions, but this does not justify those norms or reactions. (It may help us in thinking about how to overcome or modify normative behavior and inclinations that we judge to be no longer trustworthy or, indeed, ethical. It may help us understand why, psychologically, we often judge as we do.) On the other hand, I guess Plato's Euthyphro pretty well convinced me that it's implausible to hold that X is good (or right) because the gods love (or command) it. I can understand the idea of God as an "ideal observer," who has a perfect understanding of the good and the right (and the virtuous), but such a conception doesn't help us justify any particular moral claim because we are not the ideal observer (and can't know how the ideal observer would judge).

Of course, some hold that there is no reason to "be moral" if there is no God, and thus that the basic reason to be motivated to act morally is divine in nature. But I think there are cases where the idea that we "need" a reason seems strange. Do I need a reason to love and care for my children? Indeed, would warning me that God will punish me if I do not make me love and care for them more? If the question then becomes, "But what is the point of doing one thing rather than another, if there is no eternal reward or justice in the universe?" I would be inclined to respond that some of the "rewards" are internal to the relationship itself, and some arrive when you see your child becoming a marvelous person. I would also suggest that anyone who's worried about "what's in it for them" probably shouldn't have children in the first place. For the most part, it isn't about you. Christian ethics generalizes this point in certain ways (as does the Buddhist ethic of universal compassion). "It" is about no one and everything. I guess I might say that "it" is about being in sustained (and sustainable) harmony with the universe. (That's a bit abstract, and a bit hippie-ish.) There are surely different ways of doing that, but there are also surely many ways of being out of tune. Seeking a reason to live a decent, dignified, and beautiful life ultimately doesn't seem much different from looking for a reason to get out of bed every day. But I'm sympathetic with the thought that things can matter now even if they don't matter "forever" (or, "in the grand scheme of things"). The person in search of a reason to "care" shouldn't be given a reason; there may be no ultimate reason. Rather, they should be shown how to care for something, or given something to care for, in a way that may restore their sanity and, with that, their capacity to understand and imagine the possibility of a basic (and in some ways unreasoned, unintellectualized) love, care, and respect for other things.

Can't Animals Be Moral Agents?

A common quip--even one that I have used in teaching--is that animals aren't moral agents. Squirrels and tigers aren't responsible for their actions in the way that we regard humans as responsible (and as we hold ourselves responsible). I generally say something like this in ethics classes when talking about the significance of morality for humans--it's part of what we take ourselves to be. (Sometimes the claim comes out in discussions of animal ethics, though I haven't done but small bits on it so far. That all will change soon, as I'm teaching classes on animal ethics next fall and spring!)

But is it true that no animals are moral agents? In Adam's Task, Vicki Hearne insists that the relationship between a dog and a trainer is a moral relationship, in which the dog must be held responsible for its actions (and in a much more structured way than the typical, "No, Fifi! Bad dog!"). For Hearne, the idea is that training only occurs by holding the dog responsible (she is no behaviorist), and the dog can learn what is expected of it. The result of this, on Hearne's view, is that the well-trained dog earns a kind of freedom. When Hearne tells Salty, "Salty, Ok!" that means Salty can hang loose, and do what she likes. But Salty knows that she is not free to dig holes in the yard or terrorize the kitty.

Now, one might say, but Salty isn't a "full-fledged" moral agent; she isn't responsible for the course of her life in the way we might say that of a person. And perhaps that's right. But if Hearne's description of the relationship between dog and trainer is right, we can't say there is nothing of moral agency in Salty's being either. (Hearne also has intriguing things to say about the problematic nature of authority which necessarily structures this relationship, but I'll leave that for another time.)

(Thanks to one of my mentors, Ed Minar, for bringing my attention to Hearne's work. If you're looking for a primer, she has a nice article in Harper's entitled, "What's Wrong With Animal Rights?" (September 1991). Preview here, but you have to pay.)

The Purpose of Morality?

I recently came across a book called Morality and Purpose by an interesting British moral philosopher, J.L. Stocks (1889-1937), via a reference to his work in Peter Winch's "Moral Integrity" (in his (1972) Ethics and Action). I was re-reading Winch as I plan to incorporate some of his ideas into a paper I'm now working on on moral conviction and integrity.

Stocks is an interesting figure for me because the general drift of his ideas resembles what some would now call "anti-theory" in ethics--often (though not exclusively) associated with "Wittgensteinian" moral philosophers, such as Winch (and also including Rush Rhees, D.Z. Phillips, and Cora Diamond). The value of Stocks' thought is that it predates the Wittgensteinian turn, as it were, and Stocks has some striking arguments to the effect that morality is not properly conceived as "purposive." Reading his essays "The Limits of Purpose" and "Is There a Moral End?" have helped me better understand what Winch is after in claiming that morality is not properly conceived of as a guide to action (in "Moral Integrity"). Winch does not deny that morality provides guidance, but what he does deny--which is expressed quite lucidly by Stocks--is the thought that morality has some grand, unified purpose, such as the greatest happiness for the greatest number, self-realization (human flourishing), or even the achievement of moral purity or perfection (to the extent that we might distinguish these from flourishing, as a Kantian might).

For Stocks, the problem with conceiving of morality as aiming at a purpose is that this divides action into means and end. That is, there is the goal of action, and if the goal is the purpose of morality, then the most efficient means to that end will be thereby justified. Most students of ethics will be familiar with the objections to the utilitarian conception of morality as purposive: if the only thing that matters is the greatest happiness, then we would be justified in doing terrible things to individuals if that turned out to produce the greatest overall happiness. Slightly more opaque is the objection to the Kantian conception of morality as guiding the production of a good will. The problem here is that overmuch concern for "doing one's duty" can itself lead to moral corruption; the person who visits a sick friend for the sake of duty itself is a less good friend than the person who visits because he cares about the welfare of his friend and wants to cheer him up! In that case, the proper end of the action (the visit) is the friend's welfare, not one's own moral perfection (by upholding one's duty). What about self-realization, or human flourishing? Same sort of problem. If the moral purpose of all action is the ultimate realization of one's "true self" (say), this end can pervert the nature of specific actions. Consider again the visit to the sick friend. It seems silly to say that the moral goodness of this action ultimately reduces to how it conduces to one's own flourishing.

There is no one purpose of morality. But what's interesting is that Stocks does not say there are many purposes. Rather, morality, like art, subjects purposive action to a different sort of evaluation, and seeks to assess the whole particular action--both its means and its end--to determine whether the whole thing is "in all its stages a fit expression of the human will" ("Is There a Moral End?" p. 80). So, the particular purpose of a particular action is an important part of moral evaluation, but moral evaluation is not a matter of determining whether the action properly serves some (or the) moral end because there is no moral end.

In "The Limits of Purpose" Stocks draws a careful comparison between art and morality and argues that the distinctive concerns of both involve something beyond mere concern with purpose. Art is not simply representation; the manner of style, intention, process, and so on are integral to an artistic evaluation of a work. Similarly, morality is not simply a matter of achieving some end. It is tempting to gloss Stocks' ideas by suggesting that morality is a concern with the human decency of one's actions. But either "human decency" is just a synonym for "morality" or human decency is set up as yet another end of human action, and one could provide a counterexample which shows that someone's obsessive concern with acting decently led them into a form of moral corruption. At the same time, I don't think this synonym is completely unhelpful, because it draws attention to the kind of concern Stocks thinks is distinctive of the moral attitude. A person refuses to take some profitable course of action on the perhaps hard to articulate grounds that it just seems indecent (or worse) to go down that road. (Think of the Father and Son in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or the recent film adaptation. No pun intended.) The point of such a judgment, however, wouldn't be that taking that route would taint one's moral purity, or make one less happy, or conduce to less overall happiness, but rather, and simply, that it would be wrong to do it. This isn't to make morality out to be merely prohibitive, insofar as we might also judge that certain things ought to be done simply because it's the right thing to do (say, helping another person).

Stocks seems to be something of an intuitionist about moral judgments, insofar as he argues that there can be no arguing about the judgments themselves. But Stocks also acknowledges the essential role of our conceptions of ideal interpersonal relations and "spiritual" ideals in our conceptions of right action (in addition to our views about productive action and social development). (So, I don't see him as suggesting that our intuitive judgments necessarily reflect universal ideals or truths.) Any particular one of those conceptions and ideals may of course be subjected to philosophical scrutiny, but taken as a whole, the balance of our moral conceptions and ideals comprise our moral field and are (as the Wittgensteinians would say) our bedrock. What all of this comes to is an interesting response to the question, "Why be moral?" which is often interpreted as a demand that morality have a purpose. For Stocks, morality (like art) has no purpose; it is rather a texture embroidered into the many purposes we set out with in life, and to reject the significance of that texture is simply to reject (again, to put it in a Wittgensteinian idiom) our form of life. If that seems opaque, consider again the comparison to art: why care about art? Does anyone challenge art by asking, why be artistic (or, why seek to imbue one's activities with a certain artfulness)? Perhaps, but so much the worse for them!