Primatologist Frans de Waal takes exception with human exceptionalism
nautil.us
nautil.us
He flirted with all sorts of wierd conclusions. Babies are less conscious/intelligent/etc than ravens or apes. Does that mean they have the same moral standing as apes and birds?
However you try to rationalize human exceptionalism (or ethics in general), you can usually find examples where they don't apply to all people, or some other rational conclusion that doesn't feel right.
Anyway... I don't think our morals are or can be grounded in morality. Ultimately, "Man is the measure of all things." Morality applies where we decide it applies. There is no higher truth, no underlying rules we can unvover. There is only subjective human judgement and our attempts to rationalize it.
I feel that the very realization of that fact is the first step in becoming a more moral person. Now that the previous model of morality has been shown to be fundamentally flawed, one can begin building the next.
That doesn’t mean I have to assign apes moral equivalence to humans. Rights also imply responsibilities and apes are not capable of fulfilling the responsibilities of a human being. But then you hit the argument that some human beings aren’t capable of fulfilling those responsibilities either. Well, we are communal and social beings. We have a tendency to treat members of our community differently from outsiders, and generally better. For example we treat citizens differently from non-citizens. Family differently from non-family. I think it’s reasonable to treat humans differently from non-humans and grant them enhanced rights.
However I do still accept our common biology and experiential and emotional lives with some animals. I can accept that when an ape or a human sit watching a sunset, relaxing and not actively thinking about anything, that they have fundamentally the same kind of experience. I think that reasonably extends to a bias against causing unnecessary suffering for example. How we treat others and how we treat animals says something about our character.
a surprisingly wide range of species display something similar in some cases, though it is hard to say how aware they are of it, or how important it is to their lives.
So if our non-human ancestors exhibited this behaviour, but did not actually have a theory of mind, how come we can say that our equivalent behaviour does flow from having a theory of mind? That makes no sense. So we develop the behaviour first, then we develop a theory of mind, and it’s a pure co-incidence that the behaviour flowing from having a theory of mind just so happens to be completely indistinguishable, even though the cause is completely different? I just don't see how that can be credible.
The only coherent account, to me, is that the behaviour we have which we believe flows from having a theory of mind, if exhibited by other animals, must be evidence that they posses a theory of mind as well.
Having said that, one can still consider when, where, how and how often it evolved. For example, there are many species that cache food. Some (some squirrels and also scrub jays, for example) will either only pretend to cache the food they are carrying, or move it later, if they notice they are being observed. Is that an application of a general theory of mind at work, or an instinct that evolved for one particular circumstance? As far as the ethical treatment of animals is concerned, I have no objection to assuming the former, but if we want a scientific understanding of what is really going on, that assumption cannot be made without further evidence.
What you are overlooking, I think, is that there are several possible explanations for the externally-observable behavior, and once you recognize that, there should be no paradox. In our case, we, as privileged observers of our own minds, can see our theory of mind at work, and, through language, we can talk to other people and ask how it seems to them. Neither of these lines of inquiry are an option when it comes to studying other species.
There is an interesting parallel in ethics: some people are well-behaved because they are fearful of punishment or ostracism, while some do so out of respect for other people. You can't always tell motive from actions alone.
With species like squirrels that are more remotely related to us, there is more scope for an argument of parallel evolution, sure. Maybe their similar behaviour developed independently and has a different cause especially when other mammals do not exhibit this behaviour.
With our much closer relatives such as apes though that exhibit so many more behaviours that are very close to ours it’s much less plausible. If all of them exhibit a common pattern of social behaviour with ourselves, arguing all of them could have independently developed this behaviour separately from us and each other, to appear indistinguishable, that seems highly implausible.
Even with squirrels though, as mammals they exhibit many behaviours common to all mammals. Behaviours we exhibit as well. So if all mammals have these behaviours and we do too, if our behaviour has a different cause, at some point our ancestors must have switched from exhibiting the behaviour due to the common mamalian cause to exhibiting it due to this new cause unique to us. I don’t find that account very plausible either.
Did our ancestors stop exhibiting this behaviour first, then develop new neurological mechanisms that happened to replace the lost behaviours? When did that happen, before or after we diverged from other apes? Maybe they have these behaviour for the same reason as us but other mammals don’t? Did we develop a parallel mechanism and the behaviour transitioned to the new causal mechanism? I’d expect to see some residual evidence in our neurology or behavioural patterns of that having happened.
>Even with squirrels though, as mammals they exhibit many behaviours common to all mammals. Behaviours we exhibit as well. So if all mammals have these behaviours and we do too...
Here you are combining speculation with an argument from the general to the specific. There are some behaviors common to all mammals, but are there any theory-of-mind-like behaviors in that category? No, so the rest of that paragraph and the one following are built on a false premise.
I am no expert, but FWIW, I happen to think that apes, or at least chimpanzees and orangutans, do have a nascent theory of mind, and that it was more developed in the various hominins that are now extinct.
When it comes to other animals, I personally tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, though I don't think there is much room for doubt, in the case of snails, as to whether they have inner lives (for example, I think cone snails are dangerous, but not evil.)
AI is an interesting case because the discussion of AI ethics is almost always about having AI behave ethically towards us.
That's pretty much the antithesis of, for example, Derek Parfitt's work, I would say. A lot of moral philosophers would disagree with this.
I agree with you on "subjective human judgement". I'd even suggest that morality is ultimately pure human selfishness. What we find "moral" and "immoral" changes as our interests change. Morality is what we feel relatively benefits us the most. It is selfish rationalization.
The thing is really that when it comes to the mind, physical components are not really the interesting thing, holisitic, virtual components are what matter. Mice probably can’t feel remorse, but that is probably not because they lack a remorse center, it\s because their brains are too small or have too few connections to provide that functionality.
We are very clearly not the only species that can have complex communication. Other mammals do so without even counting primates.
Bird songs and whale songs are not music?
I partially agree about feelings. My gut says that animals have emotions. But we should not be assigning human emotions to whatever is going on with them. Though perhaps primates mirror our emotions since we are after all closely related.
They certainly don't have civilisations or culture on the level that we do. That's clear. But some other species of primate could have survived instead of us.
At the end of the day, we're just an accident of evolution. Our ultimate goals is still to mature and try and reproduce just like everything else.
Animal language is very limited, it is fair to call it fundamentally different. Same with bird songs.
As to your last statement, that’s just that, a statement without basis.
This is not even remotely clear. More and more we are finding that the properties we told ourselves separated our minds from those of animals are not unique to us.
Point is, "the properties we told ourselves separated our minds from those of animals [that] are not unique to us" result in a qualitatively different outcomes in us vs. all the other animals. For instance, human socializing is about as similar to raven socializing as a computer is similar to a bunch of bowls and pebbles.
There's also something to be said about using your own ruler when measuring someone else's worth.
We changed. Into something different. Which is different in kind, from the other animals.
The outcome is fundamentally different, but not necessarily the brain.
https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/slave-ants-and...
https://modernfarmer.com/2014/04/meet-earths-oldest-farmers-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/science/ant-fungus-farmer...
About religion, I don't think his argument holds. Sure it's human nature to believe in it, but it's also human nature to be quite violent. And we've come a long way in reducing violence, so why not also remove a way of thinking that no longer serves a purpose?
FWIW I too dislike human exceptionalism, I just happen to have run across the “de Waal controversy” recently and thought I’d mention it.
[0]: Primatologist? Zoologist? Biologist? But at least I’m a primate!