The kindness of beasts

Dogs rescue their friends and elephants care for

injured kin humans have no monopoly on
moral behaviour
By Mark Rowlands
Mark Rowlands is professor of philosophy at the University of
Miami. His latest book is Running with the Pack (Granta).
When I became a father for the first time, at the ripe old age of 44, various
historical contingencies saw to it that my nascent son would be sharing his
home with two senescent canines. There was Nina, an endearing though
occasionally ferocious German shepherd/Malamute cross. And there was
Tess, a wolf-dog mix who, though gentle, had some rather highly
developed predatory instincts. So, I was a little concerned about how the
co-sharing arrangements were going to work. As things turned out, I
neednt have worried.

During the year or so that their old lives overlapped with that of my son, I
was alternately touched, shocked, amazed, and dumbfounded by the
kindness and patience they exhibited towards him. They would follow him
from room to room, everywhere he went in the house, and lie down next to
him while he slept. Crawled on, dribbled on, kicked, elbowed and kneed:
these occurrences were all treated with a resigned fatalism. The fingers in

the eye they received on a daily basis would be shrugged off with an
almost Zen-like calm. In many respects, they were better parents than me.
If my son so much as squeaked during the night, I would instantly feel two
cold noses pressed in my face: get up, you negligent father your son
needs you.

Kindness and patience seem to have a clear moral dimension. They are
forms of what we might call concern emotional states that have as
their focus the wellbeing of another and concern for the welfare of
others lies at the heart of morality. If Nina and Tess were concerned for the
welfare of my son then, perhaps, they were acting morally: their behaviour
had, at least in part, a moral motivation. And so, in those foggy, sleepless
nights of early fatherhood, a puzzle was born inside of me, one that has
been gnawing away at me ever since. If there is one thing on which most
philosophers and scientists have always been in agreement it is the
subject of human moral exceptionalism: humans, and humans alone, are
capable of acting morally. Yet, this didnt seem to tally with the way I came
to think of Nina and Tess.

Binti Jua lifted the unconscious boy, gently cradled him in her arms, and
growled warnings at other gorillas that tried to get close

The first question is whether I was correct to describe the behaviour of

Nina and Tess in this way, as moral behaviour. Anthropomorphism is the
misguided attribution of human-like qualities to animals. Perhaps
describing Nina and Tesss behaviour in moral terms was simply an
anthropomorphic delusion. Of course, if Im guilty of anthropomorphism,
then so too are myriad other animal owners. Such an owner might
describe their dog as friendly, playful, gentle, trustworthy, or loyal
a good dog. On the other hand, the bad dog the one they try to
avoid at the park is bad because he is mean, aggressive, vicious,

unpredictable, a bully, and so on. Nor are these seemingly moral

descriptions entirely useless. On the contrary, it is a valuable skill to be
able to assess these descriptions when an unfamiliar dog is bearing down
on you in the street. If Im guilty of anthropomorphism, so too, it seems,
are many others.

Many scientists (and more than a few philosophers) would have no

hesitation in accusing perhaps several billion people of such delusional
anthropomorphism. A growing number of animal scientists, however, are
going over to the dark side, and at least flirting with the idea that animals
can act morally. In his book Primates and Philosophers (2006), the Dutch
primatologist Frans de Waal has argued that animals are at least capable
of proto-moral behaviour: they possess the rudiments of morality even if
they are not moral beings in precisely the way that we are. This was, in
fact, Charles Darwins view, as developed in The Descent of Man. In a
similar vein, the American biologist Marc Bekoff has being arguing for
years that animals can act morally, and his book Wild Justice (2009)
provides a useful summary of the evidence for this claim. Perhaps
scientists such as Darwin, de Waal and Bekoff are also guilty of
anthropomorphism? The evidence, however, would suggest otherwise.
Eleanor, the matriarch of her family, is dying. She is unable to stand, so
Grace attempts to help her, lifting and pushing her back to her feet. She
tries to get Eleanor to walk, nudging her along gently. But Eleanor
stumbles, and falls again. Grace appears very distressed, and shrieks
loudly. She persists in trying to get Eleanor back to her feet, to no avail.
Grace stays by the fallen figure of Eleanor for another hour, while night
falls.

If the figures that played out this grim tableau were human, we might
have little hesitation in explaining what was going on in moral terms.
Grace, we might say, was motivated by her sympathy for Eleanors plight.
However, neither Grace nor Eleanor is human. Eleanor is the matriarch of

a family of elephants, one that the British zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton

and his colleagues have come to call the First Ladies family. Grace is a
younger, unrelated, member of another family, the Virtues Family.

Grace is not unusual among elephants. Take another series of events: a

young female elephant suffered from a withered leg, and could put little
weight upon it. A young male from another herd charged the crippled
female. A large female elephant chased him away and then, revealingly,
returned to the young female and gently touched her withered leg with
her trunk. Joyce Poole, the ethologist and elephant conservationist who
described this event, concluded that the adult female was showing
empathy.

Binti Jua, a gorilla residing at Brookfield Zoo in Illinois, had her 15 minutes
of fame in 1996 when she came to the aid of a three-year-old boy who had
climbed on to the wall of the gorilla enclosure and fallen five metres onto
the concrete floor below. Binti Jua lifted the unconscious boy, gently
cradled him in her arms, and growled warnings at other gorillas that tried
to get close. Then, while her own infant clung to her back, she carried the
boy to the zoo staff waiting at an access gate.

A
pes in particular have been known to care for other species. Photo by Flickr/Getty

De Waal relates a similar story of Kuni, a female bonobo chimpanzee at

Twycross Zoo in England. One day, Kuni encountered a starling that had
been stunned during some misadventure. Fearing that she might injure
the bird, Kunis keeper urged her to let it go. Kuni, however, picked up the
starling with one hand, and climbed to the top of the highest tree in her
enclosure, wrapping her legs around the trunk so that she had both hands
free to hold the bird. She then carefully unfolded its wings and spread
them wide open. She threw the bird as hard as she could towards the
barrier of the enclosure. Unfortunately, it didnt wake up, and landed on
the bank of the enclosures moat. While her rescue attempt didn't
succeed, Kuni certainly seemed to act with good intentions, and tried to
make amends by guarding the vulnerable, unconscious bird from a curious
juvenile for quite some time.

These examples merely scratch the surface of the evidence for apparently
moral behaviour in animals. Much of it has been around for a long time but
it has languished unrecognised. As long ago as 1959, the experimental
psychologist Russell Church, now professor at Brown University, Rhode

Island, demonstrated that rats wouldnt push a lever that delivered food if
doing so caused other rats to receive an electric shock. Likewise, in 1964,
Stanley Wechkin and colleagues at the Northwestern University in Chicago
demonstrated that hungry rhesus monkeys refused to pull a chain that
delivered them food if doing so gave a painful shock to another monkey.
One monkey persisted in this refusal for 12 days.

This, however, is my favourite (delusional dog owner that I am, perhaps): a

dog had been hit by a car and lay unconscious on a busy motorway in
Chile. The dogs canine companion, at enormous risk to its own life,
weaved in and out of traffic, and eventually managed to drag the
unconscious dog to the side of the road. I cringed my way through the
video on YouTube, a site which is rapidly becoming the biggest single
repository of evidence for apparently moral behavior in animals.

While the evidence of apparently moral behaviour in animals is no longer

in dispute and cannot be restricted to mere anthropomorphic
outpourings how to interpret this evidence still is. Most scientists and
philosophers are still sceptical of the idea that there is real or genuine
morality at work here. This scepticism comes in two forms, one associated
with scientists, the other with philosophers.
Underlying scientific opposition is what has become known as Lloyd
Morgans Canon, after the 19th-century British ethologist Conwy Lloyd
Morgan. The basic idea is reasonable: when we explain animal behaviour,
we should not postulate any more than we absolutely have to. In other
words, we should not explain the behaviour of animals in complex, moral
terms when another non-moral explanation is available. But are there
other, non-moral, explanations for the sorts of cases described above?

In some cases, the alternative, non-moral explanations can be almost

endearingly desperate. In the case of Binti Jua who rescued the boy, some
argued that since she had been hand-raised by zoo staff, who had taught

her mothering skills by using a stuffed toy as a pretend baby, she was
simply doing what she had been trained to do, believing that the
unconscious boy was another stuffed toy. Yet this explanation, resting as it
does on the assumption that a gorilla is incapable of distinguishing a boy
from a stuffed toy (something a dog can do with a 100 per cent success
rate) is astonishingly, and one suspects wilfully, nave.
In other cases, alternative, non-moral explanations appear more plausible.
In the case of Russell Churchs rat experiment, for example, a rats failure
to push the food bar might be explained not in terms of moral concern for
its fellow rat but as an aversion to the noise made by a rat when it
receives an electric shock. Indeed, this aversive stimulus explanation is
supported by the fact that white noise will have a similar affect on mice
they will refuse to push the food bar if doing so results in a loud blast of
white noise.

It might seem as if this is a purely scientific issue. Either an animal is

motivated by a moral emotion sympathy, kindness, malice, etc or it
is motivated by something else. However, philosophical assumptions, and
confusions, can also intrude . First, the aversive stimulus explanation
does not necessarily rule out a moral explanation. Sometimes, the basis of
aversion will be a feeling of sympathy. I find the cries of my children
unpleasant I have an aversion to those cries. But this is precisely an
expression of my concern for them and not something separate. Consider,
for example, a (probably apocryphal) tale concerning Abraham Lincoln.
Seeing some young birds that had fallen from their nest and were in
distress, Lincoln stopped to help them back into the nest and reunite them
with their mother. On being praised for his charity, Lincoln replied: I
wouldnt have been able to sleep tonight if I had been thinking of those
poor birds.

Lincoln was certainly averse to the distress of the birds, but this aversion
cannot be separated from his sympathy for them. If he didnt care about

the plight of the birds, then their distress would not have troubled his
sleep. Lincolns aversion to their distress and his sympathy are, in this
case, inextricably bound together: sympathy is the basis of his aversion.

Secondly, the aversive stimulus explanation can often seem curiously

misdirected. After all, what explains an animals behaviour is not simply
whether it finds a situation aversive: its how it responds to this aversion
that is crucial. The apparently heroic Chilean dog in the YouTube video
might well have found the sight of his companion lying prone on the road
unpleasant or aversive. But there are various ways of escaping an
aversive stimulus walking away is the simplest. The fact that the dog
didnt walk away, but instead risked its life to save the other is, surely,
significant.

Did the apparently heroic dog think to itself: I am inclined to drag my

companion to safety. Is this an inclination I should act upon or one that I
should resist?

Perhaps Lloyd Morgans Canon itself is wrong. We might think of the Canon
as akin to a game with a set of arbitrary rules: dont give animals anything
more than you absolutely have to. Assume only the bare minimum of
cognitive abilities required to explain their behaviour. Ditto emotional
sensibilities. Moral emotions kindness, sympathy? Certainly dont give
them those unless there is no other choice. We know that we have
cognitive and emotional capacities aplenty, and we know that we can, and
often do, act for moral reasons. But dont assume other animals are like us
unless there is no other option.
Here, courtesy of de Waal, is another possible game. We know that
animals are like us in many ways in terms of their evolution, their
genetic structure, the structure of their brains, and their behaviour. Given
these known similarities, when we see animals behaving in ways that

seem to be similar to the ways we behave, then do not assume a

difference in motivation unless there is some evidence that supports this
difference. When a chimpanzee gives what appears to be a consoling hug
to its fellow who has just received a savage beating from the alpha male
then, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the working hypothesis
should be that the chimpanzee is motivated by the same sorts of emotions
as a human would be in the same sort of situation. If, in the human case,
we take this to be an expression of sympathy, then we should assume the
same for the ape unless there is positive evidence to suppose otherwise.

Many scientists assume that the Lloyd Morgan Canon is the only one in
town, and few express any fondness for de Waals alternative. But its not
clear that Lloyd Morgans game has any more legitimacy than de Waals.
On the contrary, the Lloyd Morgan position seems to make sense only if
we assume there is a drastic discontinuity between humans and other
animals an assumption that is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.

The scepticism of philosophers towards the idea that animals can behave
morally is subtly different from that of scientists. Scientists question
whether there is enough evidence to support the claim that animals can
be motivated by emotions such as kindness or compassion, or by negative
counterparts such as malice or cruelty. Philosophers argue that, even if
animals were to be motivated by these sorts of states, this is still not
moral motivation. When they occur in animals, these states are not moral
ones. For example, compassion, when it occurs in an animal, is not the
same sort of thing as compassion when it occurs in a human. When it
occurs in an animal, compassion has no moral status, and so even if the
animal acts through compassion, it is still not acting morally.

In a nutshell, this is the philosophers worry: moral action seems to imply

moral responsibility. If I act morally, then I am, it seems, morally
responsible for what I do. But do we really want to hold animals

responsible for what they do? During the medieval era, it was not
uncommon for courts of law to try (and often execute) animals for
perceived indiscretions. I assume that no one wants to go back to those
days, and underlying this reluctance is the thought that, whatever else is
true of animals, they are not really responsible for what they do. But this
seems to imply that they cannot act morally.

Consider a principle associated with the philosopher Immanuel Kant: ought

implies can. It doesnt make sense to suppose that I ought to do
something if I am incapable of doing it. Nor does it make sense to say I
shouldnt do something if I cant help doing it. To say that you ought (or
ought not) to do something is to imply that you have a say in the matter
that you are capable of choosing what it is you are going to do (or capable
of refraining from whatever it is you are tempted to do). Moral motivations
seem to imply that you have this ability. A morally good motivation is one
that you ought to endorse or act upon. A morally bad motivation is one
that you ought to resist. So animals cant act morally, it seems, unless
they are capable of deciding how they are going to act, and so are
responsible for what they do and then, it seems, we are back to
medieval animal trials.

Most philosophers have been united in their reasons for thinking that
animals cannot be responsible for what they do. To be responsible requires
an ability that animals do not have the ability to scrutinise their
motivations critically. To be responsible, animals must be able to think the
following sorts of thought: I am inclined to do this; is this an inclination I
should embrace or reject? Did the apparently heroic dog think to itself: I
am inclined to drag my companion to safety. Is this an inclination I should
act upon or one that I should resist? According to philosophers, it is not
simply that the dog didnt engage in this sort of scrutiny of its motivation.
What is crucial is that it cannot do this it does not have the ability to
scrutinise its motivations.

Of course, human beings often act unreflectively, too dashing into

burning buildings to save babies, and so on, without a thought to the
consequences. But the difference, philosophers say, is that we can
scrutinise our motivations even if, in particular cases, we dont. This is why
philosophers have almost universally rejected the idea that animals can
act morally: they assume that animals cannot perform this same selfscrutiny.

Despite its widespread acceptance, I think this is incorrect. In the first

place it is not clear that the requirement to critically scrutinise our actions
is at all crucial to our own moral behaviour. Simply put, say I am inclined
to help a dog I see lying unconscious in the middle of a busy road. Do I
have control over this inclination? According to the standard philosophical
view, I have control over it as long as I am capable of critically scrutinising
it of asking myself whether I should act upon this inclination or resist it.
But recent work in psychology suggests that my responses can be skewed
by environmental influences of which I am unaware and over which I have
no control. We have a problem of regress here: the ability to engage in
critical scrutiny of my motivations will give me control over them only if I
have control over the critical scrutiny. Where does this end? We began
with the problem of explaining my control over my motivations, but have
merely substituted for this another problem: the problem of explaining my
control over my critical scrutiny. We havent explained control at all,
merely pushed the problem back a step.

The traditional philosophers way of understanding the ought of moral

motivation in terms of rational control is questionable. There is another
way of understanding morality that does not rest on this assumption. It is,
for example, possible to do things that we 'ought' to do, even in the
absence of critical scrutiny or rationalisation about alternative courses of
action acting prudently to ensure a long and healthy life, say, or caring

for another being. This opens up a new way of thinking about the moral
capacities of animals. Animals can, in fact, act morally even if they are not
responsible for what they do. They can be motivated by the desire to do
good (and also bad) things even if they are not responsible for their
actions. A dog can be motivated by the desire to rescue his companion,
and rescuing his companion is a good thing. But this does not imply that
the dog is responsible for what it does. This allows us to make sense of the
growing body of evidence that supports the idea that animals can act
morally without returning us to the horrors of animals on trial.

The crux of this issue has as much to do with humans as it does with
animals. When humans act morally, what is it we are doing? Traditionally,
the philosophers answer has been an intellectualist one: acting morally
requires the ability to think about what we are doing, to evaluate our
reasons in the light of moral principles. But there is another tradition,
associated with the philosopher David Hume and developed later by
Charles Darwin, that understands morality as a far more basic part of our
nature a part of us that is as much animal as it is intellectual. On this
sentimentalist account of morality, our natural sentiments the
empathy and sympathy we have for those around us are basic
components of our biological nature. Our morality is rooted in our biology
rather than our intellect.

If this is true, then the reasons for thinking that animals cannot act morally
dissolve before our eyes. What is left is a new understanding of what we
are doing when we act morally and, to that extent, the sorts of beings we
are. Those beings are, perhaps, just a little more biological and a little less
intellectual, a little more animal and a little less spiritual, than we once
thought.
24 October 2012

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