Descended from apes? It would be an honor.
On Wednesday night, the Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood, Missouri hosted “Science on Tap”, a discussion and lecture with Ursula Goodenough, author of Genetics and The Sacred Depths of Nature. The topic was “Is It Natural to be Moral?” and Goodenough took the position that yes, it is. A slight woman of about fifty, Goodenough energetically turned between the audience and her Power Point slides during the twenty-five minute presentation. She animatedly showed us images of chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest ape relatives, engaged in complex social behavior.
Goodenough cited Tom DeLay’s infamous remark about the Columbine shootings, in which he argued that the horrific violence was a result of schools teaching that we “evolutionized” (sic) from lower animals. Smiling, Goodenough said that the idea that we are glorified apes is “an honor” and that she hoped, with her presentation, for us to agree.
Morality, she said, is “how best to be good to one another”, as well as “capacities which allow individuals to flourish in society.” With this definition in mind, she went on to show pictures of chimps, narrating them with a discussion of what recent studies have found out about their ability to empathize and their complex hierarchies.
Although we have “ape minds”, Goodenough argues, human morality emerges out of our unique capacity to conceive of the world in linguistic symbols. We experience our ape mind in a way that no ape does–symbolically. So, she concludes, there are antecedent experiences that have evolved under selection pressures and are useful for organisms that live in groups. One slide demonstrates how these antecedent concepts have emerged through “symbolic transformation”
Sex –> Sexuality
Nurture –> Care
Empathy –> Compassion
Reciprocity –> Fairness
Hierarchy –> Reverence
While self-interest and preservation do drive evolutionary adaptation, Goodenough argues that in social organisms, these motivations can become counter-productive. From this recognition, we have moral concepts such as “greed.” She mentioned ecological awareness as another moral concept which humans have that chimpanzees and bonobos do not have.
I left before the discussion, so I can’t comment on that aspect. But I was thinking, throughout, of the John McDowell reading I’ve been working on recently. McDowell would, I think, claim that the apes don’t really experience the world at all, merely respond. But we, in contrast, have openness to the world through the “space of reasons” (the linguistic capacity Goodenough mentions). It is this space which, on McDowell’s account, allows us to transform our perceptions into reasons for acting, without losing our grip on the content of the external world. Our second nature–the social world in which we live, including ethical concepts–is not something that is outside of the natural realm, but it emerges from it.
While Goodenough admits that there is much to learn (recently we have discovered, for example, that orangutans are not solitary animals, in contrast to previous theories), the sketch seems apt. There’s a lot of explaining to do, in a way which does justice to the phenomenology of ethical pressure (our sensation of “oughtness”) and which does not reduce our second nature to that from which it emerged.