Abstract
Nowadays many people attribute a morality to various social animal species, morality that goes far beyond ‘morality’ in the sense of an analogous system for the regulation of social behaviour. They are convinced by the huge amount of observations and stories collected by students of animal behaviour, and presented to them in popularizing books by authors such as Marc Bekoff, Marc Hauser, and Frans de Waal. The definition of morality from which criteria for classifying a system for the regulation of social behaviour as a morality must be derived is discussed in Sect. 6.2. Section 6.3 categorizes the moral behaviour patterns of animals identified by animal behavioural scientists in four clusters. Section 6.4 deals with what capacities are needed for moral behaviour. Sections 6.5 and 6.6 consider when behaviour can be said to be rule governed. In Sect. 6.7, I examine whether animals can have moral motives. Section 6.8 goes into the occurrence of social disapproval as a criterion for norm violation. Section 6.9 discusses the relation between animal morality and human morality, and argues that animal morality regulates behaviour automatically and unconsciously. However, a large part also of human morality is non-reflective and functions in the same manner as animal morality. In contradistinction to animal morality, human morality makes use of both System I processes and System II processes and can be both non-reflective and reflective. Section 6.10 contains some reflections on the moral status of animals belonging to a species that has a morality. Section 6.11 offers some concluding remarks.
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- 1.
In The criminal prosecution and capital punishment of animals ([1906] 1987) Edward Evans documented more than 191 prosecutions and excommunications of animals between the ninth and twentieth centuries. Research shows that the majority of secular prosecutions were concentrated in the southern and eastern parts of France and in adjacent parts of Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.
- 2.
There is now considerable agreement on the characteristics that distinguish the two systems. The operations of System I are fast, automatic, effortless, associative, and difficult to control or to modify. The operations of System II are slower, serial, effortful, and deliberately controlled; they are also relatively flexible and potentially rule-governed.
- 3.
In Primates and philosophers De Waal states: ‘The same process [i.e. evolution, BM] may not have specified our moral rules and values, but it has provided us with the psychological makeup, tendencies, and abilities to develop a compass for life’s choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality’ (De Waal 2009, p. 58).
- 4.
Railton speaks here of discomfort, not of shame and guilt which are more specific moral feelings.
- 5.
The correct spelling of the name of Dostoevsky’s prince in The idiot (1868) is ‘Mysjkin’, but I will follow Rowlands’s spelling. After a long stay abroad, prince Myshkin returns to Russia where he finds people under the spell of money. Myshkin is called the idiot because of his epileptic seizures.
- 6.
Rowlands’s Mishkin is someone whose morality seems to operate completely on the sub-conscious level. Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus (1991) would characterize him as a ‘moral expert’, the product of successful moral education and training whose judgments and decisions are the product of intuitive thinking. I don’t have problems with Rowlands’s characterization of Mishkin as a moral subject, but his picture of Mishkin is over-simplified. Even moral experts sometimes have to reason consciously, e.g., when their intuitions conflict or are indeterminate. Moreover, it is hard to imagine that a person is never challenged to give reasons for his judgments and actions. Therefore Mishkin must be capable to reflect on his motivation. Mishkin may most of the time function as a moral subject, but he must be capable of moral agency.
- 7.
An important implication of this view is for me that moral animals cannot be used for food, nor for research purposes.
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Musschenga, B. (2013). Animal Morality and Human Morality. In: Musschenga, B., van Harskamp, A. (eds) What Makes Us Moral? On the capacities and conditions for being moral. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6343-2_6
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