PRIMATES AND PHILOSOPHERS Part 9 ppsx

part of the same community. My disapproval reflects con￾cern about what would happen if everyone started acting

like A: my long-term interest are not served by rampant steal￾ing. This rather abstract yet still egocentric concern about the

quality of life in a community is what underpins the “impar￾tial” and “disinterested” perspective stressed by Philip Kitcher

and Peter Singer, which is at the root of our distinction be￾tween right and wrong.

Chimpanzees do distinguish between acceptable and un￾acceptable behavior, but always closely tied to immediate

consequences, especially for themselves. Thus, apes and

other highly social animals seem capable of developing pre￾scriptive social rules (de Waal 1996; Flack et al. 2004), of

which I will offer just one example:

One balmy evening at the Arnhem Zoo, when the keeper

called the chimps inside, two adolescent females refused to

enter the building. The weather was superb. They had the

whole island to themselves and they loved it. The rule at the

zoo was that none of the apes would get fed until all of them

had moved inside. The obstinate teenagers caused a grumpy

mood among the rest. When they finally did come in, several

hours late, they were assigned a separate bedroom by the

keeper so as to prevent reprisals. This protected them only

temporarily, though. The next morning, out on the island,

the entire colony vented its frustration about the delayed

meal by a mass pursuit ending in a physical beating of the

culprits. That evening, they were the first to come in.

(adapted from de Waal 1996: 89)

However impressive such rule enforcement, our species

goes considerably further in this than any other. From very

young onwards we are subjected to judgments of right and

172 FRANS DE WAAL

wrong, which become so much part of how we see the world

that all behavior shown and all behavior experienced passes

through this filter. We put social thumbscrews on everyone,

making sure that their behavior fits expectations.3 We thus

build reputations in the eyes of others, who may reward

us through so-called “indirect reciprocity” (Trivers 1971;

Alexander 1987).

Moral systems thus impose myriad constraints. Behavior

that promotes a mutually satisfactory group life is generally

considered “right” and behavior that undermines it “wrong.”

Consistent with the biological imperatives of survival and

reproduction, morality strengthens a cooperative society

from which everyone benefits and to which most are pre￾pared to contribute. In this sense Rawls (1972) is on target;

morality functions as a social contract.

Level 3: Judgment and Reasoning

The third level of morality goes even further, and at this

point comparisons with other animals become scarce in￾RESPONSE 173

3 Our experiments on inequity inversion concerned expectations about reward

division (Brosnan and de Waal 2003; Brosnan et al. 2005). In response to Philip

Kitcher, it should be noted that it is unclear that inequity aversion has much to do

with altruism. Another pillar of human morality, equally important as empathy and

altruism, is reciprocity and resource distribution. The reactions of primates faced

with unequal rewards falls under this domain, showing that they watch what they

gain relative to others. Cooperation is not sustainable without a reasonably equal re￾ward distribution (Fehr and Schmidt 1999). Monkeys and apes react negatively to re￾ceiving less than someone else, which is indeed different from reacting negatively to

receiving more, but the two reactions may be related if the second reflects anticipation

of the first (i.e., if individuals avoid taking more so as to forestall negative reactions in

others to such behavior). For a discussion of how these two forms of inequity aver￾sion may relate to the human sense of fairness, see de Waal (2005: 209–11).