Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Monkey morality

In the Science section of the New York Times yesterday, Nicholas Wade has what is to me a fascinating article. Wade writes that a growing body of evidence of acts among animals that are driven by a concern for others lends credence to the notion that these behaviors are the precursors of human morality. The best example comes right at the top:

Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Did everyone else know this?? The article says that "Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book 'Moral Minds' that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules," an echo of Noam Chomsky's famous theories and findings about language.

"Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists' bid to annex their subject," Wade writes. Count me on their side. Maybe it's the fact that moral philosophy was my area of specialty as an undergraduate. Maybe it's just an aversion to the idea that we human beings are just playing out the script evolution has written, that moral reasoning and the soul could be explained away by science.

"You can identify some value we hold, and tell an evolutionary story about why we hold it, but there is always that radically different question of whether we ought to hold it," said Sharon Street, a moral philosopher at New York University.

There's your challenge, Curious George.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:20 PM

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