Traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human nature supports Burkean conservatives and Lockean liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.
I have defended an evolutionary theory of morality as rooted in the moral emotions of evolved human nature. In stressing the importance of the moral sentiments for moral psychology, this evolutionary theory belongs to the philosophic tradition of sentimentalist ethics that includes David Hume, Adam Smith, Edward Westermarck, Edward Wilson, and Frans de Waal--a tradition that is set against the Platonic and Kantian tradition of rationalist ethics.
I have written previously about how de Waal's version of this evolutionary theory recognizes both the continuity and discontinuity in the moral psychology of animals (de Waal 2006). According to de Waal, the moral sentiments constitute the first level of morality--the emotional building blocks of morality that include empathy, reciprocity, retribution, a sense of fairness, and reconciliation to resolve conflicts and restore harmonious relationships. These moral sentiments can be seen in some form in many species of nonhuman animals.
De Waal identifies social pressure as the second level of morality. Through social praise and blame, individuals are habituated to conform to the social rules of their group that maintain the good order of the community. These rules are enforced through reward, punishment, and reputation. In these ways, morality serves as a social contract for a cooperative society. Some of this can be seen in some nonhuman animals. For example, high-ranking males in chimpanzee groups engage in "policing behavior"--these males break up fights among others, and their intervention seems to be remarkably evenhanded. Nevertheless, the human morality of social pressure goes beyond the morality of other animals in that human beings can formulate social rules that are more abstract and systematic than is the case for other animals. Much of this abstract rulemaking depends on the human capacity for language.
Finally, judgment and reasoning constitute a third level of morality, and this is uniquely human. De Waal observes: "I know of no parallels in animals for moral reasoning" (2006, 174). We are like other social animals in that we care about our reputations--how we appear in the eyes of others--so that we want to be praised and not blamed by others. But we can also use our distinctly human capacity for abstraction and imagination to see ourselves mirrored in the eyes of an imagined "impartial spectator" (as Adam Smith called it), so that we want to do what is praiseworthy, regardless of whether we are actually praised by anyone. We care not only about our real reputation but also about our imaginary reputation. From this we develop an internal sense of self-esteem or conscience, so that even when other people do not punish us for our bad conduct, we punish ourselves by feeling guilt or shame. Those few human beings who never feel guilt or shame are psychopaths who have no conscience because they do not feel the moral emotions. (I have written about psychopaths as "moral strangers.") There is no evidence for anything like conscience or the impartial spectator in nonhuman animals. (I have written about Smith's concept of the "impartial spectator.")
And yet even if nonhuman animals do not show the full range of human morality, these animals do show some of the moral emotions; and therefore, de Waal argues, these nonhuman animals do deserve to be treated with some moral respect. But then we might wonder whether these animals have equal rights. Are we morally obligated to give equal consideration to the interests of all sentient beings, as Peter Singer has argued? Must we see the immorality not only in racism and sexism but also speciesism?
Recently, de Waal and Kristin Andrews have surveyed the evidence from affective neuroscience suggesting that many animals, even invertebrates, experience emotions of pleasure and pain that should give them some moral standing (de Waal and Andrews 2022). Through emotions and felt experience (sentience), organisms judge experiences as attractive or aversive, and these physical and mental states of attraction or aversion prepare the organism for adaptive action.
So, for example, since there is increasing evidence that lobsters are sentient and experience emotions of pleasure and pain, de Waal claims, it is wrong for human beings to kill them by boiling them. Either we shouldn't kill them at all, or there should find some ethical way to kill them.
But then de Waal recognizes that Singer's argument for equal animal rights fails because it's morally impossible for human beings to give equal consideration to the interests of all sentient beings. This is impossible because there is an evolved natural desire for in-group loyalty. This belongs to my list of the twenty natural desires.
There is an expanding circle of human moral concern that begins with each individual being concerned for himself and then extends first to the individual's family and friends and beyond that to the community, tribe, or nation, and beyond that to some humanitarian feeling for distant strangers who might be brought to one's attention, and then finally to all life forms. But typically, the moral emotions of sympathy become weaker as they are extended farther out on the expanding circle (de Waal 2006, 163-66).
Loyalty is a moral duty in that we expect people to care more for those close to them than to distant strangers or to nonhuman animals. Inevitably, there are conflicts of interest within and between species. So that moral systems are inherently biased towards the in-group. For that reason, the moral sentimentalists like Adam Smith, Edward Westermarck, and de Waal, who speak of the impartiality required for moral sentiments recognize that this cannot be an absolute impartiality but only an apparent impartiality. After all, if human beings were absolutely impartial, they would not care for themselves, for other human beings, or for other animals, because nothing would really matter.
That we should feel some sympathy for other animals, particularly for those animals that are close to us or that elicit our parental care, is an expression of our morality. We know that one sign that a child might grow up to be a psychopath is that he is unusually cruel in his treatment of animals. And it is mostly a he, because most psychopaths are male.
But still most of us agree that it is right to kill animals for food and other products, and that it is right to use animals for painful medical experiments necessary for developing drugs and therapies for human beings and for the scientific understanding of mammalian physiology and neurology. We should feel some concern for minimizing animal suffering. But we feel much more concern for minimizing human suffering.
As Westermarck observed, "absolute impartiality . . . would concede to all sentient creatures equal rights," but "impartiality . . . is not absolute, only relative, that is, impartiality within certain limits" (1900, 185). Our sympathy for nonhuman animals is limited by our partiality for human beings. "Humanity to animals" does require "that we ought to pay some regard to their feelings," Westermarck suggested, but this does not mean "that they should be regarded equally with the feelings of men" (1932, 213).
Even our sympathy for other human beings is limited by our in-group loyalty. In war, fighting for one's country against the enemy is a moral duty. Betraying one's country is treason. But still, it can be a moral duty to refuse to fight in an unjust war.
REFERENCES
de Waal, Frans. 2006. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, edited by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
de Waal, Frans, and Kristin Andrews. 2022. "The Question of Animal Emotions." Science 375: 1351-52.
Westermarck, Edward. 1900. "Remarks on the Predicates of Moral Judgment." Mind 9: 184-204.
In various publications (Arnhart 1990, 1994, 1998, 2009), and in some blog posts, I have argued that a Darwinian science of animal behavior can support Aristotle's biological science of political animals. Aristotle's statement that "man is by nature a political animal" is famous. But it is often falsely assumed to mean that human beings are by nature the only political animals. As Aristotle explains in his biological writings, the political animals include ants, bees, wasps, and cranes. But even if humans are not the only political animals, Aristotle indicates, they are distinctive in that they are more political than the other political animals, because humans have a biological capacity for logos, which allows them to organize their political communities through shared symbolic conceptions of justice.
In his biological works, Aristotle sees that some animals are solitary and others gregarious. Of the gregarious animals, some are political. Some of the political animals have leaders, but others do not. The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for some common work or function. Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense.
The uniquely human capacity for speech or rhetorical persuasion makes humans more political than the other political animals, because while other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain, humans can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good. Through speech, humans cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive than is possible for other animals. Through speech, humans can deliberate about the common interest as the standard of justice. A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common interest of all or most of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private interest of its ruling group.
I have argued that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality and animal social life supports Aristotle's biopolitical science. I have also argued that the biological study of animal behavior over the past 60 years (beginning with Jane Goodall's arrival at the Gombe Stream Preserve in 1960) has largely confirmed this Aristotelian science of animal politics.
Recently, I noticed that Cheryl Abbate (2016) has disagreed with my reasoning in what is essentially a critique of my 1990 article in Social Science Information. I also noticed that Edward Jacobs (2018) has written a response to Abbate's article, and Abbate (2018) has replied to him.
Abbate's critique consists of two arguments. First, she claims that my defense of Aristotle's teaching contradicts the Darwinian principle of the psychic continuity between humans and animals--the idea that humans differ from other animals only in degree and not in kind. Second, she claims that recent studies of animal behavior show that some highly social nonhuman animals have a sense of justice, and so Aristotle is wrong in thinking that this is unique to human beings.
As you might expect, I believe she's mistaken on both points.
DARWIN ON EMERGENT DIFFERENCES IN KIND
Abbate correctly quotes from the crucial passage in Aristotle's Politics (1253a) where Aristotle declares that a human is much more a political animal than other political animals, because "man alone among the animals has speech [logos]," and through speech, "he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust," which is the uniquely human basis of human politics (Abbate 2016, 57).
She then claims that this contradicts the Darwinian principle of "evolutionary continuity"--that all differences between species are only differences in degree and not in kind (Abbate 2018, 160). She correctly quotes from Darwin's apparent endorsement of this idea in The Descent of Man:
"Nevertheless, the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals" (2004, 151).
Abbate is silent, however, about the fact that despite Darwin's explicit statement that humans differ only in degree, not in kind, from other animals, he implicitly recognized human differences in kind. That is to say, Darwin saw that human beings have some moral and mental traits that other animals do not have at all.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted that self-consciousness is uniquely human: "It may be freely admitted that no animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied, that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth" (105). Morality is also uniquely human: "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity. . . . man . . . alone can with certainty be ranked as a moral being" (135). And language is uniquely human: "The habitual use of articulate language is . . . peculiar to man" (107).
Darwin was thrown into self-contradiction--both affirming and denying that humans are different in kind from other animals--because he failed to see how he could affirm emergent differences in kind without affirming any radical differences in kind. Emergent differences in kind can be explained by evolutionary science as differences in kind that naturally evolve from differences in degree that pass over a critical threshold of complexity. So, for example, we can see the uniquely human capacities for self-consciousness, morality, and language as emerging from the evolutionary development of the primate brain, so that at some critical point in the evolution of our hominid ancestors, the size and complexity of the brain (perhaps particularly in the frontal cortex) reached a point where distinctively human cognitive capacities emerged at higher levels of brain evolution that are not found in other primates. With such emergent differences in kind, there is an underlying unbroken continuity between human beings and their primate ancestors, so there is no need to posit some supernatural intervention in nature--the divine creation of the human soul--that would create a radical difference in kind in which there is a gap with no underlying continuity of natural causes.
Edward Jacobs points to this when he describes the evolution of the human mind. "The moment a certain threshold of mental development was reached (and logos is as good a placeholder name for this threshold as any), we became able to make and grasp persuasive accounts," which made humans more political than the other political animals (155).
Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka (2019) have shown how an evolutionary neuroscience could explain this emergence of the human mind as passing through the three levels of mind identified by Aristotle in De Anima (On the Soul). The basic nutritive and reproductive soul belongs to all living things--plants and animals. The second level--the sensitive soul--belongs to all animals. The third level--the rational or symbolizing soul--is specific to humans. The crucial evolutionary transition marker of the rational soul is language. The rational soul gives humans the capacity for grasping and sharing the abstract symbolic values of the good and the just that make human politics unique. Ginsburg and Jablonka suggest that all three levels can be explained by evolutionary biology.
I have written some previous posts on emergent evolution (here and here).;
BEKOFF AND DE WAAL ON THE MORAL LIVES OF ANIMALS
Abbate relies heavily on two cognitive ethologists--Marc Bekoff and Frans de Waal--for providing the evidence that some nonhuman animals have a sense of justice, and therefore Aristotle is wrong in saying that humans alone have a moral sense, which makes them more political than the other political animals. For Abbate, this proves that humans differ only in degree, not in kind, from other animals.
Bekoff is best known for his studies of canid social carnivores--wolves, dogs, and coyotes--and his argument that their social play shows that they have "codes of conduct" that indicate a moral life of "wild justice" (Bekoff 1995; Bekoff and Pierce 2009; Pierce and Bekoff 2012).
De Waal is best known for his Chimpanzee Politics and other studies of primate colonies in captivity. He has endorsed what he calls my "Darwistotelian" view of human politics and morality as showing an evolved political nature shared with chimps and other primates. A sample of my many posts on de Waal can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
She does not notice, however, that Bekoff and de Waal show the same self-contradiction that one can see in Darwin. On the one hand, Bekoff says that "animal morality is different in degree but not in kind from human morality." On the other hand, he says there are "bona fide differences in kind" (Bekoff and Pierce 2009, 139-40). He admits that "human morality is unique," because humans are unique in their capacities of language and judgment (Bekoff and Pierce 2009, 132, 139-42). Similarly, de Waal sometimes seems to say that morality is not unique to human beings, but then he concedes that morality at the level of judgment and reasoning is uniquely human (de Waal 2006, 20, 173-75).
Abbate might say, however, that this is not necessarily contradictory. If de Waal is right about there being three levels of human morality, and if nonhuman animals show some elements of the lower levels but not of the higher levels, then the fullest expression of human morality is uniquely human, although some animals show some features of the moral life. Thus, there is both continuity and discontinuity in the moral psychology of animals. At some levels of morality, there is only a difference in degree. At other levels, there is a difference in kind. This is exactly what one would expect from the emergent evolution of animal morality. And, I suggest, this is Aristotle's position, even though his biology did not have a fully developed evolutionary theory.
According to de Waal, the moral sentiments constitute the first level of morality--the emotional building blocks of morality that include empathy, reciprocity, retribution, a sense of fairness, and reconciliation to resolve conflicts and restore harmonious relationships (de Waal 2006, 166-75). All of this can be seen in some form in other animals
In stressing the importance of the moral sentiments for moral psychology, de Waal belongs to the philosophic tradition of sentimentalist ethics that includes David Hume, Adam Smith, Darwin, and Edward Westermarck--a tradition that is set against the Kantian tradition of rationalist ethics. I have written many posts on this, including here, here, here., and here.
De Waal identifies social pressure as the second level of morality. Through social pressure, individuals are habituated to conform to the social rules of their group that maintain the good order of the community. These rules are enforced through reward, punishment, and reputation. In these ways, morality serves as a social contract for a cooperative society. Some of this can be seen in some nonhuman animals. For example, high-ranking males in chimpanzee groups show "policing behavior"--males break up fights among others, and their intervention seems to be remarkably evenhanded. Nevertheless, the human morality of social pressure goes beyond animal morality by formulating social rules that are more abstract and systematic than is the case for other animals.
Finally, judgment and reasoning constitute a third level of morality, and this is uniquely human. So, for example, we are like other social animals in that we care about our reputations--how we appear in the eyes of others--so that we want to be praised and not blamed by others; but we can also use our distinctively human capacity for abstraction and imagination to see ourselves mirrored in the eyes of an "impartial spectator" (as Adam Smith said), so that we can want to do what is praiseworthy, regardless of whether we are actually praised by anyone.We care not only about our real reputation but also about our imaginary reputation. From this we develop an internal sense of self-esteem or conscience. There is no evidence for anything like this in nonhuman animals. (I have written about Smith's concept of the "impartial spectator" here.)
Like de Waal, Aristotle saw both continuity and discontinuity between human beings and other animals in their moral psychology. In his History of Animals (588a15), he wrote:
"In most of the other animals, there are traces of the qualities of soul that are more evidently differentiated in human beings. For there are both gentleness and savagery, mildness and harshness, courage and timidity, fear and confidence, spiritedness and trickery, and, with respect to intelligence [dianoia], something like judgment [sunesis], similar in many ways. . . . For some of these qualities differ only more or less with reference to human beings. . . . For nature passes little by little from the inanimate to animals, so that this continuity prevents one from seeing a border or perceiving on which side an intermediate form lies."
Aristotle argues that the moral psychology of wild animals is like that of children: they can have natural virtue and habitual virtue, but they cannot have the deliberative virtue that requires fully developed logos (Politics, 1332b1; Nicomachean Ethics, 1144b1-1145a5). They can have the natural virtue that comes from being born with a good natural temperament that inclines them to do the right actions. And they can have the habitual virtue that comes from obeying social rules so that they habitually do the right actions.
Only human adults are capable of deliberative virtue, which requires logos. And logos is the capacity for grasping explanatory accounts--for understanding both theoretical and practical syllogisms (Moss 2014). In ethics and politics, explanatory accounts do not just prescribe right actions, they also explain why these are right. Children and animals can be trained to know what they ought to do but without understanding why they ought to do it. Virtue in the strict sense requires deliberate choice and prudential judgment with full knowledge of both what should be done and why it should be done. This deliberative virtue with prudence corresponds to what de Waal identifies as the third level of morality--reasoning and judgment.
Because of their unique capacity for logos, human beings are more political than the other political animals--and more moral than the other moral animals--because this capacity for grasping explanatory accounts means that rather than just habitually obeying social rules of justice in their group, human beings will want to know why these are the rules, and they will argue over whether there might be better rules. For that reason, human politics is always a rhetorical activity in which people have to persuade one another that what their community is doing is just, right, or noble. That's why Aristotle's Rhetoric is a crucial text for his moral and political philosophy.
The importance of rhetorical speech for human politics and human morality explains why language is the critical marker in the evolutionary transition to uniquely human symbolism and rationality, as Ginsburg and Jablonka have indicated.
ADDENDUM--SEPTEMBER 3, 2025
Abbate's article has been recently reprinted in a book edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey--Animal History: History as If Animals Mattered (Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2025). In this new version of her paper, she makes no attempt to answer my objections. Is that because my objections are irrefutable?
REFERENCES
Abatte, Cheryl E. 2016. "'Higher' and 'Lower' Political Animals: A Critical Analysis of Aristotle's Account of the Political Animal." Journal of Animal Ethics 6:54-66.
Abatte, Cheryl E. 2018. "Redefending Nonhuman Justice in Complex Animal Communities: A Response to Jacobs." Journal of Animal Ethics 8:159-165.
Arnhart, Larry. 1990. "Aristotle, Chimpanzees, and Other Political Animals." Social Science Information 29:479-559.
Arnhart, Larry. 1994. "The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle's Political Animals." American Journal of Political Science 38:464-485.
Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Bekoff, Marc. 1995. "Play Signals as Punctuation: The Structure of Social Play in Canids." Behaviour 132:419-429.
Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce. 2009. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man. Second edition. Ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond. London: Penguin Classics.
de Waal, Frans. 2006. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Ginsburg, Simona, and Eva Jablonka. 2019. The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jacobs, Edward. 2018. "Aristotle and the Zoon Politikon: A Response to Abbate." Journal of Animal Ethics 8:150-158.
Moss, Jessica. 2014. "Right Reason in Plato and Aristotle: On the Meaning of Logos." Phronesis 59:181-230.
Pierce, Jessica, and Marc Bekoff. 2012. "Wild Justice Redux: What We Know About Social Justice in Animals and Why It Matters." Social Justice Research 25:122-139.
The Picture on the Book Cover of Machiavellian Intelligence II
In 1967, Antony Jay published Management and Machiavelli: An Inquiry into the Politics of Corporate Life. He argued that the pursuit of power in a modern corporation was just like the Renaissance politics described by Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince, and that Machiavelli's principles for gaining and holding political power were also the best principles for successfully advancing one's position in a corporation. His book is considered a classic of management science that was followed by dozens of other books on "Machiavellian management."
Jay was also interested in how human behavior in organizations was like a lot of animal behavior. In a 2005 interview, he said: "During my own experiences, I saw how an awful lot of animal behavior, particularly primate behavior, comes up in the modern corporation." He also wrote the popular BBC television series "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister" that were comic depictions of British civil servants and government ministers fighting for dominance.
In 1970, Richard Christie and Florence Geis published Studies in Machiavellianism, in which they developed a procedure for identifying the "Machiavellian personality" of people who unscrupulously pursue their selfish interests by manipulating and deceiving others. They developed a "Mach Scale" based on whether people agree with a series of statements that are identified with Machiavelli. In its most extreme form, the purest Machiavellian personality might be a psychopath, who manipulates and exploits other human beings unrestrained by any moral emotions of shame, guilt, or love. The "Mach Scale" has been used extensively by social psychologists.
In 1982, Frans de Waal published Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. The book was based on de Waal's study of the chimpanzees in the Burgers' Zoo in Arnhem, the Netherlands. At that time, this was the largest group of chimpanzees in a zoo (23 individuals). During the warmer half of the year, they were free to move over a two-acre outdoor island area surrounded by a moat, which allowed for careful observations of their social behavior by de Waal and his students.
De Waal says that he couldn't understand what these chimpanzees were doing until he read Machiavelli: "The biological literature proved to be of no help understanding the social maneuvering that I observed, so I turned to Niccolo Machiavelli. During quiet moments of observation, I read from a book that had been published more than four centuries earlier. The Prince put me in the right frame of mind to interpret what I was seeing on the chimpanzees' forested island, though I'm pretty sure the Florentine philosopher never envisioned this particular application" (de Waal 2016, 168). He found that "whole passages of Machiavelli seem to be directly applicable to chimpanzee behavior" in explaining "the struggle for power and the resultant opportunism" (1982, 19).
In 1988, Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten published their edited book Machiavellian Intelligence: The Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, which explored the "Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis"--the idea that the evolutionary growth in the size of primate and human brains could be explained as an adaptation for the cognitive challenges of navigating through the social complexity of primate communities in which individuals must figure out how best to both compete and cooperate with other members of their species. This has been a popular topic of research for primatologists and for cognitive scientists generally, although the term "Machiavellian intelligence" is sometimes replaced by "social intelligence" or "social brain" by people like Robin Dunbar.
Michael Jackson and Damian Grace--social science scholars at the University of Sydney (Australia)--have complained that all of these applications of "Machiavellian" thinking to management, social psychology, and primatology show a crude distortion of what Machiavelli actually taught, and that those historians and political theorists who have studied Machiavelli should feel obligated to correct these false views of Machiavelli and his teaching (Jackson and Grace 2012, 2015).
They say that when they examined many of the textbooks on the history of political thought, "we found in them not one single reference to Machiavelli's afterlife in management, social psychology, or primatology" (2015, 68). They did not look at my textbook on the history of political philosophy--Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker. If they had, they would have seen that my chapter on Machiavelli has passages on de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics, Byrne and Whiten's Machiavellian Intelligence, and Christie and Geis's Studies in Machiavellianism (see Arnhart 2015, 145-46, 151). I also refer to Edward O. Wilson and Jane Goodall as biologists who study the power-seeking personality among chimpanzees and other animals. I bring all of this up as I ask the question, Was Machiavelli a Machiavellian? In other words, does Machiavelli's teaching correspond to the popular use of the term "Machiavellian" as denoting the ruthless pursuit of power over others through immoral force and fraud? Jackson and Grace answer no to this question.
I am particularly interested in raising this question as it bears on primatology. Is chimpanzee politics Machiavellian? If it is, does this Machiavellian chimpanzee politics conform to what Machiavelli himself taught? Or does this chimpanzee Machiavellianism depart from Machiavelli's teaching about politics? Although Jackson and Grace are a little obscure on these points, they seem to say that while chimpanzee politics might be "Machiavellian" in the popular sense of that term, this contradicts what Machiavelli himself taught.
I will survey some of what de Waal says about chimpanzee politics. Then I will consider the arguments of Jackson and Grace for denying that chimpanzee politics conforms to what Machiavelli teaches. Finally, I will suggest some ways in which the political life of chimpanzees really does manifest some of what Machiavelli teaches about politics.
When de Waal arrived at the Arnhem zoo in 1975 to study the chimpanzees, Yeroen was the alpha male. Yeroen was dominant over three other adult males--Luit, Nikkie, and Dandy. The social hierarchy is indicated by a special form of greeting. Chimpanzees show a submissive greeting that is a sequence of short panting grunts by the subordinate individual as he looks up at the superior individual, which is usually accompanied by a series of deep bobbing bows by the subordinate. Sometimes the subordinate will stretch out a hand to the superior or kiss the superior's feet, neck, or chest. The superior reacts to this by rising up and making his hair stand on end, so that he looks very large in contrast to the groveling subordinate. The alpha male is the male who is "greeted" by the other males. Generally, the alpha male is also "greeted" by the females and the children in a group.
The male on the left is dominant. The male on the right is subordinate. Although they are actually the same size, the dominant male makes himself look bigger.
People often assume that among animals the dominance hierarchy must be determined by fighting in which the biggest and strongest animal wins and becomes the alpha. But de Waal insists that this is false. Among chimpanzees and other animals, physical strength is only one of many traits required for becoming the dominant alpha leader. To become the alpha, one needs supporters. So one must form coalitions with partners, and to win the support of the females and the children, one needs to act as a mediator in intervening in disputes to enforce peace and unity either through impartial intervention or by supporting the weaker party against the stronger. One must know how to reconcile after disputes. And one must know how to achieve mutual cooperation through reciprocity by returning favors and by punishing those who are not cooperative. So a chimpanzee community is not governed by "the law of the jungle" or the "rule of the stronger."
There is a female hierarchy as well as a male hierarchy. In fact, before de Waal arrived at the Arnhem Zoo, the alpha female--Mama--was the dominant chimp over the whole group beginning in 1972. Then, on November 5th of 1973, three adult males--Yeroen, Luit, and Nikkie--were added to the group. Mama refused to accept them. With her friend, Gorilla, she attacked the males--biting their feet and pulling their hair. Their fear of her was expressed in their screaming, diarrhea, and vomiting. After two weeks of this, the zoo managers decided to remove Mama and Gorilla from the group, because these females were inflicting too many injuries through their uncontrolled aggression. Males seem to be better at controlling their aggression. And since it is known that in the wild adult males are dominant, it was thought that they should have a chance to become dominant without the interference of Mama.
After three months, Yeroen was dominant over the group. Mama and Gorilla were brought back. Mama attacked the three adult males. But she had no support from the other females, not even Gorilla. Without the solidarity of the females, Mama could not alone intimidate the males. Within a few weeks, Yeroen was dominant again, and he remained dominant from the spring of 1974 to the spring of 1976.
In 1976, de Waal saw the first of two power take-overs, which he understood with the help of Machiavelli, and this is what became the central focus of his book Chimpanzee Politics. In the spring of 1976, Luit stopped "greeting" Yeroen, which initiated months of tense conflict between them as they fought over which would be dominant. Luit formed a coalition with Nikkie, so that Nikkie would help Luit against Yeroen. On June 21st, Yeroen bared his teeth for the first time, which is a sign of fear in chimps. On September 1, Yeroen "greeted" Luit for the first time. Luit began to take on the control role of the alpha male in mediating fights to restore peace in the group. On October 31, Yeroen "greeted" Nikkie for the first time. So, now, Luit was the alpha male, Nikkie was second in command, and Yeroen was ranked third.
But then, in the spring of 1977, Nikkie formed a coalition with Yeroen to challenge Luit, and by December of 1977, Luit was "greeting" Nikkie as his superior. Nikkie had become the alpha male, with Yeroen second in command. The chimpanzees' keeper at the zoo worried, however, that Nikkie was too young and immature to properly control his aggression. De Waal responded by arguing that Nikkie was so dependent on the support of Yeroen, the oldest male, that there was no need to fear "an absolute dictatorship by a snotty-nosed upstart" (1982, 136).
But now that winter had come, and the chimps were confined to their indoor housing, Nikkie's violence did become excessive. Whenever Luit and Yeroen were sitting together, Nikkie fought to separate them and to be close to Yeroen. Nikkie became so violent that de Waal and the keeper agreed that he needed to be removed from the group for the rest of the winter. Once Nikkie was gone, Luit resumed his dominant position. In the spring of 1978, the chimps were released to their outdoor island, Nikkie was reintroduced, and Nikkie soon reclaimed his dominance.
De Waal noticed something strange about Nikkie's alpha male dominance. When Yeroen was the alpha male, he was "greeted" by the other adult males, and he also received almost all of the "greetings" from the females and children. When Luit was the alpha male, he was "greeted" by the other adult males, and he also received over 50% of the "greetings" from the females and children. But when Nikkie was the alpha male, he was "greeted" by the other alpha males, but he received a lower proportion of the "greetings" from the females and children than did Yeroen. Moreover, Yeroen exercised the control role--mediating disputes and restoring peace--that would normally be exercised by the alpha male, and this increased the popular respect for Yeroen as opposed to Nikkie. Echoing Machiavelli's famous remark that "it is better to be feared than loved," de Waal observed that Nikkie was "feared rather than respected" (1982, 149). But de Waal suggests that this lack of popularity made Nikkie weak.
There was another strange feature of Nikkie's alpha male status. Generally, alpha male chimps have the highest number of sexual matings with the females, and they actively disrupt the attempted matings of other males. This makes sense in evolutionary terms, because we assume that the drive for male dominance evolved as an adaptive trait because alpha males have higher reproductive fitness. But during the period of Nikkie's dominance, Yeroen had the highest proportion of matings, and Nikkie was forced to tolerate this in order to keep Yeroen's support.
To explain this, de Waal quotes a passage from Chapter 9 of The Prince entitled "Of the Civil Principate." A civil principate, Machiavelli explains, is when "a private citizen neither by wickedness nor other intolerable violence, but with the favor of his fellow citizens, becomes prince of his fatherland."
"One ascends to this principate either with the favor of the people [populo] or with that of the great [grandi]. For in every city, these two different humors are to be found. Thus it is that the people desire not to be commanded or oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and to oppress the people. . . ."
"The principate is established either by the people or by the great, according to whether one of the other of these parties has the occasion. For the great, when they see they are not able to resist the people, begin turning to the reputation of one of their own, making him prince, so they may, under his shadow, give vent to their appetite. The people also, when they see that they are not able to resist the great, turn to the reputation of one, and make him a prince, so that he may with authority be their defense. He who comes to the principate with the aid of the great maintains himself with more difficulty than the one who attains to it with the aid of the people--for he finds himself prince with many around him who opine themselves his equals, and because of this he cannot command or manage them in his own mode."
De Waal quotes the last sentence above, and he explains:
"Nikkie's position was not an easy one. Compared to him Yeroen and Luit were almost all-powerful, thanks to the collaboration of the females. The important difference between Nikkie's leadership and the old order was that Nikkie stood on the shoulders of someone who was himself very ambitious. The ensuing problems are familiar enough in the human world. Machiavelli wrote about the relative powerlessness of this kind of leader. In in the following quotation from The Prince, we translate 'nobility' [the 'great'] by 'males of high rank' and 'common people' by 'females and children,' then we see that Nikkie's 'principality' is indeed very different from the 'principality' of his two predecessors" (1982, 153).
De Waal observes:
"Sometimes it seemed that Nikkie was being used as a figurehead, and that Yeroen--experienced as he was and extremely cunning--had him in the palm of his hand. The broad basis for leadership rested not under Nikkie but under Yeroen. The older male had a coalition with the females to pressurize Nikkie and a coalition with Nikkie to keep Luit in check. Seen in these terms the situation appeared to represent a comeback for Yeroen. Luit had deprived him of the support and respect he had hitherto enjoyed, but by pushing a youngster forward, Yeroen seemed to have succeeded in reacquiring both" (1982, 152).
But then, from 1978 to 1980, the proportion of the "greetings" directed from the females and the children towards Nikkie increased until he had the level of respect that normally goes to the alpha male.
In Chimpanzee Politics, de Waal ended the story here. But years later, he admitted that he had left out a brutal act in 1980 of what he called "political murder," because he didn't want to end his book on a "dark note" (de Waal 1986; 1998, 211). In the summer of 1980, Nikkie refused to tolerate Yeroen's copulations with estrus females, and consequently Yeroen withdrew his support of Nikkie. Without the coalition with Yeroen, Nikkie lost his dominance, and Luit became alpha male again for ten weeks.
But then Nikkie and Yeroen renewed their coalition and challenged Luit. One night, while the chimps were in their night cages, Nikkie and Yeroen jointly attacked Luit--bitting off fingers and toes and then ripping out Luit's testicles. Luit died from loss of blood.
The powerful jaws and teeth of adult males are deadly weapons. Their incisors are like knives that can easily kill their victims. But male chimps almost never use these weapons in lethal attacks. There seems to be a rule against lethal fighting. And yet the underlying threat of fighting to kill always creates tension in any severe conflict. On rare occasions, killing does occur. It's more likely to occur in war--in conflicts between chimpanzee groups rather than within a group. Jane Goodall has seen this in Gombe. De Waal could not see this because he was observing only one group.
De Waal's silence about the killing of Luit in the first edition of Chimpanzee Politics was not just to avoid ending the book on a "dark note," I suspect, but to avoid confirming the fears of those who had warned that establishing such a large community of chimps, including adult males, in a zoo without separating them in cages would lead to explosive and even lethal violence. Since it was known that feeding chimps together created violence in fighting over the food, the Arnhem chimps were fed every morning and evening in separate cages so as to eliminate fighting over food. But then being enclosed indoors every night during the warm months and throughout the day in the cold months created tension, because chimps in conflict could not separate. Mama had to be removed in the winter of 1973, and Nikkie was removed in the winter of 1977, because their aggression was leading to serious injuries. The killing of Luit in 1980 was during a night when Luit, Yeroen, and Nikkie were all caged together, and so Luit had no room to escape the attack.
The longest chapter in Machiavelli's The Prince--Chapter 19 on "Of Avoiding Contempt and Hatred"--is about how princes who become hated open themselves up to conspiracies leading to their assassination. The killing of Luit seems to show that political assassination is also part of the Machiavellian politics of chimpanzees.
So why exactly do Jackson and Grace object to identifying chimpanzee politics as Machiavellian? They suggest at least five arguments. First, they object that what is called "Machiavellian" is based on "the more flamboyant passages" in The Prince--such as "it is better to be feared than loved"--without seeing how less flamboyant passages in The Prince moderate what Machiavelli is saying. They write: "The Prince, like his other books, also offers moral judgments, recommendations of caution, emphasis on the importance of stability, advice on treating the populace with respect, and much else that surprises those whose stereotype of Machiavellianism is transposed to Niccolo Machiavelli" (Jackson and Grace 2012).
Second, they object that primatologists like de Waal have read only The Prince, and so they don't see Machiavelli's support for republicanism in The Discourses and other writings.
Third, they object that the popular view of Machiavellianism fails to see how Machiavelli was simply responding to his historical circumstances in Renaissance Italy in which political life was disrupted by domestic violence, warfare, brutality, and deceit. The apparent cynicism of what Machiavelli says is a response to those harsh conditions. They write: "The best analogy for the circumstances in which Machiavelli lived are to be found today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mexico, or the remoter regions of Pakistan, where power does grow out of the barrel of a gun" (Jackson and Grace 2012).
Fourth, they argue that much of Machiavelli's writing is a factual description of what princes and politically ambitious people do without any endorsement of that behavior.
Fifth, they argue that Machiavelli is clear that the political class of people who strive for dominance over others is very small, and that most human beings do not have such a dominance drive, and they wish only to live their private lives in peace without being exploited by those who wish to dominate them. In a republic, Machiavelli indicates, the desire to be free is for most people a desire to be free to live a secure life; and it is only for a few people--perhaps no more than 40 or 50--that the desire to be free is a desire to be free so as to command others `(Discourses, I, ch. 16).
Oddly, however, Jackson and Grace don't reflect on the fact that much of what de Waal says about Machiavelli and the chimps agrees with some of their arguments. De Waal indicates that he does not like the term "Machiavellian intelligence" insofar as it assumes the crudely distorted popular meaning of "Machiavellian":
"The term Machiavellian implies a cynical, the-ends-justify-the-means exploitation of others. Social cognition covers much more than this. A mother resolving a weaning conflict by cleverly distracting her offspring, or an adult male waiting for the right moment to reconcile with his rival, both intelligently use their experience but are not exactly acting 'Machiavellian' in the usual sense. Sensitivity to others, conflict resolution, and reciprocal exchange all demand a great deal of intelligence but are left out if our terminology one-sidedly emphasizes one-upmanship" (1998, 218).
Thus, de Waal agrees with Jackson and Grace in rejecting the popular sense of "Machiavellian." He also agrees that this Machiavellian idea of "a cynical, the-ends-justify-the-means exploitation of others" cannot explain chimpanzee social life, which requires "sensitivity to others, conflict resolution, and reciprocal exchange." In Chimpanzee Politics, De Waal sees in chimpanzee life the evolutionary roots of morality--a "sense of moral rightness and justice" (1982, 105, 111-12, 176, 200, 204-205, 207, 212-13).
In his writing published after Chimpanzee Politics, which Jackson and Grace ignore, de Waal argues that chimpanzees show the evolutionary foundations of morality--including reciprocity, fairness, empathy, and social cooperation. De Waal has summarized some of the evidence for this in a TED talk:
And while Jackson and Grace accuse the Machiavellian primatologists of ignoring Machiavelli's teaching about the importance of a republican politics that respects the needs of the populace, De Waal sees in chimpanzee politics a democratic or republican structure like that recommended by Machiavelli with a balance of three orders--the one, the few, and the many.
Machiavelli analyzed politics as competition for power and glory organized around three orders of human beings--the "prince," who is number one; the "great ones," who are high-ranking individuals with ambition to rule; and the "people," who are the great majority of individuals in a society with no ambition to rule, but who do not want to be oppressed by the "prince" or the "great ones," because they want to live their private lives in security and peace. A stable and peaceful regime would have to balance these three orders in a manner that would satisfy the ambitions and appetites of all three without anyone having the power to tyrannize over others (The Prince, ch. 9, 57-60; The Discourses, I.2, 10-14).
De Waal saw a similar social structure among the chimpanzees: the alpha male chimp is the "prince"; the high-ranking males are the "great ones"; and the females and children are the "people." The similarities between chimpanzee politics and human politics were so close that Newt Gingrich, when he was Speaker of the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress, recommended de Waal's book to all freshmen congressmen who might want to understand Washington politics.
Just as Machiavelli saw the balance of three orders in a republic as the fundamental mechanism for maintaining a stable and free political regime that would not be despotic, de Waal saw the same mechanism at work among chimps. Noticing how the alpha male often had to rely on the support of an ally to keep challengers down, de Waal explained this as a "balance of power: the superiority of one party over another depends on the support of a third, so that each party affects the position of the others." De Waal observed that the leader "cannot impose his leadership on the group single-handed. His position is granted him, in part, by the other chimpanzees. The leader, or alpha male, is just as much ensnared in the web as the rest" (1982, 23). So, among chimps, there is something like government by the consent of the governed.
De Waal sees here what some political scientists have called government by the "minimal winning coalition" (de Waal 1982, 187; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2011). No one individual can rule without supporters, and so there must always be a ruling coalition supporting the leader, who must satisfy his supporters. A dictatorship is rule by a small coalition. Democracy is rule by a large coalition. The leader must serve the interests of his coalition, and so the larger the coalition, the closer this approximates to serving the common interests of society.
Consequently, there was something like a "democratic structure" in this order of chimpanzee society:
"All parties search for social significance and continue to do so until a temporary balance is achieved. This balance determines the new hierarchical positions. Changing relationships reach a point where they become 'frozen' in more or less fixed ranks. When we see how this formalization takes place during reconciliations, we understand that the hierarchy is a cohesive factor, which puts limits on competition and conflict. Child care, playing, sex and cooperation depend on the resultant stability. But underneath the surface, the situation is constantly in a state of flux. The balance of power is tested daily, and if it proves too weak, it is challenged, and a new balance is established" (1982, 176, 212-13; 1998, 172, 208-209).
Although every human society shows an order of dominance like that of a chimpanzee society, a well-balanced society can achieve egalitarian dominance rather than despotic dominance. De Waal has observed that rhesus monkeys manifest despotic dominance, because a dominant rhesus monkey instills unremitting fear in subordinates. But among chimpanzees, the dominant chimp often acts to protect subordinates, and if he becomes a bully, he can provoke an alliance of subordinates to throw him out of power (de Waal 1996, 125-32).
This seems to be what happens in egalitarian human communities. Among hunter-gatherers, leaders who become too proud are attacked with social ridicule, and in extreme cases, leaders can be deposed or even executed by their followers. With the establishment of centralized, bureaucratic states, it became possible for despots to concentrate their power. And yet the natural human desire to be free from despotic exploitation has provoked alliances among subordinates to check the power of dominants, which has promoted political systems for balancing power. In their style of political dominance, human beings are more like chimpanzees than rhesus monkeys (Boehm 1999, 2012; Rubin 2002; Turner and Maryanski 2008).
John Adams agreed with Machiavelli that every society shows three social orders rooted in human nature--the one, the few, and the many--and that a stable and free republic requires a balance of these three orders. Adams saw this balance in the American and British constitutions (Arnhart 2009, 73-84; Ryerson 2016).
Adams believed that human nature is such that every human society must decide the question, Who is the first man? "It is a question that must be decided, in every species of gregarious animals, as well as men." In a savage state, this question is decided by physical combat between contenders. But even in the most civilized societies, "the same nature remains," and the contest for first rank must be decided, whether by peaceful or by violent rivalry. The balance of powers answers this question by providing for a supreme executive office to be filled by one with sufficient ambition to strive for it, while still checking the power of this executive officer with the powers of other offices.
At the top of every society, Adams thought, there will be competition among the "first men" for the highest rank. The people of a society will fix their attention on these men at the top. And if there is division over who should fill the dominant position, the society will be thrown into turmoil and eventually civil war. For this reason, societies should select a single person with executive authority separated from the rest of society and from the legislative body. This chief executive unifies a society and directs its management. This executive can then mediate between the passions of the ambitious few who want to rule and the passions of the deferential many who want to be free from oppression by the ambitious few.
Machiavelli and Adams saw this balance of three orders as a republican form of government best designed in conformity to human nature. De Waal and other primatologists can see the evolutionary precursors of this human nature in the political life of chimpanzees.
And, after all, as de Waal has observed, can't we see a lot of chimpanzee politics in Donald Trump? Trump once told People magazine: "Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat. You just can't let people make a sucker out of you."
Arnhart, Larry. 2015. Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker. 4th edition. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, and Alastair Smith. 2011. The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics. New York: Public Affairs.
Byrne, Richard, and Andrew Whiten, eds. 1988. Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackson, Michael, and Damian Grace. 2012. "Machiavellian Monkey Business: Machiavellian Intelligence in Primates and Machiavelli." The Montreal Review, December. Available online.
Jackson, Michael, and Damian Grace. 2015. "Machiavelli's Shadows in Management, Social Psychology, and Primatology." Theoria 62: 67-84. Available online.
Jay, Antony. 1967. Management and Machiavelli: An Inquiry into the Politics of Corporate Life. New York: Bantam Books.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1989. The Prince. Trans. Leo Paul de Alvarez. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1996. Discourses on Livy. Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rubin, Paul H. 2002. Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origins of Freedom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Ryerson, Richard Alan. 2016. John Adams's Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Turner, Jonathan H., and Alexandra Maryanski. 2008. On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
de Waal, Frans. 1982. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. New York: Harper & Row.
de Waal, Frans. 1986. "The Brutal Elimination of a Rival Among Captive Male Chimpanzees." Ethology and Sociobiology 7: 89104.
de Waal, Frans. 1996. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
de Waal, Frans. 1998. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. Revised edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
de Waal, Frans. 2016. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
If the morality of third-party punishment is part of our evolved human nature, as indicated in the previous post, then we might ask whether this is also found in our closest evolutionary relatives--chimpanzees and other primates. Among primatologists, there is disagreement about this. Michael Tomasello and his colleagues argue that there is no third-party punishment in chimpanzees (Riedl et al. 2012). But Frans de Waal and his colleagues argue that in fact chimpanzees and other primates (such as pigtailed macaques) do show third-party punishment (Flack et al. 2005; Flack et al. 2006; von Rohr et al. 2012; Suchak et al. 2016). This is part of a more general debate in which Tomasello tends to emphasize human uniqueness compared with other primates, while de Waal tends to emphasize the similarities between human beings and other primates. (I have written about this debate here, here, and here.)
In his first--and most popular--book Chimpanzee Politics, de Waal described the Machiavellian politics that he observed in the chimpanzee colony at Burgers' Zoo in Arnhem, the Netherlands. In the summer of 1976, he saw the overthrow of Yeroen, who had been the alpha male, by Luit. A few weeks after becoming the new alpha male, Luit adopted a policy that would make him "the champion of peace and security" and thus win the support of the females and the children to strengthen his position against his male rivals for dominance. Whenever a fight broke out among the chimps, Luit intervened to restore the peace. Sometimes he would intervene impartially, not favoring one side over the other, but forcing the two sides apart and hitting anyone who tried to continue the fight. At other times, he intervened to support the weaker party against the stronger--helping the lower ranking individual against the higher ranking individual who would normally win the fight. De Waal called this the "control role" of the alpha male (1982, 124-25). He thought the control role of the alpha male was "not so much a favor as a duty," because his position depended on keeping the peace and protecting the females and the children from attack so that they will help him in repulsing his male rivals.
In his later writings, de Waal has identified the "control role" as "policing"--intervening impartially to control conflict. This term "policing" was first used by biologists studying social insects as the term for how insects monitor behavior and suppress conflict through impartial enforcement of norms by bystanders. (I have written about the "bee police" here.)
"The Surprising Science of Alpha Males"
Against de Waal's claims, Tomasello and his colleagues have asserted that de Waal has not presented any direct tests of third party punishment of violations of cooperation among chimpanzees or other primates. In 2012, they reported their own experimental study in which 13 captive chimpanzees were presented with an opportunity to engage in third-party punishment, but they failed to do so (Riedl et al. 2012). Three chimpanzees occupied three separate cages designated as "victim," "thief," and "actor." A tray of food was in front of the victim's cage. The thief could pull a rope to drag the tray towards his own cage and thus steal the food. While observing this theft, the actor could pull a rope or press a button to collapse the food tray into a box out of reach of the chimpanzees. The actor was either dominant over the thief or subordinate to the thief. But in neither case did the actor punish the thief for stealing the food from the victim. However, in a test of second-party punishment, where the thief stole food from the actor, and the actor was dominant over the thief, the actor did punish the thief. This seemed to show that chimpanzee punishment is restricted to retaliation against personal harm, when the punisher is in a position of dominance.
De Waal and his colleagues insist that they have observed third-party policing, or intervening impartially to control conflict, in captive groups of pigtailed macaques and chimpanzees (Flack et al. 2005; von Rohr et al. 2012). They do concede, however, that this is one of the rarest forms of conflict management among primates, and that most of the policing interventions that do occur are carried out by a few dominant individuals.
De Waal suggests that Tomasello's failure to see third-party punishment in his experiment arose from his limited laboratory setting in which two or three apes were brought into a very contrived situation. De Waal describes his own experimental setting that mimics natural conditions in which many individuals have an open choice for cooperation, competition, and enforcement mechanisms (Suchak et al. 2016). A group of 11 captive chimpanzees was put before a pulling apparatus where two or three individuals were required to pull together to obtain a food reward. The experiment took place in 94 one hour sessions--occurring two to three times per week--that were videotaped. During these sessions, the chimpanzees could pull jointly at the apparatus to obtain the reward, and this would be counted as a cooperative act. They were also free to engage in competitive acts--freeloading (stealing the reward without pulling), displacement (taking someone's place at the apparatus), or fighting.
The cooperative pulling experiment was originally designed by Meredith Crawford in 1937 to test for cooperation among chimpanzees. Since then, many different species of animals have been tested with cooperative pulling experiments. The Wikipedia article on this is good.
Over the 94 hours of de Waal's experiment, there were a total of more than 600 competitive interactions (freeloading, displacement, or fighting) and 3,565 cooperative interactions--an average of one cooperative act every 2 minutes. The rate of cooperation versus competition fluctuated over the 94 hours--starting with high cooperation then dropping to more competitive interactions and finally rising to almost complete cooperation at the end.
There were 175 attempts at freeloading, and 91 were successful (63%). Most of the punishment for freeloading was second-party punishment--that is, the victim of freeloading retaliated against the freeloader. Third-party outsiders intervened to punish freeloaders only 14 times (8% of the freeloading events). Four of these third-party interventions were impartial or policing interventions, in which a dominant chimp intervened to stop a fight between a freeloader and a victim of freeloading. In nine of the 10 partial interventions, the intervening dominant individual favored the victim of freeloading over the freeloader. So third-party punishment did occur, but it was quite rare.
The primary means for enforcing cooperation was not direct punishment but partner choice. Victims of freeloading or displacement chose to withdraw from the freeloading and displacing individuals, and then they sought out individuals of similar rank who could be counted on to cooperate. Partner choice can be seen as indirect punishment or indirect reciprocity, in which individuals cooperate with those who have a reputation for being cooperative.
The rarity of the third-party punishment seen by de Waal and his colleagues might explain why Tomasello and his colleagues have not seen this at all. This also suggests that nonhuman primates show only the evolutionary precursors or building blocks for the fully developed third-party punishment practiced by human beings.
REFERENCES
de Waal, Frans.1982. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes. New York: Harper and Row.
Flack, Jessica, Frans de Waal, and David Krakauer. 2005. "Social Structure, Robustness, and Policing Cost in a Cognitively Sophisticated Species." The American Naturalist 165: E126-E139.
Flack, Jessica, Michelle Girvan, Frans de Waal, and David Krakauer. 2006. "Policing Stabilizes Construction of Social Niches in Primates." Nature 439: 426-429.
Reidl, Katrin, Keith Jensen, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello. 2012. "No Third-Party Punishment in Chimpanzees." Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 109: 14824-14829.
Suchak, Malini, Timothy Eppley, Matthew Campbell, Rebecca Feldman, Luke Quarles, and Frans de Waal. 2016. "How Chimpanzees Cooperate in a Competitive World." Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 113: 10215-10220.
von Rohr, Claudia Rudolf, Sonja Koski, Judith Burkart, Clare Caws, Orlaith Fraser, Angela Ziltener, Carel van Schaik. 2012. "Impartial Third-Party Interventions in Captive Chimpanzees: A Reflection of Community Concern." PLoS ONE 7: e32494.
The seminar on "Evolution and Ethics" that I directed at the University of Oxford last week left me with many questions to ponder.
Most of the participants were professional philosophers (professors and advanced students) from China and from Calvin College. As I anticipated, much of the discussion turned on the debate between the Platonic or transcendentalist view of ethics and the Humean or empiricist view. A Darwinian evolutionary understanding of ethics is on the side of the Humean view that sees ethics as rooted in human nature, particularly in human emotions, beliefs, and desires. On the other side, the Platonic view taken by those like Kant looks to a transcendent conception of the Good that is somehow woven into the order of the cosmos. (As I have indicated in previous posts, the careful reader of the Platonic dialogues might doubt whether Plato himself--or Plato's Socrates--was a Platonist in this way.)
A growing number of leading philosophers are adopting a Humean/Darwinian moral psychology supported by recent research in evolutionary science, neuroscience, anthropology, and animal behavior. But one can still see the powerful influence of a Kantian transcendentalism in moral philosophy that regards morality as an autonomous realm of pure reason totally separated from the empirical realm of nature as studied by natural science.
After discussing this general debate in our first meeting, we turned in the second meeting to the debate between Charles Darwin and George Jackson Mivart. As far as Mivart is concerned, Darwin's evolutionary account of the moral sense stresses the role of the moral emotions and thus misses the essence of morality as pure rationality. Mivart insists: "It is judgment and not feeling which has to do with right and wrong." Mivart fails to see, however, that Darwin recognizes the role of reason in moral judgment that makes morality uniquely human, because it depends on human intellectual capacities, but he also recognizes the role of emotion and social instinct in motivating moral actions. The emotions and instincts underlying human morality can be seen in other animals, which shows the building blocks of moral experience in animal nature.
Although some of the participants in the seminar were receptive to Darwin's moral naturalism, many were deeply skeptical of whether his naturalism could account for the moral ought, for that sense of imperative normativity that seems to transcend emotion and desire, and which is so prominent in Kant's moral philosophy. These Kantians argued that while natural science could explain the origins of morality through evolutionary history, it could not explain the justifications of moral rules by reason. The Kantians insisted on this dichotomy between origins and justifications in order to preserve the Kantian separation between the natural realm of human moral sentiments and desires and the transcendent realm of human moral reasoning and freedom. The natural realm of human action is governed by hypothetical imperatives about what we have to do to be happy. The transcendent realm of human reason is governed by categorical imperatives of what we absolutely ought to do regardless of the practical consequences.
This set up the opposing sides in our discussion. I and the other naturalists were inclined to argue that morality is completely a matter of hypothetical imperatives, because the only ultimate answer to questions about why we "ought" to do something is that it will promote our human happiness or flourishing, and therefore evolutionary science helps us to understand the evolution of human morality as hypothetical imperatives that are constrained by our nature as social mammals. Against this position, the Kantian transcendentalists argued that morality strictly speaking--the morality of the moral "ought" rather than the calculation of the prudential "ought"--is a matter of pure reason separated from all natural experience.
But what I found most interesting in this discussion is how far the Kantians were willing to go in compromising by acknowledging that Kant's "pure ethics" of a priori reasoning had to be combined with his "impure ethics" of human nature and moral emotions. The pure a priori rationalism of Kantian ethics has been strongly challenged by research in moral psychology that shows that reason by itself cannot be the only ground of moral judgment. Consequently, the Kantians have had to argue that an expansive reading of all of Kant's writings shows that he allows for a naturalistic explanation of moral experience beyond pure reason. Kant is not simply a Kantian!
This reading of Kant has been elaborated by Robert Louden's Kant's Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Still, however, the Kantians could not compromise at all on one point. Darwin speculated that if bees had mental capacities comparable to those of human beings, bees would develop a moral sense. But the content of bee morality would be radically different from human morality. Moral bees might regard it as a "sacred duty" for sisters to kill their brothers, and for the queen mother to kill her fertile daughters. The thought here is that since morality is relative to the natural needs and desires of the species, each species would have a different morality. So there is no cosmic morality. The standards of right and wrong are not woven in the fabric of the cosmos, there to be discovered by any animal that evolves a moral sense. Rather, morality is species-specific in its content. This bothered the Kantians in our group (just as it bothered the original Kantian reviewers of Darwin's book--Mivart and Cobbe), because it denies the transcendentalist claim that morality manifests a truth about the cosmos--perhaps about God as the moral lawgiver of the cosmos.
These same basic positions and lines of reasoning continued in the other meetings. In the third meeting, we discussed a paper by Frans de Waal, with critical responses from Robert Wright, Philip Kitcher, Christine Korsgaard, and Peter Singer. De Waal stressed the continuity between the social behavior of other primates and the moral behavior of human beings as showing the evolutionary roots of morality. The critics insisted, however, that there was a gap between animal behavior and human morality created by the uniquely human capacities for language and abstract reasoning.
Although initially there seems to be a sharp separation between the sides in this debate, closer examination reveals that both sides eventually move close to one another. I saw the same thing happening in our group. On the one side, de Waal and the Darwinian naturalists say that even as they stress the continuity of human morality with the social behavior of others animals, they recognize that morality strictly speaking really is uniquely human because of the uniquely human mental capacities required for morality. On the other side, the Kantians can recognize that nonhuman animals can display some of the natural dispositions and capacities that go into human morality.
Everyone seems to agree here that morality requires an "impartial" or "disinterested" perspective that leads to something like the Golden Rule as a fundamental moral principle. But I agree with de Waal that this moral impartiality is not absolute, because it rests on an "abstract yet still egocentric concern about the quality of life in a community." This is evident in the "tension between loyalty and moral inclusion." Morality is an "in-group phenomenon" in that morality has evolved largely to promote cooperation within groups to compete with those outside the groups. We can extend our moral concern to ever wider groups--fellow kin, fellow citizens, all human beings, perhaps even all sentient creatures. Darwin speaks of moral progress reaching the point of "disinterested love of all living creatures." But I agree with de Waal that as we extend our moral sympathy farther out on the moral circle, our attachments to those far away is commonly weaker than our attachments to those close to us, and we are even morally obligated to feel a stronger concern for those close to us than for strangers.
The question of whether absolute impartiality is possible, or desirable, becomes evident in the debate over "animal rights." Peter Singer claims that the ultimate moral principle is impartial concern for the interests of all sentient creatures, which dictates that we might have to sacrifice human interests for the interests of nonhuman animals. Against Singer, de Waal argues that while we should show some sympathy for other animals, our moral obligations to our fellow human beings come first. So, for example, de Waal thinks using primates for scientific research where we would not want to use human beings is justifiable if the benefit for human beings outweighs the suffering of the animals.
In our reading for this seminar, some of the authors interpret the principle of moral impartiality as dictating universal love, like the teaching of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. As I said in the seminar, I am not persuaded by this, because it seems to me that universal love is contrary to human nature. A morality of universal love would dictate absolute pacifism and socialism in the pursuit of global peaceful cooperation free of any conflict. But we know that doesn't work. In fact, refusing to punish evildoers would make human morality impossible.
This point came up in our fourth meeting as we discussed my Darwinian Natural Right and John Hare's criticism of my book. Hare is a Kantian Christian. He agrees with me that complete moral impartiality as dictating universal love is unnatural for human beings. But then he says this only shows the "moral gap" between what morality demands of us and what we can do. To cross that moral gap--to satisfy the demands of morality--we need the assistance of God. This leads him into his divine command theory of morality. Against the secular Kantianism of people like Korsgaard, Hare defends a religious Kantianism based on the claim that Kant's categorical morality cannot be obeyed by human beings without some religious support.
Darwin intimates the religious character of Kant's moral philosophy when he quotes Kant's depiction of moral law as evoking "reverence." Moreover, in the passage from the Critique of Practical Reason from which Darwin quotes, Kant speaks of "man as belonging to two worlds"--the phenomenal world of natural causes and the noumenal world of human freedom. But then Darwin indicates that he will explain morality "exclusively from the side of natural history." So, implicitly, Darwin rejects Kant's "two worlds" in favor of one world--the empirical world of nature.
This points us again to the fundamental debate between Platonic transcendentalism and Humean naturalism. In the last meeting of our seminar, I began by suggesting that if we're laying out a typology of fundamental sources of moral principles invoked in moral philosophy, we might consider six possible sources:
1. Cosmic God
2. Cosmic Nature
3. Cosmic Reason
4. Human Nature
5. Human Culture
6. Human Individuals
The transcendentalists look to the first three--the cosmic sources of moral order--because they believe that morality cannot have "moral clout" (in Richard Joyce's phrase) unless it is believed to be part of the cosmic order of things as dictated by God, by the nature of the universe, or by universal rational structures. So just as we discover mathematical principles as somehow woven into the constitution of the world, we should be able to discover moral principles as part of the "wisdom of the world" (in Remi Brague's phrase).
The empiricists, however, look to the second three sources--the human sources of moral order. Human nature gives us the generic goods of life as rooted in the natural desires of the human species as shaped by evolutionary history--perhaps the 20 natural desires that I have sketched. But within the contraints of human nature, human culture specifies the moral traditions of human morality as shaped by cultural history. Then, within the constraints of both human nature and human culture, human individuals make choices that reflect the uniqueness of their individual temperaments, abilities, and circumstances as shaped by their individual history.
Kant's "pure ethics" corresponds to the transcendental order of the first three sources. His "impure ethics" corresponds to the human order of the last three sources.
Philosophers like Kant and Hare are satisfied Platonists because they believe that morality really does find its transcendent grounds in the cosmic sources. But philosophers like Richard Joyce and John Mackie are frustrated Platonists who agree that "moral clout" requires belief in "moral facts" as cosmic facts beyond the "natural facts," but they are convinced by natural science that this belief is false, because what appears to be a cosmic moral objectivity is actually a subjective projection of the human moral emotions onto the cosmos, and therefore morality is necessarily fictional.
By contrast, the satisfied Humeans--those like Darwin and Westermarck--see no need for morality conforming to a moral cosmology, and so the illusion of moral objectivity as founded on moral cosmology can be exposed for the illusion that it is, even as we accept the purely naturalistic grounds of morality in human experience--human nature, human culture, and human individuality.
The Humeans and Darwinians accept the historical contingency of morality as shaped by the genetic history of human nature, the social history of human culture, and the personal history of human individuality. The good is the desirable. But what is desirable varies according to the contingencies of human cultures and human individuals. Even so, the generic goods of human nature are stable and universal across all of human history for as long as the human species exists. And yet, there was a time when the human species did not exist, and there will be a time sometime in the future when the human species will be extinct. In the absence of the human species, morality would not exist. If some other species develops the capacities necessary for a moral sense, it will have a moral sense, but the content of that moral sense will be distinct to its specific nature.
On the last day of this seminar, we spent the afternoon touring some sites around Oxford associated with C. S. Lewis. It was fitting that we did this, because Lewis struggled his whole life with the consequences of the modern scientific rejection of the moral cosmology of the ancient and medieval world that Lewis loved.
Lewis was a student at Oxford, and then he taught for 30 years as a Fellow at Magdalen College at Oxford. He was a scholar of medieval and renaissance literature. But he is best known as the author of some of the most popular works of Christian apologetics and literature, including science fiction and children's fantasy.
We toured his house ("The Kilns"), Magdalen College, and the graveyard where he is buried outside his parish church--Holy Trinity Church in Headington. At the house, our tour was guided by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Oxford and the author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Ward argues in his book that Lewis's love of medieval cosmology provides the key to the symbolic coherence of Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, which became one of the most popular series of children's fantasy novels of the twentieth century. Ward shows how the seven novels in the series correspond to the seven planets of medieval cosmology.
I have written an earlier post on Lewis' book The Discarded Image as his study of the geocentric cosmic model that combined Platonic and Christian teachings about the moral order of the universe as designed by God. This model shaped the human sense of cosmic moral order in the Western world for almost 2,000 years before it was discarded by modern science.
Lewis' transcendent longings were satisfied by that cosmic vision of the world as a creation of God's love that offered ultimate satisfaction to the human yearning for meaning and purpose in the universe. Lewis doubted that modern natural science could ever provide a proper substitute for that old cosmology. And yet Lewis was a theistic evolutionist who accepted the scientific truth of evolutionary science, even if he doubted that such a science could ever give us the moral truth that we seek. I suggest, however, that what Lewis in The Abolition of Man lays out as the "common morality" (or Tao) of humanity--universally found in all human societies throughout history--points to the sort of natural morality that is supported by evolutionary reasoning.
A few of my previous posts on pertinent themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.
In our discussion of the evolution of morality at the Liberty Fund conference in Tucson, some discussants complained that Ridley's account of the spontaneous evolution of morality did not recognize the importance of reason in moral judgment. Ridley says a lot about Adam Smith's emphasis on moral sentiments, but he ignores Smith's recognition that the moral sentiments are guided by moral reasoning.
In response to this, Ken Blanchard (a political scientist at Northern State University, Aberdeen, South Dakota) said that evolutionary morality is always rational in the sense that there is some evolutionary logic in morality, even when there is little or no conscious reasoning involved. For example, he observed, there is an evolutionary logic of justice even among bacteria. All dead organic material is potential food for bacteria. But the large organic molecules must be broken down by bacteria secreting enzymes that break up proteins and peptides, so that the smaller molecules can then be absorbed through the bacterial cell membranes. Through "quorum sensing," bacteria communicate their presence to one another by secreting signaling molecules, detecting changes in concentration of signaling molecules, and then regulating the transcription of genes in response. Once the signaling molecules exceed a certain threshold level (the quorum), this triggers changes in gene expressions. In this case, it triggers the secretion of enzymes for dissolving the organic material into nutrients that can be consumed by the bacteria. But since secreting enzymes is costly for bacteria, evolution can favor the appearance of mutant bacteria that cheat by not secreting the enzymes but then consuming the nutrients generated by the work of the other bacteria that secret the enzymes: the cheaters can thus enjoy the benefits of a public good without paying their fair share of the costs for producing that public good. To enforce cooperation, bacteria have evolved the capacity for detecting these cheaters and punishing them by secreting cyanide that kills them. Here then is the evolutionary logic of justice among bacteria in which those who fail to cooperate for the common good are punished.
I now realize that Blanchard was reporting the research of microbiologist E. Peter Greenberg and his colleagues. Greenberg first introduced the term "quorum sensing" in 1994 to denote the regulation of bacterial gene expression by population sensing (Fuqua, Winans, and Greenberg 1994; Davis 2004). Thirty years ago, most microbiologists assumed that bacteria could not communicate with one another, and so they could not use communication to coordinate social cooperation. But now Greenberg and others have shown that just as human beings communicate with words, bacteria communicate with signal molecules, which allows them to cooperate with one another. This has become part of a new field of research--called "sociomicrobiology"--that studies the social evolution of microorganisms (Parsek and Greenberg 2005; West et al. 2006). As with plants and animals, bacterial cooperation is subject to social cheating, and one way to suppress cheating is for bacteria to engage in policing that punishes cheaters. The bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa shows this, because these are the bacteria described by Blanchard, that secrete cyanide to punish social cheaters (Wang et al. 2015).
Policing punishment to enforce social cooperation has been seen in many animals (Clutton-Brock and Parker 1995; Bekoff and Pierce 2009). For example, among social insects--particularly, ants, bees, and wasps--each worker in the colony would benefit from rearing her own sons, rather than the queen's sons. But other workers have evolved to prevent this because it reduces the reproductive efficiency of the colony, and the policing workers are more related to the sons of the queen than the sons of other workers. This has favored an evolutionary selection for policing by workers, who destroy the eggs laid by other workers (Ratnieks, Foster, and Wenseleers 2006).
A different kind of policing has been observed among some primates. Among pigtailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina), building and preserving social networks requires conflict management. A small group of individuals who are high ranking in the power structure--alpha males--exercise third-party policing by intervening impartially to control conflicts. When monkeys come into conflict, a high-ranking individual can intervene with a threat that pacifies the conflict (Flack, de Waal, and Krakauer 2005; Flack, Girvan, de Waal, and Krakauer 2006).
Just as it is with bacteria and other animals, human beings have a naturally evolved propensity to punish cheaters who violate the social contract that supports social cooperation. Lucretius recognizes this when he speaks of how justice originated when our early human ancestors formed "common pacts of peace" neither to harm nor be harmed, and here he follows Epicurus who taught that natural justice is "a pledge of reciprocal usefulness, neither to harm one another nor be harmed," which is enforced by the fear of punishment of those who violate this social contract (5.1012-1025). This is the evolutionary Epicurean morality that Nietzsche promoted in Human, All Too Human. This also corresponds to Locke's teaching about the "executive power of the law of nature"--the natural right to punish cheaters who violate the law of nature.
Extensive cross-cultural experimental research by evolutionary psychologists has shown that human beings are very good at detecting cheaters in a social exchange. This has led them to conclude that one of the evolved mechanisms of the human brain is a cheater detection module (Cosmides & Tooby 1992, 2016; Van Lier, Revlin, De Neys 2013). As I have indicated in some previous posts, Judge Morris Hoffman (2014) has surveyed the evidence for concluding that evolution built the human brain to punish cheaters, and that this explains how the legal system for punishment can be rooted in our evolved human nature.
This suggests that Darwinian natural right as enforced by the natural right to punish cheaters could have appeared in some form very early in the evolutionary history of life--perhaps with the first bacteria.
Some of these points have been developed in other posts--on bacterial morality (here), on the Lockean right to punish cheaters (here, here, and here), and on Nietzsche's evolutionary morality (here and here).
REFERENCES
Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce. 2009. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Clutton-Brock, T. H., and G. A. Parker. 1995. "Punishment in Animal Societies." Nature 373: 209.
Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby. 1992. "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange." In J. H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, 163-228. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby. 2016. "Adaptations for Reasoning About Social Exchange." In David M. Buss, ed., The Hundbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 2nd ed., 2 vols., 2:625-68. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley.
Davis, Tinsley H. 2004. "Biography of E. P. Greenberg." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101: 15830-15832.
Flack, Jessica C., Frans de Waal, and David C. Krakauer. 2005. "Social Structure, Robustness, and Policing Cost in a Cognitively Sophisticated Species." The American Naturalist 165: E126-E139.
Flack, Jessica C., Michelle Girvan, Frans de Waal, and David C. Krakauer. 2006. "Policing Stabilizes Construction of Social Niches in Primates." Nature 439: 426-29.
Fuqua, W. Claiborne, Stephen C. Winans, and E. Peter Greenberg. 1994. "Quorum Sensing in Bacteria: the LuxR-LuxI Family of Cell Density-Responsive Transcriptional Regulators." Journal of Bacteriology 176: 269-75.
Hoffman, Morris. 2014. The Punishing Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parsek, Matthew R., and E. P. Greenberg. 2005. "Sociomicrobiology: The Connections Between Quorum Sensing and Biofilms." TRENDS in Microbiology 13:27-33.
Ratnieks, F. L. W., K. R. Foster, and T. Wenseleers. 2006. "Conflict Resolution in Insect Societies." Annual Review of Entomology 51: 581-608.
Van Lier, Jens, Russell Revlin, and Wim De Neys. 2013. "Detecting Cheaters Without Thinking: Testing the Automaticity of the Cheater Detection Module." PLoS ONE 8 (1): e53827.
Wang, Meizhen, Amy L. Schaefer, Ajai A. Dandekar, and E. Peter Greenberg. 2015. "Quorum Sensing and Policing of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Social Cheaters." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112: 2187-2191.
West, Stuart, Ashleigh S. Griffin, Andy Gardner, and Stephen P. Diggle. 2006. "Social Evolution Theory for Microorganisms." Nature Reviews Microbiology 4: 597-607.
