A new book has recently appeared that deserves wide attention. Dale Peterson's The Moral Lives of Animals considers a topic that is of great interest among a large number of scholars and lay people, namely, can nonhuman animals be moral beings? (see also and)
This book follows a small number of other books on this general topic, including one of my own. In fact, in March 2006 I had dinner with Dale Peterson, the author of this well written, well researched, and forward looking book. Dale was eager to tell me about his great idea for a new book and went on to outline his views about the moral lives of nonhuman animals (hereafter, animals). When he was finished I timidly told him that Jessica Pierce and I were in the final stages of writing a book on the same topic called Wild Justice, with, as it turned out, the same subtitle as his new book. Later, Dale told me he felt crestfallen, but I encouraged and assured him that there was plenty of room for more than Jessica's and my voice on this wide-ranging and controversial topic. I'm glad Dale went on to complete his own project because while we (and a few others) cover the same topic we come to it from decidedly different perspectives. And, the more the merrier since the discussion of moral intelligence in animals is in its infancy.
Peterson is well qualified to write this book. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature but he has had 25 years of first-hand experience with a number of different animals around the world. He was educated in primatology during collaborations with renowned researchers Jane Goodall and Richard Wrangham and he learned about elephants while writing about them, advised by well-known elephant expert, Katy Payne.
Peterson's latest book was born after an argument at a dinner party where someone seemed to suggest that animals having moral behavior was the stupidest thing he'd heard all day! I can relate to that experience. One colleague told me years ago that surely I had better things to do with my time because animals simply could not be moral beings or display moral sentiments. They surely didn't know right from wrong and that was it, end of story. Clearly these nay-sayers were and are wrong and are beginning to find themselves in an ever-growing minority. Almost daily we learn about elephants, wolves, dogs, rodents, and many other animals who care for one another by displaying compassion and empathy and put others before themselves. We now know that mice and even chickens display empathy.
The Moral Lives of Animals is eye opening, original, wide-ranging, and ambitious book. There are four parts and fourteen chapters. Part I is concerned with where morality comes from. Peterson shows how morality can be understood as a gift of biological evolution. He is concerned with tracing evolutionary continuity and not inventing it where it doesn't exist and throughout the book does this in a careful and detailed way. Peterson offers a simple functional definition of morality: "The function of morality ... is to negotiate inherent serious conflict between self and others." (page 51) He notes that morality in animals could be homologous with human morality, having been derived from a common origin, and not merely analogous or due to coincidental similarities. Inherent in his definition are conflict and choice. Further, moral behavior isn't the same as niceness and doesn't necessarily promote egalitarianism. Animal can be fully moral rather than "pre-moral" or "proto-moral". As Jessica Pierce and I concluded in Wild Justice, we don’t need to use hesitation quotes when we talk about the moral behavior of animals. They have the real thing.
Parts II and III center on what morality is. Peterson argues that there are nonlinguistic rules that evolved in response to social conflict and attachments. Part II is concerned with the rules of morality in five different social situations, namely, authority, violence, sex, possession, and communication. Part III centers on attachments morality which includes mechanisms promoting cooperation and kindness.
Part IV is concerned with where morality is going. Here, Peterson envisions an increased importance for empathy that will serve nonhuman animals and human animals well. He hopes that in the future we will move towards "greater tolerance, higher wisdom, and a new condition of peace between humans and nonhumans like." (p. 22)
Peterson's diverse background leads him to take a refreshingly novel and wide-ranging view of animal moral behavior by anchoring his arguments using Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick in which Ahab, who lost his leg to an albino whale named Moby Dick, and his first mate Starbuck, have different perspectives on the cognitive and moral life of whales. Ahab believes Moby Dick is "alive, aware, and morally responsible" (pp. 14-15) and vows revenge. Ahab assumes what Peterson calls the First Way of thinking about animals - a "medieval vision of animals minds as intelligent entities constructed in a humanoid form - essentially underendowed human minds" (page 13) Starbuck, on the other hand, adopts the Second Way of thinking about animals in that he believes animals act from blind instinct and are not morally responsible for what they do. The Second Way of thinking is the Enlightenment vision often associated with French philosopher René Descartes according to which only humans have minds. Animals are alive and experience sensations but are basically machines, so animals not actually feel pain because they don't have mental experiences.
Peterson notes that both characters are wrong. Ahab, because Moby Dick is not responsible as would be a human and Starbuck because animals are not unfeeling things or objects. Peterson cleverly suggests triangulating these two views into a Third Way of thinking about animals that allows for the existence of animal minds but recognizing they are "alien minds", that is, alien from human minds. The Third Way looks for real similarity and genuine dissimilarity between human and animals minds. Alien does not mean lesser, just "imperfectly comprehensible" (p. 285) Humans are not above and apart from other animals. Skeptics can't resort to Peterson's First or Second Way. They’re too reductionistic and simplistic and fly in the face of what we now know about the emotional and moral lives of animals.
While Peterson writes about numerous different species, he also writes about this companion dogs Smoke and Spike. He notes of the relationship between himself and his dogs, "we are friends … in spite of evolutionary discontinuity and because of evolutionary continuity." (p. 19)
