Re-framing the debate over animal morality (original) (raw)

Is morality uniquely human or does morality exist in at least some non-human animals? Are animals full-fledged moral creatures or do they merely exhibit proto-morality-evolutionary building blocks or precursors to morality, but not quite the genuine article? Such questions, prompted by remarkable advances in empirical research into the social and emotional lives of non-human animals, have aroused much recent interest amongst scientists, philosophers, and in the popular media, not least for their apparent bearing on questions of human uniqueness, evolution, and the ethical status of animals. The debate over animal morality has produced many valuable contributions and stimulated new areas for empirical and theoretical research. However, focusing on these questions has led researchers to talk at cross-purposes and down some unproductive paths (Fitzpatrick, 2017). The problem concerns the terms "morality" and "moral". One initial source of confusion stems from the fact that many have interpreted the question of whether morality exists in animals to amount to asking whether animals act in ways that we might judge to be good according to our own normative standards-chimpanzees consoling friends who have lost a fight, rats helping a drowning companion. But, Joseph Stalin was surely a moral creature, even if we don't judge his deeds kindly, and we typically regard resentment as a moral attitude, even if we don't think it good to resent others. So, it seems better to ask whether animals have a moral psychology : mental states and processes that are somehow about, or connected with, things that are of moral significance. On that question, researchers have ostensibly divided themselves into three camps: the human exceptionalists, who hold that nothing like a genuine moral psychology can be found in other species, the anti-exceptionalists, who hold that core features of a moral psychology are definitely shared with many other species, and the building-block theorists, who hold that at least some species possess elements of human moral psychology, but not the full thing. However, the disagreement between these camps stems from their endorsing different definitions of what it is to have a moral psychology. Korsgaard (2006) is an exceptionalist because she ties our moral psychology to a kind of self-reflection referred to as "normative guidance", widely