Human Animal Life

Morality

What is the nature of murder, theft and deception? What is morality?

When a Skua forces a smaller bird to drop the fish in its beak and then swoops down and catches and eats it, we have a clear case of theft as well as examples of harassment and intimidation. When a black and yellow striped fly proves not to have a sting we have a clear case of deception; black and yellow patterns being warnings of hidden harm in insects and reptiles.

When thinking in these ways we are also aware that we are seeing the world through our own eyes standing on the lofty towers of morality. We think that morality is peculiarly human and that it is something that we have created. We know that murder, theft, deception and other actions; pointed to by other words; identify what we should not do. We also know that human beings do these things and that the references for many of these moral words trail out, in small ways at least, in all of our lives. Morality is ours alone and we can and should let all other animals off the hook. This view is entirely false and the understanding that ‘all of us do it and shouldn’t’ is corrosive of human affairs because it mistakes the nature of morality.

Taking their actions as their voice, we find that many social animals would disagree with the view that humans alone exhibit morality. Morality can only exist in social animals. The Skua and the black and yellow striped fly are not among them. It is created in the social world in which animals live and is expressed anew in every group. We can best understand it by looking more closely at these animals and at the development of our own children.

Theft, deception and their colleagues only exist when social animals indicate by their actions that they have identified an instance of an action taken by another animal in their group that we would refer to by using moral words. Morality breaks down into a collection of actions that individually attract the censure and hostility of the group.

Murder

Do new adult lions in a pride ‘murder’ or ‘kill’ the cubs? When is killing murder and when isn’t it? Murder might be described by the sentence, ‘murder is being aware that an animal of your species intended to and succeeded in taking the life of another member of your species’. Murder is actually described by the sentence ‘murder is being aware that an animal in your group intended to, and succeeded in taking the life of another member of your group’. It is the group that identifies killing as murder. Humans in particular have a complexity of groups and we commonly understand that ultimately all humans are in the same group. The first description only applies when a species acts as one group.

Murder can be hard to identify as ‘fighting/conflict/differences’ are fundamental to social animal interaction and extend into the most intense and richly intimate human relationships. For example, in the recent past in Papua, totally separate human groups killed one another and the individuals involved were not considered murderers by either their own or other groups. They were killers.

At the time of Mohammad’s young life in Mecca the circumstances of the city exposed the beginnings of the difference between killing someone and murdering them.

Mecca was unusual. Though, a place in the territory of a particular tribe other Bedouin used to keep their tribal totems there. It was accepted that they had a right of access. Trade and market activity had grown around this. In the context of its historic period Mecca had become a small city. Unlike many other cities there were no means of holding people to account for their actions. As a result, every person walking the street could be killed, raped and robbed, let alone cheated and abused. In order to survive and function everyone needed to be clear who their protector was and who protected the other people that they met. The protector would avenge you if anything happened to you.

The open groups of our nature had become closed and turned to face each other. Leaders, set within a number of strong kinship groups, now identified who was protected and who was not. If, however, you were killed by someone in your own group then the impact on the group would be considerable. Complex patterns of kinship and intimacy, and the feeling of being protected, helped and supported by these, would be shaken by threat and loss. The cohesion of the group would be undermined. The circumstances and motives of the killing would become an almost obsessive topic within the group. At the centre of this would be establishing intention. It is in this way that killing becomes murder.

What of fighting?

Try a little experiment. When lying in bed with your partner, and when friction and issues are not centre stage, stroke their upper arm. It should be clear that they have felt the emotion of satisfaction. After about twenty seconds, push your knuckle with a little force into their arm. They are likely to be puzzled and use the word hurt. You have not caused them harm but it will be evident that they are now conflicted between the caress and the assault. It will be clear that they feel annoyed or apprehensive.

We have seen how the registers of touch are the primary awareness of the boundary of our embodied life, of the space we move in and the ‘objects’ that we encounter. Not only do we use touch to guide the defence of our body but social animals use it to structure their encounters with each other. Remember that touch is also the primary ‘force’ behind intimacy. iIn social animal intimacy, picking nits is done gently. We should think of the caress as a form of touching each other’s bodies when resting i.e. lions resting making sure that their bodies are touching at least one other lion in their group. All social mammals hug together. When we see humans do it we say that it is for ‘emotional support’. When we see other animals doing it we say that it is in order to keep warm. In both cases it is primarily for intimacy and secondly for warmth. It is hard to see why lions resting and touching at the hottest time of the day should want to keep warm. Intimate touch is a direct continuation of the nurture on which the social world is built. In natural philosophy it is fundamental. Another living thing is within your embodied life boundary.

All social mammals fight each other. Each animal is also an individual and the ‘knuckle’ is as likely as the ‘caress’ particularly when food is needed. Social animals can run shared attention life models; such as co-operative hunting actions; in order to work together to find food and then use knuckle on each other in order to swallow what they individually need.

Putting intimacy and co-operation before food and taking this to the end (to the point of death) is the extreme sacrifice; to slowly and painfully die of starvation so someone else can eat.

Physically hurting members of your social animal group is common. It happens in many scenarios, such as in order to assert your own presence, hang on to your own food or in an attempt to stop an interruption or an assault. A fight is when the other animal starts using ‘knuckle’ as well. There is little chance of bodily damage where ‘knuckle’ is used to change the actions of another animal in your group. When the ‘other’ animal responds and uses ‘knuckle’, a fight begins. The chance of injury quickly accelerates. Given that in the natural environment even a minor injury can be life threatening it is biologically necessary that social animals find a way of minimising fighting. In order to avoid using ‘knuckle’ these actions have to be replaced by actions that warn that you are about to use it. If the animal on the receiving end does not want to fight then they move away. This is often reinforced by the aggressor pursuing.

A factor in informing fighting is the episodic and movement memories that the members of the group have about each other. Within these are life models of the strength, temperament and functioning of every member of the group set within a range of situations. These need constant updating and often ‘knuckle’ is needed in order inform the modeling. This makes for a very complex and changing social picture for highly evolved animals such as monkeys and us. In many animal groups they inform shared attention life models that create a status order among the members of the group. These models can be used by simpler animals. Status order helps to minimise fighting in general but makes status changing fights more violent. Fighting is most evident in conflict between males over the opportunity to mate with females. This can lead to the death of one of the combatants, a killing, yes, but where is the evidence of intention.  

When observing complex animals such as baboons, in open country with adequate food, it is striking that though they largely seem to be together, at the same time they are doing their ‘own thing’ – a picture of scattered contacts sprinkled among a gathering. These contacts would largely be made up of small ‘fights/threats’ when actions are interrupted (especially in relation to food), grooming, resting close together (with at least proximate touch) and shared gaze, sometimes followed by shared actions. Some of the latter directed at other baboons and some in order to explore threats and food opportunities.

In observing our human reference group in semi-arid Australia we would find a similar picture, except that we would see very little ‘knuckle’ and a new action. We would be most likely to see ‘knuckle’ activity among the independent but not yet mature males. This would also be true of the baboons. The new action would be the frequent rapid moving of their lips. Often they would stop what they were doing in order to look at each other ‘face to face’ while moving their lips. If we got nearer we would hear that they were making complex sounds and largely taking it in turns to do this.

Those who studied our aboriginal group were surprised by how much ‘knuckling’ took place and particularly how much it was used by women. The group least likely to use it were the mature males. All examples of human ‘knuckling’ would still occur a lot less than observed in baboons as a major benefit of language is that it includes conflict and conflict resolution reference modeling. This would minimise the need to cause each other physical hurt with the risk of harm. Mature males fighting would be serious and if it led to a death then the circumstances and the motives would be pored over across a very wide group. Was it intended or was it accidental? The killing would have social ramifications but if it was considered to be intentional (murder) then the effects on group intimacy and cohesion would be much greater.

We need to see the women’ s ‘knuckle’ actions (kicking being the most effective) as a measure of their equality. The culture did not accept males ‘knuckling’ women – one imagines that pushing and shoving (targeting balance) nevertheless occurred as a response to being hit. Men are protectors and generally have a stronger build than women. Cultures that oppress women often forbid them from hitting males, but allow fathers and husbands to assault them. Sadly such cultures are still with us today.

For animals, the interplay of intimate touch and actual and threatened physical assault create together the social world. Intimate touch begins the creation of the social world itself, and remains at its heart, but it is also a world of individuals who need ways to resolve conflicts.

From an existential point of view life is conflicted in its very nature. In many of this websites topics we find that every moment we live is the outcome of conflict resolution within our brain/body. It would be surprising, and take some kind of miracle, if the social world wasn’t itself deeply and constantly conflicted.

Theft

What of theft? In animal kingdom experience theft has only one form, the interruption of another animal’s action when this is focussed on an object followed by the removal of that object. In reality the objects in question are largely food but can be other, such as nest and bedding material and objects collected and displayed to attract a mate.

Observations indicate that when an animal has begun to eat, or has focussed on a food item with the ‘intention’ to eat (i.e. the brain modeling has, or is about to, switch the movement modeling on), aggression can be triggered when another animal attempts to take the food. This would apply to our selected aboriginal group and to all humans alive today. In the modern developed world we have ownership stickers on almost anything in both our man made and natural worlds. This does not apply to our selected aboriginal group. Conflict can arise over a wide range of objects. However there is not much of a cultural framework for this as there is only a weak sense of personal ownership. What would attract censure would be ‘disturbing the peace’ (acting in a way that creates conflict) and failing to observe the priority of intimacy over everything else.

Theft crosses species boundaries, ie a bird snatching an otter’s meal. More complex animals clearly focus attention on the thief. There are consequences even if these are not observable by others. The victim animal’s episodic memory will register the experience leading, for example, to more caution when the thief animal is around.

We began as an animal biologically dependent on non-food objects; namely the stone, leaf-bag and ‘spear’ group; it is likely that conflict arose around the use of these. Females may well have used leaf bags for collecting the tiny grass seeds making male and female use of this tool co-terminus. A lot of time would go into making the leaf bags and in finding straight sticks and the small stones that could be spliced into them. Chimpanzees take time to select tools and there can be tensions as they are being used, nevertheless this can be understood as ‘interruption of an activity’. Humans carried tools with them and were probably not alone among the hominids. It is not appropriate to place possession of this group of objects in the context of a material culture; nevertheless all ownership is built on the brain/body modeling of objects as extensions of the body. For early humans there was a more fundamental understanding, tools were group objects and essential for the survival of the group. By the way, do not harbor the idea that being dependent on an object is the mark of highly evolved animals. Think hermit crabs.

Deception

Deception exists as an outcome of evolution. Take as an example some flies surviving because they have triggered avoidance actions in an animal eyeing them as food. The triggering occurred because they had a vague likeness to harm carrying insects. Vague likeness is enough. See the life modeling topic. The breeding trend of the flies will favour those that most look like harmful species, resulting in the evolution of misleading black and yellow stripes. Deception can also evolve in the actions of animals, as in the ground nesting bird faced with a predator, who, while running away from the nest, acts as if they cannot fly because their wing is broken, even distorting their wing so that it looks broken.

The two fundamental benefits of being a social animal are reduced predation risk and the increased likelihood of finding food. Deception within the group is found in both these areas. Why? In the first area, an individual can avoid a ‘knuckling’ by other members of the group by turning their attention towards a non-existent predator. In the second area, you can eat more if you disguise the fact that you are eating. To do either of these acts as an animal is to threaten the very existence of the group.

False warnings of a predator, crying wolf, reduce the strength of the modeling that switches on actions to challenge predators, escape to safety and protect the young. The group and everyone in it, is more likely to be predated but especially the young. Social animals are kinship and friendship extensions of nurture where the young are nursed and given food. Sharing food remains at the very heart of all social animal life, including ours. This largely depends on keeping an eye on other members of the group; where are they, what are they eating and do they need any help to catch or dig out the food? To disguise this is to revert to individual foraging and personal survival. Dispersal follows and the breakdown of the group.

Let’s look at predator perception in more detail. Mistaken and over sensitive predator perception is the starting point for the development of false warnings. One of the most common examples of the effect of mistaken predator identification on the group is found in the behaviour of sparrows. Sparrows largely do everything as a group. If you order a bird box for sparrows you will not get a space for one family but three spaces build into one box for three families.

When feeding together you will suddenly see them take flight as a group and perch nearby. Shortly they return to feeding. They do this very frequently so much so that you wonder if the energy that they use in coming and going is replaced by what they eat. A larger bird, such as a pigeon, flying nearby will often trigger it. We are looking at a biological life model. It is made up of the visual perception of ‘big bird swooping’ triggering the movement model of flight. This is allied to the visual perception of a nearby bird flying (it need not be a sparrow)which also triggers the movement model of flight. The sparrowhawk was a major partner in this evolution. Sparrows do not have very complex brains so the perceptual model that they are using is broadly drawn, consistent with what we have found out about life modeling. It will result in many errors. This is the starting point for deception.

Some sparrows return to the food quicker than others. We would expect this to be a result of variation of nature and episodic memory. If the sparrows that tended to fly away first were also the sparrows who quickly returned then we could suspect deception. Though I think that deception is more common in the animal kingdom than we know at present, I doubt that a sparrow’s brain can do the necessary modeling. If sparrows did have this they would become very vulnerable as a group. Those sparrows that flew first and returned first would have a biological advantage and sparrows would increasingly have this modeling.

In all social animals, including spectacularly ourselves, and in all situations, shared attention life models are badly damaged by deception. No animal group can afford to tolerate it and survive as a group.

Instances of false alarms are registered by other members of the group as predator disappearance. Their own predator perception is over sensitive so there is no reason to develop the ability to recognise deception. We are interested in false alarms that coincide with being in trouble with other members of the group. This can be modeled by the brain. Baboons who have interrupted the actions of others, or have otherwise irritated them, can sometimes find that running away is not enough and pursuit follows. A predator alarm for a baboon involves suddenly standing up and looking in a fixed direction at the suspected predator. As soon as a baboon does this it triggers the same actions in all nearby members of the group. Some baboons will ‘sound the alarm’ when they are being chased. How do we know that this is not just a co-incidence of being chased with over sensitive predator perception? How do we know that it is deception?

Normally all other focussed attention stops for the chasing baboons when they see the alarm movements. This does not always happen for those chasing a suspected deceiver. They too stop, stand upright and look in the same direction. Some spend less time and effort looking than they would usually. They also glance at the animal that they were pursuing. As soon as this animal drops down they do not continue their own searching but drop down and chase it with renewed vigour; an example of identifying deception. The modeling of false predator’s does sometimes mean that the chasing ends but it often leads to more hurt than you would have suffered had you been caught in the original chase as your pursuers are now more angry. Emotion topic.

Disguising eating is probably more common in animals than we currently understand. Animal identification of it may be behind some of the conflict that we observe. Certainly conflict over food takes place alongside eating together in close proximity (sharing). There have to be brain/body models to account for this co-existence. Generally, friendship (establishing intimacy) between humans and chimpanzees is required in order to study them in the wild. In the original studies some interference in their natural lives took place largely in the form of feeding them. One of these involved a wooden box with a door on it. In order to study the chimpanzee’s ability there was some sort of catch. Bananas were placed in the box. The group tended to rely on one or two members who had mastered how to get into the box. They all arrived together and the bananas were shared out. On more than one occasion the following actions were observed. Bananas are placed in the box. In due course the chimpanzees arrive and a skilled member of the group masters the catch and slightly opens the box and looks in. They quickly close it, indicating that it is empty, and walk on, joined by the rest of the group. Shortly after, the box-opening chimpanzee returns and helps themselves to the bananas. In our terms the chimpanzee was not using mind. It was not ‘thinking’ about it. The brain modeling it was using was stunning. It would take a wealth of writing to try and describe it. The stakes for the chimpanzee were very high. Detection of the act by one or more of the group would weaken intimacy. This weakens the group but there is also a direct effect for the offending chimpanzee. Friendship is very important to chimpanzees, for example the dominant male chimpanzee is the one with the greatest support from the other mature males. Had the deception been discovered by one or more members of the group then it would have left a strong episodic memory with them.

Lying

Let us imagine that instead of chimpanzees the banana scenario was played out by humans. It would only take one human to see the act of deception for it to be soon known to the whole group thanks to language.

‘I followed you and saw you take the bananas out of the box’.

This challenge can be made individually or said in the presence of the group. What has been observed can also be passed on by word of mouth. However, language provides the ‘box-opening’ human with many ways of responding to being challenged.

‘I am sorry I should not have done it’. ‘Why did you do it’? This is where the ‘why’ question has its home, in language when examining each other. ‘I don’t know’. This is the best defence to the why question. OR ‘It is not as bad as it sounds. When I opened the box the first time I didn’t see the bananas’. ‘Why not, they are easy to see’? ‘I wasn’t concentrating and was thinking of something else’. ‘So why did you go back’? ‘I thought that I might have missed them and went back to check’. ‘When I saw you, you were eating them’. ‘I thought that the rest of you were too far away. Also I have hurt my left hand and couldn’t carry them easily so I ate them’. Is this the truth or is it a lie to hide the nature of the action? It is also possible that the verbal challenge is itself a lie. You would probably only be able to create the following potential action in language (thought - inner dialogue). I know how to socially damage him by saying that there were bananas in the box after all and that I saw him take them.

Being able to refer to our own and ‘other’ actions, makes human groups more cohesive providing that no one practices deception using language. Lying requires language to bring it into existence and is therefore specific to human beings. It is nevertheless encompassed by deception as it is a case of misleading by referring to the world in a way that contradicts your own experience and knowledge (sentences that you believe in). Believing and knowingi. In a physically located and shared attention group context, lies are hard to construct. In lying, there are also the matters of the strength of denial and of the significance of the lie and its intention; ‘no I have not got you a present’ (when you have), ‘the child that you want to beat up has gone home’ (when they haven’t).

In our natural state, kinship and intimacy were fundamental to the survival of every individual in the group. Strangers were rare. Deceive and lie to the people that you are intimate with and you will get a sense of our original moral condition. You will experience more conflict, encounter more hostility and find intimacy weakening. We call this weakening, loss of trust and the strengthening of intimacy the development of trust. This process is common to all social animals and is the core of the meaning cluster behind the word trust. We use the words ‘friendship’ and ‘trust’ to point to animal aspects of our nature, aspects that we can only in part refer to within language. Language is designed for promoting intimacy, thoughts that when expressed can bring us closer together. When engaging with what we should do and what we should not do, we need to keep our attention on actions and their consequences. We obscure the truth about actions by talking about them. What do they feel like? What sense do you have of them?

For animals, including ourselves, morality lies within the given group and consists of a collection of actions that individually attract the censure and hostility of other members of the group. This can clearly be seen in the development of our own children. There is no such condition as being born good where you naturally do the right thing. There is no such condition as being born bad where you naturally do the wrong thing. You are born as your own unique, embodied, individual/social member of the human species. You are born innocent, and ignorant of the ways of your human group.

Children have to learn more and more social acts, many with features specific to their families and groups. From a young age they are expected to adapt to different material environments and variations in human expectations. What you do at home you cannot do at the child minders but you can get away with even more at granny and grandads. When they start nursery as three year olds, each individual child is faced with a physical and social situation that finds them in a large group of children of roughly the same age and where their social actions are shaped by the adults who inhabit the physical space. In a moment we are going to look at some interesting observations about these children.

In addition to censure and hostility there is another way to learn both morality and the shape of other social actions. A child can act in a way that is followed by the displayed distress of an intimate adult; the adult shows apprehension/fear, loss/sadness or irritation/anger. We know that these expressed feelings weaken intimacy. They make babies distressed. The child will feel the weakening of intimacy and it is possible that they might desist from what they are doing and even possible that, after other similar encounters, they model the situation strongly enough in episodic memory to avoid the action in the future. In our knowledge base this would be described as empathy. However we have a problem. How does the child ‘know’ that it was their action that caused the displayed emotion? If the child models on the basis that they caused it they might have a brain model built on sand. Another problem is that we can deceive in the display of an emotion; an alternative type of sand to build the brain model on. Humans have yet another resource. As we saw with the bananas earlier; we can say that what the child did has made us upset. Upset is the word generally used and covers sadness and irritation/ anger. If it has made us anxious/fearful we use the word worried.

When the child acts and the adult says that they are upset and also displays the appropriate emotion and when the child can model all three within an episodic memory, then, they can learn by empathy. The problem with the empathy approach is that different individuals are upset and worried about different things. This is fine for interpersonal intimacy but bad for group intimacy. The group has to create an ethos of fairness and sharing together that embraces all the members. We have already seen that the knowledge base has established that females are generally better at interpersonal skills and males generally better at group maintenance skills. It would not surprise you then that the knowledge base has also found that girls tend to learn appropriate social actions through empathy and boys through censure and hostility (discipline).

The nursery enquiry:

Here is a list of some common social actions that will lead to the obvious displeasure of the adult inhabitants of the nursery:

1. Not putting the crayons and pencils back in their appropriate boxes after you have used them
2. Taking a toy from another child when they are playing with it
3. Dropping your coat on the floor as you come in
4. Pushing another child over in the outside play space
5. Spoiling what another child is making
6. Painting without putting an apron on
7. Saying that you did not hit a particular child when other children witnessed the act.
8. Taking someone else’ s drink

2 and 5 are interruptions of an animal’s actions and 4 is an assault. These actions create conflict in our nursery ‘animal’ group which in turn weakens the cohesion and shared intimacy of the group. 7 is an instance of lying and 8 is an example of theft. All of this group of social actions have nothing in common other than the fact that they threaten the cohesion of the group by creating conflict between individual members of the group. The only one that is particularly human is lying but as we have seen this is a version of animal deception. All of these selected numbered actions have a direct effect on another animal. Conflict does not just affect the children it also makes it difficult for the ‘responsible’ adults to keep the group together and calmly learning from the activities presented.

1, 3 and 6 are actions that have no direct effect on other children. The children themselves would not register them unless the adults made them social actions (shared attention life models) that they had to master.

The knowledge groups who take an interest in how children think about actions such as those listed above tend to describe the first group; 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8; as breaking moral rules and the second group; 1, 3 and 6; as breaking social rules.

What do we find when the nursery children are asked about these actions? Whatever enquiry strategy is used, those children who have only been in nursery for a term generally do not separate them into two groups. Broadly they treat them as being of equal import. The experienced nursery children who have been in the nursery for about eighteen months generally do separate them into two groups. They consider that the first group are more serious than the second. Boys are statistically better at making the distinction than girls. Again this does fit with our accumulating evidence and argument that males are more orientated towards group maintenance issues and skills. There is no evidence that the nursery adults aid the children in making the distinction. Observations show that they act, talk and display emotion in broadly the same way for all the listed child actions.

The children themselves experience the effects of the actions on the cohesion of their own group and model them accordingly. They do not need a moral universe, or adults, to point this out. I personally would like to throw my coat on the floor, not bother where the used crayons have gone and get paint all over my clothes, the floor and anything else in the vicinity. I am sure many of you would be happy to join me in these activities. You would have a very different reaction if I expressed a desire to snatch objects from other people, push them over, spoil what they are doing, hit them then deny it, and take objects that they have ownership of.

How do we honour the chasmic difference in our social actions between those with an animal moral foundation and those based only on shared attention life models? We have established that humans can create these endlessly with endless content. In all cases the way that the humans participate can move from ‘this is how we join in’ to ‘these are the rules’. As we can see with the nursery adults, it is authority modeling that obscures and confuses by mixing moral social actions with participatory social actions and creating ‘a rule is a rule’.

We have detailed earlier the inexactness of language. Nevertheless the elegant simplicity and generality of core grammar (biological grammar prior to the development of any given language) and the stick-ability of random speech/sound sequences used as fillers (words) makes it a robust and rich reference medium. Do not however expect it to have anything to do with truth. Its wanderings are as infinite as space. We cannot get beyond shared stories and shared beliefs (commitments to thoughts). We need to be as interested as the ancient Greeks were in the practise of philosophy, as opposed to studying the thoughts of a long list of philosophers. Socrates (Plato) states that the art of debate refers to ‘everything that is said’ – we can extend this to everything that is thought - and it is to be governed by an attempt to refer to the truth.

To win debates (persuade) with little or no interest in the truth of the arguments leads to ‘a harvest of bad outcomes’. Socrates was specifically concerned about lawyers (orators) in the courts and how putting persuasion before truth leads to injustice. In the variable and unstable worlds of human experience and human language, among the greatest threats that we face are cheating (an issue for other social animals as we have seen) and lying (a by product of language use). As Socrates pointed out, it is easier to pay attention to the truth when speaking using words where we understand by them the same thing (iron or silver) but much harder to do when using words where there is no clear agreement about what they are referring to (justice, fairness, virtue and simplicity). He suggests that in communicating (and by extension, thinking) we should all be aware when we are using words where there is naturally no clear agreement about what they mean.