CA✩ FORUM ON ANTHROPOLOGY IN PUBLIC Perspectives on de Waal’s Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved

disinterested level. It is only when we make general judgements of how anyone ought to be treated that we can begin to speak of moral approval and disapproval. It is in this specific area, famously symbolized by Smith’s (1937 [1759]) “impartial spectator,” that humans seem to go radically further than other primates. There is no doubt that this distinction touches on something that we all recognize and value. Impartiality in the face of threat is the essence of heroism. So why not insist on impartiality as the essence (if we must have an essence) of morality? Yet there are two dangers in this definition. First, by pitting emotion against principle one may fall into an emotionmorality opposition that de Waal is committed to defeating. Second, one may invite an evolutionary dichotomy between species, precisely the opposite of the Darwinian emphasis on continuity that de Waal vociferously argues for. As a consequence, de Waal has to draw a conceptual distinction between emotional morality and cognitive morality and thus just as insuperable an evolutionary distinction between apes and monkeys as had previously been drawn between humans and all other animals. These distinctions are standard in current psychology and have impeccable pedigrees (and well-established challenges, e.g., Gilligan 1977). But there is as much reason to be suspicious of the Platonic divide between cognition and emotion as there is to be wary of yet another Rubicon dividing species in evolution or stages in ontogeny. How, then, does one deal with this tension between the partial and the impartial? John Dewey (1961 [1916], 502) expressed this relation rather neatly: One wholly indifferent to the outcome does not follow or think about what is happening at all. From this dependence of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the consequences of what goes on, flows one of the chief paradoxes of thought. Born in partiality, in order to achieve its tasks it must achieve a certain detached impartiality. The really difficult question (for psychology at least) concerns not the relative prominence of partiality and impartiality but rather how to manage the relation between them. Do we overcome partiality and dismiss it, or should there be a balance? Can impartiality ever be genuine if there is no partiality to give it meaning and value? Similarly, the balance between engagement and detachment is also problematic in the development of social cognition: without engagement, detached “theory” has no meaning, and without detachment, engagement has no capacity to name. The issue, in relation to morality, is this: if we cannot assume a one-directional movement from partiality to impartiality, perhaps we should be looking not only for continuity but also for simultaneity (and balance between the two) in evolution. Most of the objections from the commentators in Primates and Philosophers are, in fact, that de Waal’s distinctions do not go far enough or sufficiently recognize the uniqueness of human morality. The idea of normative self-government—of choice according to principles or norms—keeps emerging as a defining feature of what we might choose to call “moral.” Christine Korsgaard, for instance, skillfully distinguishes between actions that happen to be moral and those that are intended to be moral, choosing good because it is known to be good (p. 112): We do not merely have intentions, good or bad. We assess and adopt them. We have the capacity for normative selfgovernment, or, as Kant called it, “autonomy.” It is at this level that morality emerges. The morality of your action is not a function of the content of your intentions. It is a function of the exercise of normative self-government. The prerequisite is self-consciousness and skill at conceptual objectification, that is, knowing not just how but that one is to be moral. To this extent, the argument is wholly cognitivist: the essence of morality lies in thinking morally, not in doing or feeling so. The emphasis on cognition over emotional and motivated action is as theoretically problematic in discussions about morality as it is in discussions about social intelligence (Reddy 2007): for both evolution and development, if intelligence matters, it can only really matter in action (Baldwin 1909; Dewey 1910). The danger of exclusive reliance on moral cognition or the principles underlying action is particularly evident in moral self-deception (Wilson, n.d.). Even though arguments against de Waal’s “veneer” terminology—Philip Kitcher argues that it is too easy a position to demolish, and Korsgaard hints that it is too neglectful of the distinctive and un-veneerlike way of being in the world that human action gives us—are serious and important, they do not diminish the value of his contribution. In using this metaphor, however flawed, he has struck an empirical blow for process in the development of psychological phenomena and a conceptual one against our penchant for simplistic dichotomization.