Minds and Morals

Extract

Humans have a long-standing fascination with how other animals might see the world. Our curiosity about our own mental lives extends easily to other species, especially when their actions are similar to our own. The perennial question, of course, is whether our perception of a mind in another species is simply a projection of our own thoughts and feelings or whether we are perceiving something that truly exists.

For René Descartes, the answer was notoriously simple: Lacking souls, nonhuman animals were mere automatons with no reason, rationality, or mental life. (It should be noted that Descartes was writing at a time when clockwork mechanisms had only just been invented, and there is a sense in which his comparison was meant to invite wonder and awe—not to denigrate, as we assume now.) Darwin rejected this Cartesian assessment, arguing that the difference between humans and other species was one of degree, not of kind. In TheDescent of Man (1871), Darwin applied his theory of evolution explicitly to humans, tracing the origins of human behavior and psychology to our primate ancestors and beyond. This stance was taken further by George Romanes, Darwin's friend and protegé, who argued that it was possible to use an introspective assessment of one's own mind to infer the mental states of other animals by using a method called double induction. The rise of behaviorism in the early twentieth century brought another pendulum swing, and the attribution of invisible mental states and emotions to animals was considered scientifically dubious, if not outright heresy. As the end of the twentieth century approached, a reaction against behaviorism gained momentum, heralded by Donald Griffin's book The Question of Animal Awareness (1976), in which the mental life of animals was unabashedly reintroduced to comparative psychology by direct analogy with our own. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, studies of the human-like nature of animal cognition have become something of a boom industry, with demonstrations of everything from grief in chimpanzees (Anderson et al. 2010) to charades in orangutans (Cartmill and Byrne 2007) to “counterespionage” in scrub-jays (Dally et al. 2010).