It occurred to me in reading the arguments presented by Arner and Fuentes that my own biography as a scientist almost inevitably comes into play in terms of my most formative years of training. The methodologies presup-posed as adequate for the task differ in standard theological or biological anthropology; for the former, close attention to primary sources is the gold standard, while, for the latter, verifiably observed evidence is critical. Both, however, are either explicitly or implicitly creating a narrative about what it is to be human.
Fuentes’ narrative is one with which I have a great deal of sympathy. But as a scientist, he tries to see morality in terms that could in principle be measured and observed. The difficulty of doing that in any satisfactory way makes it hard to come up with agreed notions of what morality is. Where there are some broad agreements, such as a prohibition of homicide, there are still variants. Naming wisdom, therefore, as a category that is amorphous but more specific than morality seems to be a step in the right direction, especially in the relational manner in which Fuentes perceives morality.
Arner, for his part, provides a robust theological warrant for seeking wis-dom through the contemplation of not only God but also nature. Though we three are still refining our depictions of wisdom, this conversation is an improvement on the current muddle concerning the evolution of morality.
Fuentes’ view of moral capacities as emergent in human communities, and representing a decidedly ‘human pattern,’ certainly in some respects makes sense to me. It becomes almost impossible to avoid comparative rhet-oric when studying the social lives of other animals. Speaking of animal mo-rality is an experimental thesis, rather than something more solid, a heuris-tic tool that might tell us something interesting about animal behavior. On that basis, it is better to look at specific aspects, such as justice, and probe those21. But I firmly agree with Fuentes that basal morality approaches such as advocated by de Waal are likely to be misguided, not least because they are still liable to lead to demeaning attitudes towards animal social worlds.
It is better, perhaps, to acknowledge important distinctions rather than opt for a pure ‘ethic of continuity’ towards other animals (for a Thomistic argu-ment for an ‘ethic of continuity,’ see Berkman 2015).
21 Elsewhere I have argued that wild justice cannot readily be put on a comparative scale with human justice, but the interaction between human justice and what looks some-thing like justice to us in animal communities is important (Deane-Drummond 2015).
In other words, our social worlds are interlaced with numerous others.
De Waal avoids this issue by stressing, as Arner so clearly articulates, the
‘good natured’ aspects of primate behavior. But I am less sure, compared with Arner, that de Waal is quite as confident in the root goodness of pri-mates. De Waal is prepared, for example, to talk about aggression in chim-panzees and other violent acts (de Waal 2007). His intention is to generate a narrative that corrects misguided earlier models of the biological primacy of selfishness and what he views as its theological correlates. But here an ana-lytical problem arises: What does it really mean to be good or bad? What is good for a (common) chimpanzee will be different for a bonobo, and differ-ent from a human. We can expect variations dependdiffer-ent on captivity states and cultural and geographical communities right across the board of dif-ferent species.
Arner delves into Calvin’s corpus to show his understanding of human nature is not as universally pessimistic as de Waal thinks it to be. At the same time, I wonder how far de Waal can be criticized for naming Calvin in this light. Peter Harrison, who is a renowned scholar at the interface of the history of theology and science, makes the following comment about Calvin:
Total depravation, in this context, means that no faculty of the human mind – will, imagination, or intellect – retained its prelapsarian perfection. Calvin thus echoed Lu-ther’s sentiments about the corruption of the human intellect following the Fall, agree-ing that the ancients had typically overestimated the powers of the human mind (Har-rison 2007, 59).
Perhaps the problem in this case, as Arner also hints at, is that de Waal has not appreciated fully the Christian narrative of perfection that precedes the Fall. Arner also re-coups Calvin’s doctrine of natural law. He believes Cal-vin’s theology has something significant to contribute to the evolutionary study of morality. But the accusation that de Waal has misread Calvin may not make much difference to de Waal and to argue for an alternative based on Calvin is unlikely to be successful in convincing de Waal, even if it will be encouraging to some theologians.
Given his agnosticism regarding the internal lives of nonhuman animals, I am not surprised Arner questions the more experimental ideas I have elabo-rated, such as inter-morality. But a few issues need to be cleared up as part of this discussion. In the first place, inter-morality does not need to imply that there are no other ways of conceiving morality, or that human moral responsibility is simply a factor of that inter-moral state without remainder.
Nor do I suggest that the closer the entanglements between humans and other creatures, the higher the moral status of those animal agents. So bac-teria living symbiotically in the gut are not to be confused as having a similar
moral status to domesticated animals. Such creatures are still morally con-siderable. The gradations of moral sophistication I allow for do attempt to acknowledge differences between humans and other creatures according to degree, regardless of their respective intimacy with humans. But the point is to try and get away from comparative rhetoric and view the emergence of what eventually comes to be counted as moral judgments, like other complex phenomena, as an interacting system.
Treating other creatures and animals in particular as part of the same in-tegral system with us means animals are less likely to become pure instru-ments for human pleasure. And we might even pause before deciding to eradicate our gut flora. In other words, it is more likely to make particular animals morally considerable. I fully admit this is not sufficient as an ac-count of human morality; it is just one piece in the evolutionary narrative that I think is worth flagging up. How far and to what extent those other animals, including domesticates, might display characteristics that remind us of our own morality is relevant in as much as our own response to those others is likely to be shaped by our own perceptions of what is going on in their minds. It is only much later in human history that we have come to challenge our basic inclination to think of other animals as having inten-tions, which for centuries was presupposed.
Practical aspects of what this might look like are best worked out by mov-ing on from a consideration of what morality looks like in general terms to much more specific instances of what it means to express particular forms of moral behavior, such as compassion, wisdom, empathy, or justice in complex inter-species communities. Yet here, I would concede, there is a mutuality of response. Compassion shown by humans towards animals reverberates towards behavior to other humans. We live in a multispecies commons, and contemporary detachment from that insight has blinded our sense of moral responsibility for those others.
Due consideration of the importance of other creatures for the develop-ment of human morality has its own religious history. Thomas Aquinas, for example, had no hesitation in this respect, and, like the author of Prov. 6:6–8, considered that the way of the ant did indeed bring insights into practical wisdom or prudence. So, in his discussion of sham prudence, he speaks of the vigilance of the ant that provides for humans an imitandum (literally, for us to imitate or follow as example; Aquinas 1973, q. 55, a. 7). While it is true Thomas still managed to hold to an instrumental view of other animals, his portrait of them as capable of teaching something important to humans about how to live a moral life is significant, since it reinforces the possibil-ity of something like inter-moralpossibil-ity being supported by traditional sources.
Space does not permit a discussion of other examples of moral exemplarism in Thomas.
Finally, in commenting on patterns of dominance among macaques, Fuentes indicates that he is not prepared to name this as social justice. The-ologically, the most realistic tradition that traces lines of continuity but also striking discontinuity is that of natural law. For that, an Aristotelian framing of what justice requires, such as the Thomistic one, is the most helpful, but a full discussion of that is outside the scope of this short response (for a fuller discussion, see Deane-Drummond 2015b). I do agree, with Fuentes, that exploring specific elements of what morality is about is much more fruitful.
Perhaps that marks another case for an attempt, at least, to discuss the evo-lution of wisdom as we do in this journal issue.