Chapter 4
We do not consider animals as moral beings. But do you think that animals consider us as moral beings? An animal which had the power of speech once said: “Humanity is a prejudice from which we animals at least do not suffer.”
—Nietzsche1
Hashizume Aihei was a soldier in the 6th Infantry Division of the imperial Japanese army. On March 8, 1868, Hashizume’s division was stationed in the seaside town of Sakai (near Osaka) when soldiers from a French warship anchored in the harbor—the Dupleix—came ashore. This was only a year after the start of the Meiji Restoration in Japan, a transition from a feudal system ruled over by shoguns (military dictators) to a central imperial government that, for the first time in centuries, permitted Westerners onto Japanese soil. It was the first time the townspeople of Sakai had seen a foreigner, and they were quite dismayed when the French soldiers began casually sauntering through their sacred temples and flirting with the locals. The French sailors’ behavior was exactly what you’d expect of a nineteenth-century Western seafarer on shore leave, but the Japanese considered it a disgusting breach of decency. Hashizume and his men were ordered to persuade the French soldiers to go back to their boats, which was nigh impossible given the language barrier. Frustrated, the Japanese soldiers took action, grabbing and restraining one by binding his hands. Thinking this was the start of a confrontation, the French fled toward their boats, but one stole a Japanese military flag as he ran past. The Japanese flagbearer, a firefighter named Umekichi, ran after the French flag thief and split his head open with an ax. In retaliation, the French began shooting their pistols at Umekichi. Hashizume and his fellow soldiers drew their rifles and returned fire. The French were vastly outnumbered and outgunned, having intended only to explore the town (and accost local women). They were wholly unprepared for battle. After a brief volley of bullets, the Japanese had killed sixteen French soldiers.
Given the new and still precarious relations between them, diplomats from both sides were quick to quiet tempers, preventing further bloodshed. The French insisted that the Japanese military be held accountable for the deaths. They demanded an official apology, $150,000 USD in compensation, and the execution of twenty of the Japanese soldiers responsible for the massacre.
All seventy-three soldiers involved in the incident were interrogated, with twenty-nine men admitting that they had fired their weapons. All twenty-nine were willing to be executed in honor of their emperor. Since the French diplomats had asked for only twenty, the soldiers went to a temple where they drew straws to determine who would die. Hashizume made the cut. The nine soldiers who didn’t make it were disappointed. They protested their fate, demanding to be executed alongside Hashizume and their fellow soldiers. Their request was denied.
It’s at this part of the story where the question of what the correct moral path is depends entirely on your cultural background.
Hashizume and the other soldiers condemned to death accepted—even embraced—their fate, but they did not agree that they had violated any military code. After all, the French had fired first. What they wanted was an altered sentence: to die by ritual suicide—seppuku—instead of being executed. Doing so would elevate them to the status of samurai—the ultimate goal of any foot soldier. They were granted this request, which, in the eyes of the Japanese authorities, was a chance to surreptitiously humiliate the French and rain honor—not retribution—onto their condemned soldiers.
On March 16, 1868, Hashizume and the nineteen others were dressed in ceremonial white hakama and black haori and carried on palanquins (fancy covered litters) accompanied by hundreds of soldiers to a Buddhist temple. They were provided a last meal of fish and sake. Dignitaries from both nations were seated across from where seppuku would take place. Among them was the commander of the Dupleix, the fantastically named Abel-Nicolas Georges Henri Bergasse du Petit-Thouars, the senior French official on hand to verify that the Japanese would hold up their end of the deal.
One by one, the soldiers came forward where they calmly knelt on a tatami mat and plunged their sword into their belly, severing the superior mesenteric artery in their abdomen. While in agony, they bowed their heads and were then beheaded by their assistant. Seppuku is an ancient practice formalized over the course of seven hundred years of samurai history. This is the first time it had been witnessed by a non-Japanese person, and du Petit-Thouars was, to say the least, shocked. According to some accounts, du Petit-Thouars stood repeatedly during the ceremony, overcome by how impossibly calm these men were as they disemboweled themselves. Hashizume was twelfth in line and, just as he was about to begin seppuku, du Petit-Thouars demanded that the ceremony be stopped, decrying that the debt had been paid. He then gathered the remaining French dignitaries and hastily retreated to their ship.
For Hashizume, this was a huge dishonor. He was being denied a righteous death—a chance to bring honor on himself and his emperor. Whereas du Petit-Thouars considered the stay an act of mercy, it was, for Hashizume, precisely the opposite. The remaining nine samurai were told, a few days later, that du Petit-Thouars had petitioned that their death sentences be revoked. This was such a blow to Hashizume that, upon hearing the news, he bit through his tongue in hopes that he might bleed to death. For Hashizume and the other men, the mercy shown by du Petit-Thouars was a fate worse than death.2
Let’s consider the moral quandaries this story evokes. Was it justified in the first place for the French to demand executions as payment for the killing of their soldiers? Is the eye-for-an-eye system moral? Or are state-sanctioned executions inherently barbaric and amoral? Was du Petit-Thouars being merciful when he halted the ceremony? If so, merciful in whose eyes? Certainly not to the Japanese soldiers spared. Is honor by suicide an anachronistic moral code? As this story shows, answers to these moral questions vary depending on whom you ask, where they are from, and what century it is. Morality, while not necessarily wholly arbitrary, is largely culturally determined.
The fact that sociocultural and historical context has such an enormous influence on what we consider right or wrong behavior suggests that our moral sense is not a monolithic code bestowed upon us by external, supernatural forces. It appears more like a set of inherited prescripts that get tweaked by culture. If that’s true, then our capacity for morality is something that evolved like any other cognitive trait. At least, that’s what it looks like to scientists studying animal behavior. The primatologist Frans de Waal has published many amazing books on the subject of social complexity in animals, and has popularized the idea of the bottom-up approach to the evolution of human morality. This proposes that human morality (including religiosity) is not handed down to us by god(s). Nor is it derived exclusively from high-level thinking about the nature of right and wrong. It is instead a natural outcropping (shaped by evolution) of behavior and cognition that is common to all social animals. “The moral law is not imposed from above or derived from well-reasoned principles,” writes de Waal in The Bonobo and the Atheist, “rather it arises from ingrained values that have been there since the beginning of time.”3
Consider, for example, how other primate species fueled by ancient, ingrained values would handle social conflict reminiscent of the Sakai incident. Such as the stump-tailed macaque, an old-world monkey that lives across the sea from Japan in southeast Asia. Like most primates, conflict is a normal part of their social world. Fights determine who’s in charge and where each sits on the social ladder. Stump-tailed macaques live in groups of up to sixty individuals, with the alpha male being the main protector of the group, and the one who gets exclusive rights to mate with the females and sire offspring. Alpha males are occasionally challenged by younger males and must assert their dominance. Imagine, then, a hypothetical scenario where a young male has wandered over to where the alpha male is busy grooming a female. The young male sits down and starts running his fingers through the female’s fur, looking for mites. Given his status, it’s the alpha who has priority for grooming this female, so this intrusion simply won’t stand. The alpha reprimands the precocious young male by smacking him upside the head. In order to make amends, the young male turns around and presents his hindquarters to the alpha male—wiggling his bottom near his face. The alpha recognizes this is an act of contrition, and grabs hold of the young male’s bottom, hugging and holding on to it for a few moments. This is a signal that their relationship has been restored and all is well. The lesson here being that both animals knew that some sort of rule had been violated, and something had to be done to clarify who was in charge.4
Social animals (like macaques) live by codes that dictate how they should and should not behave within their social worlds. Scientists call these codes animal norms. Humans have norms that guide our actions, too, as we will learn. But humans also have additional codes that guide our actions in the form of morals. Unlike norms, morals tell us not just that we should behave a certain way, but why we should. Hashizume believed that he should perform seppuku because it honors the emperor and would allow him to die a samurai, for example. Du Petit-Thouars believed he should halt the execution because it was creating unnecessary suffering. Unlike norms, which are unspoken rules operating in the background, moral positions have been explicitly considered, evaluated, and decided upon by either the individual, society/culture, or perhaps even our gods.
This chapter is dedicated to showing how the human cognitive skills that we’ve encountered so far in this book—like why specialism, death wisdom, theory of mind—have molded the human moral sense from the clay of animal normativity. But I will also show that it is in fact animals that usually hold the ethical high ground despite lacking the capacity for full-blown human moral thinking. You see, human moral reasoning often leads to more death, violence, and destruction than we find in the normative behavior of nonhuman animals. Which is why human morality, as I will argue, kind of sucks.
Consider how the Sakai incident might have been resolved with macaque-style restorative justice. Imagine the French acknowledging that it was the Japanese who had a right to protect their village due to their alpha-male-like status, and that it was du Petit-Thouars who would need to atone for his troops’ poor behavior while on shore leave. As the samurai seated around the outdoor pavilion looked on, du Petit-Thouars, dressed in military regalia, would walk over to a kneeling Hashizume and squat in front of him with his keister in the air. Hashizume would then grab du Petit-Thouars’s bottom and hold it tightly in his arms for a few minutes while everyone in the crowd nodded along with appreciation. Nobody would have to die. There would be no concept of honor or politically motivated retribution. Only reconciliation, and the heartwarming image of a samurai hugging a Frenchman’s bottom.
Bottoms up
All animals, including humans, appear to live and die by implicit, unexamined, and unspoken rules. Scientists and philosophers use the word norms to label the implicit rules determining which behaviors are allowed or expected within an animal’s social world. The philosophers Kristin Andrews and Evan Westra at York University use the term normative regularity to describe the kind of norm-based system that governs animal societies, which they define as “a socially maintained pattern of behavioral conformity within a community.”5
These patterns of conformity that Andrews and Westra highlight are readily apparent to anyone who spends time watching animals. My chickens, for example, have clear patterns of behavior concerning which of them gets first access to the spaghetti that I throw over their fence. Shadow, who’s far up the pecking order, is always the first one to grab any food I toss over. Dr. Becky, on the other hand, is near the bottom of the social order, and will hover near the outskirts of the group. If Dr. Becky should try to muscle her way in to grab some spaghetti before her turn, she will get pecked by Shadow. Dr. Becky will have violated a norm about who gets to eat first. My chickens have a system for determining what each other should and should not do when it comes to eating first (and the consequences of violating those norms) to maintain patterns of conformity (i.e., the pecking order) for the group.
Westra explained to me by email that norms are not synonymous with rules since “in practice, it’s pretty hard to tell what rule—if any—an animal is actually following when it behaves a certain way,” and that “a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists actually think that feeling is a more central part of social norms than actually having rules.” When norms are violated, there are often consequences in the form of negative emotions (for both the violator and the violated), and sometimes active punishment. Animals feel pressure to conform to norms in the form of anxiety or discomfort or even anger if a norm is violated. Norm violations usually result in behaviors that help reestablish the status quo to make those negative emotions go away, like Shadow pecking Dr. Becky, or the bottom-holding reconciliation technique favored by macaques. The pressure that animals feel to conform to norms, and the consequences they experience for violating them in the form of negative emotions, is what maintains the social structure for all animal societies.
Animals like chickens do not need much in the way of complex cognition for these social norms to both crop up and guide their actions through negative emotions. Chickens do not need theory of mind in order to guess what the other chickens might know about the pecking order. Nor do my chickens need causal inference to ruminate on the reasons why Dr. Becky should wait to eat last, and whether this is fair or just. Most norms work like this for animals; patterns of behavior guided by emotions that are otherwise unconsidered. In fact, most norms work like this for humans, too.
Human behavior is governed by norms that we internalize but that are not taught to us explicitly. Because they are unexamined and untaught, and thus not framed by ideas of good/bad or right/wrong, they are not elevated to the level of morals. Consider the norm involved with whether it’s acceptable to wipe someone else’s face. Chances are you live in a society where it would be unacceptable to walk up to a stranger on the street with a napkin in your hand and wipe food from the corner of their mouth. This is a rather intimate behavior that we reserve for our children and loved ones and maybe a close friend, but not at all something we do with strangers. No one taught you this, yet you respect this rule all the same. And chances are you had never even thought or read about this face-wiping rule before now, proving that you had internalized the rule before I even mentioned it. You would simply feel uncomfortable trying to wipe a stranger’s face with a napkin. That’s the classic nature of a norm: an unspoken rule guiding your behavior by manipulating your emotions.
There are many types of emotions lurking in the minds of animals (including humans) that help generate normative behavior. And some are far more complex than just feeling uncomfortable.6 Consider the emotion of equity. When scientists scanned the brains of people asked to make a decision about distributing food to hungry children, regions of the brain involved in emotional response—the insular cortex—were activated when food was distributed unfairly.7 “Given the involvement of the insular cortex in emotions and fairness judgments,” lead author Ming Hsu told ABC News, “we conclude that emotions are underlying equity judgments.”8 In other words, equity and fairness are not high-level moral judgments in the human brain, but emotion-driven norms lurking in the periphery of our consciousness. Which is why it’s no surprise that we find equity and fairness present in the minds of other animals.
Perhaps the most famous experiment showing the presence of fairness in animals was conducted by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal. They tested a group of capuchin monkeys for their sensitivity to social inequality by offering them different food rewards for completing the same task. In his 2011 TED Talk, de Waal played a video for the audience that showed two female monkeys (Lance and Winter) in side-by-side cages. A researcher places a rock in Lance’s cage, which she hands back to the researcher, receiving a slice of cucumber as a reward. The researcher then places a rock in Winter’s cage, which she hands back and receives a grape as a reward. Capuchins vastly prefer grapes to cucumbers, and Lance watches this exchange with interest. The researcher again places a rock in Lance’s cage and again gives Lance a cucumber in return. Lance tastes it, realizes it is a cucumber and not a grape, and then throws it violently back at the researcher. She then bangs angrily on the table and rattles her cage. This is evidence that Lance felt as if it was unfair that she was given the lesser food reward for the same task. Lance was responding to the violation of a fairness norm.
This, however, does not mean that Lance necessarily has a sense of morality. Clearly, a sense of fairness leading to moral codes is the bedrock upon which human justice and legal systems are built. It is what drove the French and Japanese to behave the way they did during the Sakai incident. But a subconscious notion of fairness is but a shadow of the kind of moral complexity found in, for example, the samurai code. “This is because sentiments do not suffice,” argues de Waal. “We strive for a logically coherent system and have debates about how the death penalty fits arguments for the sanctity of life, or whether an unchosen sexual orientation can be morally wrong. These debates are uniquely human. This is what sets human morality apart: a move toward universal standards combined with an elaborate system of justification, monitoring, and punishment.”9
Unlike animals, humans have formal, explicit rules for “right” and “wrong” with elaborate and well-considered justifications. And, unlike animals, we are constantly adjusting what we consider right and wrong as our cultures and societies evolve. We derive these formal ideas from philosophical and religious discussions about the nature of morality and ethics. Consider the many reasons we can give for why it’s wrong to eat pigs. A Judeo-Christian religious leader might, for example, argue that it is wrong to eat pigs because the Bible considers them an “unclean” animal.10 An abolitionist philosopher—one that argues that all animal use of any kind is inherently wrong—might argue that it’s wrong to eat pigs because sentient nonhuman animals have an inherent right to not be treated as property. A lawmaker might decide that eating pigs is fine, but only if they have been slaughtered at a sanctioned abattoir by a licensed butcher, and that the meat had been processed according to relevant health codes. All of these moral and legal systems denoting right and wrong (and the definitions of right and wrong themselves) depend largely on the human capacity to hold these ideas in our conscious minds, and formalize them via the medium of language.
How, then, did Homo sapiens create our moral system from the normative systems we find in other animals? Are cognitive skills like language necessary? In his book A Natural History of Human Morality, the developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello describes human morality as “a form of cooperation” that emerged as humans “adapted to new and species-unique forms of social interaction and organization,” resulting in Homo sapiens becoming an “ultracooperative primate.”11 For Tomasello, the evolution of this cooperation-based morality did not initially rely on language as much as it did the precursors of theory of mind. He imagines a period in our evolutionary history—predating the appearance of our ancestors we saw around Lake Baringo in Chapter 1—when ancient hominids started doing something novel: hunting together in pairs. To hunt with a partner requires an understanding that the other person has a goal that is the same as yours (e.g., kill an antelope). This understanding (called joint intentionality) where you understand the goals of another creature is a precursor to theory of mind (which gives you an understanding of beliefs and not just goals). There is evidence that some nonhuman species—like chimpanzees—engage in hunting practices that involve joint intentionality along these lines.12 In Tomasello’s imagined scenario, a sense of “we” emerges from these scenarios where each partner had clear expectations for how the other partner ought to act in order to collaborate and hunt the antelope. Rules and norms begin to crop up helping us determine, for example, the correct way to divvy up the meat after a kill so both members of the “we” are fairly rewarded for their contribution to the hunt.
Once humans began gathering in larger groups 100,000 years ago, the next phase of human moral evolution began: the transition from joint intentionality to collective intentionality. The “we” of the two-person hunting pair was, at some point in our evolutionary history, upgraded to the “us” of the tribe. Our ancestors were able to make better guesses as to what one another were thinking (via a fully developed theory of mind) and could use language to probe one another’s thoughts and coordinate behavior on large scales. Once human groups began competing (and fighting) with other human groups, this tribal sense of “us” and “them” spawned a new set of rules about what others “ought” to be doing if they are to remain a member of “us.” Coupled with language, you can see how this collective intentionality would spawn formal rules and laws governing the behavior of individuals within a large social group.
But language and theory of mind are not the only ingredients that helped generate the human moral sense as our societies grew. Humans, unlike animals, can ponder the very nature and origin of those normative emotions bubbling up from within our minds and ask ourselves not only where they come from, but why they are there in the first place. I daresay that most humans on this planet would disagree with the idea that norms are ancient evolutionary adaptations shared by many species to help regulate social interactions. Most would suggest the norms that generate our moral behavior are put in our minds by a supernatural entity of some kind. Or maybe there exists a universal moral code that is part of the fabric of existence that our species alone has the mental tools to contemplate. These conclusions are natural outcroppings of our why specialist nature. Combine this line of inquiry with our death wisdom and you have the question of “why do you have to die?,” which is intimately tied to the problem of how we should behave while we’re alive in case it impacts what happens to us in the afterlife. The most common answer to these questions involves a religious explanation, like heaven and hell, samsara, etc. Even non-supernatural explanations as to the origins and value of morality and how to live a good life are all products of our why specialist thinking. Philosophers have been generating formalized moral systems to help guide our behavior for millennia. They are all based on the application of systematized thinking to the problem of which behaviors are good or bad, and why we should choose one action over another.
The peculiarity of human moral behavior lies in its ability to be formalized, analyzed, revised, and propagated on a large scale. This gives us, in theory, a more sophisticated take on the concept of right and wrong compared to animals, who are stuck with a finite set of emotions generating behavioral norms (but not explicit rules or laws) on a much smaller scale. You could argue that these human cognitive peculiarities made us an advanced moral animal. Or, as Tomasello writes, results in humans being “the only moral one.” But I think the way in which humans behave in deference to their moral thinking results in truly bonkers behavior (from an evolutionary perspective) and might in fact make us less moral than other species. If, that is, we define moral as the ability to produce beneficial behavior and minimize pain and suffering. To make this point, all I need to do is read the current headlines here in Canada.
It became necessary to destroy the town to save it
Sir John Alexander Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, believed that white Western culture was superior to all other cultures, and that the integration of the Indigenous peoples of Canada into Western society was a noble cause if not a moral imperative. Under his leadership, the Canadian government established the Indian Act of 1876, which outlined the government’s approach to assimilating First Nations people into Western European culture, including the banning of indigenous religious and cultural ceremonies.
But the government felt they needed a more proactive system to ensure assimilation occurred quickly. An obvious place to start would be the reeducation of Indigenous youth. With this in mind, the residential school system was authorized in 1883, with the goal of “separating Aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages, and to indoctrinate children into a new culture—the culture of the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society.”13 Sir John Alexander Macdonald had this to say about the establishment of the residential schools when speaking to the House of Commons in 1883:
When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.
The Canadian residential school systems were funded by the federal government, but run by the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and the United churches of Canada. By 1896, there were forty schools across Canada. In 1920, attendance was made mandatory for all Indigenous children ages seven to sixteen. There are endless heartbreaking stories of children as young as four or five being forcibly removed from their homes and taken to residential schools thousands of miles away. Isaac Daniels, a residential school survivor, explained what happened to him in 1945 at his home on the James Smith Reserve in Saskatchewan when an “Indian agent” (a federal government representative) came to take him to a residential school:
I didn’t understand a word, ’cause I spoke Cree. Cree was the main language in our family. So, so my dad was kind of angry. I kept seeing him pointing to that Indian agent. So that night we were going to bed, it was just a one-room shack we all lived in, and I heard my dad talking to my mom there, and he was kind of crying, but he was talking in Cree now. He said that, “It’s either residential school for my boys, or I go to jail.” He said that in Cree. So, I overheard him. So I said the next morning, we all got up, and I said, “Well, I’m going to residential school,”’cause I didn’t want my dad to go to jail.
Once at the schools, siblings were separated (to further break them of family ties), and they were forbidden from speaking their native languages. Conditions at the schools were deplorable: drafty, cold, cramped, with poor sanitation, and inadequate access to food and water. Disease was rampant, as was physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the church leaders and school employees. A government report stated that “the failure to develop, implement, and monitor effective discipline sent an unspoken message that there were no real limits on what could be done to Aboriginal children within the walls of a residential school. The door had been opened early to an appalling level of physical and sexual abuse of students, and it remained open throughout the existence of the system.”14
In the 1956–57 school year, residential schools saw peak enrollment at 11,539 children. All in all, 150,000 children attended residential schools in Canada until the last school was closed in 1996. In the hundred-plus years of the residential school system, the number of children who died in them was a minimum of 3,200. Most recorded deaths were caused by tuberculosis, but the majority of deaths (51 percent) had no specific cause listed. The rates of death and disease at the schools far exceeded the national averages at the time. Children who died at the schools were rarely sent home to their families for burial. Instead, they were buried in graves (often unmarked) on school grounds.
The horrors of the Canadian Indian residential school system were laid bare in a 2015 report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC was established as part of a deal negotiated after a successful class-action lawsuit against the Canadian federal government filed by a group of more than seven thousand residential school survivors. According to the TRC report, the Canadian government has had the goal of cultural genocide from its first interactions with the Indigenous peoples of Canada. The TRC report notes that “it was not uncommon for principals, in their annual reports, to state that a specific number of students had died in the previous year, but not to name them.” When the schools eventually closed, the bodies of these nameless children were forgotten. After decades of pleas from First Nations, the sites are only now being investigated, and the bodies (and the names) of these children are finally being recovered.
On May 27, 2021, a ground-penetrating radar specialist working for the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in Kamloops, British Columbia, released a preliminary report, which exposed the remains of 215 children found on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. A month later, 751 unmarked graves were found at the former site of the Marieval Indian Residential School in Marieval, Saskatchewan. As of this writing in the summer of 2021, Canadian news media are revealing the atrocities committed at these residential schools, and the nation is grappling with the reality that the government—working in close contact with a number of Christian churches—is responsible for committing cultural genocide.
These atrocities are, at their root, products of moral reasoning. Sir John Alexander Macdonald viewed the residential school as a moral imperative, the best solution for bringing Indigenous children in line with modern Western values. The churches were operating under a similar imperative, albeit one derived directly from their scriptural interpretations. In the New Testament, Jesus spoke to his disciplines about God’s wish to spread the news about his teachings. In Matthew 28:19–20, Jesus said: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” The missionary work that started in Canada in the seventeenth century and that carried on in the residential schools until they closed in 1996 was based on these divine commandments. Consider the words of Reverend Samuel Rose, principal of the Mount Elgin residential school, writing about the need to break the ties his young Chippewa students had with their culture:
This class is to spring a generation, who will either perpetuate the manners and customs of their ancestors, or being intellectually, morally and religiously elevated, take their stand among the improved, intelligent nations of the earth, their part in the great drama of the world’s doing; or of want of necessary qualifications, to take their place and perform their part, be despised and pushed off the stage of action and ceased to be!15
This is divine moral reasoning that justified cultural genocide.
All churches involved in the residential-school programs in Canada have issued apologies for their involvement in this horrid practice. The Catholic Church, which operated 70 percent of the residential schools, did not issue an apology until April of 2022, after First Nations, Inuit, and Métis delegates traveled to Rome to ask Pope Francis to acknowledge and apologize for the Church’s role in Canada’s residential-school system. One can only speculate as to the hesitation to apologize, but it might well come down to the possibility that the Church did not believe that it had done anything wrong. Some church leaders argue as much. Following the news of the discovery of the bodies of children on the grounds of the residential school at Kamloops, a Catholic priest in Mississauga, Ontario, released a YouTube video of his sermon wherein he said, “Two-thirds of the country is blaming the church, which we love, for the tragedies that occurred [at Kamloops]. I presume the same number would thank the church for the good done in those schools, but of course, that question was never asked and we are not allowed to even say that good was done there.”16
This example underscores the dark reality of the human moral capacity: We, as a species, can justify—on moral grounds—genocide. Not just cultural genocide, but the murder of entire populations and racial groups, including children. During the Nuremburg trial of Nazi war criminals, the SS leader Otto Ohlendorf calmly explained why he was justified in overseeing the murder of thousands of Jewish children. “I believe that it is very simple to explain if one starts from the fact that [the Führer’s] order not only tried to achieve security, but permanent security, lest the children grow up and inevitably, being the children of parents who had been killed, they would constitute a danger no smaller than that of the parents.”17 In other words, in order to ensure the safety of future generations of Germans, Jewish children had to be eliminated lest they grow up to resent the Nazis for murdering their parents. It is a logical moral position to take insofar as it was an attempt to minimize societal pain and suffering in the long term, but so unbelievably repugnant and horrifying that we still recoil in horror at the Nazis’ ability to justify their actions.
From the moment Canadian residential schools were first established, many political and religious leaders believed that they—like the Nazis—were a force for good. That the hardships and deaths of Indigenous children were worth it in the end. Consider the chilling words about the value of these schools written by Duncan Campbell Scott, deputy superintendent general of Indian affairs from 1913 until 1932:
It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is being geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem.18
This kind of moral reasoning is only possible with human-style cognition. In contrast, animal behavior within a given species’ social group—guided by normativity—is typically far less violent and destructive, as I will show in the next section. While there are examples of things such as infanticide for animals (like we see in our great ape cousins or dolphins), or within-group violence leading to the death of individuals, animals do not have the cognitive capacity to systematically kill entire subgroups of their same-species populations resulting from a formal claim to moral authority.
The wisdom of gay albatrosses
Outside of humans, the best (worst?) example of repugnant same-species violence is found in chimpanzees. When compared to other nonhuman great apes, chimpanzees are notoriously bloodthirsty. I mean that literally. Rival chimpanzee groups defending their territories will engage in open battle where they will occasionally beat one another to death. But they also conduct clandestine raids into enemy territory, targeting rival males to kill. In the book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, primatologist Richard W. Wrangham and science writer Dale Peterson note that these raids are “marked by a gratuitous cruelty—tearing off pieces of skin, for example, twisting limbs until they break, and drinking a victim’s blood—reminiscent of acts that among humans are regarded as unspeakable crimes during peacetime and atrocities during war.”19
The primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy describes the violent nature of chimpanzees in the opening pages of her 2011 book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.20 Humans, she notes, can spend hours crowded together in an airplane without resorting to violence, even when faced with rude passengers and crying babies. “What if I were traveling with a planeload of chimpanzees?” she asks. “Any one of us would be lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached, with the baby still breathing and unmaimed. Bloody earlobes and other appendages would litter the aisles.” In other words, chimpanzees are terribly violent and often outright murderous, and they inflict this upon one another.
But even this behavior pales in comparison to the kind of violence that humans exhibit, and our moral reasoning justifies it. Chimpanzees have never been observed killing every individual (males and females, juveniles and newborns) within a rival group; the unspoken behavioral rule or norm that chimpanzees live by when they battle is to only remove a select few individuals (usually the adult males) so as to make the rival group less of a threat. Perhaps, if they had the humanlike cognitive abilities that allowed them to formalize their norms into morals, these raids would be far more expansive and destructive. But they don’t. In contrast, when humans go to battle, they justify the killing of entire cities filled with noncombatants (including children) if it serves the greater (morally defensible) goal of winning the war in order to bring about peace. This is how we ended up with the infamous quote, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” spoken by a US Army major when justifying the bombing of Bến Tre during the Vietnam War despite there being children in the town.21 Like so many human moral decisions, the Army’s decision to kill civilians emerged from our unique capacity for moral reasoning (i.e., the ability to formalize, analyze, revise, and propagate normative behavior on a large scale), a skill that chimpanzees lack, and the reason that even our most violent animal cousins are still less violent than us. While it’s entirely true that the human capacity for cooperation is why, as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy argues in Mothers and Others, “face-to-face killings are a much harder sell for humans than for chimpanzees,” and why, despite 1.6 billion airline passengers every year, “no dismemberments have been reported yet,” it is also this human capacity for cooperation that gives humans (but not chimpanzees) the ability to bomb the children of Bến Tre and establish Indian residential schools.22
But to drive my point home that humans often wind up with unnecessarily violent behavioral norms due to our complex ability for moral reasoning, I don’t want to talk about war. I want to talk about homosexuality. In the introduction to the book The Biology of Homosexuality, the biologist Jacques Balthazart writes that “homosexuality in humans is to a very large extent, if not exclusively, determined by biological factors acting prenatally or soon after birth.” In other words, people’s sexual orientation is largely determined at birth. He arrives at this conclusion through the study of same-sex sexual behavior in animals, where there is a mountain of evidence showing that not only is homosexuality not unique to humans, but it’s rather the norm for most animal species. This is old news for scientists studying animal behavior and biology, which is why Balthazart writes, “Scientists reading this book will think, ‘We have heard all this before.’… But somehow that information has either not made its way into the world outside the laboratory or has not been presented in a sufficiently definitive matter to affect the general population’s view on the matter.”
He’s right. I’m surprised at the number of people I talk to about animal behavior that are shocked at how common homosexual behavior is in the animal kingdom. I often point gay animal skeptics to Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagemihl—a 1999 book detailing more than three hundred different animal species that engage in a diverse array of behaviors that fall under the umbrella of homosexuality. Everything from same-sex sex, affection, pair bonds, and parenting. It might seem odd that homosexuality should be so widespread given that evolution is based on the need for animals to produce offspring. This is often a topic broached by anti-gay groups hoping to (misguidedly) show that same-sex behavior is not “natural.” But the literature on animal homosexuality shows that same-sex sexual behavior in a given species does not negatively impact a species’ reproductive rates, so it’s a non-issue. Take the example of the Laysan albatross. This species of giant bird forms lifelong pair bonds—where two individuals stay together for life, mating and raising offspring together over the course of many decades. Some of these lifelong pair-bonds are between same-sex couples. In one study of Laysan albatrosses living on Oahu, one-third of the lifelong pairs were female same-sex couples.23 In many of these cases, however, one or both females would mate with a male at some point, resulting in fertilized eggs that the female pairs raised together. Many of the cases of homosexuality in the animal kingdom work like this, where same-sex behaviors are just part of an individual’s typical behavioral repertoire, and reproduction still occurs to ensure species survival. Bonobos are perhaps the best example: Individuals engage in sex between same- and opposite-sex partners on a regular basis, resulting in lots of gayness, but also lots of babies.
Exclusive attraction to members of the same sex is rarer, but not unheard of. In domestic sheep, it’s estimated that 10 percent of rams (the males) are only interested in mating with other rams.24 Researchers studying this phenomenon found that these gay rams had differences in their brains—a thicker cluster of neurons in part of their hypothalamus—when compared to straight sheep. The reason for the differences being the relative amount of estrogen levels that the developing ram was exposed to before birth. In other words, as Balthazart argues in his book, these rams were born gay. All this to say that there’s nothing particularly unusual or controversial about (inborn) gayness in the animal kingdom.
Despite the frequency with which it crops up, same-sex attraction does not threaten the survival of the hundreds of species for which homosexuality has been observed. Which is why no animal species seems to have evolved any social norms around punishing individuals for engaging in same-sex acts. In other words, while same-sex attraction is not unique to humans, homophobia is.
Of course, there are many past and present cultures where homosexuality is normalized, accepted, and even embraced. Throughout most of Japanese history, for example, same-sex relationships have not been stigmatized, and stories of male-male love and sex have long been associated with the samurai warrior class,25 and would’ve been something Hashizume Aihei and his fellow samurai would’ve found entirely uncontroversial. But in many modern cultures—and especially Western European, Middle Eastern, and African cultures with Judeo-Christian roots—homosexuality is not just socially unacceptable or controversial, but illegal and punishable by death. Iran’s Islamic Penal Code—enacted after the Islamic revolution of 1979—declares gay sex between men a capital offense, penalized by execution. A Pew Research Center poll from 2013 found that many Middle Eastern countries have negative views of homosexuality, with 97 percent of people in Jordan, 95 percent in Egypt, and 80 percent in Lebanon believing that homosexuality “should be rejected.”26 Even in current Western countries ostensibly tolerant of LGBTQ people, anti-gay sentiment abounds, rooted in Judeo-Christian values. Conversion therapy—an attempt to change people’s unwanted and “unnatural” sexual orientation through various forms of “therapy”—is often aimed at minors, and is legal in most parts of the United States. It is often administered by Christian faith-based therapists, even though, according to a 2009 report by the American Psychological Association Task Force, “results of scientifically valid research indicate that it is unlikely that individuals will be able to reduce same-sex attractions or increase other-sex sexual attractions through [conversion therapy].”27
It’s not the case that this moral rejection of homosexuality always has religious origins. The Nazis—famously secular—did not approve of homosexuality (especially male homosexuality) for the simple reason that it deviated from the norm, and anything abnormal was simply not fit for inclusion in the Third Reich. Subsequently, more than 100,000 gay men were arrested, and tens of thousands were executed in concentration camps.
The reality is that, in recent history, millions of humans around the globe have suffered violence or death because of anti-gay sentiment. LGBTQ people are four times more likely than the general population to be the victims of violent crime, and that’s just in the US, where homosexual behavior is no longer criminalized, and where corporations like McDonald’s proudly fly rainbow flags during Pride Month.28 One can only speculate what the rates of violence must be in countries like Russia (which does not compile data on homophobic attacks), where a 2018 survey found that 63 percent of Russians believed that gays were conspiring to “destroy the spiritual values generated by Russians, through the propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,”29 and one in five Russians believed that gays should be “eliminated.”30 And all this despite the fact that homosexuality is just as common in humans as it is in other species. Around 4 percent of people in the US self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender,31 while more than 8 percent of people in the report having engaged in same-sex sexual behavior, and 11 percent acknowledge at least some attraction to the opposite sex.32 These numbers are right on par with sheep, but significantly lower than the same-sex activity found in bonobos.
The conclusion here is that humans, through our complex capacity for moral thinking, have taken something that does not constitute a normative problem for any other species and turned it into an issue for which we can justify marginalization, criminalization, execution, and even genocide. This is, I argue, a case of animals having a far superior—that is, less violent and destructive—normative system for dealing with difference than almost all human cultures. Homosexuality is quite clearly not just normal in the animal world, but entirely non-destructive. Maybe even beneficial for maintaining animal societies. Why, then, are humans uniquely homophobic? It’s a mystery that can only be solved if you understand how we can reason ourselves into a corner via our capacity for moral thinking. A handful of cultures and religions have convinced themselves that homosexuality is a moral problem, and millions of our fellow humans must suffer because of it. Not only does anti-gay sentiment have no real counterpart in the behavior of any other species, but it actively creates barriers to our species’ success. It not only sows societal discord but leads to the suffering of a large swath of the human population. What biological benefit has been given to our species through our bizarre moral posturing around the non-problem “problem” of homosexuality? Precisely none. It is a sad testament to the cruelty of human moral reasoning.
Losing our moral authority
The history of our species is the story of the moral justification of violent acts resulting in the pain, suffering, and deaths for billions of our fellow humans who fall into the category of “other.” That could be the Indigenous peoples of Canada, the LGBTQ community, Jews, Blacks, the disabled, women, etc. In contrast, most animal norms exist to maintain a social equilibrium that minimizes the need for pain, suffering, and death. If we operate from the base principle that pain, suffering, and death is generally a bad thing, then it seems as if animals have the right idea (and the higher moral ground) most of the time. But does this mean that human morality is “bad” in the evolutionary sense? Could it be the case that our capacity for moral reasoning—our philosophy, religions, and legal structures—is precisely the thing that gave our species the edge these past few millennia? The thing that has helped us organize our societies and spread across the globe in our great civilizations?
I don’t think it was our moral capacity per se that was responsible for our success, but the other components of the human mind that gave us the ability to coordinate our efforts, like language and theory of mind. And it was our why specialism that did the heavy lifting when it came to divining the nature of the physical universe and the biological world, giving us the technological know-how that put our species on the map. Human morality, in contrast, wasn’t necessary for any of this. As I’ve been arguing, I think we would’ve been better off without the ability to turn our ancient primate norms into absurd and destructive moral rules that gave us things like residential schools and anti-LGBTQ legislation. But you can’t unlink these things. You cannot have that laundry list of positive cognitive skills without the negative consequences. Human moral reasoning was unavoidable. But that doesn’t necessarily make it good, in an evolutionary sense. Human moral reasoning might be a bug and not a feature—an evolutionary spandrel that cropped up as our unique cognitive skills blossomed, but not itself a trait that natural selection selected for. Humans might currently be succeeding as a species not because of, but despite, our moral aptitude. We have taken this universal normative system that governs and constrains social behavior for most animals to weird extremes. Animals, with their less sophisticated normative systems, are the ones living the good life.