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novapsycheWhose life would you save?
Primatologists have found that moral instincts have deep roots. In September, for instance, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University reported that monkeys have a sense of fairness. Brosnan and De Waal trained capuchin monkeys to take a pebble from them; if the monkeys gave the pebble back, they got a cucumber. Then they ran the same experiment with two monkeys sitting in adjacent cages, where they could see each other. One monkey still got a cucumber, but the other one got a grape—a tastier reward. More than half the monkeys who got cucumbers balked at the exchange. Sometimes they threw the cucumber at the researchers; sometimes they refused to give the pebble back. Apparently, de Waal says, they realized that they weren’t being treated fairly.
In an earlier study, de Waal observed a colony of chimpanzees that only got fed by their zookeeper once they had all gathered in an enclosure. One day, a few young chimps dallied outside for hours, leaving the rest to go hungry. The next day, the other chimps attacked the stragglers, apparently to punish them for their selfishness. The primates seemed capable of moral judgment without benefit of human reasoning. "Chimps may be smart," Greene says. "But they don’t read Kant."
Primatologists have found that moral instincts have deep roots. In September, for instance, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University reported that monkeys have a sense of fairness. Brosnan and De Waal trained capuchin monkeys to take a pebble from them; if the monkeys gave the pebble back, they got a cucumber. Then they ran the same experiment with two monkeys sitting in adjacent cages, where they could see each other. One monkey still got a cucumber, but the other one got a grape—a tastier reward. More than half the monkeys who got cucumbers balked at the exchange. Sometimes they threw the cucumber at the researchers; sometimes they refused to give the pebble back. Apparently, de Waal says, they realized that they weren’t being treated fairly.
In an earlier study, de Waal observed a colony of chimpanzees that only got fed by their zookeeper once they had all gathered in an enclosure. One day, a few young chimps dallied outside for hours, leaving the rest to go hungry. The next day, the other chimps attacked the stragglers, apparently to punish them for their selfishness. The primates seemed capable of moral judgment without benefit of human reasoning. "Chimps may be smart," Greene says. "But they don’t read Kant."