Towards analogues of ordinary human morality in apes

Résumé 0

Since its revival in 1975, debates about the contribution of evolutionary ethics have concentrated mostly on realism/antirealism issues and to a lesser extent, on normative ethics, trapping evolutionary ethics into the frame of philosophical ethics. As the syntactical and semantic dimensions of human language are needed for philosophical ethics, it seemed very unlikely to find an extension of morality outside the human species. Attempts at speaking about the moral dimension of apes, made by Edward O. Wilson (1978) or Frans de Waal (1996), were often disqualified as oversimplified or anthropomorphic. This crude elimination of animal morality comes mainly from an ignorance of the ontogenetic dimension of morality and of the fact that very sophisticated moral theories (such as those developed in contemporary analytical moral philosophy) could underestimate ordinary morality as the core of the moral phenomenon. Contemporary moral psychology, launched by the pioneer work of Jean Piaget and developed in different ways by Lawrence Kohlberg and Martin Hoffman, is a good basis to identify the main characteristics of ordinary morality: centrality of reciprocity, ability to follow shared rules, ability to handle exceptions, and ability to regulate the state of relations in the group. Through the current attempts in primatology to identify and interpret such phenomena mainly in great apes, we propose, after the insights of Konrad Lorenz (1956) and Hans Kummer (1980), to explore anew the possibility of analogues of ordinary human morality in other living species. Through the conflicts in interpretations among primatologists and psychologists concerning the areas of consolation, reconciliation, sense of justice, obedience to implicit shared rules, perception of others' intentions by apes, we present the outlines of the analogues of human ordinary morality in apes, their similarities and differences to our own.