Whether or not animals can be moral beings is an idea that puzzles scientists and philosophers to this day. The philosophical article “Animal moral psychologies” contains multiple examples of what appears to be animal morality, such as a family cat chasing a dog away from an injured child or an orca doing a tour of grief. The piece then defines morality according to different philosophical approaches. Some approaches state that morality is exclusively a human quality, while the authors disagree with this idea by defining morality as capacity of care, capacity of autonomy, and normative capacities. Care, being the most important, is typically characterized as prosocial and empathetic behaviors. Research that supports that animals can exhibit this thought to be “human-only” quality is growing significantly in the scientific community.
Some animals can even be seen engaging in what appears to be helping behaviors, some that may even serve as a loss to the individual. A 2011 study from the University of Chicago provides compelling empirical evidence that rats are capable of prosocial, empathetic, and altruistic behavior. The evidence indicates that rats may have deliberate responses when responding to a fellow rat in the laboratory. However, it is important to note that they are exhibiting what we as humans consider moral behaviors, which is an important caveat because morality is a subset of social norms specific to a population.
“A 2011 study from the University of Chicago provides compelling empirical evidence that rats are capable of prosocial, empathetic, and altruistic behavior.”
Rats are the main non-primate animal being used for animal morality studies. Rats are considered to be altruistic, and help other rats when they are in distress. Rats are also more likely to help other rats when they have shared negative experiences similar to how humans do. The research says that when humans exhibit prosocial behavior their emotional distress is downregulated, so they are not too overwhelmed to help. Similarly, when this was tested in rats, “the free rat did not simply mimic another rat’s distress, i.e., express emotional contagion, but also acted with intention to liberate a trapped rat, suggestive that rats can down-regulate emotional distress to act upon empathic concern and thus improve the well-being of a conspecific.” Being able to project one’s mental state onto another organism shows that rats are intelligent beings, and have metacognition. These acts also would insinuate that rats are empathetic and reliable. However, this raises the following questions: How can we understand animal morality when evaluating animals according to human standards, and define their actions using human terms? How can we recognize animal intentionality through the human lens?
The study’s main finding is that when rats are given the ability to open a cage to either liberate a cagemate or obtain food, rats show more incentive to open the cage to help another rat. Specifically, “[rats] spent more time near the restrainer in the arena center, and showed greater movement speed than rats in the control conditions [which] suggest that rats are motivated to move and act specifically when in the presence of a trapped cagemate.” Rats opening a door to free a cagemate suggests that they act deliberately, and make calculated goal-oriented choices. Rats have also even been seen sharing very palatable food. But how do we know definitively that these rats are sharing, motivated, and deliberately helping their cagemates? How can we determine animal intentionality, without being inside of their heads?
These are examples of what we consider positive behavior and maybe even good morality. But, if animals are capable of good morality, can they be capable of evil morality, or antisocial behavior? If they can, this would imply that animals can understand social norms or a standard of morality, and there would be a concept of non-acceptable or antisocial behavior. As humans, one way that we deal with antisocial, immoral, or wrong behavior is punishment. Interestingly enough, chimpanzees also have been observed discriminating against antisocial behavior, and even punishing other chimpanzees! According to the Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology, “In one study that compared human children and chimpanzees’ responses to antisocial behavior, researchers found that individuals of both groups made an effort to watch the antisocial individual get punished for the antisocial behavior.”
In addition to the social component of animal behavior, there also seems to be a biological basis for helping behavior. In humans, we know that brain regions that experience trauma can cause people to act differently, and in some cases make people antisocial, have reduced empathy, and act immorally. A damaged amygdala affects a human’s behavior similarly to how a damaged amygdala impacts a rat’s behavior. Research suggests that “intact rats and other species have been found to prefer provisioning a partner as well as the self. However, when a rat’s amygdala is damaged, [their] responses change significantly, and [they] fail to reliably choose the mutual reward option.” Agreeing with current research on the human brain, damaged or non functioning amygdalae are associated with impairments in social functioning and consideration of others’ wellbeing, and demonstrate that rats can make decisions with some emotional input.
Rat behaviors and decisions are not only biologically influenced, but behavior is also influenced by sex. According to the 2011 study, “females were tested in the trapped cagemate and empty conditions. Consistent with previous findings that human and non-human females are more empathic than males, all female rats in the trapped condition became door-openers whereas a third of the male rats were non-openers.” Additionally, personality played a factor. They also found that “animals who eventually proved to be openers showed significantly lower latencies for approach than non-openers, suggesting that openers were bolder.” This supports that behavior is multifactorial and that biological and individual differences may impact an animal’s ability to respond to certain situations. This is why it is so difficult to understand animal intentionality and make that final leap from behavior to morality.
While it is difficult to definitively conclude that animals are moral beings, it is illogical to dismiss the idea that they may be capable of morality. There have been multiple examples of animals exhibiting care, and evidence that animals can understand some level of social norms, but it is difficult to judge the level of choice that animals have in their behavior. Looking at the biggest flaw in animal morality research, how can we define animal morality without viewing things from the human perspective? If animals were moral beings, and morality is a subset of social norms, then there is behavior that only animals would consider morally permissible and would be different from the parameters that humans consider moral behavior. Removing our cognitive bias is imperative for proper animal morality research.