Ciro Galli

Barbara King argues that while primates may not possess morality in the human sense, they do exhibit some traits that would have been necessary for the evolution of morality. These traits include high intelligence, a capacity for symbolic communication, a sense of social norms, realization of "self", and a concept of continuity. Frans de Waal and Barbara King both view human morality as having grown out of primate sociality. Many social animals such as primates, dolphins and whales have shown to exhibit what Michael Shermer refers to as premoral sentiments. According to Shermer, the following characteristics are shared by humans and other social animals, particularly the great apes:   attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, conflict resolution and peacemaking, deception and deception detection, community concern and caring about what others think about

[A] universal morality can be defined with reference to the negative end of the spectrum of conscious experience: I refer to this extreme as “the worst possible misery for everyone.”   Even if each conscious being has a unique nadir on the moral landscape, we can still conceive of a state of the universe in which everyone suffers as much as he or she (or it) possibly can. If you think we cannot say this would be “bad,” then I don’t know what you could mean by the word “bad” (and I don’t think you know what you mean by it either). Once we conceive of “the worst possible misery for everyone,” then we can talk about taking incremental steps toward this abyss: What could it mean for life on earth to get worse for all human beings simultaneously?   Notice that this need have nothing to do with people enforcing their culturally conditioned moral precepts. Perhaps a neurotoxic dust could fall to earth from space and make everyone extremely uncomfortable. All we need imagine is a scenario

What about things like jealousy, joy, happiness and love? Are these not also real? Yes, they are real, but they depend for their existence on brains. Human brains, certainly, and probably the brains of other advanced animal species, such as chimpanzees, dogs and whales too. Rocks don't feel joy or jealousy. And mountains do not love. These emotions are intensely real to those who experience them, but they didn't exist before brains did. It is possible that emotions like these, and perhaps other emotions that we can't begin to dream of, would exist on other planets. But also if those planets also contain brains, or something equivalent to brains. Who knows what weird thinking organs, or feeling machines may lurk elsewhere in the universe?