Abstract: 

In this paper, I explore the neuroscientific, evolutionary, developmental, and social roots of moral conflict in the United States. I begin by exploring how moral systems are inherently derived from intuitions, and their explanations are post hoc rationalizations. I then emphasize why morality and political behavior is more accurately explored through ethological analyses. I also use the ethological analyses and work done by Frans de Waal to make the case that primates have a primordial morality that serves as the basis for human morality. Next, I explore the role Play has in the development of moral systems, societies, and the consequences of improper play on a society. Then, I explore the developmental and evolutionary roots of human behavioral and moral variation and the consequences of such variations on human interactions. Following, I explore the consequences of Rationalism (evidence and reason-based value claims) on societies. I then conclude with a synthesis of the arguments I present in the preceeding sections of this paper and a prognosis for the future of America. I finish the paper with pieces of evidence that support the conclusion I draw in Part VI, some ways to change how we develop our moral sentiments, and lastly the utility of sacrifice in the development of the individual and society.

Part I: Introduction – The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Morality

Over the past several months, I have been exploring what it is that makes a moral judgment moral, how moral actors interact with each other, how individual interactions create perturbations that produce group phenomena, and how those group phenomena become fixated in a community, ultimately producing culture. I was compelled to explore this topic at around the time the SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade. While I had no specific feeling about the ruling, or its overturning, I was fascinated – if that’s the appropriate word – by the response of both parties involved. The first question I asked, especially as someone who’s studied neuroscience for the past year, was “how is the neurophysiology and anatomy of the brain producing the responses I’m seeing?”. I knew that to begin exploring this question, based on my previous studies, that it would be prudent to start exploring moral phenomena from a psychological, rather than a neuroscientific perspective. The mechanisms mean very little if those physiological processes do not map onto a set of behaviors that are capable of being conceptualized as matters of the psyche, i.e., not expressly matters of neurophysiology. And so, with this in mind, I turned to the best-known moral psychologist I was aware of: Jonathan Haidt. 

I began with Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind. Upon my reading of the text, I was pleased to discover that, while his start in the field of Moral Psychology was in some sense stochastic and serendipitous, his passion for Moral Psychology as a field was driven by his desire to help people talk about the things they couldn’t find the words to describe. Like Haidt, I had a desire to explore Moral Psychology to help my fellow Americans, or at least to help myself understand where both parties were coming from. I picked apart Haidt’s book, piece by piece, in my quest to unravel the political strife before my eyes. Yet in doing so, I was left with only more questions. What were the biological roots of morality? How do moral judgments play themselves out between people, groups, and nations? How does the neuroscience of morality relate to political and moral phenomena? While I appreciate Haidt’s work, and will use some of the research he highlighted in his text to clarify my thoughts, develop some theories, and perhaps hypotheses of my own, I still wanted to know more about the topic that had so viscerally captured my attention. 

I then began to study moral judgments, moral philosophy, and the neuroscience of morality. I followed Haidt’s work up with Richard Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality (Joyce, 2006). Contrary to Haidt, thinkers like Joyce do not emphasize the moral emotions as the core foundations for moral decision making and thus are less favorable of arguments stemming from Adam Smith (Smith, 1976/1759) or Hume’s rejection of moral rationalism (Hume, 1960/1777; 1969/1739-40). Instead, Joyce and others, like Joshua Greene, emphasize rationality, with Joyce specifically emphasizing language, not moral sentiments, as the “prerequisite for moral judgment.” I will be upfront in this paper and admit that I do not find this position defendable. Take for example Joyce’s discussion of disgust. 

Joyce seeks to identify the qualitative distinction between visceral disgust and conceptual or contagious disgust (Rozin et al, 1999). Joyce then continues by claiming that “though infants and animals obviously find certain foods distasteful, they exhibit none of the symptoms of extreme offended repulsion that we associate with disgust.” To this claim, I think it is appropriate to ask: what is the difference between “distasteful,” such as a child biting into an exceedingly sour lemon, and extremely offended repulsion, of which such a response may be elicited from biting into an extremely sour lemon. In other words, the salient and qualitative difference between the two phenomena is equivocal. While variants of sentiments may emerge due to contextualized experiences, such as the many ways we can express Love in different languages (e.g., Greek), this doesn’t deprive the underlying sentiment of its animating and compelling force. 

I then followed Joyce’s work up with a book titled Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality (Liao et al., 2016), which is a collection of essays edited by Liao. The essays in this book use neuroscientific evidence to present philosophical arguments about the neuroscience of morality, explore the neurophysiological and anatomical bases for morality, discuss new methods in moral neuroscience, and present lessons learned from the study of morality through a neuroscientific lens. While there are several authors with whom I agree in this text based on my own understanding of the physiology of the human brain, there are a number of authors with whom I also disagree, Joshua Greene being the foremost. Joshua presents two essays in the text Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive (Neuro)Science Matters for Ethics (p. 119) and Reply to Driver and Darwall (p. 170), the latter of which is a response to two other essays in the text that are in response to Joshua Greene by Julia Driver titled The Limits of the Dual-Process View (p. 150) and Getting Moral Wrongness into the Picture (p. 159). These essays are under the second section of the book, Deontology Versus Consequentialism. I think discussing Greene’s take on the rationalist position, or in this case the consequentialist position, will help to show why the rationalists get things so backwards.

He begins by establishing his Central Tension Principle ((Greene, 2014, p. 121): 

The Central Tension Principle: Characteristically deontological judgments are preferentially supported by automatic emotional responses, while characteristically consequentialist judgments are preferentially supported by conscious reasoning and allied processes of cognitive control.

Greene is careful to qualify consequentialist and deontological positions as not merely consequentialist and deontological but characteristically consequentialist and deontological. It is here that we can begin to see Greene’s modus operandi. He does not face ethically consequentialist arguments or deontological arguments as consequentialist and deontological arguments but rather as characteristically consequentialist and deontological positions. He emphasizes that characteristically deontological arguments are framed “in terms of rights, duties, etc.” while characteristically consequentialist arguments are akin to “impartial cost-benefit reasoning.” Greene defines the terms in this manner to help “characterize the tendencies of [the] distinct cognitive systems.” In other words, he wants to get at the idea that the “essence of deontology lies with the automatic settings, and the psychological essence of consequentialism lies with manual mode.” Greene then proceeds to supply a plethora of citations to support his claims about the dual-process theory of moral judgment. 

Greene’s theory heavily emphasizes deliberative thinking in the generation of moral judgements, tacitly suggesting non-deliberative thinking (thinking not governed by intuitions) produce more deontological or rule-based decision making. However, he admits “the point… is not that the dual-process theory predicts every case perfectly, but rather that it captures the general shape of philosophical moral psychology.” I disagree. Once again, this “general shape” produces equivocal conclusions based on highly contextualized evidence such as moral dilemmas proceeding “trick math problems” (Joe Paxton, Tommaso Bruni, and Greene, 2014) or by inducing mirth (Valdesolo and DeSteno 2006, Strohminger et al, 2011), or in clinical cases of patients with damage to the VMPFC (Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex) (Mendez et al., 2005; Moretto et al., 2010; and Thomas et al., 2011) or who exhibit a variant of psychopathic disorder (Koenigs et al., 2012; Glenn, Raine, and Schug 2009; and Glenn, Raine, Schug, and Hauser 2009), or lastly individuals with emotional deficits due to alexithymia (Koven et al., 2011).  If Greene were only making a case for a model of characteristically consequentialist and deontological decisions, this may not be a problem. Instead, he takes this one step further. He asks: “What’s better automatic settings or manual mode?” 

Greene takes a modular route, claiming neither Manual or Automatic responses (Consequential and Deontological respectively) are bad per se, but rather – being modal – are context dependent. He proceeds by arguing that for familiar situations, it is best to use automatic responses, to act on what we have acquired through various sources of information through “genetic transmission, cultural transmission, and learning from personal experience” (p. 131). Thus, for Greene, it is best to use characteristically consequentialist moral decision making on unfamiliar problems, or ones “with which we have inadequate evolutionary, cultural, or personal experience.” It also seems as if what Greene means by automatic responses is that familiar situations were responded to as if one were experienced with the dilemma they were facing. I see no reason why familiar situations -- or situations where it is modularly optimal to respond with an automatic response – imply one ought, or does, respond with a seemingly experience-based, if not in fact experience-based, response; is that only how they’re responding? Nor do I see any reason why, or that it is the case that, unfamiliar situations require or make use of manual, rational thinking (consequentialist decisions); is it the case that unfamiliar situations ought to be responded to with just manual, rational, non-automatic responses, is that even possible; i.e., are we obligated to do something that is impossible? Are the manual responses driven by rational (DLPFC) considerations of the many parameters a scenario may entail or are those parameters (perhaps each differentially) colored, if not outright determined, by sentiment? It is not clear, there is overlap, and where there is overlap, it is best to rely on hands-on, real-world observations of such rationalizations, not models. Haidt enumerates just this kind of work for us in The Righteous Mind (Haidt, 2012), but also in his research on moral sentiments by emphasizing the post hoc nature of moral reasoning. 

In other words, there’s no clear evidence consequentialist moral judgments are not emotionally laden, post hoc judgments, i.e., in some sense automatic responses. To be fair, Greene does not claim the model perfectly depicts the split in ethics, only that it gets the “general shape.” I think the model, the general shape, is only an artifact of selective evidence. While Greene emphasizes a bi-modal nature of moral judgments with his model, and suggests we make decisions in unfamiliar situations with rational thinking, there’s no clear evidence that rational, evidence based, logical thinking is not colored (if not driven by) automatic responses. I.e., the bi-modal nature of Greene’s model is equivocal, just as Joyce’s claim that language, not sentiments, is the basis for moral judgments is equivocal. Greene responds to an argument that’s similar to my own on page 139 of The Neuroscience of Morality. 

He begins the paragraph with this question: “But, doesn’t act consequentialism ultimately depend on some kind of intuition?” Like Joyce, he relies on qualitative distinctions between different kinds of intuition, e.g., “perceptual, dogmatic, and philosophical.” Here the qualitative differences appear to be more distinct than in Joyce’s argument, but I think they suffer from the same issue. Greene claims Sidgwick’s intuitions “enter consequentialist theory at a very high level (“philosophical” intuition), and not as a reaction to particular actions (“perceptual” intuition) or action types (“dogmatic” intuitions).” Because “act consequentialism is based on a “philosophical” intuition, rather than on “perceptual” or “dogmatic” ones, doesn’t imply that it’s correct,” Greene claims, “but it does shield it from the objection that it’s too tightly yoked to the ups and downs of automatic settings.” To this I ask, is there no overlap between any of these kinds of intuitions, and, where there is intuitional overlap, is that not the kind of intuition that animates moral judgments? I still see no reason, based on my parametric view of moral decision making -- i.e., that a moral arbiter bases his decision on various parameters, some rational and some automatic -- that consequentialist decision making isn’t driven by or “yoked” to automatic responses. In what way, i.e., how are, consequentialist decisions affected by intuition, sentiment, or automatic responses, Greene may ask. The same way any other decision or scenario is affected by the moral sentiments when one assesses or is affected by various parameters. The ask for a qualified kind of intuition takes the argument out of the realm of the observable and testable and places it in the realm of semantics; i.e., if only Greene can get me to qualify just how these intuitions affect consequentialist decisions, he can show how that kind of intuition doesn’t quite animate the moral decision or judgment the way we think it does. I.e., an intuition is an intuition (as Haidt has defined it), and it only obfuscates reality to apply qualitative distinctions to intuitions. Disgust is still disgust even if we define disgust as “distasteful” or “extremely offended repulsion.” The emotion, sentiment, intuition, etc. is still acting as an animating and compelling force. 

Regardless, I did find James Woodward’s essay in this text to be eminently valuable (Woodward, 2016). Like myself, James doubts that there can be a genuine distinction between emotional and cognitive moral judgements and decision-making. James clearly highlights that moral judgements are constructed from cognitive processing that occurs in the emotional areas of the brain. Woodward notes that reason “exerts [an] influence… by modulating an affect-laden value signal that reflects input from other sources (including “emotional” areas) outside of the DLPFC.” I.e., “the DLPFC does not have its own value that somehow supplants or replaces the signal in the VMPFC, so that the DLPFC generates, as it were, purely reason-based valuations.” In other words, the DLPFC, the area highlighted in Greene’s model and responsible for the “manual,” non-automatic, consequentialist decision making is still influenced by areas of the brain responsible for emotion unless other areas of the brain are impaired. This forces us to consider the validity of the notion that “rational” thinking can make use of “reason” to grasp true moral claims without emotional processing; a conception of “Reason” and “Rationale” homologous to the definition of these words provided in Black’s Law Dictionary: 11th Edition (p. 1514). The evidence provided by Woodward through Hare et al. (2009, 2011), however, does not support this conception of “reason.” Just as Haidt identified, and as I have shown through a deconstruction of both Greene and Joyce’s arguments, Woodward shows the empirical evidence does not support a dual-process model, but instead an integrated, networked model (likely a small-world model – Cole et al., 2012 & Reijneveld et al., 2007). Specifically, Woodward states, “other structures that are affective or emotional also play central causal roles in moral judgment and valuing, just as they do in other sorts of valuation [italics added].”

Woodward points out that this doesn’t necessarily defeat the rationalist’s position. They could posit this kind of argument: “the acceptability of moral rationalism turns on whether moral requirements, correct moral judgments and evaluations, and so on, are derivable from considerations supplied by reason.” People don’t have to make moral judgments based on pure reason, logic, or an impartial examination of the evidence, “but as long as such judgments, insofar as long as they are correct, follow from such considerations, that is enough to vindicate moral rationalism.” Yet there’s a significant problem with this kind of argument. Just because there’s a principle, or logical constraint, does not mean a moral judgment necessarily follows from any of those moral principles or logical constraints, or even evidence. Why are there differences in opinion, even when rationalists claim their conclusions are correct? Because the principles they have, their logical considerations, the evidence at their disposal, all are affected by areas of the brain responsible for emotion.

Of note, Woodward is responsible for my conception of moral judgments as parametric evaluations. Woodward’s example of Pedro and Jim is a fascinating demonstration of why trolley problems, a well-known ethical scenario from which Greene derived his dual-model theory, are exceptionally anemic. Here is the scenario: Jim is an explorer in the jungle, and is told by Pedro that he (Pedro) will shoot ten villagers unless Jim shoots one – what would you do if you were Jim; i.e., wouldn’t you pull the lever and kill one person to save five, or push one morbidly obese person onto the tracks to save five? But Woodward points out in his example that to truly respond to this scenario you have to ask numerous questions: e.g., is Pedro telling the truth, what will happen if Jim shoots one of the villagers, how will the other villagers respond, does Pedro get something out of having Jim kill one of the villagers, is Pedro trying to blackmail Jim, how will this affect Jim’s public-image, what is Pedro’s relation to the villagers, what will happen if Jim decides to shoot Pedro instead of the villager, can Jim benefit from turning Pedro in if he kills the ten villagers? Of all the parameters we could use to assess the scenario of Pedro and Jim, why should we only assess whether or not we should kill one villager to save ten, why – like in the trolley problem – should we only take the numerical outcome into account? Clearly, the complexity of moral judgements cannot be constrained purely through rationale, logic, evidence, or principle-based arguments alone; the truly parametric nature of moral decision making in some sense necessitates that we “feel” or intuit how we ought to respond because there are simply too many facts to consider rationally; some of the facts, at least, must be considered intuitively and thus Greene’s model and Joyce’s emphasis on language are insufficient to understand the proximate nature of our moral decisions. Only a model that recognizes the systematic nature of our moral judgments is capable of conceptualizing the physiological processes that give rise to moral judgments. And if I have accurately done the initial work, which is supported by the work of Jonathan Haidt, then it should be clear those moral judgments are rooted in emotions and they are not rational. I.e., our moral judgments are ultimately based on feeling and are not rational, as defined by Black’s Law Dictionary.  

Part II: Ape Political Behavior, Morality, and the A Priori Moral Intuitions 

After my examination of the psychological and neurophysiological processes underpinning moral judgments, I felt as if I still needed to understand what was happening to my fellow Americans. How could the component parts of their neurophysiology explain how they were interacting with each other; how they felt about each other; how they were beginning to treat each other; and how they saw each other? Importantly, how could the behavior, derived from the moral judgments of my fellow Americans be explained? The interactions of the neutrons, protons, and electrons could not explain the movements of the celestial bodies. To answer the new kinds of questions I was beginning to grapple with, I would need, and did, begin to examine them ethologically. But before I could understand human moral behavior, specifically political behavior governed by value (moral) judgments, I needed to examine a less emotionally salient, yet near species: Apes.

I think if one wishes to begin to understand what human political behavior is like, it would help to understand ape political behavior. Specifically, to understand my fellow Americans, I looked to Chimpanzees, the chimpanzees in Frans de Waal’s book, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (De Waal, 1982/2007).  This book opened my eyes to what ape behavior is like, how it plays itself out, how it is measured and analyzed, and just how rich and complex ape and animal behavior in general can be. 

De Waal recognized that dominance comes in two forms: Power and Rank. Power is defined by “who can defeat whom and who weighs in most heavily when a conflict in the group occurs.” No power confrontation is absolutely predictable. De Waal notes that “A young adult of not more than two or three can sometimes put an adult male or female to flight or even coerce them to do something.” Rank, unlike power displays, is “frozen.” Rank can be measured with respect to who greets whom. Children, for example, “are never “greeted” by adult group members: they may sometimes exert real power but they have no formal dominance.” I.e., “if A “greets” B during a certain period, B will never “greet” A during the same period.” In De Waal’s view, chimpanzee formal rank and power do overlap, but it is possible for rank to be separated from power. I.e., just because an ape is dominant does not mean that he will remain dominant. Chimpanzees with a lower rank can “track” whether they are being greeted or are greeting more often, e.g., dominance conflicts between Luit and Yeroen. If “the subordinate party begins to win conflicts more and more often, or if he at least regularly produces fear and hesitation in the dominant party, this will not escape him,” he is tracking his and the other party’s behaviors, he is aware of them, it seems reasonable to assume he has assigned them some value or meaning. Frans then proceeds to say “if this shift in the relationship persists, the “greetings” between [the two parties] will become no more than a hollow formality.”

But Power and Rank are not all that defines political or power relationships between chimps. “Grooming” also defines political relationships between chimpanzees. In his conflict with Yeroen, Luit often tried, and may have been successful at, securing an alliance with females in the chimpanzee community at Arnhem zoo through grooming. Luit’s grooming of the females and offspring of the community was tactical; he timed and moved between the females of the community at Arnhem just prior to intimidation displays towards Yeroen. De Waal even recognizes this: “Was it a kind of “bribe” or an attempt to “arouse sympathy” by his friendly actions?”. His rhetorical questions seem to have been answered, especially given that Luit was eventually able to overthrow Yeroen. However, after their conflicts, the males began grooming each other. After dominance disputes, it is noted that males engage in grooming to “reconcile” their differences. By sitting face to face, looking each other in the eyes, the two parties are able to lower tensions. The significance of this behavior was so important that the two parties “never came into their cage unreconciled, and the fact that they had only two night-fights may well be due to these truces.” I.e., these apes were able to recognize the utility of mutualistic relationships to preserve peace. Yet, grooming is not only used to facilitate peace, to form alliances, or lower tensions. Grooming can also serve as a kind of currency. By holding out their hands, chimpanzees signal they are of lower rank, as the hand gesture communicates to the higher-ranking chimp that the lower-ranking chimp needs permission to perform a kind of behavior or to receive something. Sexual bargaining occurs in this manner when a low-ranking male gestures with his hand to a higher-ranking male so that that male may grant him access to one of the females he has preferential access to. Clearly, grooming behavior – securing, establishing, and maintaining social ties – serves as a kind of currency that can be spent or applied to acquire rank, not just power. 

One of the last key attributes of political relationships in chimps is their triadic awareness. Triadic awareness is “the capacity to perceive social relationships between others so as to form varied triangular relationships.” This capacity is unique in that it allows the chimp to not only be aware of his or her relationship with another chimp, but also the “relationships that exist in the social environment so as to gain an understanding of how the self relates to combinations of other individuals.” Another way to view these relationships is through Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth’s (1990) “non-egocentric social knowledge.” By learning about the relationships that exist between members of a community, an individual may be able to more effectively navigate their social milieu, netting benefits for doing so. 

By examining the political relationships that exist between chimps, de Waal has provided us with three aspects of a political community: a hierarchy defined by rank and power dynamics that are extensively interconnected but also dissociable; social capital acquired through acts of greeting, submission, and grooming used to acquire rank and apply power; and at least, the ability to understand and recognize social bonds between members of a community, such that individual chimps can navigate their social milieu to acquire power and rank. The importance of these aspects of political relationships in chimpanzee communities for our exploration of morality is to begin to highlight that an understanding of values, or morals, and the morals of Americans specifically, need to be conceptualized not merely from a psychological or neuroscientific lens (although that has its uses) but also a behavioral, biological, and sociobiological lens. 

Chimpanzee politics, like American politics (or any politics), is not defined by reason but instead is governed by a set of unstated, a priori rules that tacitly imply the values of the apes who apply them. De Waal’s book Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Primates (De Waal, 1996) helps us explore these a priori rules, how they’re applied, and why they’re applied. In doing so, he helps us understand our moral values, how we apply them, and why we apply them. 

To start, it is clear de Waal does not see chimpanzees as moral philosophers, capable of generating personal value judgments about a given scenario. In other words, while it is my opinion that primates (apes and monkeys) act morally, they are incapable of talking about “what is right, and why, and what is wrong, and why”; they do not have an explicit moral system, i.e., explicit, enumerated morality. However, as I have shown through my analysis of Joshua Greene’s and Joyce’s emphasis on the dual-model of moral decision making and linguistic preeminence in moral discussion and judgments respectively, our recursive abilities afford us very little in the realm of ethical and moral philosophy. We certainly do talk about what is right, wrong, and why as humans, but these discussions are post hoc, personally qualitative rationalizations and thus not scientific. Even those principles we use to logically and strictly define our moral behaviors are only given favor on account of our moral sentiments, intuitions, or feelings. This is borne out, as was discussed in the beginning of this paper, by the fact that, even when we make principled judgments, the output of those judgments is personalized, colored by one’s moral sentiments, intuitions, emotions, or feelings. And thus, while it is relevant to recognize apes are not moral philosophers, what’s more integral to any moral science is not so much what is stated about any particular moral belief system (i.e., what’s right, wrong, and why) but rather how that moral system plays itself out. In other words, the a priori values, their objectiveness, is borne out in a set of behaviors that constrain the political (or social) dynamics of the group. Hence, why it was relevant to discuss the political dynamics of chimps before discussing their morals. I.e., primate norms, or morals, are a genuine, a priori metaphysical framework defining their social (political) behaviors. But in what way do those moral behaviors play themselves out in primates? 

In de Waal’s eyes (De Waal, 1996), the behaviors exemplifying morality are sympathy, norm-related characteristics (a kind of unspoken ethic), reciprocity, and getting along. Sympathy is defined by “attachment, succorance, and emotional contagion; [and] learned adjustment to and special treatment of the disabled and injured.” Norm-Related Characteristics are defined by the observation of “prescriptive social rules; [and] internalization of rules and anticipation of punishment.” Reciprocity is defined by “a concept of giving, trading, and revenge; [and] moralistic aggression against violators of reciprocity rules.” And lastly, Getting Along is defined by “peacemaking and avoidance of conflict; community concern and maintenance of good relationships; [and] accommodation of conflicting interests through negotiation.” 

In all four of these, we can faintly see the outline of the six moral foundations provided to us by Haidt: care/harm, fairness/cheating, ingroup-loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and proportionality/freedom. In the sympathy behavior of primates, we can see the foundations of care/harm and ingroup-loyalty/betrayal. In norm-related characteristics, we can see the authority/subversion, fairness/cheating, and ingroup-loyalty/betrayal foundations. In reciprocity characteristics, we can see the proportionality/freedom and the fairness/cheating foundations. And for behaviors that demonstrate a tendency to get along, we see the ingroup-loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, fairness/cheating, and in some sense, the sanctity/degradation foundations. The sanctity/degradation foundation expressed in behaviors that facilitate good relations between primates requires some qualifying; I will use de Waal’s words to do so. 

Good relations express that members of a community care about their community; they want to preserve their community; they do not want to see it degrade. De Waal defined this kind of community concern as “the stake each individual has in promoting those characteristics of the community or group that increases the benefits derived from living in it by that individual and its kin” (De Waal., 1996, p. 207). In other words, each individual in the community is tasked with upholding the relationships between each member in the community (likely making use of triadic awareness or non-egocentric social knowledge) to prevent the destruction (degradation) of that community and to uphold harmony (sanctity) in the community. 

With that said, I think it is clear that the moral foundations of social behavior in humans and primates fit quite nicely together. Why wouldn’t they? But to be fair, ethological analyses of primate social and political behavior using the defining features of the moral foundations Haidt has provided us would have to be done to further solidify this claim. Regardless, this helps to buttress the idea that social and political behavior (I think it is appropriate to use the terms interchangeably) are defined for all of us by a set of a priori, metaphysical moral foundations (or values). 

In the book Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (De Waal, Marcedo, & Ober, 2006), a collection of essays responding to some of the claims Frans de Waal has made over the years, we can find arguments that seek to challenge some of Frans’s ideas. I think it will be prudent to examine two essays from the text by Robert Wright and Christine M. Korsgaard to further hash out my own thoughts on the primordial essence of Human and Primate morality. 

Wright’s response to de Waal is titled The Uses of Anthropomorphism. His argument goes like this: “It is a cogent surmise, for various reasons, that in the primate lineage the emotional governance of behavior has preceded, in evolutionary time, the consciously strategic guidance of behavior; given that human beings, though manifestly capable of conscious strategizing, nonetheless have emotions that encourage strategically sound behaviors, it seems likely that our near relatives, the chimpanzees, who exhibit analogous sound behaviors, also have such emotions; if indeed chimpanzees have emotions that could generate strategically sound behaviors, one has to ask why natural selection would add a second, functionally redundant layer of guidance (conscious strategy)?” (De Waal, Marcedo, & Ober, 2006, p. 91).  Wright follows this by saying that de Waal should avoid using “cognitive” language and should use “emotional” language instead. I.e., he doesn’t think it’s wrong to use anthropomorphic language to talk about the moral behaviors of primates, but he does think it’s only useful to talk about the moral behavior of primates through emotional anthropomorphism. I would go one step further, it makes no sense to talk about moral behavior as if it is a form of rational cognition, even in homo sapiens. 

In humans, the cognitive aspect of our moral behavior is a post hoc rationalization of our intuitions, feelings, or emotions. Thus, to discuss primate moral behavior as if it were humans engaging in the behavior is perfectly permissible because it is still how humans behave; for both, emotional language or language about intuitions is the more appropriate kind of nomenclature. One needs only to recall the work of James Woodward (cited at the beginning of this paper) to recognize that while we do engage in recursive evaluations of scenarios as humans, the assessment of the interconnecting outputs from those evaluations is heavily affected by intuitions. Emotion, intuition, and sentiments are still driving the recursive moral decisions of humans.

Wright then goes on to explain how he is not a “Veneer theorist,” and that he holds a third position. This argument is not quite relevant for the discussion in this section of the paper but perhaps touches on a topic we will get to later: Nature vs. Nurture. Thus, for now, it will behoove us to proceed to the next essay by Christine M. Korsgaard. 

Korsgaard’s main argument goes like this: “a nonhuman agent may be conscious of the object of his fear or desire, and conscious of it as fearful or desirable, and so as something to be avoided or to be sought… But a rational animal is, in addition, conscious that she fears or desires the object, and that she is inclined to act in a certain way as a result.” In other words, human morality is differentiated by the fact that we are not only conscious but engage in self-conscious behavior. In Korsagaard’s words: “Once you are aware that you are being moved in a certain way, you have a certain reflective distance from the motive [whether it is fearful or desirable, e.g.], and you are in a position to ask yourself ‘but should I be moved in that way? Wanting that end inclines me to that act, but does it really give me a reason to do that act?’ You are now in a position to raise a normative question about what you ought to do.” Korsagaard thinks this is what defines reason. According to Korsagaard, “Reason… looks inward, and focuses on the connections between mental states and activities: whether our actions are justified by our motives or our inferences are justified by our beliefs.”  Here we can see the objective, fact-based, impartial position of reason we were treated with through the works of Joyce and Greene, once again (a pattern that may continue to perpetuate itself despite its invalidity). The question that needs to be posed to Korsgaard is whether one, given their allegedly impartial evaluation of a scenario, indeed must do what they think they ought to do. In other words, even if we engage in an impartial, objective, self-conscious, reason-based assessment of a scenario affected by motivating (fearful, disgusting, or desirable) stimuli, does our conclusion necessarily follow from our reason or do we ultimately just intuit it’s the correct act? At the core of this question is whether the moral judgment made through a reasonable assessment of a motivating stimulus is, in fact, a reasoned and intentional act, or is it still motivated by subconscious processes; i.e., do we really have the kind of self-consciousness Korsgaard suggests we do?

In the classic example of Joe and Jane’s behavior (Weathers 2008), the emotionally motivating force, despite no present evidence for its effect (and attempts made to prevent deleterious effects of an incestuous relationship), still affects the moral decision made by evaluators of Joe and Jane’s behavior. When presented with such a scenario (Paxton et al. 2011), accounting for all apparent negative effects, college students still reacted emotionally. Yet, as Korsagaard suggests, when they were given more time, they changed their judgment and found no issue with Julie and Mark’s behavior – they were able to sympathize with Julie and Mark. But again, this conclusion does not mean this moral decision was rational, impartial, or dependent on the evidence, only that the students were able to consider their judgments, or provide an apparently more logical judgment, even if they still were disgusted by Julie and Mark’s behavior. There’s no reason to conclude the moral decision they made was complete; i.e., genuinely self-conscious. For example, there’s still the idea that the relationship could be socially-contagious, even if Julie and Mark keep the night they had together to themselves. Knowing about their night dissolves this reality (the ego still plays a role; the judge knows about Julie and Mark’s night together). I.e., Julie and Mark did not conform to a social norm, they did not conform to the standard imposed on all the students (like the Amish who are shunned for being social deviants – Richerson and Boyd, 2005, p. 185). 

With this in mind, logically or impartially assessing the scenario as it is written is insufficient to determine the morality of the act. The students still know about Mark and Julie; the students’ subjective awareness of the scenario may be a parameter that affects their moral decision; and why shouldn’t it be?  Man is a social animal – and these particular humans necessarily know about Julie and Mark’s decision and may still judge their act to be immoral to uphold the social ties that bind their community and prevent it from becoming inharmonious (degrading, degenerating). The scenario acts as a contagion that the judges upbraid to prevent further corruption – knowledge of the act can be seen as a corrupting force. In other words, the decision cannot be merely impartial; the impartial nature of the moral decision is an illusion, and the more realistic decision may be derived vis-à-vis the social milieu; e.g., through triadic awareness. The subject’s awareness of Julie and Mark’s night must be considered; to be truly impartial and rational, the students had to assess Julie and Mark’s night with respect to themselves and their social environment; they had to step outside of the immediate and see themselves judging Julie and Mark’s night in a particular environment affected by varying laws, social forces, cultures, and histories, at least. A more impartial decision would at least incorporate how the judge plays a role in the judgment vis-à-vis the consequences of the judgment for them socially. What does it mean to admit you think incest, pedophilia, or terrorism are socially acceptable in particular contexts? 

Are the moral judges of Julie and Mark’s act aware of this? If they were, would they still make the same decision? Are they even capable of such impartial decision making? Perhaps they would realize that subjective knowledge of the scenarios presented to them also need to be taken into account. I.e., the knowledge of the act may serve as a vehicle to normalize what they intuitively recognize as wrong. In other words, while self-consciousness does exist in humans, it doesn’t seem humans can be as self-conscious, impartially self-conscious, as we might hope; are they really aware of the motivating forces affecting them (what’s fearful or desirable), or only as many motivating forces as they recognize? Are we not intuiting these are the only motivations we ought to consider? In other words, the “ought” is insufficient because humans, as moral judges, are insufficient – they are not as self-aware or self-conscious as they think; there are no grounds to privilege their capacity for self-conscious reasoning over their intuitions, and in fact, their reasoning may obfuscate good intuitive motivations affecting their moral decisions. Reason, not the moral intuitions, may separate Man from what he ought to do just as much as it has the capacity to provide him access to what he ought to do. 

Korsgaard’s main point: “we develop the capacity to be motivated by thoughts about what we ought to do and what we ought to be like”; we are not simply motivated by the fearful or desirable object, we are aware we’re motivated by the fact that we are motivated by the fearful or desirable object. Indeed, this is the recursive nature of our human brain. However, this doesn’t mean our ability to separate ourselves from our intuitions through manual reasoning means we ought to act on the products of that process, or that we will be better off for doing so; e.g., such an act may generate a self-centered niche separated from the conditions that produced the intuitions guiding and affecting our moral reasoning, creating a kind of dysphoria. Should we genuinely be comfortable with the moral “ought’s” we’re comfortable with? In other words, according to whom is the act we engage in wrong? Are we genuinely self-aware that our acts are wrong? Is conscious reasoning genuinely, in fact, the process by which we do good or can it blind us to the good? 

De Waal responds in a similar manner: 

“Do animals ever intentionally help each other? Do humans?... I add the second question even if most people blindly assume an affirmative answer. We show a host of behavior, though, for which we develop justification after the fact. It is entirely possible, in my opinion, that we reach out and touch a grieving family member or lift up a fallen elderly person in the street before we fully realize the consequences of our actions. We are excellent at providing post hoc explanations for altruistic impulses. We say such things as “I felt I had to do something,” whereas in reality our behavior was automatic and intuitive…”

Just as we may not be self-aware of the rightness of our act, we may not be aware of the wrongness of our act. There’re no clear grounds to believe truly moral acts are derived from reason, not intuitions. 

What we now have is an image of primate morality, in other words, a moral system. Haidt defines morality as follows: 

“Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest to make cooperative societies possible. [italics added]” 

Based on what we have unraveled from the work of Frans de Waal and those who have critically commented on it, I think it should be clear how Haidt’s conception of morality fits onto the behavior of apes. Apes have the same kind of values or intuitions we do, albeit qualitatively different (they are apes after all); they exhibit behaviors derived from those foundations, values, and intuitions; and they use those behaviors to engage in politics or to socialize. While Frans de Waal does not think Apes have morality, in the sense that they have explicit rules to enhance in-group solidarity (De Waal, Marcedo, & Ober, 2006, p. 54), apes do engage in behavior that increases cooperation between members by ameliorating social disputes between members. Besides, morality, or moral systems, need not have explicit “teachings about the value of the community and the precedence it takes, or ought to take, over individual interests.” A moral system may be conceived of as a game of backyard ball, whose rules are not stated – maybe ever -- but implicit and easily grasped once one jumps into the fray. This is more of an informal morality, but it is nonetheless morality. 

For both Apes and Humans, according to Haidt and myself now – I have separated from de Waal – morality’s goal is to increase “cooperation” in Haidt’s eyes and to ameliorate intragroup conflict in my eyes. By ameliorating conflicts, members of an ape community, and human community, are more apt to cooperate (e.g., to escape their enclosure in Arnhem), more likely to gain access to resources by cooperating, playing their role according to their rank (e.g., in tit-for-tat games), they may also gain access to females reserved for higher-ranking members of an ape community, increasing their reproductive fitness, and in the wild, fend off outsiders (Wrangham and Peterson, 1996).

Part III: The Emergence of Complex, Eusocial, Moral Societies Out of Play

I think it is now time to begin introducing human behavior into the mix. After all, I am exploring where, how, and why there are two moral viewpoints in the United States that seem so at odds with each other. In this section of the paper, having discussed the physiological and psychological underpinnings of moral behavior, and having made the argument that morality need not be defined explicitly, but is more a system of intuitively driven behaviors that increase cooperation by ameliorating intragroup conflict for various reasons, I would now like to explore how that behavior plays itself out socially amongst both apes and primates. Thus, this part of the paper will delve into the origins of human societies, how human societies are maintained, the effect of emotional behaviors in human societies, and how moral systems (really behaviors) play a role in preserving human societies. 

Before we delve into the evolutionary origins of human societies, I would first like to begin with some seemingly lighter fare: Play. From the last part of the paper, you may recall that I explained that morality (moral systems) are like a game of backyard ball. But what exactly is happening in a game? Individuals are collectively engaging in play. But what is Play? 

Johan Huizinga, in his brilliant work, Homo Ludens (Huizinga, 1950/2014), defines Play as follows: 

Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life.”

Play is behavior constrained by certain values, which in humans may be defined by a set of explicit prescriptions that define what is good or appropriate play. This good or appropriate play is virtuous. Virtue is derived from Latin, and’s root is the Latin word Vir or man. For the Romans, according to Peter Turchin (Turchin, 2006 pp. 155-156), a virtuous man “embodied all the qualities of a true man as a member of a society.” In other words, the virtuous man played his part in accordance with what it was to be an ideal Roman. For the Romans, “The ideal of hero was one whose courage, wisdom, and self-sacrifice saved his country in time of peril.” According to Cicero (whose words we can find in Turchin’s book), “[The virtuous Roman hero] with the prospect of death, envy, and punishment staring him in the face, does not hesitate to defend the Republic, he truly can be reckoned a vir [man].” For Huizinga, this kind of play is inherently agonal, or as we may contemporarily recognize it, “rough-and-tumble.” This kind of social behavior is defined by its competitive nature, exemplified in the form of contests, e.g., which rat will pin whom, or more aptly, who will be a real man, stare death in the face, grapple and wrestle with the prospect of death, and defend the Roman Republic? There’s no legitimate reason to see the gravity of this evocative interrogative as anti-play either. Play, as a defining feature of human societies, and perhaps animal behavior (if not animal societies, e.g., in chimps and other primates), defined itself by the intuitions and values of the people from that society, need not be frivolous but instead may be thoroughly serious, e.g., in the many types of potlatch behavior Huizinga provides us.

For animals, though it is likely fun, play is not merely done for frivolity’s sake either; animals depend on play (as a form of behavior) for their survival. In Ursus arctos (brown bears) Fagen and Fagen (2004), controlling for cub conditions, prenatal and first-year salmon availability, and maternal characteristics, found that the survival of Ursus arctos increases as play increases. Because significant confounds were accounted for, this increase in survivability due to play occurred “independently of… other possible effects.” Fagen and Fagen speculated that “play experience [may relieve] past stresses and [help to build] resistance to future stress.” In a longitudinal study, assessed over a nine-year period, Fagen and Fagen came to the same conclusion (Fagen and Fagen, 2009). In a study by Antonevich et al. (2020), play behavior in the Eurasian Lynx (Lynx lynx) was associated with cubs’ body mass; i.e., the more resources the cubs had available, the more likely they were to initiate play. With the previous finding by Fagen and Fagen in mind, i.e., play potentially increases survivability, and healthier, heavier, and larger cubs (cubs who have greater access to resources) engage in more play, it is possible that play-feedback may occur, increasing the survivability of those who do play, their ability to acquire resources, provide those resources to their young, and thus increase their young’s ability to survive. This play hypothesis is supported by the fact that larger brained species play more (Iwaniuk et al., 2001) and that, at least in carnivores (which may include Apes), brain size is associated with technical problem-solving (which may or may not translate into hunting success) – Benson-Amram et al., 2016. I.e., play increases survivability, resource acquisition, thus creating a feedback that increases technical problem-solving abilities, selecting for brain size, which further increases technical problem-solving ability, resource acquisition, and thus survivability. As we can see, play is one way to increase a species’ ability to survive, acquire resources, develop bigger brains, and to increase their problem-solving capacities. But how does this generate societies? To answer this question, we will turn to Hymenoptera or, more specifically, ants before we finally discuss the origins of human societies. 

While the societies of ants are not derived from their capacity to play, ants are an extremely social species. Specifically, ants are a eusocial species. In The Superorganism (2009) by Holldobler and Wilson, Eusociality is defined as a “truly social species.” For ants, their society, their eusociality, is defined by three parts. “First, its adult members are divided into reproductive castes and partially or wholly nonreproductive workers; second, the adults of two or more generations coexist in the same nests; and third, nonreproductive or less reproductive workers care for the young.” This is the state of the superorganism. More strictly, the superorganism is defined as “an advanced state of eusociality, in which interindividual conflict for reproductive privilege is diminished and the worker caste is selected to maximize colony efficiency in intercolony competition [pp. 8-9].” But where does this come from? This superorganism originated “more than 120 million years ago” (Wilson, 2012, p. 114), specifically at the point when gymnosperms were “largely replaced by angiosperms.” I.e., ants coevolved with flowering plants. The complexity provided by the angiosperms “were richer in substance and more complicated in architecture, hence favorable to more kinds of small animals living in them [Wilson, 2012, p. 124]. With a new diversity of niches and prey available to them, ants radiated from their gymnosperm environments, into the angiosperm environments, where “most of the two dozen taxonomic subfamilies of ants living today [came] into existence.” Eusociality was solidified in ants when “organized groups [groups capable of organizing] beat solitaires in competition for resources, and large, organized groups beat smaller ones of the same species” (Holldobler and Wilson, p. 30). However, eusociality is rare. 

The reason why eusociality is so rare is because it requires members of the species (or community) to sacrifice for the “good of the group.” One resolution to this is kin-selection. For ants, this makes sense. Each member of an ant colony, each dissociable unit, is in effect an extension of the queen, they are part of her phenotype. Each member of the ant colony is hard to see as an individual unit, capable of engaging in personal progeneration. Instead, when workers try to produce on their own, conflict often ensues (Wilson, 2012 p. 145). Thus, because intergroup competition selects for the survivability of the species, and intragroup cooperation increases survivability in social organisms, when intragroup conflict increases, the capacity for any given colony to survive intergroup competition decreases, and thus the more cooperative, eusocial colony survives. Thus, the ant that sacrifices its personal reproductive success is more likely to enable its kin to pass on its genes. Humans, however, are not ants. And yet, eusociality in humans persists. But how? Tribes. 

For ants, the origin of social behavior Is the nest, “especially [nests that are] expensive to make and within reach of a sustainable supply of food (Wilson, 2012, p. 184).” Following, around the nest, the species must care for their young, generating dissociable castes and divisions of labor; some must care for the young, some must protect the nest, some must seek out food and resources, some must prepare those resources for use, et cetera. Various complex environments must also serve as a pressure to promote the emergence of nest behavior and labor divisions. Groups with members that are more similar, phenotypically than genetically, will be better at getting along with each other (Whitmeyer, 1997). Phenotype is also defined as “all traits of an organism other than its genome (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 31). For ants, this phenotypic recognition (how do ants have access to the genotype except through phenotype) is pheromones. Behavior that mimics co-helpers will benefit co-progenitors of a group more than behavior that doesn’t mimic co-helpers; if your pheromones match mine, we can work together. This suggests similar behavioral and psychological phenotypes serve as a selection mechanism, which the individual organism is capable of assessing (West-Eberhard, 2003, pp. 440-468), that increases group cooperation. This enables members of the group to acquire more resources, decrease or ameliorate intragroup conflict more effectively, and fend off threats to the group from other organisms, conspecifics, and the environment. With the inclusion of the concept of phenotypic plasticity, a species, exposed to various different conditions, yet working as a group, may express different phenotypes (e.g., Leaf-cutter ants (atta)) when exposed to those different conditions (e.g., heterophylly in plants). Each of these groups, as members of the single tribal group, for example, are dependent on each other. Thus, the ability to specialize in generating various behaviors generates variants that work together as dissociable, dependent units, to generate more than any one of them could do as an individual organism in diverse environments, against numerous predators, and potentially other cooperating conspecifics. The initial nesting behavior, requiring the division of labor and specialization, creates a feedback that generates more complex social systems and behavioral or phenotypic variants, each dependent on the other for success, yet dissociable enough to remain plastic (e.g., modularity and holism exist simultaneously, depending on the level of analysis you’re exploring). This allows the ant, like Man, to engage in husbandry (e.g., their mutual relationship with aphids), farming (e.g., the fungal farming of leafcutter ants), and the establishment of granaries (e.g., in harvester ants). With that said, how did eusociality develop in Homo Sapiens? To answer that question, we will look to a cladistic analysis done by Alexandra Maryanski (1986; 1987; 1992; 1993; 1995; 1996). 

Earlier, I described ape morality as primordial to emphasize that, while our ape brethren have something like morality, they do not have morality in the sense we understand it. Their morality, more so than being non-linguistic, is non-symbolic. However, how did we get from engaging in the kind of moral behavior our ancestors did to the moral behavior we engage in now? To answer this question, I think it would be helpful if we examined a cladistic analysis of apes to see how we got to the kind of social organizations we have today. For a start, we must recognize that the great apes are not “a natural formation (Turner and Machalek, 2018, p. 296). Ape groups fuse together and then fissure. In Chimpanzees, our common ancestor, females fuse to groups of fusing/fissuring males and then fissure from them. In “chimpanzees, temporary groups form to patrol the home range, and this group will attack any male who seeks to cross the boundary; in contrast, migrating females from other communities are welcomed as replacements for those who, at puberty, have left their natal community (Turner and Machalek, 2018, p. 297). In other words, great apes typically only form “mother-offspring ties, do not form permanent groups, and reveal very little intergenerational continuity with the constant transfer of offspring at puberty to other communities (Turner and Machalek, 2018, p. 297).” So how is it that humans are so socially distinct from chimpanzees? 

Around 10 million years ago, the forests of Africa began to recede, leaving immense savannas. Our ancestors, lacking the food they once relied on in the forests of Africa, had to learn to make use of, and develop in, savanna environments. For our ape ancestors who lacked the ability to form groups, this was exceedingly difficult; most of our ape ancestors are now extinct because they were not able to adapt to the savanna. However, life did find a way. 

First, because groups do exist in apes today, even if the bonds aren’t strong, selection on the savanna would favor apes who were able to produce more stable groups (perhaps through play and touch, generating the release of peptides and amines that promote social cooperation). Second, with the use of tools, labor may be divided, some may have hunted more, others may have gathered more (e.g., tubules), others may have cared for the young more, and still others may have protected a central location where food was stored. As previously stated, apes who were less capable of engaging in these kinds of behaviors in the savanna landscape went extinct. Thus, to overcome our almost autistic, in the antiquated sense of the term, social sense, evolution had to target, and did target, the emotional centers of the brain in our hominin ancestors, ratcheting up the group-ish tendencies of savanna apes. This increased the salience of the bonds that tied each member to the other, made us more aware of the emotions of our fellow conspecifics, and allowed further developments to target our ability to infer the intentions of others, form stronger memories, and lastly develop language and symbolic thinking (Turner and Machalek, 2018 pp. 337-64; Coolidge, 2019, pp. 130-151). 

With the development of language and symbolic thinking, particularly associative reasoning rather than discrete reasoning capacities (e.g., Neanderthal Reasoning vs. Homo Sapiens Reasoning, Wilson, 2012, pp. 218-19), symbols could be used to generate ethnolinguistic tribal groups. These symbols could be used to bind members of a group, serve as a phenotypic extension that allowed for more extensive, complex groups (like a pheromone), to show group solidarity (increasing group trust), identify who isn’t a part of the group and protect ingroup members from exploitation, abuse, or conquest by an outgroup (e.g., Odin as a replacement for Tiwaz for the Germanic Tribes to define themselves as a group distinct from Romans, Turchin, 2006, pp. 70-72), and thus increase the fitness of the group, as intragroup cooperation is facilitated in ant colonies. Haidt talks about the significance of these ethnolinguistic, and symbolic, groups in his chapter The Hive Switch, found in The Righteous Mind (Haidt, 2012, pp. 256-84, while Abrutyn and Turner (2017) – in their paper Returning the Social to Sociocultural Evolution: Reconsidering Spencer, Durkheim, and Marx’s Models of Selection -- discuss the social pressures that give rise to these ethnolinguistic groups, particularly religious groups. Yet how are these groups maintained? Why do they not simply collapse? To begin answering this question, I would like to turn to the Waorani and the Semai (Robarchek and Robarchek, 1992). 

The Semai and Waorani were essentially technologically equivalent communities. Both were swidden gardeners and hunters (pulling in relatively good game and hulls), both lived as family groups, the compositions of households were similar, and their settlements were both politically autonomous and lacked a head or chief. However, the Waorani, unlike the Semai, had a homicide rate of 60%. The Semai are essentially peaceful, while it is not impossible for Semai to engage in violence, violence by the Semai is not known to occur. So, what’s causing these differences? The difference between the two people essentially lies in how they perceive the world. I.e., how they symbolically perceive the world. 

Clayton and Carole Robarchek describe the differences between the two peoples as follows (pp. 200-201, Robarchek and Robarchek, 1992), “[The] Semai see themselves as essentially helpless in a hostile and malevolent universe that is almost entirely beyond their control. Their world is populated by a vast variety of supernatural beings, the great majority of which are actively hostile to human beings… In this world of ubiquitous dangers, even the most ordinary activities — gardening, firewood gathering, hunting, eating, even children’s play – are hedged by taboos and circumscribed by rituals in an inevitably vain attempt to ward of the dangers that constantly menace without.” The Waorani, on the other hand, see the “world [as a place] to be exploited. Lone individuals go off for days at a time to hunt and fish, or just to wander. There are few animistic beliefs, little concern with the ‘supernatural’ beings, and few taboos or rituals designed to ward off danger… They are, in general, a thoroughly confident and pragmatic people living in a world that they feel fully equipped to deal with and control [italics added].” 

These two disparate perceptions of the world also produce two distinct perceptions of self. The Semai essentially see themselves as “helpless.” Comfort and recourse from the malevolence of the world lies “in the band, that group of a hundred or so human beings with whom one’s life is bound up from birth to death. Without the support and nurturance of this group, no individual can survive.” Cohesion or, as Turchin (2006) describes it, asabiya is paramount. “To be given nurturance by the community is to be given life itself; to have it denied is to be left exposed to the dangers that menace from without, a message that is constantly stressed and reaffirmed, both directly and symbolically.” In contradistinction, the Waorani are “highly individualistic and autonomous; both men and women are expected to be self-reliant and independent, and they see themselves as such… every person’s survival and well-being is ultimately his own responsibility.” E.g., women are not attended to when they give birth and snake bite victims are sometimes left to the forest. “Until recently, the elderly were not infrequently speared to death by their own kin when they became a burden.” There was no societal cohesion either, “In the event of a raid, all fled for their lives, men often abandoning their wives, and women their children [italics added] (Robarchek & Robarcheck, p. 202).” 

The Semai also feel a great sense of obligation and are bound to their kin. If we consider that the Semai seek comfort and protection in their kin group from the malevolence of the world, a “sense of group consciousness [emerges] on two levels: the kindred and the band.” Emotional, or “affective,” salience “minimizes the possibility of the band splitting into agonistic mutually exclusive factions, and it provides a powerful motive for resolving disputes in ways that are as equitable as possible for all concerned.” Any conflict within the group threatens the cohesion of the group and thus has the potential to cast all members into the malevolency of the inspirited world around them. This high level of affective salience, the essence of morality as I have suggested and the integral component for the emergence of group-ish behavior on the savannahs of Africa 10 million years ago for our hominid ancestors, also motivates members of the tribe to “reprimand… his own kindred if he is found to have any fault”; each member of the tribe is not only responsible for themselves but their kin. The Semai see themselves as siblings as well, and they express this linguistically: “We are all siblings here and we take care of one another.” This phrase is often repeated amongst the Semai. Something like religion, or Animism, also plays an integral role in the Semai community. “In times of sickness and danger, to ward off the attacks of mara’, the malevolent spirits that cause sickness and death,” the gunik, “the familiar spirits,” may be called upon. The gunik are seen as siblings themselves, part of the tribe, and “are passed from generation to generation until, after several generations, parents’ and grandparents’ gunik become, in the generational terminology of the Semai, grandparents to most of the people in the band. They become mai mana, “the old ones,” responsible for the welfare of the entire community, protecting it from the… [malevolent spirits].” In other words, the Semai have a shared cultural heritage they pass down that preserves them from the malevolence of the world, binding them from one generation to the next, presumably going back as far as when the Semai came into being. While this religious tradition may not seem or be rational to us, it’s rational to the Semai and it keeps them alive. All of these elements, including a reaffirmation ritual, preserve the cohesion of the Semai, keep them obligated to one another, and serve to protect them from the world without, decreasing violence in and from the group to virtually zero. 

The Waorani, who are pragmatic individualists, do not have any of the social structures the Semai do. The Waorani never developed mechanisms to prevent conflict between members or to promote solidarity. Instead, “For the Waorani, every kindred, and in the final analysis, every individual, is an independent entity.” The Spirit world of the Waorani is also exceedingly different from the Semai’s. “No spirit familiars come in dreams to offer protection or assistance to their human kin. Wengongi, the creator who set the world in motion, has no significant role in human affairs, and human actions are thus not contingent upon or constrained by more powerful beings or forces. With no tutelary spirits and few animistic beliefs, there are no communal rituals or responsibilities [obligations] linking people together.” Unlike the Semai, whose culture emphasizes group cohesion, social responsibility, and solidarity, the Waorani have “no such cultural or individual values nor is there a concern with group cohesion, and thus there are no comparable internalized controls on conflict and violence… no institutions exist for the resolutions of disputes… the restoration of amity… thus [there are] few constraints, social, cultural, or psychological, on the actions of individuals.” The highly individualistic, seemingly apathetic, Waorani are thus prone to violence. Without the aid of Christian missionaries who helped to end the retributive murders within the Waorani society, it is possible they would have wiped themselves out as a people. 

What is clear is that the two symbolic perceptions of the world, one clearly more affectively (emotionally) derived than the other, affected the behavior of the two groups in two entirely distinct ways despite the numerous commonalities between the two tribes. One’s sentiments, values, and moral (spiritual system) preserved the group, brought the group cohesion, and generated norms (obligations) that kept the group bound to each other. The others’ sentiments were entirely self-driven (in the antiquated sense, autistic), the progenitor of their spiritual system was effectively ambivalent about their existence, what they do, or whether its right or wrong. As a consequence, if it were not for the aid of Christian missionaries and Waorani women who wanted to end the violence within their group, the Waorani would have been wiped out. Under other circumstances, another tribe, band, or warring kingdom could have moved on the Waorani and wiped them out or incorporated them, dissolving the Waorani people forever. Hence it should be clear now just how essential the intuitions and morals are for the emergence of a functioning and long-standing society. The consequences of the near a-spiritual, unintuitive, and unemotional society of the Waorani is backed up by another finding by Sosis and Bressler (2003). They essentially found that religious rituals and taboos promote intragroup cooperation; secular organizations, or tribes like the Waorani who lack such taboos, are less cohesive; ergo, religious tribes, tribes with rituals or taboos (like the Semai), are more adaptive, are better at surviving and perhaps propagating, than non-religious, secular, purely individualistic, reason-based tribes. Regardless, for now, we shall return to where this section of the paper began: Play. 

There were no written records for what caused the violence between the Waorani. And there were no clear records for the origins of the Semai peoples either. Thus, it is difficult to make sense of just how the Waorani got where they were and the Semai did not. Yet, I think I may have an answer, and that answer rests in right play. 

In Jaak Panksepp’s book, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Panksepp, 2004), play is one of the central topics. Instead of defining what play is for, I think it would be useful to begin to explore the consequences of lack of play, or disorders related to play. I will begin with the latter. 

For Panksepp’s disorders of play may included depression or melancholia, mania, hyperkinetic and attention deficit disorders, and Tourette’s syndrome (p. 297). Panksepp speculates that ADHD is caused by a lack of rough-and-tumble play, leading to a lack of focus in the classroom, generating poorer performances for the students affected by ADHD. He also questions the utility of pharmacological substances in treating ADHD. However, I think his claims about Tourette’s syndrome are a little more dubious. Regardless, Panksepp was certain of at least a few things, particularly, when playing, “animals are especially prone to behave in flexible and creative ways.” For Panksepp, it then follows that “it is not surprising [then] that play interventions have been used in educational and therapeutic settings (i.e., play therapy) to facilitate more efficient acquisitions of new information and behavioral change.” As identified at the beginning of this section, play is not merely a frivolous endeavor, nor should its ends be limited to being “educational and therapeutic,” but it is necessarily a natural behavioral process that generates creative outputs. Going back to our example of Ursus arctos (Fagen and Fagen, 2004; 2009) and Lynx lynx (Antonevich et al., 2020), play clearly has beneficial effects. But what happens when play is prevented? 

For primates, rats being too distinct a species to truly make comparative analyses from, social play is purportedly essential. Panksepp cites four authors in his discussion on social play in primates, C.S. Evens (1967), H.F. Harlow and M.K. Harlow (1969), A.S. Chamove (1978), and M.A. Novak (1979). Panksepp’s summation of these papers is as follows (p. 282): “In most primates, prior social isolation has a devastating effect on the urge to play. After several days of isolation, young monkeys and chimps become despondent and are likely to exhibit relatively little play when reunited. Apparently, their basic needs for social warmth, support, and affiliation must be fulfilled first; only when confidence has been restored does carefree playfulness return.” These observations are supported by the effects certain peptides have on playfulness. “Neurochemically, if one animal of a play pair is given a small dose of an opiate agonist such as morphine and the other is given a small dose of an opiate antagonist such as naloxone, all other things being equal, the animal receiving morphine always becomes the winner (Panksepp et al., 1985)… These effects suggest that brain opioids control social emotionality, so that without brain opioids an animal tends to feel psychologically weaker, causing it to lose because it is more prone to experience negative feelings such as separation distress [italics added].” Thus, from the observations of the primates in the papers Panksepp summarized, and his findings from his study on the relationship between brain opioids and play, it seems clear “social warmth, support, and affiliation” causes the release of opioids in the brain that increase playfulness. Without an environment conducive to socialization and if during development a primate is not socialized, they will not engage in play, benefit from its creative and educational effects, and will be poorer social partners. 

For Panksepp, competitive play, leading to the acquisition of a highly specific skill, leads to more aggressive tendencies. “The new economic dimensions of professional sports have made us realize that in humans, games are simply no longer what evolution meant them to be. Instead of exercising various skills and having a good time, institutionalized play has become the arena for demonstrating one’s acquired and aggressive skills.” In other words, play behavior is separate from aggressive competition, although there’s ostensibly some overlap. The ideal virtues Cicero implied in his discussion on the ideal Roman perhaps are reflective more of the latter, but we must also recognize that such aggressive skills emerge from playful behavior, games of competition, skill, combat, and excellence. Humans may have simply specialized this kind of specialty beyond its initially “intended” use; there’s still no reason to not see violence and aggression, agonistic or agonal play, as forms of right socialization; rough-and-tumble play, for their own sake, is still highly laudable. Yet, like Huizinga (1950/2014) in his book Homo Ludens, there’s a sense that play for the sake of competition isn’t quite play:

“During the first centuries of the Empire, thousands of citizens from all quarters competed in the founding and donating of halls, baths, theaters, in the mass distribution of food, in the institution or quipping of new games, all of which was recorded for posterity in boastful inscriptions… [The] real nature of this passion for splendid donations would be… adequately summed up by calling it the potlatch spirit. Munificence for the sake of honor and glory, for the sake of outdoing your neighbor and beating him – that is what we can discern in all this, and therein the age-old ritual-agonistic background of Roman civilization comes to light… The play-element also appears very clearly in Roman literature and art. High-flown panegyrics and hollow rhetoric are the mark of the one; superficial decoration thinly disguising the massive under-structure, murals dallying with an inane genre or degenerating into flabby elegance dominate the other. It is features like these that stamp the last phase of Rome’s ancient greatness with inveterate frivolity… All the deeper spiritual impulses withdraw from this culture of the surface and strike new root in the mystery religions… when Christianity cut Roman civilization off from its ritual basis, it withered rapidly (p. 178).”

Like the rats Panksepp observed, those whose goal is winning, rather than continuing to play, and to see what comes of that play (to play more), miss the point of play. Such rats will find fewer and fewer play partners as time progresses (Panksepp, 2004, p. 284-85). We can now begin to speculate on what caused the dissolution of the Waorani society.

In a paper by F.F. Strayer (1992), The Development of Agonistic and Affiliative Structures in Preschool Play Groups, the researchers examined the development of social dominance (rank) in young children. The development of affiliative, pro-social, and in some sense peaceful tendencies, increased with age. Young children, ages one to three, expressed the highest rates of agonistic behaviors (competition, threat, and attack). While in children aged one to five years, affiliative behaviors increased (signaling, approaching, and contacting, the latter of which includes actions such as touch, pat, kiss, hold-hands, shoulder-hug). It is clear that from Stayer and colleagues’ work that as children interact with each other, specifically as children are allowed to interact with each other, they begin to socialize themselves. It is not clear from his work or work done by Carol Lauer whether adult supervision in such matters is genuinely essential, unless there’s an emergency. In fact, such interactions may have unforeseen or negative consequences, e.g., it may lead to the assumption that girls, for example, are less agonistic than boys, causing agonistic behavior in girls to be overlooked. This fact, that adults can influence the social development of children, specifically their agonistic and affiliative tendencies, was highlighted by Strayer who says, “Such issues foreshadow the more central question in ethological study: how cultural variants differentially shape the developing socials skills of young children.” 

However, through skillful interactions with their peers, a child may effectively develop friendships, ask for the help of allies, “[enhancing] both their affiliative relationships and dominance rank within the peer group.” In more socially sophisticated individuals, dominance is not necessarily the determining factor in the success of a dyadic competition. Instead, “individual differences in the ability to identify and exploit common social resources,” may be the determining factor; i.e., triadic awareness is essential in social relationships, as discussed in part two of this paper. These findings suggest that “Early peer group structures may provide concrete learning experiences which facilitate the acquisition of interactive, representation and planning skills that are universal prerequisites for successful integration into a functioning adult society.” Without these prerequisites, or through ineffectual adult influence, affiliative tendencies, interacting in a non-agonistic manner, capacities for navigating a complex social milieu, may not properly develop. In turn, what you might observe in such instances is behavior analogous or homologous to that of the Waorani’s.

Thus, what we can see is that play leads to right socialization. By right we must mean that the group’s, really species, need for eusociality is preserved. Without proper emotional and intellectual development, cognitive development may be delayed (Robert S. Fink, 1976), the use and conception of emotions as a mechanism and effecter for prosocial behaviors may be delayed (Rebecca H. Bauer et al., 2021), and language or symbolic knowledge use may be delayed (Marbach and Yawkey, 1980). What I have shown about morality is that it is predicated upon the emotion centers of the human brain. Without proper play, emotional development is delayed, delaying socialization. Understanding our emotions, the emotions of others, formulating that others have intents (Theory of Mind), and playing with different scenarios involving the emotions, non-corporeal bodies, and circumstances of others (Theatre of Mind), requires the development of the emotions, cognitive problem-solving capacities, and the understanding of symbols and language. Without proper, creative, and educational play – play with the end goal of further play in mind, not competitive play – these capacities may either never develop or may be significantly stunted, as was the case in the Waorani. As a result of ineffectual socialization and development, an atavistic stage of Man’s social existence may present itself, one characterized by brutishness, ego-centricity, emotional retardation, or rapaciousness. Man may very well be naturally social, but there’s no reason he must be social – his specialty, his ability to learn, as plastic as it is, affords him the ability to learn to not be social.