I believe that if we truly valued what Jane Goodall did, it would change our concepts of humanism and morality. Frans de Waal has recently suggested searching for humanism among the primates (de Waal 2013). Goodall (1971) entrusted her life to that humanism almost 60 years ago, when she went to live with chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania. She did not do so naively. Had she underestimated the strength and determination of full-grown chimpanzees, she would not have survived. Rather, she embarked on her research with the confidence that primate females must have had for tens of millions of years; that whatever dominance behavior she would encounter, she would be able to be respectful, and that this respect would protect her.

Goodall’s approach could be interpreted as that of an anthropologist who accepts the next challenge beyond living among a different human culture. As she was observing chimpanzees, she gave them names and followed families over many generations. Apes do not have a grammar-based language so she could not use the approach of anthropologists who learn the language of the culture they want to study and ask questions. She had to find different ways of understanding chimpanzees. How did she know if she would be attacked? Her mentor, Louis Leakey, made sure that she had thorough training in what was known about apes at the time (Bowman-Kruhm 2005). We can assume that he would not have let her live among them had he considered it to be unreasonably dangerous. It must have been clear that chimpanzees need some level of empathy to exhibit the group behavior we see. Basic concepts of the morality among wildanimals can be inferred from observation, using simple logical reasoning, and thus living among a different species becomes a reasonable prospect.

When I read Goodall’s work, I can’t help but think that she views chimpanzees as individuals capable of making moral decisions, much like humans. More than half a century ago few people had that attitude. Only recently has research on the morality of animals gained substantial popularity (Bekoff and Pierce 2009, de Waal 2009). Ironically, some of the fiercest moral debates are now fought between those biologists, like Richard Dawkins (2006), who use animal instincts to explain human moral behavior, and those who actually observe the morality of animals (de Waal 2013). While Goodall has stayed out of such battles, her understanding of animal morality sheds some light on the controversy.

Although few people would trust the moral reasoning of chimpanzees enough to live among them as Goodall did, most dog owners will probably assert that if they were to kick their pets repeatedly and unfairly, they would expect the dogs’ behavior to become less friendly towards them. Instinctively, many of us believe that dogs have an understanding of reciprocity that can be trusted to some extent, and chimpanzees are even more similar to us. Nowadays, primates’ ability to act morally is no longer questioned by most biologists or psychologists, although religious leaders and some moral philosophers have maintained other viewpoints.

Moral philosophers generally consider language as a prerequisite to reason (Birsch 2014, 5). Unfortunately, they do not distinguish between language that is used in communication, which is limited to humans (Pinker 1994), and the reasoning processes that happen in our brain. The linguist George Lakoff (1999) discussed this inconsistency extensively in his work about the importance of metaphors in our innate thought processes. Linguistic theories about metaphorical thinking have also been supported through studies of chimpanzees (Dahl and Adachi 2013). When most biologists and psychologists discuss morality, they focus on observations of animal behavior (Bekoff and Pierce 2009, deWaal 2009) or our understanding of evolution (Wilson 2014, Dawkins 1978), neither of which depend on underlying linguistics models for the reasoning that happens in our brains or that of animals. However, while biological analogies with regard to other species can answer some questions, their usefulness has a major limitation: language does not only matter for our internal reasoning processes but also in communication.

The grammar-based languages that humans employ have resulted in persistent narratives that have the potential to influence large groups of people (Harari 2014), and they have enabled formal reasoning and critical thinking with regard to those narratives. Herein lies a recipe for controversies over moral implications of observations even within the domain of biology and psychology research. While primates understand many moral concepts, there is one thing they cannot do: They have no way to debate morality. At some point in time our ancestors’ language abilities would have become powerful enough to create basic agreements like “If you not punch me, I not punch you.” The grammatical concept “if … then” is beyond the language instincts of apes (Pinker 1994). The behavior of dogs lets us infer that they can represent the concept “If sit then get treat” internally, but their language lacks the grammatical features to express it. Our family’s puppy, Luna, is quite capable of signaling “I know you want this pencil back, but I don’t want to give it to you”, but she would not be able to create persistent rules about property or establish whether they were broken.

Yuval Harari (2014) has argued that many of the concepts that drive our lives, such as corporations, gods, or even money, are fictions that gain their impact from our shared belief in their use. Nonhuman species cannot create abstract concepts that are generally recognized, because they lack the communication capacity to do so. When our ancestors started negotiating agreements not to punch each other and to respect each other’s property, they were able to form larger groups and live more peacefully within them. They may also have started reminding one another of who was notoriously breaking such agreements. Robin Dunbar (1998) has argued that gossip was an important function of language in the development of humans. Imagine a police force or legal system without language. Despite its benefits, our language also allowed us to build weapons that are more dangerous than those of any animals.

When reading Goodall’s “In the Shadow of Man,” I get the impression that she greatly enjoyed watching chimpanzees, as supported by the many decades she spent at Gombe. Would she have equally enjoyed seeing her male colleagues engage in the shows of dominance behavior that she witnessed in chimpanzees? I first read “In the Shadow of Man” as a junior faculty member, when I was confronted with competitiveness that went beyond what I had previously experienced. At the time, my children were preschool-aged, and when I read a picture book to them that described the social interactions of apes I couldn’t help but recognize similarities. That was when my husband, Alan, suggested that I might be interested in Goodall’s book. It was the best recommendation he could have made.

Goodall’s work helped me to understand innate dominance behavior. It also reminded me that if you want to go into the jungle you don’t wear high heels. Perhaps most importantly, it led me to suspect that there may be things that women can accomplish more easily than men, a view that is supported through primate studies (Blaffer Hrdy 1981). I am convinced that Goodall’s perspective as a woman helped her face the risks of living among chimpanzees. How many women have to live with the fear of primate males of the species Homo sapiens? How many end up being abused? How many are killed by men they may have loved? It does not surprise me that a woman would develop a level of trust towards a community of apes that would make it natural for her to live around it for a long period of time. Women are more likely to grow up conscious of potential dangers coming from a group over which they have very little control, and when they do, they are trained to respond with offers of peace rather than aggression. Without substantial technology, a human observer of chimpanzees would not have a chance of winning a fight against them.

The group behavior that Goodall observed in chimpanzees is fascinating, but it does not directly translate to humans. Goodall did not make the kinds of quick sociobiological inferences that have rightly drawn criticism from philosophers like Philip Kitcher (1985), and she certainly did not do it with the naïveté that is popular in some of the modern atheist literature (Dawkins 2006). When I hear some of Dawkins’ arguments about instincts as source of morality, I wonder if he has ever feared for his personal safety. It seems to me that almost anybody who has experienced threats of violence would wish for others to remember our written and unwritten conventions of behavior, rather than letting their instincts take control. Tens of thousands of years of using grammar-based languages, and the conventions that have been created during that time, have hardly left us unchanged, and our weapons are now far more dangerous now. Arguing that our evolutionarily determined instincts are a good model for describing social interactions and moral behavior in humans is a slippery slope, and has been extensively analyzed in the theory of Social Darwinism (Hawkins 1997).

Just as the cultural experiences of a woman may have helped Goodall accept the risks of living with apes, it is likely that they would also have discouraged her from viewing primate interactions as an unfiltered source of moral guidance. When male chimpanzees exhibit dominance behavior they do so within the context of their environment. We can assume that female apes are attracted to the behavior, since it would not be evolutionarily selected for otherwise. Among apes, instincts are powerful mechanisms for maintaining peace. Once grammar-based languages were available, conflict resolution could be made more effective through a discourse that examines scenarios from the perspectives of everybody involved. In a world where dangerous weapons are easily available, we can no longer afford to rely on instincts alone.

Goodall’s primary interest has always been in protecting the interests of the apes themselves rather than using them for moral guidance. The protection of nonhuman life is also a serious moral problem. As Harari (2014) observes, Homo sapiens jumped to the top of the food chain within a very short timeframe, leaving not much time for ecosystems to adjust. Using guidance from instinctual moral behavior will not solve that problem, as long as we have the tools and weapons that placed us at the top of the food chain in the first place. To answer the question of who has had the type of impact Goodall did, we must first understand why our current moralities do not solve the problem of Homo sapiens’ destructiveness either.

The notion of humans having dominion over other animals is ingrained in many modern religions. In contrast, the spirituality of Native cultures typically involves respect for nonhuman life and for Earth as a mother (Gill 1991). In his study of Native Asian spiritual traditions, David Abram (1996) found that the role of spiritual leaders was centered more on connecting people with the nonhuman world than the supernatural. He also argued that when early interpreters used terms such as “supernatural,” they might have been biased by their own religious convictions, which led them to objectify the nonhuman. When modern religions began discounting the role of nonhuman life, it may sadly have had evolutionary benefits in societies that were advanced enough not to rely on hunting for much of their nutrition, but not yet developed enough to seriously endanger the entirety of life on our planet.

Conventional moralities have never undergone anything that a scientist would accept as an independent objective test of justice. Once humans were able to form grammatical sentences, they were motivated to establish rules that guide behavior, but they were not necessarily motivated to do so in an objectively fair way. Some rules still make sense today. Take the example of not killing a person. It is easy to see how such a law would have come into being. After all, people do not normally want to be killed. Taking the perspective of the victim would motivate anybody to support it as law.

The logic of viewing moral rules from the perspectives of those they affect may not extend, however, beyond those represented in the decision-making. When most religious moral documents were written, the group of decision makers did not even include women. The consequences can be felt until today. Consider the notion of blaming a woman’s clothing for a rape she suffered. Most people would consider it fair that culprits, and not victims, be blamed for a crime. Yet, victim blaming is still a problem even in modern culture (Pennington 2015). Today, most secular countries, in which women are represented in legislative bodies, are motivated not to formally include victim blaming of women into their laws.

There is no reason to assume that traditional moral concepts were fair except to those who had a say in creating them. Not so long ago, that excluded women, slaves, and most definitely nonhuman species. It is consistent with Dawkins’ (1978) concept of memes as the units of human cultural evolution that our beliefs are subject to selective pressure much like genes. Biologically, individuals are more likely to survive if they exhibit some degree of selfishness, especially at the level of groups. Collective narcissism can be readily observed in our culture (de Zavala et al. 2009). It should be expected that traditional beliefs reinforce collective narcissism to protect the group that shapes them. We have no reason to assume that conventional moralities are objectively fair.

Ultimately, our unjust and untested beliefs endanger us all. The current risk of our civilization collapsing is serious (Oreskes and Conway 2014, Wilson 2016), and many of our practices are unsustainable (Hoekstra and Wiedmann 2014). If we want to stop the current destabilization of our planet’s biosphere we have to recognize that our conventional beliefs fail to serve that goal, and we must revisit our morality. Common belief systems do not give nonhuman life a status that is in any way comparable to human life. Even in moral philosophy, biocentrism (Taylor 1986) is not universally accepted. At least as importantly, our belief systems overall do not adequately consider the rights of future life, even while some of that future life would be human. In “Environmental Footprints as Methods of Moral Reasoning” (Denton 2017 a), I have argued that the tools that provide us quantitative information about our impact on future life should be granted the status of moral reasoning tools. If our technology can endanger life on Earth, our scientific reasoning must be granted a role in protecting it.

I am convinced that a major reason why Goodall’s accomplishments appear so unusual is that they defy the traditional moralities that are heavily skewed towards the current generation of humans. Rather than having been deliberate, the processes that caused this skewing may have been a result of the mechanisms through which moral guidelines evolved. However, it baffles me that not even secular moral philosophers appear to be willing to criticize the narcissistic origins of our convictions. For example, Kant’s moral philosophy is still viewed as a currently relevant example of moral reasoning, without discussing the implications of his “maxims” that would have to be phrased and evaluated using a grammar-based language. Animals would not be able to defend their actions based on maxims, and yet their behavior matches human moral behavior in many ways (Bekoff and Pierce 2009).

Picture, 30,000 years ago, a human mother and her infant. A bear attacks the infant. The mother fights, nearly loses her life, but all is well that ends well; eventually she is able to get the bear to run off. All this time she could have just let the bear do what he wanted to, and save herself, but her love of her infant told her otherwise. Was this the moral thing to do? Who would be willing to deny that this human mother acted morally? Now replace “human mother” with “nonhuman primate mother.” 30,000 years ago there might have been very little biological or cultural difference between the human and the primate mother. The incident did not require language-based communication. Who could possibly argue that the nonhuman primate mother acted less morally than her human counterpart? Both mothers had the choice to run (Owens and Owens 1984). Yet, we could reason that the human mother acted on a maxim, considering that she had the language capabilities to do so. We have no way to argue that a nonhuman primate did the same, because primates cannot communicate the reasoning processes they use internally.

Moral philosophy does not impose on itself the obligation of being intrinsically consistent. Its heritage was shaped by mandating respect for statements that are attributed to deities, without a need to satisfy scientific expectations. I claim that only a small portion of moral philosophy is consistent with scientific ways of reasoning and current scientific understanding. From a scientist’s perspective, the most important and scientifically consistent element of moral reasoning may well be Rawls’ veil of ignorance (Rawls 1971). The veil of ignorance asserts that those who make moral rules should evaluate them as if they did not know in advance which position in society they would hold. Elsewhere, we have argued that this idea can be rephrased in terms of a scientific invariance under change of perspective, and generalized to account for nonhuman and future perspectives (Denton and Denton, submitted). From a scientist’s perspective, the moral validity of abstracted statements ought not to depend on who makes the statement.

Rawls’ reasoning is consistent with science, because only the process of shaping a social contract in a morally consistent way is viewed as depending on language-based reasoning. Following the rules of a social contract, in a context in which such a contract is enforced, requires little or no capacity for language. We can teach a dog not to be violent without using a grammar-based language. Fundamentally, Rawls only applies language-based techniques to language, which is inherently consistent. Perspectives of nonhuman species can contribute to our reasoning without requiring explicit statements from individuals of the species, provided we refrain from anthropomorphizing (de Waal 1999). For example, when we accept putting down an aggressive dog but object to killing dogs otherwise, we implicitly use rules that show similarities to those that we use for humans.

Clearly, there are animals for which we consider it acceptable to kill them, no matter if they break our rules, in particular those that we consider livestock. The vegetarian and vegan movements try to draw attention to the inconsistencies with which we treat nonhuman life. It is indeed hard to imagine that we would accept all currently legal ways of treating livestock if we viewed the animals with the respect with which Goodall treats primates. We may try to argue that because of our intelligence we do not have to apply the same rules to animals as to ourselves. However, that argument has limitations. Imagine a group belonging to a more intelligent extraterrestrial species arriving on Earth. Would we grant that group the right to torture or kill us?

The apes that Goodall studied cannot be legally killed for meat, but their fate is not much better, because of the destruction of their habitats alone. It has been Goodall’s life accomplishment to stand up for the perspective of apes. As such, she has consistently represented the idea that human morality has to defend itself from perspectives other than its own. She has always done so in peace-seeking ways that take into consideration the perspectives of all involved. Dian Fossey, who studied gorillas in ways similar to Goodall’s approach to studying chimpanzees, directly opposed poachers (Mowat 1988). Goodall tried to take the perspective of poachers and use education to counteract the circumstances that lead to poaching. Based on the notion that moral statements should be defensible from all relevant perspectives, Goodall’s approach stands out as exceptionally thoughtful.

What I consider to be least defensible is when scientists claim to argue about morality based on scientific principles, yet ignore the problem of human impact on the nonhuman world. It is widely recognized that habitat destruction stands to have catastrophic consequences not only on the nonhuman, but also on the human world (Wilson 2016). We cannot afford labeling moralities as “scientific” that fail to recognize our own dangerous impact on our planet. The failure to shine a light at the injustice committed by the human species is pervasive not only to atheism (Dawkins 2006) but even to classical humanism that draws on conventional moralities (Kitcher 2014). It greatly saddens me when scientifically literate scholars discuss morality while ignoring the tremendous effort that their own colleagues in educational institutions, nonprofits, and governments worldwide spend on teaching the young generation conservation principles. If the future of life on our planet is in question (Wilson 2016), how can that not be a moral problem?

While conservation principles are widely taught, few programs are designed to integrate nonhuman and future interests into moral practice as directly as the Roots and Shoots program of the Jane Goodall Institute is (Johnson and Johnson-Pynn 2007). In this service-learning-based program, young people work on projects that serve animals, people, and the environment. The program includes teaching of knowledge related to those goals and often also involves a community assessment of the needs in those areas. Roots and Shoots groups have been formed in countries as diverse as Tanzania, China, and the United States. Youths are encouraged to carry out the projects independently, under the guidance of an adult. In many ways, one could compare the values that are taught with religious values such as compassion, except that the education is grounded in science and driven by concern for perspectives that are not otherwise represented. Roots and Shoots has grown to a substantial size and has local chapters in more than 100 countries.

This brings us back to the original question “Who was the first man to do what Jane Goodall did?” The question was intended to play on our habit of counting firsts, such as Charles Lindberg having been the first to fly solo across the Atlantic, and Amelia Earhartthe first woman to do so. When I have asked this question among friends, I am almost invariably given the name of a woman as an answer, most commonly Dian Fossey. Sometimes friends suggest the name of another woman who did something first before the first man did it. Apparently the question is very confusing. Eventually, a conservation scientist, Craig Stockwell, pointed out to me that as far as the observation of apes in the wild is concerned, the question does have a simple answer: George Schaller (1963) did a 1-year study of mountain gorillas in 1959, before Goodall began her work with chimpanzees. He went on to write several books about different species in the wild and his experiences observing them. Schaller’s scientific accomplishments and conservation efforts are widely respected (Turner 2008), but they appear to fill a different cultural niche than Goodall’s. To what extent is it our culture that shapes its heroes?

The length of Goodall’s study allowed understanding aspects of primate behavior that were not accessible to the 1-year timeframe of Schaller’s approach. In fact, Goodall has pointed out that even the 10-year timeframe that Leakey envisioned originally, would not have been sufficient to see some of the cruelty among chimpanzees that she witnessed later, such as gang violence between subgroups (Jampel 1984). These long-term observations place Goodall’s approach closer to anthropological endeavors, which is consistent with Leakey’s background in anthropology. Such anthropological roots also support the comparison of Goodall’s work with more recent books that link ethology (de Waal 2013, Bekoff and Pierce 2009) and conservation (Wilson 2014) to morality.

When individuals want to understand whether their actions are moral, they do well to get input from others. It could be argued that our species should attempt to get input from other species as well. If chimpanzees could speak, what would they say about us? What would they say if they understood the extent to which their habitats have already been destroyed and stand to be destroyed in the near future? Few people have made as serious efforts to infer answers to these questions as Goodall. Work centered on the perspectives of nonhuman species is still a relatively minor part of science in general, even half a century later. When Goodall first went to the Gombe Reserve, it had been less than a decade since Rosalind Franklin did the experiments that allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to publish the structure of the DNA molecule (Maddox 2003). Imagine a world without biotechnology now! A world without Jane Goodall is unfortunately all too easy to picture.It is symptomatic of our morality that “earning the respect of a nonhuman culture” has not changed the world as much as airplane travel or biotechnology. We do not see nonhuman cultures as evaluators of our accomplishments. Bridging the gap between them and us is not at the forefront of our interests.

Although Goodall has been granted an intellectual leadership position, we have done little to change the culture that made her work so unusual in the first place. Societies that view Earth as a motherare more open to taking the perspectives of nonhumans. If we did consult with those whose cultural memory goes back further than the beginnings of the major religions, we might be left with the conclusion that one of our culture’s misconceptions is to treat time as a sequence of “firsts”. Maybe it is the race towards some ill-defined end that has got us to endanger our home, the Earth. In fact, one could caricature this essay as asking which male non-Native scientist should be credited with reinventing the Native belief in nonhuman life as our family. No doubt, this question sounds cynical. What options do we have for changing culture? Goodall herself does amply refer to the belief in Earth as a mother and has gained respect in Native communities, some of which have seen substantial value in her Roots and Shoots program (Atzwanger 2010).

It is being increasingly recognized that we have to consider cultural factors in our environmental reasoning (Hoffman 2015). This statement does not conflict with recognizing the value of scientific inquiry. It was the study of DNA that finally removed any doubt about our evolutionary origins. That understanding, in turn, makes it clear how little we differ from chimpanzees. When I read Watson’s “The Double Helix” (Watson 1968) as a teenager, it taught me that difficult questions could be answered. At a conventional moral level, I feel obligated to note that when Watson and Crick used Franklin’s data without her consent (Maddox 2003), and without inviting her to be a coauthor on their paper, they violated common scientific ethics expectations.

Watson and Crick’s work was a milestone on a road towards extensive progress in biotechnology. Was it “good” to travel that road as fast as we did? This question is much more difficult than the conventional ethics question about giving credit where credit is due. Even now, we have no mechanisms for validating the ethicality of technological progress against science’s own predictions (Denton 2017 b). There is no scientific process for answering what technologies we “ought” to pursue or not pursue, considering their impact on future, current, nonhuman, and human life. Science has historically not been viewed as answering questions of what “ought” to be done, not even with regard to technological innovation. Conventional ethics concepts are nothing but heuristics of what has “worked” as moral guidance in the past --- from the perspectives of those who got to write the rules. To this day, science and technology increase humanity’s power without testing scientifically whether the innovations improve or hurt even humanity’s own chances of survival!

We lead much of our lives based on beliefs that we acquire at a young age. That applies to scientists as it does to anybody else. Only perspectives that are represented in those beliefs are bound to affect our choices later in life. Now that our future is in question (Wilson 2016, Oreskes and Conway 2014), we should be able to agree that “collective survival” constitutes a value that no one can ignore, and that it requires us to rethink everything we take for granted. When Goodall founded the Roots and Shoots program, I picture her as having struggled with such concerns. After all, her experiences in Africa exposed her to tangible consequences of our environmental destruction early on. What she created is ingenious on many levels: She chose to focus on those young enough to be flexible in their beliefs; she integrated a diverse group of cultures; she emphasized those concerns that nurture the spirit of care for our planet. Any of these choices help young generations incorporate diverse perspectives, including future and nonhuman ones, into their beliefs.

I consider the Roots and Shoots program to be the quintessence of what the science versus religion debate ought to be about. Science tells us that we are not the center of the universe. Galileo was able to collect experimental evidence that our planet is not the center of the movement of celestial bodies. Darwin convincingly showed that our species has shared origins with others. The universe is billions of years old, and the age of the human species a negligible fraction of that time. When some of the traditional moral codes were written that still guide our lives today, the authors had no access to this information. When we teach children morality now, we have to consider the scientific evidence. Neither religious belief systems that are a few thousand years old nor the instincts that humans may have had a hundred thousand years ago are sufficient to guide our actions. We cannot argue that the morality of modern humans is solely based on instincts, because we understand the uniqueness of the human capacity for grammar-based language (Pinker 1994), and we understand the manipulative power of language itself (Herman and Chomsky 1988).

Even if Goodall’s Roots and Shoots program is not enough, at least it is a start. Nurturing scientifically consistent beliefs is almost certainly more than one person can do alone. For beliefs to be consistent with science, they must adequately represent nonhuman and human, future and current perspectives. We are all related to nonhuman and future individuals as long as life on Earth survives. Beliefs that sound cruel to those perspectives should sound cruel to us. Goodall’s choice of requesting that Roots and Shoots projects cover people, animals and the environment is a way to work towards this expectation. The success of her model amply validates her thinking. Let’s start by recognizing that, more than a quarter century ago, Goodall made a giant leap forward in solving the problem of what scientifically consistent beliefs would look like. Who will be the first man to do what Jane Goodall did?

Acknowledgments

The philosophical concepts underlying this paper were developed together with Alan Denton, and benefited from valuable discussions with Karl-Heinz Bohle, Greg Burrill, Megan Bouret, Olga Bourlin, Dennis Cooley, Carl Denton, Martha Denton, Frank Denton, Robert Foertsch, Ron Gaul, Adam Hackathorn, Adam Helsene, Rebel Marie, Kendall Nygard, and Birgit Prüß. Special thanks to Diana Denton, Denise Lajimodiere, Sangita Sinha, and Craig Stockwell, for contributing their expertise in providing feedback on the manuscript. Finally, thanks to our family’s puppy Luna, who is a most charming teacher of nonverbal negotiation.

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