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Seeking the full participation of all baptized Catholics in the life of the Church |
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A Moral Monkey
Nicholas Wade of the New York Times recently published an article on morality in monkeys. Citing primatologist Frans de Waal, Wade says, "Human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies." How supposedly genetic, evolutionary "building blocks" can at the same time be "societal" isn't a question that Wade ever answers. Let's examine a main gloss from the article and give an alternative to Wade's naturalistic version of morality and the law: Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book "Moral Minds" that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, "Primates and Philosophers," the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes. Frans de Waal sees morality as a byproduct of genetic and evolutionary causes, but the broader idea that moral behavior--or as Dr. de Waal might say "socially beneficial" behavior--appears in the things of nature sounds like an idea from Aquinas in 13th century. All created good derives from an independent, ontological absolute. In contrast to de Waal's story, morality doesn't come from the ground up, rising from the lowest animals to human society. Instead, the moral law pre-exists human society and human law. Its pre-existence appears not in the evolutionary precursors of homo sapiens, but in the eternal law that has a supernatural existence of its own, above the mundane existence of creation. True, all created things take part in a similar good, but this good derives from a divine intention. Animals aren't the source of human morality. They simply share in and reflect the order that permeates all creation. There's a well-known story in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad of the Hindu religion. In the story, some men ask Brahma to teach them morality. In response, Brahma establishes perpetual thunderbolts that make the sound "Da." This sound intones the first syllable of the words datta, dayadhvam, and damyata (self-control, giving, and mercy). The natural religion of the Hindus is without supernatural revelation, but the Hindu story of the thunder shows that traces of morality can be found in the order inherent in all created things. Why not infer from the fact that inanimate objects follow certain physical laws that humanity's sense of moral law arises from the laws of physics? Isn't it true that there is a systematic order to the physical world's "laws"? Such a thesis wouldn't fit the evolutionary mindset of Nicholas Wade and Frans de Waal. For them, human traits have their source in the proto-humans of a bygone point in evolutionary history. The problem is that in order to demonstrate this, Wade and de Waal depend on today's apes, and these apes exist at the same time as humans, not prior to them. What is prior, though, is the intentional order in all creation. 
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