Morality and pack behavior?

Question

This may get a bit wordy, so please excuse that...
I was thinking this morning, how are people and animals alike? How are we different?
Now, I know that people are animals, mammals, primates. So what separates us from different species? An extra fold or two in our brains? Opposable thumbs? A face conducive to speech? Could it be morals? Do other animals have morals?
I know that animals have behaviors based on instinct, the instinct being what is best for survival of the species. Those that don't follow the rules are outcast, or killed, removed from the gene pool...which got me thinking about prisons, mental institutions, and why people are removed from society. Because they behave in ways that are not beneficial to the pack. Which sounds an awful lot like morality.
This made me realize that when you question a person's morality, it's so offensive because you are questioning their suitability to be part of the people pack. Their suitabilty to reproduce, to be.
Thoughts?

It sounds like real compassion, chem...even "lower" animals have it...nice...=0)

Garwy, when I say "the people pack", I'm referring to society as a whole, not specific cliques.

Arewethereyet: What is love, anyway? I'm sure that animals do feel it, but just don't have the words to articulate it. What about dogs going into burning buildings to save their people? Is that not an act of love, loyalty? But, it can still be called pack behavior, protecting the alpha...

Blue, I'm not saying that morality is bad at all. I just don't think it's exclusive to people. =0)

Mr. Ecko, I appreciate your opinion, but I would like to know why.

L&R- but HOW are they not the same thing? See?

Answer 1

Morality and instinct are not the same thing at all. However, the end result of both could lead you to think they are similar or identical. Animals don't have morals. They go mostly by instinct.

Now, certain animals get phased out of the evolutionary cycle because of some trait that works against their survival. The same applies to humans too.

So back to your actual question and the people pack, there likely are some individuals that for whatever reason, you would not want to see their genetic material passed on. That is simply fact. The people pack, hmmmm. Sounds a lot better than the People's Court.

Morality requires actual thought. We learn it through experience and our parents. Instinct is pre-programmed and does not have anything to do with thought. Insects are ruled by instinct. There is no such thing is Bumble Bee University where they take classes in order to pollinate the flower. Do you suppose that houseflies have thoughts?

Answer 2

You make a good point. I had never really thought about animals in contrast like this question is until a couple years ago when my wife showed me the "Conversation With Koko" video and I swear it blew my mind. Then I've seen other forms of compassion and other very human qualities in nature footage. You can't say reason because of other apes that do display reasoning skills. There are (I think it was) chimps, or maybe orangitangues (spelling, sorry) that can do basic math. Seals that can do memory tests. A bird that can describe things, actually describe and descern between specific things not just based on a mimic function. I saw some really amazing things in various "check out how awesome animals really are" types of videos. On the topic of love I saw a video of a pack of elephants that had a baby with a deformed leg. The mother stayed with it, the pack leaving her to go hunt. Maternal instinct, right. True, but the weird part was the mother's sister started to follow then kept stopping and looking back. Very clearly torn about what she should do. She innevitably stayed with the mother and the baby, and to show the happy ending the baby through stretching it's leg out and forcing it to be in the right position healed itself. It was a trip though, you could see the aunt really wrestling with what the right thing to do was. You could say that the elephant was choosing between love for her family and desire to help protect them and a survival instinct, knowing that the rest of the herd was going to where the food was.
Our reasoning skills/problem solving abilities are far more advanced, at least once we are beyond infancy (there was a test where an orangitang totally whooped a 3-4 year old at a memory game, it was pretty funny) and that has led us to technology and a certain life structure. I think it is taken for granted though how mentally advanced some animals are.

To answer the real question though. I think morality is based out of instinct. We, through our reasoning and communication skills though have just put the terms in writing, and there is more room for error (a lot more offenses possible) because of the fact that we are so broadly connected as a species and are capable of so much beyond what animals are because of the tools we have.

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Lovenrckts is right, I was being too broad. I think a big portion of morality (the real big stuff, victimed crimes) is born out of instinct. The more ticky tack stuff is not, those are born out of preference which is reason based (even when it's not necessarily reasonable).

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Self preservation, preservation of the community and territorialism (if that's a word) are the key instinctual concepts.

Answer 3

The only difference between us and other animals is that we’re aware of ourselves and that we can contemplate stuff about stuff.
Other than that we are totally similar starting with the facts that we and ‘animals’ are born, many of us procreate and then we all die.
Admittedly the ways we do thing are a little more ‘sophisticated’:
We all live in some sort of shelter - nests, caves, logs or houses.
Most of us mate - some in the middle of a road or field and some on the back seat of a car or in a bed.
We all eat - some like it raw and or as it comes and some of us cook our food first.

We all do what is best for us – we are all selfish; everything we ever do is so’s we can get some happy as a result or at least a clear conscience.
All of us have at least two choices at all times – at ALL times we will do what best suits us … even if it is to be a martyr.

We are only animals – it is ONLY ego that separates us from the other ones.
We may well all be unique but in essence we are all the same.
Theists just can’t get their egos around this simple truth – they’d rather believe an invisible man in the sky ‘made us in his image’ with the wave of a hand or purple wand … like Bill Hicks’ Goat-boy.
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Answer 4

I have said the same thing when an Atheist's morals have come into question or under fire.

I believe what seperates humans from animals is the size of our brains. We are more able to reason. I know apes can reason to an extent and also use simple tools. But humans take this ability to the maximum level. I also think another factor is that we are aware of our own existance and mortality. "I think, therefore, I am."
I do not necessarily think what animals do is exactly as having morals. They do what they do for the survival of their species. We humans do the same thing. We are the ones that put the label on it. We have laws that benefit our society. Animals do the same thing. As we both have said, if the rules of the family clan are not followed, depending upon the severity of the infraction, a punishment is handed out. Anything from a verbal scolding to becoming exiled or killed. Do we not do this in our own species?
We have rules of ettiquette that dictate how we treat each other. Animals do this as well. They will groom one another, they have a pecking order when they eat. They have their own standards of social class. The top member eats first then, according to rank, the others get to eat.

It is all based on the same thing. We humans have evolved into more than a basic animal mentality. However, the basis of instinct and ancestral "memory", have taken it to where we are today.

Answer 5

Bettierage,
You've asked a really good question. I'm not up to equaling it with my response, so I'll just list some areas to consider further.

1) Comparative work with animal studies and social anthropology on the subject of exile and punishment could help flesh out your hypothesis. I have no idea if anyone has studied that at all. %-)

2) Anything short of killing does not remove a member from the gene pool, but instead restricts their ability to contribute. Some genes will of course be harmful at certain times but helpful at others, so keeping them around could have an unintentional benefit.

This could also be why some U.S. Americans are so gung-ho about the death penalty, but I think that that has a lot more to do with socio-economics and media conditioning.

3) Genes and behaviours do not exactly correlate. Better to think of both in terms of tendencies that may or may not be triggered by environmental conditions. So part of the question is how much this is about removing from the gene pool and how much is about removing from society.

That question doesn't change your end hypothesis, however. Questioning morality is absolutely about questioning a person's suitability to be part of the social group. It is, and always will be, deeply offensive.

Answer 6

Wow, you are a lot like me two years ago.

Moral is indeed in part instinctive, the most basic precepts of moral are not killing and not stealing. If you see this, no pack kill itself, and no pack steals between themselves.

Social animals live in a comunist-like life, sharing everything with everyone. Meanwhile humans chosed the capitalism, meaning the resources ends in the hands of a few instead of being shared by all.

In my opinion that's what differs us, humans are animals, and in most of the times have no reason, feelings or heart, or use the thumb. What differs us from social animals is in fact the greed.

Answer 7

I want to start by asking... how did you learn to talk. Do you have kids? If you do how and when did they learn to talk. Why didn't our so called primate relatives not learn to talk. Sure they make grunts and noises that they can communicate a little. but its no different than a baby making grunts and cries before he/she talks. Every human on earth speaks with some kind of complex language including tribes found in primitive areas found in the early 60's. Never mind written language yet. How long ago do you think it was that humans could talk. Do you think maybe a mutant geneous somehow along the way figured out how to do this? He would have had to teach everyone else how to do it. Now that is how written language came about. Somebody figured a way to represent the sounds they made on the ground and taught everybody else how to do it. But I dont think spoken language is that old. I'd like to see and explanation on how humans learned to talk to each other. We certainly cant go very long without talking to somebody we'd go nuts. I just dont see how it could come about through some evolutionary process. Only ocean mammals have a better ability to communicate than humans

Answer 8

Humans have language and make tools, partly do to reasoning and partly do to physical structures that help. As a result humans do the same kinds of things other animals do but better -- animals fight but humans use weapons, wolves take care of wounded pack members but humans build hospitals and devise social services.

Morality is conformity, nothing new their. Often being seen as intelligent is a mater of conformity. Almost every complement has an aspect of conformity behind it. True superiority could very easily be maladaptive, even fatal, because fitting in is often more important. Yes, morality is related to kind of herd instinct, and "immoral" is a judgment of unworthiness to exist / justification to punish or ostracize.

So this herd mentality allows one group to benefit relative to another -- ultimately at the expense of some other. "Goodness" is just helping your group in its "evil" -- there is no such thing as "good," only "evil," as "good" is just a cleverly disguised form of "evil." This is why it can be said that reality is continuum of "evil" and that all things are manifestations of "evil" -- evil is all there is!

Answer 9

I think you're absolutely correct. It struck me some time ago that morality was simply an instinct, and one that any social animal would have to have in order for the society to hang together.

Examination of other animal societies shows that they do indeed exhibit an instinct to be nice to each other, and to my mind this - the Golden Rule - is the basis of all morality.

Humans have expanded and extrapolated this basic drive into such complex rules in order to cope with the complexity of our social interactions that it's sometimes hard to see that the Golden Rule is the core of it.

You'll be pleased to know that even Darwin agreed with us on this: Origin of Species contains a reference to it. Strangely, this simple and logical basis for morality seems to have dropped off people's radar to a large extent. The Brights (an onanistic bunch at the best of times) have already spent about three years trying to come up with a definitive reason why atheists don't need a Bible to be moral - with no results this far.

I'm deeply grateful to for the observation that our primary method of judicial punishment is to remove criminals from participation in reproduction for a fixed interval. Well spotted! I *knew* there was something weird about conjugal visits!

CD

Answer 10

Good thinking. Another distinguishing feature of being human is the ability to contemplate self and the concept of something greater than us. Those abilities imply that we possess abilities beyond nature, beyond mere self preservation, and beyond perpetuation of our species. Not that we don't misuse and misapply them, but abilities don't evolve without purpose.

Animals are by nature locked into a specific narrow range of behaviors and cannot choose to deviate from their particular set of patterns. Humans however have by comparison an extremely wide range of behaviors from which to choose for a wide range of reasons including selflessness and sacrifice. We can even plan our selflessness and sacrifice. All of which feeds back into what you've pointed out -- the welfare of the precious pack.

Although we're slowing awakening and have a tiny glimmer, we humans are hardly aware of what it means to be human, what we are in reality as individuals, and what we are in reality as a group. So misunderstood and underestimated as to what stunning creatures we are, and what we as a stunning pack are capable of, that we get stuck thinking that all we are is a rational animal.

A worthy question to consider is why have humans evolved the capacity to think so vastly beyond mere survival of species, while none of our dear animal friends have; and why are we ever-evolving our groups into ever-larger unities? Merely to ensure the survival of species? Something greater is implied. Where does our evolution go once we've achieved the capacity to function as a planetary whole? What's left to evolve after that? I propose that we are evolving inwardly, and such evolution has great implication regarding what we humans in reality are.