Kristin Andrews

There is currently much scientific and public interest in using machine learning to uncover the meaning of animal signals, which could ultimately lead to two-way communication systems between humans and other animals. This paper examines the research ethics that should govern this line of inquiry, and explores the transformative implications if scientists are successful at creating translations between animal signals and human language. We argue that the scientific and philosophical literature on animal communication systems warrants the attempt to engage in these translation projects, and describe the current state of the art of the research. While the ability to translate animal signals has many possible benefits, these come alongside no small number of risks to animal communities. We enumerate the risks that exist in the development of these models in order to help scientists avoid them. Looking ahead, we argue that successful two-way communication with animals would both reveal an existing moral landscape and create a new one. Any successful two-way communication system would require radical translation of animal signals, which in turn entails that animals are rational beings who live in normative communities. Furthermore, the creation of these communicative systems also gives rise to new responsibilities and new demands. As researchers work to transform our social relationships with animals, they must also take on the responsibility to prepare humanity for the challenges that will arise in this novel multi-species landscape.

A growing acceptance that many nonhuman animal communities have distinct cultures – group-variable patterns of behavior and information sustained over time by social learning – is beginning to reshape thinking about animal conservation. Culture, in this sense, can significantly influence how different populations interact with their environment and respond to environmental changes, and, therefore, has important implications for conservation. The literature on animal culture and conservation has led to valuable insights about how to protect endangered cultural animals. It has also led to some challenging questions. Should protecting animal cultural diversity become a new conservation goal, along the lines of preserving biodiversity? Should culture be an important consideration in prioritizing populations for conservation? Should we be designating animal “cultural heritage sites” for special protection, analogous to heritage sites of special significance for humans? This paper explores these questions and various arguments for preserving animal culture that have been offered in the literature. These include both instrumental arguments and arguments that suggest that animal cultures are of intrinsic value in their own right. These arguments raise important considerations, but they do not address all the ways in which animal cultures matter. We argue for more sustained attention to animals’ own interests in culture: animal cultures matter first and foremost because they matter to the animals themselves. Animals’ interests with respect to culture are not only about preserving practices or geographical locations, but include more abstract interests in protecting opportunities for agency, self-determination, and changing cultural traditions.

Observations of animals engaging in apparently moral behaviour have prompted the question of whether morality is shared between humans and other animals, with little agreement on the answer. Some philosophers explicitly argue that morality is unique to humans, because moral agency requires capacities that are only demonstrated in our species. Other philosophers argue that some animals can participate in morality because they possess these capacities in a rudimentary form, or because the touted capacities are not necessary for moral participation. Empirical research programs on possible moral capacities such as fairness and empathy have seen scientists joining in these debates. We argue that the current debate suffers because discussions often fail to provide both a proper philosophical foundation about the nature of moral practices and a solid empirical ground for claims about what animals can and cannot do. In this chapter we focus on the second of these issues, and defend the claim that animals have three sets of capacities that, on some views, are taken as necessary or foundational for moral judgment and action. These are capacities of care, capacities of autonomy, and normative capacities. Care, we argue, is widely found among social animals. Autonomy and normativity are more recent topics of empirical investigation, so while there is less evidence of these capacities at this point in our developing scientific knowledge, the current data is strongly suggestive.

If the UK joins a handful of other nations to recognize the sentience of invertebrates, such as cephalopod mollusks and decapod crustaceans, by, for example, prohibiting the boiling of live lobsters, this will be based on evidence that emotions and felt experiences (i.e., sentience) are not limited to animals close to humans, such as the mammals. This topic has been heavily debated in both affective neuroscience (how to define an emotion?) and philosophy (what is the moral relevance of animal experiences?), but a consensus on the criteria for and implications of recognizing animal sentience seems to be emerging (1).

Following recent arguments that cultural practices in wild animal populations have important conservation implications, we argue that recognizing captive animals as cultural has important welfare implications. Having a culture is of deep importance for cultural animals, wherever they live. Without understanding the cultural capacities of captive animals, we will be left with a deeply impoverished view of what they need to flourish. Best practices for welfare should therefore require concern for animals’ cultural needs, but the relationship between culture and welfare is also extremely complex, requiring us to rethink standard assumptions about what constitutes and contributes to welfare.

Great apes have been observed to help one another cross roads, spring traps set by poachers, share food after group hunts, respond to the recently dead as if they were grieving, and to play with sticks as if they were dolls. But some deny that empathy is involved. This chapter argues that great apes empathic behavior does not fit the spectatorial model tested in recent studies. Ape empathy and ape morality are best seen from the perspective of their engaged interactions with others as individuals with relationships, past histories, personalities, social roles, emotions, and moods. When empathy is seen merely as the ability to correctly attribute mental states to others, it loses the richness involved in the entangled empathy experienced between individuals, which has cognitive as well as conative elements, and conclusions about ape ethics can only be that they have a rudimentary precursor to real human morality.

We describe an as yet unidentified bias relevant to comparative cognition research: WEIRD-centrism. This bias leads us to take as the gold standard the practices, capacities, or concepts of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) humans, that is, humans who grew up in WEIRD societies and whose behavior has been shaped by the influence of WEIRD cultural norms and practices. We identify how the bias impacts the study of practices, capacities, and concepts, and offer two suggestions for mitigating the bias. The first is to use what we are calling a multibaseline approach, which involves starting with constructs that come not from our experiences as humans, but from our growing understanding of other species. The second is to make use of philosophical analysis and conceptual engineering, which includes identifying minimal concepts of psychological capacities as well as a dimensional approach that depicts the many ways in which a capacity can be instantiated. We hope that these tools will allow us to better understand the similarities and differences both within and between species.

Traditionally, discussions of moral participation – and in particular moral agency – have focused on fully formed human actors. There has been some interest in the development of morality in humans, as well as interest in cultural differences when it comes to moral practices, commitments, and actions. However, until relatively recently, there has been little focus on the possibility that nonhuman animals have any role to play in morality, save being the objects of moral concern. Moreover, when nonhuman cases are considered as evidence of moral agency or subjecthood, there has been an anthropocentric tendency to focus on those behaviors that inform our attributions of moral agency to humans. For example, some argue that the ability to evaluate the principles upon which a moral norm is grounded is required for full moral agency. Certainly, if a moral agent must understand what makes an action right or wrong, then most nonhuman animals would not qualify (and perhaps some humans too). However, if we are to understand the evolution of moral psychology and moral practice, we need to turn our attention to the foundations of full moral agency. We must first pay attention to the more broadly normative practices of other animals. Here, we begin that project by considering evidence that great apes and cetaceans participate in normative practices.

While more species are being identified as cultural on a regular basis, stark differences between human and animal cultures remain. Humans are more richly cultural, with group-specific practices and social norms guiding almost every element of our lives. Furthermore, human culture is seen as cumulative, cooperative, and normative, in contrast to animal cultures. One hypothesis to explain these differences is grounded in the observation that human children across cultures appear to spontaneously over-imitate silly or causally irrelevant behaviors that they observe. The few studies on over-imitation in other species are largely taken as evidence that spontaneous over-imitation is not present in other species. This leads to the over-imitation hypothesis – that the differences between human culture and animal cultures can be traced to the human unique tendency to over-imitate. In this paper, we analyze the current state of the literature on animal over-imitation and challenge the adequacy of the over-imitation hypothesis for the differences between humans and animal cultures. To make this argument, we first argue that the function of human over-imitation is norm-learning and that over-imitation, like skill-learning, should be subject to selective social learning effects. Then we review the empirical evidence against animal over-imitation and argue that these studies do not take into account the relevant variables given the normative and selective nature of over-imitation. We then analyze positive empirical evidence of over-imitation in great apes and canids from the experimental literature and conclude that the current body of evidence suggests that some canids and primates may have the capacity for over-imitation. This paper offers a methodological suggestion for how to study animal over-imitation, and a theoretical suggestion that over-imitation might be much more widely found among species. The larger implication for claims about human uniqueness suggests that if we do find widespread evidence of over-imitation across species, many of the current theories of human uniqueness that focus on human hyper-cooperation or social norms may have only identified a difference of degree, not of kind, between humans and other animals.

Shared intentions supporting cooperation and other social practices are often used to describe human social life but not the social lives of nonhuman animals. This difference in description is supported by a lack of evidence for rebuke or stakeholding during collaboration in nonhuman animals. We suggest that rebuke and stakeholding are just two examples of the many and varied forms of social maintenance that can support shared intentions. Drawing on insights about mindshaping in social cognition, we show how apes can be stakeholders of a different sort in joint action. Drawing on pluralistic social maintenance methods of behavior enforcement, we show ape joint action can be supported by different forms of positive and negative social pressures, and not just protest. We explain how diverse relationships, contexts, social structures, and forms of communication may play a role in forming and successfully fulfilling joint commitments for humans, great apes, and other animals.

This paper examines the meaningfulness of pointing in great apes. We appeal to Hannah Ginsborg’s conception of primitive normativity, which provides an adequate criterion for establishing whether a response is meaningful, and we attempt to make room for a conception according to which there is no fundamental difference between the responses of human infants and those of other great apes to pointing gestures. This conception is an alternative to Tomasello’s view that pointing gestures and reactions to them reveal a fundamental difference between humans and other apes.

Human communities teem with a variety of social norms. In order to change unjust and harmful social norms, it is crucial to identify the psychological processes that give rise to them. Most researchers take it for granted that social norms are uniquely human. By contrast, we approach this matter from a comparative perspective, leveraging recent research on animal social behaviour. While there is currently only suggestive evidence for norms in nonhuman communities, we argue that human social norms are likely produced by a wide range of mechanisms, many of which we share with nonhuman animals. Approaching this variability from a comparative perspective can help norm researchers expand and reframe the range of hypotheses they test when attempting to understand the causes of socially normative behaviours in humans. First, we diagnose some of the theoretical obstacles to developing a comparative science of social norms, and offer a few basic constructs and distinctions to help norm researchers overcome these obstacles. Then we develop a six-dimensional model of the psychological and social factors that contribute to variability in both human and potential nonhuman norms. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Social norm change: drivers and consequences’.

Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is little agreement among these researchers about what these psychological prerequisites are. This makes empirical study of animal social norms difficult, since it is not clear what we are looking for and thus what should count as behavioural evidence for the presence (or absence) of social norms in animals. To break this impasse, we offer an approach that moves beyond contested psychological criteria for social norms. This approach is inspired by the animal culture research program, which has made a similar shift away from heavily psychological definitions of ‘culture’ and to become organized around a cluster of more empirically tractable concepts of culture. Here, we propose an analogous set of constructs built around the core notion of a normative regularity, which we define as a socially maintained pattern of behavioural conformity within a community. We suggest methods for studying potential normative regularities in wild and captive primates. We also discuss the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this research program with respect to questions of human uniqueness, animal welfare and conservation.

The marker approach is taken as best practice for answering the distribution question: Which animals are conscious? However, the methodology can be used to increase confidence in animals many presume to be unconscious, including C. elegans, leading to a trilemma: accept the worms as conscious; reject the specific markers; or reject the marker methodology for answering the distribution question. I defend the third option and argue that answering the distribution question requires a secure theory of consciousness. Accepting the hypothesis all animals are conscious will promote research leading to secure theory, which is needed to create reliable consciousness tests for animals and AIs. Rather than asking the distribution question, we should shift to the dimensions question: How are animals conscious?

What is it to be a better ape? This is the question Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell ask in their book on the evolution of the moral mind, an ambitious story that starts with the common ancestor of the modern apes—humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. Of all of us, it’s the humans who remain in the running for being a better ape, because we’re the ones who have all the necessary ingredients: the binding emotions of sympathy and loyalty which we share with our nonhuman cousins, but also the collaborative emotions of trust and respect and the reactive emotions of guilt and resentment. Importantly, only humans are thought to have norms, and to be biologically prepared to learn norms. For Kumar and Campbell, the co-evolution of emotions and norms is what set humans on this path so we can become a better ape. The story they tell is artfully woven from major theories in psychology and anthropology, and those of us who have pre-existing opinions about these theories have points where we can quibble regarding the nature of the emotions–whether only humans imitate, what norms of fairness amount to, or whether any other species are generalists who can survive in a wide range of habitats. Rather than focusing on these, I want to turn to an exciting hypothesis Kumar and Campbell propose about the evolution and function of norms. While it is most common to think that norms helped our ancestors solve the collective action problems that emerged when larger groups of individuals started living together, Kumar and Campbell suggest a different, though complementary, function for norms. They propose that norms provide a more precise and flexible means for coordinating behavior in quickly changing societies. On their view, it isn’t the size of community that is the most significant variable, but rather the speed at which culture evolves. That norms are a human universal is indubitable. Our contemporary human societies are rife with rules constraining our behaviors, governing aspects of our lives from birth to death, prescribing practices about what to wear, how to work, what to eat, when and how to sleep as well as rules about rare practices that are proscribed. However, Kumar and Campbell also presume that norms are human unique. Here I have more than a quibble, given the burgeoning empirical and theoretical literature on the question of animal normativity (Andrews 2020; Danón 2019; Fitzpatrick 2020; de Waal 2014; von Rohr et al. 2011; Rohr et al. 2015; Whiten et al. 2005; Westra et al., in prep)...