Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals by Jessica Pierce, Marc Bekoff - 9780226041612 - Compare Prices on New & Used Textbooks, Cheap Textbooks

Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. Yet what are we to make of a female gorilla in a German zoo who spent days mourning the death of her baby? Or a wild female elephant who cared for a younger one after she was injured by a rambunctious teenage male? Or a rat who refused to push a lever for food when he saw that doing so caused another rat to be shocked? Aren’t these clear signs that animals have recognizable emotions and moral intelligence? With Wild Justice Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce unequivocally answer yes.

Marrying years of behavioral and cognitive research with compelling and moving anecdotes, Bekoff and Pierce reveal that animals exhibit a broad repertoire of moral behaviors, including fairness, empathy, trust, and reciprocity. Underlying these behaviors is a complex and nuanced range of emotions, backed by a high degree of intelligence and surprising behavioral flexibility. Animals, in short, are incredibly adept social beings, relying on rules of conduct to navigate intricate social networks that are essential to their survival. Ultimately, Bekoff and Pierce draw the astonishing conclusion that there is no moral gap between humans and other species: morality is an evolved trait that we unquestionably share with other social mammals.

Sure to be controversial, Wild Justice offers not just cutting-edge science, but a provocative call to rethink our relationship with—and our responsibilities toward—our fellow animals.

		Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals by Marc Bekoff, Jessica Pierce ISBN-10: 9780226041612 ISBN-10: 0-226-04161-1 ISBN-13: 9780226041612 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04161-2 Hardcover 2009-05-30 University Of Chicago Press Find Lowest Price
Editorials

Product Description Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. Yet what are we to make of a female gorilla in a German zoo who spent days mourning the death of her baby? Or a wild female elephant who cared for a younger one after she was injured by a rambunctious teenage male? Or a rat who refused to push a lever for food when he saw that doing so caused another rat to be shocked? Aren’t these clear signs that animals have recognizable emotions and moral intelligence? With Wild Justice Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce unequivocally answer yes. Marrying years of behavioral and cognitive research with compelling and moving anecdotes, Bekoff and Pierce reveal that animals exhibit a broad repertoire of moral behaviors, including fairness, empathy, trust, and reciprocity. Underlying these behaviors is a complex and nuanced range of emotions, backed by a high degree of intelligence and surprising behavioral flexibility. Animals, in short, are incredibly adept social beings, relying on rules of conduct to navigate intricate social networks that are essential to their survival. Ultimately, Bekoff and Pierce draw the astonishing conclusion that there is no moral gap between humans and other species: morality is an evolved trait that we unquestionably share with other social mammals. Sure to be controversial, Wild Justice offers not just cutting-edge science, but a provocative call to rethink our relationship with—and our responsibilities toward—our fellow animals.
Reviews

Clear and compelling! Wonderful source of material with plenty of reviews and citations from professional psychological studies. Should be read by everyone, especially those studying Environmental/Animal Ethics. Very insightful.
Wild Justice and Human Justice Lurking behind scientific research into animals is human cruelty. If I believe that the rat or dog I'm about to give an agonizing death to is a moral creature, I'm putting myself in a quandry. It would be against my ethical code to do that to a human, even a brain-damaged person with no more intellectual capacity than the dog. In fact, I wouldn't do that to my German Shepherd, Peppy, who's at home playing with the kids, guarding them, and whom I love dearly. And yes, whom I respect as a dignified, loyal individual. Yet for my own peace of mind I'm forced to believe that the animals I'm cruel to don't deserve respect or kindness from me, or that my research will produce such important results that I'm justified in applying a different moral standard to them. Wild Justice isn't specifically about this issue, but I think the book, with its measured tone, will be an important contribution to an important discussion.
Wild Speculation? No, Why Bekoff & Pierce get it right I'm glad Wild Justice is bringing in comments, as it deserves a wide readership. It's fine science coupled with fascinating stories, and I disagree avidly with its being labelled as 'wild speculation' (see earlier review). I'd like to point out, as a primate studies-oriented anthropologist who has observed apes for many years, that the reviewer who brings up the now-cliche 'the plural of anecdote is not data' misses the point of what Bekoff and Pierce set out to do. B&P realize that we've barely scratched the surface of understanding animal cooperation, empathy, and morality/justice, and that we need to go beyond statistics to embrace what animals do (sometimes, not all the time) under different circumstances, with social partners of certain social histories, etc. They are as interested in negative evidence for their hypotheses, it seems to me, as in positive evidence. After all, individual variation is key to their endeavor, just as it is key to the workings of natural selection. They note, furthermore, that animal morality has its limits; they do not conflate nonhumans with humans. In sum, the case-study approach DOES have merit scientifically. It can be beautifully combined with statistical studies, so no one is arguing for either/or. It's time for long-term, rigorously done qualitative work on animal behavior to get its due, and there's no place better to start than with what Bekoff and Pierce have accomplished here. Read my full review here: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2009_06_014521.php PS Please don't take anyone's word for Bekoff's expertise in this arena: look him up. His website is full of credentials.
A Scientific Defense of Animal Rights There was a time when evolutionary biologists really believed Tennyson's famous description of "Nature, red in tooth and claw." The Darwinian notion of "survival of the fittest" certainly indicated that ruthlessly competitive struggle was the natural world's ineluctable fate. In addition, the amorality of human life before civilization was an uncontested assumption of the classical political philosophers, for whom in the state of nature, to quote Thomas Hobbes, life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The notion that human civilization is a delicate veneer covering an implacable and vicious self-centeredness that is characteristic of human nature was taken up and embroidered by evolutionary biologists in the mid-twentieth century. The explanatory power of William Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory and Robert Trivers' reciprocal altruism (which was simply enlightened selfishness) convinced generations of researchers that what appears to be altruism---personal sacrifice on behalf of others---is really just long-run self-interest. Richard Dawkins, for instance, argued in his wildly popular book, The Selfish Gene (1976) that ``we are survival machines---robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes....This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior.'' Dawkins allows for morality in social life, but it must be socially imposed on a fundamentally selfish agent. ``Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,'' he advises, ``because we are born selfish.'' Even social morality, according to R. D. Alexander, the most influential ethicist working in the Hamilton tradition, can only superficially transcend selfishness. In his book, The Biology of Moral Systems (1987), Alexander asserts ``ethics, morality, human conduct, and the human psyche are to be understood only if societies are seen as collections of individuals seeking their own self-interest'' (p. 3). In a similar state of explanatory euphoria, Michael Ghiselin (1974) claims ``No hint of genuine charity ameliorates our vision of society, once sentimentalism has been laid aside. What passes for cooperation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation... Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed'' (p. 247). If one accepts this evolutionary vision, there is of course absolutely no possibility of non-human animals being "moral." The only reason humans are "moral" in this vision is the patina of civilization that overlays our animal instincts. Because animals lack "civilization," there is prima facie no possibility of their being moral. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce want us to believe that that is exactly the state of current theory, to which their book is a long-overdue corrective, based on thorough scientific research and attention to the evidence provided by the minute observation of our non-human primate relatives (and to a lesser, but important extent, other mammals, including mice, rats, wolves, and hyenas). This is a serious mischaracterization of research over the past several decades. Indeed, the idea that evolution is as much about the evolution of cooperation as competition is a central theme in modern evolutionary theory. Perhaps the broadest statement of this theme is in E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology (1975) and John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary's The Major Transitions in Evolution (1997), and in the seminal works on human sociality initiated by Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman's Cultural Transmission and Evolution (1981) and Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson's Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985). The idea that there is a genetic dimension to human morality, while still contested by some biologists and economists, has drawn considerable support in recent years, and is probably now the received wisdom. This literature is surveyed in Herbert Gintis et al., Moral Sentiments and Material Interests (MIT, 2005) and more recently, The Bounds of Reason (Princeton, 2009). Typical of Bekoff and Pierce's cavalier treatment of the literature, they say "As far as we know, there has been no careful delineation of the prosocial in relation to the moral, either for humans or for animals." (p. 12) If they cared to look, they would find literally dozens of papers in the major biology journals on the topic over the last few decades. Indeed, it is currently a top research agenda item for both humans and other species. For starters and references to the literature, see Lee Alan Dugatkin, Cooperation among Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Lee Alan Dugatkin and Hudson Kern Reeve, Game Theory and Animal Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, "Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology", The Quarterly Review of Biology 82,4 (2007):327-348; Jung-Kyoo Choi and Samuel Bowles, "The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War", Science 318,26 (2007):636-640.and my own "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Altruism: Genes, Culture, and the Internalization of Norms", Journal of Theoretical Biology 220,4 (2003):407-418. Central to the analysis of prosociality and altruism in this literature is the distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding behaviors. Bekoff and Pierce do mention the terms (which they incorrectly call "philosophical lingo"), but get it completely wrong. "A self-regarding action," they say, "affects no one other than the agent (the individual) performing the action. An action or behavior becomes other-regarding when it produces some benefit to another, cause some harm, or violates some social rule or obligation..." (p. 14) In fact, an agent is self-regarding if he makes decisions considering only how the outcome affect his own payoff, whereas when the payoffs to others are taken into account in making a decision, the agent is said to be other-regarding. Mutualism is other-regarding, and hence moral, using their faulty definition, whereas it is self-regarding, and hence amoral, according to the usual definition. Virtually every animal behavior researcher now agrees that mammals and perhaps other sorts of animals have emotions---Darwin wrote a whole book about this---and animals that live in groups cooperate. Frans de Waal has enjoyed a distinguished career arguing that chimpanzees have many of the social skills, in somewhat elementary and primitive form, that characterize human behavior and make social living possible. Moreover, for the past few decades there are been many stories of empathy, caring, and helping in the animal world. Indeed, this book can be described as philosophizing about these well-known findings. The problem is that, as the saying goes, "the plural of anecdote is not data." The book uses data in much the same way as self-help books that announce miracle cures, attested by the personal experiences of dozens of users, but says nothing about the actual frequency of success or the extent of nasty side-effects. Anecdotes are wonderful sources of inspiration for researchers, but they are starting points, not endpoints. When researchers write a book for the lay public with the authority of experts, they should stick to the research findings, not inspirational material that is not substantiated by solid research. Bekoff and Pierce are, in effect, making an end-run around the professional journals by going to the public with wild speculations treated as virtually substantiated fact. Indeed, Pierce has no publications in this area at all, and Bekoff has two papers, both dealing with Grosbeaks, a bird species not discussed in the book. The fact that animals cooperate does not make them moral beings. There is evidence that some animals feel empathy and jealousy, but no evidence that they have other social emotions that are connected to human morality, especially guilt, shame, pride, disgust, or remorse. Dogs, which have coevolved with humans for tens of thousands of years, may have a rudimentary sense of shame, but this is certainly not proven. Despite the book's title, there is no evidence that animals have a sense of justice in the egalitarian/equal rights sense that humans do, although I believe they do in the sense that in many species individuals have "rights" that they cherish and will fight to establish and be recognized by conspecifics. Bekoff and Pierce have a political purpose in writing this book: they want to make a case for animal rights. Thus, in the concluding chapter they say "In drawing a picture of animals as beings with rich cognitive, emotional, and social lives, wild justice invites a serious reconsideration of the uses to which we put animals in research, education, for clothes and food..." (p.137) It is laudable for scientists to consider seriously the policy implications of their work, so this chapter is a laudable addition to the book. However, I think they could have supported their position more forcefully by sticking to the facts, and choosing their anecdotes less one-sidedly---for every story about how animals are cruel to one another and treat other species purely instrumentally, there are in this book ten stories (often the same ones repeated several times) about how empathetic and helpful they can be. This book is thus likely to be exploited by animal rights activists for whom truth and accuracy have no intrinsic value, and speculation will circulate as truth in the public arena. Are animals moral agents? Bekoff and Pierce say that some are, because they can voluntarily choose to be nasty or nice, and in fact many individuals in mammalian species do both. This capacity to choose between right and wrong requires a great deal of cognitive complexity and behavioral plasticity, which is why Bekoff and Pierce refuse to attribute morality to the social insects, despite their clearly altruistic behaviors. The authors' position is that animals that are moral agents should have rights, much as we base human rights on status of human beings as moral agents. Personally, I would argue that animals have rights even when they are not moral agents. For instance, I would say chickens have the right to exercise their natural capacities and propensities even if they are not moral agents. I think Bekoff and Pierce's argument for animal rights is possibly defensible (the above caveats aside), though they could have done a better job of explaining the why and how, as well as the severe limitations, of animal morality. Indeed, the authors' idea of the very meaning of morality is extremely rudimentary. It is that society has certain norms, and morality consists in conforming to these norms. "Behavior becomes immoral," they assert, "when it goes against socially established expectations" (p. 16). This is a definition of conformity, not morality. If it is the norm for newly established alpha male chimps (or lions) to kill infants sired by the previous alpha male, that does not make it moral, and a new alpha male who tolerates and supports the stock of infants is not thereby immoral. I believe human morality, as opposed to human social conformity, is based on the notion that individuals have rights and they have intrinsic dignity and value. Being moral is recognizing and protecting these rights, and treating others with the respect they deserve by virtue of their dignity and value. The irony of the situation is that if Bekoff and Pierce had a more plausible notion of morality, they might have made a better case for the moral status of animals. Let me give one example, which I take from an article of mine, "Herbert Gintis, "The Evolution of Private Property", Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 64,1 (2007):1-16. In this paper I show that territoriality in many species is a social norm that is generally respected by conspecifics, and when their territorial rights are threatened, a territorial animal is prepared to fight, with the prospect of death or serious injury, to protect them. Territoriality in animals is evidenced in humans in the form of "individual rights" to person and the product of one's labor, and has the behavioral implication of loss aversion, which can be measured and substantiated in the experimental laboratory. Bekoff and Pierce begin to be on the right track when they stress that play in mammal species often evidences the fact that individuals respect the rights of others and stay within the limits of both propriety and morality by not exploiting playfulness by turning it into domination. But there are not enough arguments based on a defensible notion of morality.
Too much fat, not enough meat. First, this book in general is interesting. It presents several interesting experiments and events. But it is fairly dry. The authors spend way too much time precisely describing what it will talk about, definitions, etc. The kind of thing that is definitely required for a scientific journal, but boring in a book. Then the descriptions of the animal behavior are too short. The examples are used to push certain views/conclusions, as opposed to encouraging creative thinking and debate, and possible future experiments. I was hoping for far more detailed descriptions and analysis of possible different explanations, as opposed to a statement of view with short descriptions intended to defend that viewpoint. It is clearly written by scientists and works hard to be taken seriously as a work of science. But this is not a peer-review scientific paper. Less of a sense of rigorous argument and more a sense of wonder would have made the book much more interesting. For example, it discusses how rats sometimes refuse to push a lever to get food if they see another rat be shocked when the lever is pushed. This is very interesting, but instead of delving further into it, the book provides little more information then I just did.