| miz1q2w3e said: I see your point, but think about this: A mother chimp, for example, would probably sacrifice herself to save her young one. The box that was too heavy for one chimp experiment showed that one is able to sacriface their comfort (so to speak) for the benifit of another, even though they don't get anything immediate in return. What about the chimp who refused to take his treat until his friend was treated fairly? Now you may argue that the motive in the first example is perhaps to ensure the survival of the species, or something along those lines. The second example may have been motivated by future compensation/repayment. My question is, how is that any different from humans? I'll admit, I probably don't know as much on the matter as you do. Do you see the similarities, though? |
Yeah, like de Waal said, the going belief is that it's based on reciprocity and that chimpanzees help one another on the basis that they will be owed a favor in the future. So, it is a matter of survival for both the individual chimp, who expects he will be helped in the future, and for the group, which will continue to operate smoothly. It's a testament to their intelligence and relative farsightedness, not their altruism. The experiment with the tokens showed how cooperation breaks down when one chimp acts like an asshole (unethical behavior). I'd really like to see how empathy would come into play if one color of token gave the chimp selecting the tokens food, and the other color gave only the other chimp food.
But if the most altruism you can expect out of an animal is fighting to save its offspring, that is not actually altruistic from an evolutionary standpoint because propigation of the genes is what is supposed to drive an organism's behavior. Also, animals do frequently abandon their young when the need arises. Even in the most extraordinary of cases - a female gorilla protecting a person from an aggressive male, say, or dolphins saving a swimmer from a shark - it seems that the actual risk to the animals involved is pretty low. Or so it would seem, since I've never heard of an animal actually dying in such a situation, indicating that they don't do something like that unless they're confident of succeeding.
So the difference is that humans can engage in absolutely unethical behavior, or behavior that is against their own interests of comfort or even survival, for the sake of a higher ideal. Maybe it's because, as smart as it is, an ape can't even imagine a higher ideal, but then, I should think that a very high, human level of intelligence would be a prerequisite for having free will. Although I suppose the counterargument can be made that the satisfaction an ascetic gains from adopting a life of celibacy trumps physical pleasure for him, and therefore it isn't actually against their interests in terms of comfort, it's still a remarkable choice, and one that I think supports the idea of man having free will.
