Introducing Sentientist Conversations: Jamie Woodhouse discusses Animal Morality with Frans de Waal

This week we bring we are delighted to share the a guest episode from Sentientist Conversations, a podcast hosted by Jamie Woodhouse (Humanism Now Episode 4). In this episode, Jamie speaks with legendary primatologist Frans de Waal.

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“You cannot go wrong with compassion” – primatologist Frans de Waal – Sentientist Conversations

Frans (fransdewaal.com) is a primatologist & ethologist. He is Professor of Primate Behavior at Emory University, director of the Living Links Center at Emory & the author of many books including “Chimpanzee Politics”, “Our Inner Ape” & “The Bonobo & the Atheist”. He has featured in TV/radio productions & TED talks viewed by tens of millions of people. His research centers on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, & food-sharing. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences & the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?” Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The audio is on our Podcast here on Apple and here on the other platforms. ​​​​ You can watch the video here.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing Sentientiest Conversations
• 1:21 Welcome to the Sentientism Podcast & Introduction to Frans de Waal
• 2:42 Frans’ Intro – Understanding animals
• 6:40 What’s Real? From Catholic to apathist
• 11:24 What Matters Morally?
• 23:25 Human Moral Development
• 27:30 Who Warrants Compassion?
• 45:37 The Future

Transcript

James Hodgson (Intro): 0:00

Hello everyone, James here. Once again, this week we're sharing a guest bonus episode from a fellow podcast that we love and support here at Humanism Now. This week I'm delighted to share an episode of Sentientism, hosted by friend of the show, Jamie Woodhouse. Each week on the Sentientism Podcast, Jamie discusses with a guest the sentientist worldview, bringing together the values and campaigns of humanism with those of animal ethics, advocating all of sentient life. With Jamie's permission, I'm delighted to share this episode of the podcast, originally published in June 2021 and featuring primatologist Franz DeWal in what would sadly be one of Professor DeWal's final podcast entities. I hope you enjoy the conversation, and if you would like to find out more about sentientism, you can follow Jamie at his website sentientism.info or subscribe to sentientism wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen back to episode number four of Humanism Now, where Jamie was one of our very first guests. But for now, enjoy the Sentientism podcast.

Jamie Woodhouse: 1:20

Welcome back to the Sentientism Podcast, a podcast about what's real and what matters. Sentientism answers those two deep questions by committing to using evidence and reason and having compassion for all sentient beings. In this episode, I talked to Franz DeVar. Franz is a primatologist and ethologist who's featured in TV and radio productions and TED talks viewed by tens of millions of people, helping us understand the morality of non-human animals. He's a professor of primate behavior and director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, and is the author of many books, including Chimpanzee Politics, The R in a Ape, The Mama's Last Hug, and The Bonobo and the Atheist. His research centers on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food sharing. He's a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. I'd love to know what you think of this episode and the more than 50 others. Don't forget to work through our back catalogue if you're a new subscriber. Every person who rates and reviews or shares our podcast with a friend helps us nudge a few more people towards more compassionate, rational thinking. You can find out more about sentientism at Sentientism.info, or just search for sentientism on your favourite social media platform. We're on Twitter, Reddit, Discord, Telegram, Instagram, Facebook, and most other places. You'll be made welcome in our global community groups. They're open to anyone interested in these ideas, not just sentientists. Thanks for listening.

Frans de Waal: 2:46

Good morning, friends. How are you? I'm here in Atlanta. I'm on my way for the for my first travel by airplane to Europe soon. So we are all being vaccinated here. And I hope in Europe, this the same situation.

Jamie Woodhouse: 2:59

Yeah, slowly haltingly starting to get back to normal. Some nervousness about the variants, but you know, we're generally on the right track. And hopefully in a position to be a bit more generous to the rest of the world soon as well. But let's see. Let's see. But it's good to hear that you're you're going to get your first trip in. Thank you so much for taking the time to join this series of sentientist conversations. And as we've talked about briefly, it focuses on the two deepest philosophical questions, what's real and what matters morally. And I'm biased because I'm trying to put forward this some think of it as an upgrade of secular humanism, which suggests that when it comes to thinking about what's real, we should use evidence and reason and a naturalistic approach. And when it comes to what matters morally, the clue is in the name that we should use sentience, the capacity to have experiences, to suffer and flourish, as the defining characteristic for moral inclusion. But I'm talking to people in these conversations who agree and disagree with the philosophy. So yeah, it'll be fascinating to hear your personal story. And if so much of your work plays into those themes, of course. Yeah, it's great to talk to you. And for the rare people that don't know of your work already, how would you best introduce yourself?

Frans de Waal: 3:59

I'm a Dutch American um zoologist, etologist. I work on animal behavior, mostly primates, a few other animals too. Intelligence, emotions, social behavior, social cognition. I work mostly myself in captivity. I have many students who work in the field. My my work is has become more experimental. Initially, I was an observer of primate behavior. I worked with large colonies in large enclosures. But later I started doing experiments, bringing them in for half an hour or an hour into a room and testing them and then releasing them again. They usually live the animals that I worked with live in a social group usually. And to see more up close what their intelligence is. And as you may know, in the last 25 years, we have been mightily impressed by the intelligence of animals. Before that time, I grew up as a student where you were not allowed to talk about cognition or consciousness or emotions or any internal state was taboo.

Jamie Woodhouse: 5:02

Yeah.

Frans de Waal: 5:02

And I grew up in the time that these terminology was not allowed. But now we have so much evidence for animal intelligence and really remarkable intelligence, that I think these taboos are being broken more and more.

Jamie Woodhouse: 5:16

Yeah, absolutely. Your work's been completely central to pushing that behaviorist approach back and just giving us a richer and richer view of what the internal uh experiences of non-humans might be like. And it seems that the more we research, the more we look, the more richness we find. It's I can't think of a single instance where people have explored a non-human animal's experience and found that it was actually duller or simpler or more basic than we'd expected.

Frans de Waal: 5:44

No, and also I think what also happened is that we moved, I call it the ripple effect. We moved from the primates to other species. So usually these discoveries are first made with chimpanzees because they're similar to us, and we know how to test them because they are because they also similar. And so we compare them with children or whatever we do. But then we find remarkable capacities in chimpanzees, but within five years, usually someone finds them in Corvitz, uh, birds, yeah, or in dogs, or in elephants, and so many of these remarkable capacities, such as tool use, tool making, theory of mind, metacognition, all these things at some point are going to be found outside of the primates. And now we think that the octopus is a very smart animal, uh, or the dog is actually a very smart animal. And I think that we have expanded the view of that very much.

Jamie Woodhouse: 6:36

Yeah, agree. And we'll come back to the implications for that later in the conversation. But where I like to start is the first of those two deep philosophical questions, what's real? And for many of my guests, that's a story about whether they grew up in a religious or a spiritual or a supernatural household and context, or one that was already quite naturalistic or atheistic or agnostic, and how their philosophy has shifted over time, if it has. So that you can wind the clock back as far as you like, but it'd be interesting to know where you started and where you are now in terms of naturalism versus supernaturalism.

Frans de Waal: 7:07

I grew up in a Catholic family in the Catholic south of the Netherlands, which at that time was really very Catholic. But when I became a student at 17 at the university, I basically dropped my religion. I I I I was never very convinced by um the the religion. I I I probably have internalized many of the values of the Catholic religion. That's very well possible, because I'm uh maybe I'm culturally Catholic, let's let's say. Yeah, but I didn't follow the religion much anymore, and became more interested in if my moral perspective was probably more based on uh how I feel about things, so sort of intuitive human perspective of how you treat others, how you treat animals, how you treat the world as a whole. So uh religion for me has always fascinated me because there was at some point, and I wrote a book about it. The book is called The Bonobo and the Atheist. And it's about how we can never completely discard religion. It's all human societies have religion, and there's a reason for that. I think humans need religion, uh, but I'm not sure they need the religions that we have now, the organized religions that we it could be something totally different, I assume. But all human societies have religions, and so that raises the question for the biologist: what is this need? Where does it come from and how did it evolve, and how does it serve society? Because you would assume that if all human societies have it, it serves a purpose in the society. So I'm fascinated by religion and why it exists, but I'm myself, I call myself actually an apatist in the sense that I'm not an atheist. An atheist believes that God doesn't exist, and I'm not an agnostic who doesn't know if God exists, an apatist, I don't particularly care if God exists. It's for me, it's not the most important problem in my life. And I'm not gonna get excited about his or her existence or non-existence. For me, that's not the main issue uh in life.

Jamie Woodhouse: 9:08

Yeah. And as you dropped your religion, was it because of sort of facts and evidence and reason and logic, and looking at the inconsistencies or understanding other religions and thinking this doesn't seem true, or was it more some sort of dissonance with the ethical values you saw being played through Catholicism or a bit of both?

Frans de Waal: 9:26

Or yeah, I think in the Catholic religion, but I think it's true for every religion, there's a lot of hypocrisy. People who talk one way and act another way. The Catholic Church, we have seen how that goes, with their priests and their abuse. And so I think it's the hypocrisy is the disconnect between what you're supposed to believe and how people actually behave that really got me. And and I've never been convinced by these stories. And I've always felt that that Jesus was an inspiring figure because everything he said, at least according to the Bible and according to the church, I found interesting and worthwhile. But whether he's a real historical figure or not, that's not something I can figure figure out completely.

Jamie Woodhouse: 10:11

Yeah. And was that transition? It doesn't sound like it was a difficult transition for you internally or personally. Was it were there challenges with family or society at large, or again, was it quite an easy, straightforward thing to do?

Frans de Waal: 10:23

Oh no, my parents were very unhappy about the whole situation, but I was part of a generation where everyone was doing that. So uh everyone was leaving their religion at that point. This was the 60s, where we students had long hair and protested everything. And that was also the time where we lost our religion. And even though I went to a university that at that time was called the Catholic University, even that university didn't do much on religion anymore at the time. And I say I think that was on the way out, and and that's a development that you see now in the US. I live now in the US, and when I came here, I felt it was an extremely religious country compared to the Netherlands, which is half of the people call themselves atheists.

Jamie Woodhouse: 11:06

Yeah.

Frans de Waal: 11:06

But now we see that same development uh 50 years later coming to the US, where also many young people leave their religion. And I think again, uh hypocrisy is part of that story, is that people talk one way and act another way. And I think the young people don't buy into it anymore, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Jamie Woodhouse: 11:24

And there's and I to me there's an interesting parallel between your thinking about the role of religion in morality and the role of evolution in morality, because you know, both of those forces have given us, to my mind, good ethics, rich veins of compassion and capacity to have empathy. But there are there is also downsides, right? There's tribalism, there's in-group-out-group distinctions, there's you know, myths and legends and burning in hell and various other problems, and sexism and homophobia and caste distinctions. And so it's quite an interesting balance that there's there's good and bad both here in both of those drivers. And it sounds one of the reasons some of my guests found it difficult to move away from a religious worldview, partly was the societal context. And some of my guests have had uh breathtakingly difficult journeys compared to yours and mine, which were pretty simple and straightforward, reasonably. But one of the reasons why some people sh hesitate about moving away from a religious worldview is because they are nervous they're going to lose some sort of moral foundation. And for you, you hinted already that I don't think you felt the gap there because you already had a sort of intuitive sense of morality. Is that fair to say? Because that's in a way, that's the second question is you what what does matter morally? And what's the basis for you asked what replaces to religion? Yeah. What's the basis for morality once you've put religion to one side?

Frans de Waal: 12:40

I think what religion does and sometimes does very well is provide narratives that support your moral intuitions. Let's say the story of the Good Samaritan, which is a real biblical story, which talks about compassion and how compassion is important. So I think what religion is good at is picking certain moral elements and amplifying them for you and making them visible for you. And I think that could be very helpful. I I personally don't think it's that important to me. And I've always felt that you get very far morally with compassion. So I'm a bit on the line of the Dalai Lama who says that all you need is basically empathy and compassion. Yeah, you need nothing else. You cannot go wrong with compassion, I think, morally. And so I find that a very interesting standpoint. And since I study empathy in animals, I've been thinking about that quite a bit. And I think without empathy, uh you could not build a moral system. If you wanted to build a human moral system and you leave empathy and compassion out, I don't think you go anywhere. Because empathy is what hooks you into other people, what makes you interested in them, interested in their situation. And if you leave that out, you you can be all have all the Kantian reasoning that you want to do, which the philosophers always say that morality is based on reasoning and logic. I don't think without empathy you get there. Because reasoning and logic can lead to all sorts of horrible things, also, and and it has done so in the past, of course.

Jamie Woodhouse: 14:16

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you, I mean, your work has been absolutely central to uncovering the potential evolutionary basis for empathy and compassion and moral systems. And you've made it, I think, incontrovertibly clear that morality isn't something that humans have cooked up. Morality pre-exists, not just religions, but pre-exists humanity by many millions of years.

Frans de Waal: 14:37

So empathy and compassion are not new human inventions. Yeah they are mammalian, and you could even look beyond the mammals and find it in birds and some other species. Being interested in the situation of somebody else. So, for example, the the first tests of empathy in in children were done by an American psychologist who would go into human families and ask someone to cry, and then see how very young children would respond. And very young children who can barely walk, they walk up to this person and they touch them and they stroke their face and things like that. In the same study, she found that dogs did similar things. Dogs would also approach the person who's crying. And see, her name is Carolyn Zahn Maxler. She already told me that at that time that she did her studies, she thought, if the dogs do, that's also empathy. If the children do the same thing, basically. And compassion and being interested in the emotional state of somebody else is an old characteristic that we find in all the mammals. There are now rodent studies on empathy, certainly elephants, dolphins, the primates, uh, you find it everywhere. And so that's the basic capacity. And I think human moral systems are built around that. Is we go, of course, much further in in terms of how we justify our moral rules and so on. It it is much more complex in humans, but uh that basis is there, and that basis is very old.

Jamie Woodhouse: 16:08

And it seems compelling to me that it it was it proved evolutionarily useful to be able to cooperate with other beings of your own kin and of your own species and groups, and potentially even broader than that. So you can see a technical rationale for why that capacity would have evolved, but it's interesting as well in that it wasn't just a sort of technical cooperation mechanism, it actually involves an ability to detect and infer the experience of another and then to feel some value in that.

Frans de Waal: 16:40

So it is almost uh and being affected by it. Yeah, so it's not just that you detect it, yeah, and that you that you understand it, but you but you are emotionally affected by it. Yeah, and so it's a capacity that we think started with maternal care, because uh a female mouse or a female elephant, uh, she needs to be sensitive to the emotional states of her offspring when they are distressed or when they're hungry or when they're cold or they are in danger. The mother needs to respond. And so that's also why we think empathy is more developed in females than males, why oxytocin is involved, which is a maternal hormone. Uh oxytocin in humans uh stimulates uh empathy. And from there, from that basis, it it expanded to other relationships, and and males can have empathy, and there's all sorts of relationships, non-parental relationships in which empathy can occur. But if you have a cooperative society, and many animals do, like elephants, wolves, uh lions, many animals have cooperative societies, you need to worry about your fellows. You hunt with them or you work with them or you rely on them. And so you need to be interested in this in their states when they're injured or uh hurt or something like that. And so uh empathy is a very adaptive trait for cooperative animals. They need it, and and so it's not some sort of luxury or some extra thing, it's an absolutely essential characteristic of uh cooperative animals.

Jamie Woodhouse: 18:13

That's the I guess that's the legacy that's granted to us as a species, is we have largely the same sort of mental kit and capacity and you know, to some degree value systems as certainly most of the mammals, and maybe even broader. And one of the other side questions here is given sentientism focuses on the capacity of sentience, the capacity to experience things as a central characteristic, it doesn't specify what sentience is. So different people who call themselves sentientists will have radically different views about what it really is. My personal view is that it's an evolved class of information processing that happens to run in our neural substrate and does in many other animals as well. So that while some people might think it's something that's more mystical, or they might take a pan-psychist approach or think that consciousness and sentience are somehow distinct from matter and energy and information. My my personal view is it just is a class of information processing that runs in our neural substrate.

Frans de Waal: 19:08

So, as a tangent, do you have a view on you know what the essence of consciousness and sentience is, or or are you neutral about it's very difficult because consciousness, everyone talks about consciousness, but no one defines it, and no one tells me what it is. And and and if people ask me, do elephants have consciousness, I always say, You tell me what it is, and I can tell you if they have it. But but no one tells me what it is. And there's even a book by I think it's by Dennett, it's called Consciousness Explained. Yeah, and I've read that book and I still don't know. By the end, I still did not know what consciousness exactly was. And I know my own consciousness, I don't know yours, but I I do know my own consciousness. So there are certain things I cannot do. So, for example, I cannot plan a party for tomorrow uh with beer and music and friends. I cannot make the plans for that without consciously thinking about that. And we now know from studies on animals that they plan. We we we have these studies of it's called time travel. Can they look into the future? Can they look into the past? And we know from studies where you give them tools that they can only use the next day or some. There's many studies now that have been done that demonstrate that some animals with large brains, uh certain birds and certain primates, they can plan ahead. Now, I would be very curious if they can do something without consciousness that we for which we have to use our consciousness. That would be unusual, in my opinion. And so I assume that since they have these capacities, they must have the same sort of consciousness going on. Sentence for me is a much broader concept. Sentence is that you can experience things.

Jamie Woodhouse: 21:02

Yeah.

Frans de Waal: 21:02

I I would not even exclude that in plants necessarily, even though they have no nervous system. And it is hard to imagine how that would work. But certainly, all animals with brains they must have experiences because they have bodies that they need to react when they lose a leg or something. They need to have experiences. And maybe some of them are extremely simple, like only pain and pleasure. That's that those are the basic ones, of course. But yeah, they it's unlikely that they have no experiences. Yeah. Because they have bodies that they need to take care of.

Jamie Woodhouse: 21:37

Agree.

Frans de Waal: 21:38

So they must have they must be able to be thirsty and hungry, which are experiences. So sentience for me is a much broader concept. And and I assume that in so many species. Yeah.

Jamie Woodhouse: 21:51

And I share that view as well. And that's another thing that sentientism itself is neutral on. It doesn't have a list and say, here's the list of sentient species. It just says here's the definition. It's the capacity to have experiences and follow the science. And my again, people will disagree with me here, but my personal view is fairly traditional, in that I think the vast majority of animal species are sentient. You might have an argument about a sea sponge that, again, has no nervous system at all. But I think there's an interesting distinction to draw between an entity like a plant, which I think of more as analogous to a thermostat, which has information capacity that enables it to sense and information capacity that drives motor responses or different behavior or moving towards the sun. But as far as I'm aware, there isn't any additional information processing that could be, if you like, running the awareness. Whereas it my understanding of most uh human and animal anatomy is that we have the perception, we have the motor stuff, but there's also some other processing going on, which seems to be, you know, super correlated with uh sentient experience as well. But again, who knows? There's more research to be done.

Frans de Waal: 22:52

Yeah, there are animals without brains, like some mollusks, let's say oysters and and mussels. And so so they would, in your view, be more at the plant level, then I suppose.

Jamie Woodhouse: 23:02

So do we, certainly, yeah.

Frans de Waal: 23:04

Yeah, so I don't know. I I don't want to exclude anything and and plants. We haven't studied plants to the degree that I would be very confident and say they have absolutely no sentience. I I would leave that question open. Yeah.

Jamie Woodhouse: 23:16

Yeah, yeah. I think that's an important distinction. And given the potential suffering we might cause if we get these assessments wrong, it makes sense to be prudent as well. So I think provisional probabilistic beliefs, but also prudent and you know, give certain things the benefit of the doubt if we think they might be able to experience suffering. Um, so that I think there's a really compelling story about the the origins of morality and where they came from and the evolutionary rationale for them. And that's if you like the baseline for our own morality and many of our intuitions as well. Um, but in a sense, I guess evolution and nature are amoral, really. They there's nothing that cares about good or bad morally in the same way as we do. And so while there's genuine empathy and compassion, there's also in-group, out-group tribalism and you know, competition and aggression and all of the other things, many of which you've studied as well. So to really think about ethics, we need to go beyond a natural story about what we've been gifted and say, okay, as humans, we have the capacity to think in a richer way about what we think good and bad are and what right and wrong are. And again, I think you've given a very clear answer that the center of that for you is compassion. It's this sense of recognizing the experiences of others and having a motivation to wanting not to do needless harm and wanting to help them. Is that a reasonable summary of what you think morality is when you go beyond purely the evolved basis of or the natural?

Frans de Waal: 24:40

Yeah, morality has to go beyond because empathy is actually very parochial. Compassion is a bit more broad-minded, but our empathy responses, and the same is true for other species, are directed to individuals who are similar and familiar, usually.

unknown: 24:56

Yeah.

Frans de Waal: 24:56

So we're very biased. The studies on the rodents indicate the same thing. Empathy is a biased system. I I already mentioned maternal care, which is, of course, the female is very worried about her own offspring. She's not necessarily worried about somebody else's offspring. It's a very biased system. And if you want to turn that into morality, you have to add elements to it. So, for example, in humans, I find it so interesting that we have the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Convention tells us to worry about our enemies. During war, we need to treat our enemies. We don't need to treat them perfectly well, but we need to respect them to some degree, which is such an interesting concept because I don't think chimpanzees or other species would have that concept of thinking about your enemies are to be eliminated. And of course, for the longest time in human history, that's exactly what we did. We eradicated the enemy, we didn't worry about them at all.

Jamie Woodhouse: 25:54

Yeah, we could not excluded them from moral consideration. They were outside.

Frans de Waal: 25:58

They didn't exist in there. And so we we have expanded our morality and our range of empathy, so to speak. And that's a very interesting process that we are capable of because of our mental powers. And I don't see much of that in the animal kingdom. So we still use these original capacities of empathy, but we are able to mentally expand them. And that's actually when you talk about how we treat other species, that's a bit what we're doing at the moment with other species, is that they were also not part of moral considerations for the longest time.

Jamie Woodhouse: 26:30

Yeah.

Frans de Waal: 26:30

But now we say we should start worrying about them because they also deserve some consideration. And so that's a sort of a cognitive layer that we put on top of empathy.

Jamie Woodhouse: 26:41

Yeah, absolutely. And that's the topic we'll come on to next. My previous guest, actually, Peter Watts, the sci-fi author, amazing mind, but he mentioned the upside and the downside of oxytocin, because as you you mentioned it already, that people tend to think of it as the sort of warm, cuddly, familial compassion or empathy substance, if you like. But is it true that it also accentuates outgroup tribalism as well?

Frans de Waal: 27:05

So it's again Yeah, there was a time where we said you just spray oxytocin in a room and everyone will love everybody. Yeah. And now we think, um, well, be careful with oxytocin because there may be certain people that you start hating at that moment.

Jamie Woodhouse: 27:20

Yeah, absolutely. We might need to switch to MDMA and the water supply instead, maybe. But that's the next central question in a way, because I think you're right. This centering the moral system on compassion is critically important. But the next question, obviously, is okay, who warrants compassion and who warrants moral consideration? And as you said, I guess humans have gone through a patchy, incomplete, difficult, but I think overall positive process of broadening moral consideration within our own species. And there are so many problems still to work on there. But the very fact that after the Second World War, most countries signed up to a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that, at least in concept, said all humans matter was you know a radically positive step given human history.

Frans de Waal: 28:04

So that model you have to be careful. We don't want indiscriminate compassion. We also want commitments in in human society. Let's say yeah, I'm the father of a family and there's a hunger, there's hunger all around us, and I find a bread. It's a bit like what is this musical? There's this musical, French musical. I'm forgetting now. But let's say I find the bread and I could bring it to my family. But Le Miserable. Yeah, Le Miserable. Yeah, so I could bring it to my family, but I'm a sort of randomly altruistic, and I give the bread away in the street to hungry children or something. And then I come home and I tell my family, well, I had a bread, but I gave it away. I I think my family would be very unhappy with me and and and on moral grounds, because I have an obligation to my family first before anybody else.

Jamie Woodhouse: 28:58

Yeah.

Frans de Waal: 28:58

And so we do expect in human moral systems some commitment to the in-group versus the out-group, or to your family versus the non-family, or your friends versus non-friends. So we cannot just do away with that, because that's part of our moral fabric. The only thing that we're doing at the moment is expanding the moral fabric, and I completely agree that we need to do that, but you cannot do it by abandoning these commitments that we have.

Jamie Woodhouse: 29:26

Yeah, I agree. And I think that's that's partly why, again, this idea of sentientism is irritatingly neutral on so many things, right? But it doesn't say this is how you should prioritize, and it doesn't say how you should resolve conflicts of interest or difficult situations like whether you should give the bread to a stranger or to your family. It doesn't resolve those things. It just says let's at least set the boundary of our moral consideration in the right place, such that you would still prioritize within that, of course, as you say, family first, maybe, or in different ways, but at least you wouldn't exclude any relevant being from your moral considerations, such that you would see needlessly harming or killing it as a negative. So it's an inclusion. But it doesn't, you know, it still leaves plenty of flexibility and most of philosophy.

Frans de Waal: 30:08

So there's there's still a hierarchy or a priority, as you say, there's still priorities within that system.

Jamie Woodhouse: 30:14

Yeah. So some people some people would like to push for a much more radically egalitarian approach, but I I agree with you personally that you run into some very difficult problems very quickly. And so one of the other interesting things that would be good to get your story around is we've talked already about we're trying to broaden our moral consideration to humans. You've mentioned we're working on trying to do that across the species boundary and extending that. And your work has been central to that because it's helped people, I think, break through this anthropocentrism that only humans have experiences. And there was a religious version of that, of course. Humans are made of the image of God, humans have souls, animals don't, we're given dominion over them. But there's also been a non-religious approach to that as well, which still privileges humans because we have certain advanced capacities or intellectual capabilities. Dolphins haven't built any skyscrapers, so humans must be worth more. So there's a there's a non-religious way of privileging humans as well. And your work's really been helping to break those boundaries down because it's helped people understand we have an common evolutionary history, we often have a common information processing architecture, we often have common behavior and communications, and it just makes sense to infer that there is sentience at least in a much broader range of beings. But in terms of setting your own moral considerability boundary, how have you gone through that journey so far in your life and where are you up to? Where, you know, which be which types of beings do you think do warrant moral consideration?

Frans de Waal: 31:40

Yeah, I find that's a very subjective process in a way. We tend to, for example, we tend to value more mammals than non-mammals in general. We tend to value cuddly mammals more than non-cuddly mammals in the sense that we fall for these species, especially the primates and the dogs and the dolphins, the species that we are attracted to, and species that we are not attracted to, we we don't particularly care about. And so that's but we're very biased in that system. And same thing with animals that we eat or don't eat. So we care about dogs in the West, and we don't care about pigs, whereas from a perspective of the biologist, there's not much of a difference um uh between those two. Yeah, we are we are very biased in these in these things, partly based on our sort of innate responses to what is attractive and what is not attractive to us. So we don't particularly care about fish. Fish, as you see, have a big tank behind me. I'm a very big fan of fish, but fish don't scream if you kill them, and so we think they probably have no pain, or people have that kind of thinking. Yeah, so we're very penetrated in that regard.

Jamie Woodhouse: 32:54

And I think you're right. There is there are some and there are some reasonably obvious things about how easy it is for us to identify with, you know, easier to identify with mammals than some others. Some with some things it's more about distance or lack of familiarity. And with some other instances, it's more arbitrary than that. It's more about how we want to interact with them. The companion animals, of course, of all types warrant very obvious direct moral consideration. You know, charismatic wildlife, we enjoy watching them on the television. We're quite keen for them to survive and and thrive, and uh, particularly if they're endangered, we suddenly value them more.

Frans de Waal: 33:27

But the vast sometimes these moral considerations are so strange because uh I have this Facebook site on which I very often place uh videos. And if you place a video of, let's say, uh a lion killing an antelope, everyone is for the antelope, everyone uh roots for the antelope, but the lion has to live, and so that's a very strange moral reaction that we have. We want the antelope to live, but the the lion uh is hungry and needs to eat. So we have we we project our morality on nature in a way that sometimes is really problematic, in my view.

Jamie Woodhouse: 34:07

Yeah, agree. And one of the other interesting things that I find challenging in in many of my conversations is, in a sense, I think if you spoke to the average human, most people they would recognise that these categories we place non-human animals in are somewhat arbitrary. And they would also, I think, say they wouldn't really want to needlessly cause suffering, even for some of the neglected wild animals that normally get ignored, or even for farmed animals. You most put me most people in a room with a pig and they wouldn't want to harm it, particularly once they got to know it. So, in a way, there's a sort of latent moral baseline of agreement I think most people would have with us. But where most of us fail is taking through the practical implications of that thinking as well. And is that how far have you explored that journey? Because personally, I do try and grant moral consideration to all sentient beings. That doesn't mean that's equal moral consideration. I recognise there are different degrees and levels. You wouldn't value a chicken over a human, but at the same time, I I would value them all enough to say, look, I don't want to needlessly cause suffering or death to them for my taste preferences, for example. Therefore, you know, I don't want to participate in animal farming.

Frans de Waal: 35:15

I struggled with that in my professional work because I work with captive animals and I I'm a scientist, and I'm surrounded by medical scientists who do all sorts of things to animals. That I I don't I've never done an invasive study on animals in the sense that I've opened them or hurt them or things like that. And and I've always felt that since my research is not on life-threatening problems like cancer or viruses or uh I work on intelligence and behavior. I I've always felt I have no justification to do anything that's harmful, and I've always done my experiments with the animals in a way that was done on a volunteer basis. If they wanted to do it, they could do it. And if they didn't want to do it, I would not force them into anything. And so I've always done these non-invasive studies on and usually on animals that most of the time live in very pleasant circumstances. So I've always struggled with that, being surrounded by scientists who did other things with animals.

Jamie Woodhouse: 36:14

Yeah.

Frans de Waal: 36:14

And to what degree are they justified or not? So in science, if it is a life-threatening problem, like when Ebola came along. I don't know if you remember when Ebola came along, there were projections that 200 million people might die of Ebola. That's much more than we have at the moment with the COVID crisis. So Ebola was seen as an incredible problem. And Ebola was fought with a vaccine, and I think monkeys were involved in the development of that vaccine. And so for me, that kind of research is a different kind of research than, let's say, someone who's curious about how the brain works and does some invasive study on the brain. Because I think with the brain, we are now reaching a point, and this is happening at certain places in the world, that we can do non-invasive studies on the brain, as we do with humans. I can put you in a scanner and I can study your brain and how it functions in a brain scanner, and you come out alive without any problems. And we we are doing that with dogs at the moment, and people are training primates on non-invasive neuroscience. And I think that's the direction, since it is not a life-threatening problem that we're talking about. I feel that's the direction we need to go. Non-invasive neuroscience on animals that is not harmful and that they can do on a volunteer basis, basically. So, yeah, I'm struggling with these issues in my profession.

Jamie Woodhouse: 37:42

And I had a fascinating conversation with Aisha Aktar recently, who's who's working to essentially replace all animal testing research. And I think even she would recognize that there are some really difficult trade-offs we have to take where you know there's harm being done, but there's an overwhelming benefit. But I guess her story was that the vast amount of research that's going on isn't really of that type. There's a vast tranche of basic research that aren't required at all, and there are some things like LP50 testing and so on, that there's just no point.

Frans de Waal: 38:12

And yeah, that that's something that's something to be discussed with a medical scientist to see how much of that is really essential or non-essential. Yeah, I I find that hard to judge, but but I do agree there is probably quite a bit of medical research that could be done differently. Uh may maybe you could not, maybe we still need it, but it could be done differently. Let's say I think that's an open discussion that we need to have.

Jamie Woodhouse: 38:40

Now, for me, farming and food and so on is an easier challenge to resolve because there the needs that we're meeting are almost exclusively taste preferences and social norms. There aren't many people who are really in a survival setting, it's a life or death or a deep human health situation.

Frans de Waal: 39:01

I think it used to probably be like that. People used to be dependent on animal meat, not large quantities, but some of it. But yeah, that equation has changed because of our better knowledge of nutrition, our history as humans, long history. Is probably that because if you look at the literature on the brain expansion of the human species, we we got much bigger brains than other primates, is that meat and meat products were probably part of that. We have a long history of being omnivores, and and our gut system and and and even our psychology, because there's cooperative hunting involved, I think was shaped by that. So we have a long history as omnivores, but we have now reached a stage of knowledge where uh it's not strictly necessary anymore. So it's an interesting transition that we're going through at the moment. My own view on that is that uh I object to the treatment of animals. I'm not personally opposed to eating animals, but I object to how the animals that we eat are being treated. The the agricultural industry is a mass industry that locks up animals in very small spaces and doesn't treat them very well. And I think that has to change. And in order to change that, yeah, there has to be less meat consumption. You cannot change that system having the same amount of meat consumption that we do. So something needs to happen.

Jamie Woodhouse: 40:29

Yeah. And there's interestingly strong common ground between vegans like me and omnivores around factory farming and intensive farming. There's interesting surveys that show there's an enormous ground to have a public opinion that you know rejects the idea of intensive factory farming because of the conditions and because of the environmental impact and arguably the risk to human health through zoonosis and antimicrobialism.

Frans de Waal: 40:51

How big is that movement? I think I think among young people that's a strong movement. I still think I'm living in the US, that the majority of people has no trouble with it. Of course, as soon as you take them into a big farm, they will notice they will notice the problem and they will be objecting to the problem. Most of the time they they put their blinders on and they don't think about it.

Jamie Woodhouse: 41:16

And I think that's it. The main reason is that I did this for many years myself, right? It's been a slow journey of realization, partly inspired through work like yours that's helped me understand you know what it might be like to be one of these animals. But the cultural resonance we have is so rich and deep, it has an identity resonance as well, partly because of the you know, ancient human history. The social norms are very strong. So I think you're right. It for most people it's really about cognitive dissonance and just deliberately not thinking about the reality of it and putting it to one side now.

Frans de Waal: 41:44

So let me tell you what I think is a solution to this is that I I've always felt that what we need in the in the supermarkets, in the meat department, we need a scan bar on each piece of meat that you buy. That if you you put it on your cell phone, you can see in a video or photos how these animals lived. And it should be done by an independent agency, not by the farmers, but an independent agency goes there and films the conditions. And so then when you buy a piece of meat in the supermarket, you have your choices to make. Do I want meat from animals who lived in this particular condition? Yes or no? Yeah. I think that would certainly for um people who are who are sensitive to this issue, which is a growing group of people, that would facilitate their choices and would make their choices more ethical than they were before. But we don't get the right information. We get some sort of label on these animals like bio chicken or whatever, and we really don't know what that means. It's totally unreliable from what I can tell.

Jamie Woodhouse: 42:50

Pictures of happy cows and smiling chickens and pigs trotting happily to the slaughterhouse. But I like the idea. I think that just that clarity and transparency would really help. And I think one central tragedy is that nearly all meat, dairy, and egg products do come from factory farm. So even the people that object to factory farm still buy from them on pretty much on a daily basis. And I think in the States it's way over 95%. So that's one challenge, is okay. Many people disagree with factory farming, but it's that is the default nearly everywhere. But I think the interest one other interesting thing is that those little videos, even of the supposedly non-factory farms, would also be pretty shocking to people because even in free-range organic high welfare situations, you still have calf separation, you still have they all end up in the slaughterhouse at a very early stage of their lives, chicks are still macerated. So I think it would one of the interesting shifts would be one, I think yes, it would double down on the rejection of factory farming, but I think the other thing would be it would be much harder to do the sort of ethics washing around supposedly high welfare animal farming as well. Yeah, we'll see. And I think the other thing that will help, although it frustrates me that so many people seem to be waiting for this, is the technological solutions for clean meats and cultivated meats and the plant-based meats, where I think the alternatives in some fields are already really compelling.

Frans de Waal: 44:08

And if that happens, that if that happens, that solves all the problems because that solves ecological problems. So then we have both the moral and the ecological solved. I myself, I I eat barely any mammals anymore. I've reduced my meat intake. There's also many days now that I eat vegetarian. It's never been easy. But I but I'm not for me, it's not the eating part, it's it's the treatment, the treatment of animals that is the issue for me. Yeah, and and in that regard, we have gone completely wrong. And actually, I'm from the Netherlands. Um in the Netherlands, I think that's where these very high-intensity farms started, and we still have many of them because the Netherlands is a very big exporter of meat, even though it's a very small country. And so it's very high-intensity stuff that they're doing there. And I don't agree with that. I think we need to get rid of that.

Jamie Woodhouse: 45:00

Yeah, I think many people, an increasing number of people agree with you. And and I agree as well. I guess I just take it to that next stage where to me I'm also concerned about their treatment and the treatment of their families in the process of the slaughter, which is where it ends up. And I and I also think that even if you had a you know theoretical, almost painless death under anesthetic, I would still have a moral objection to that as I would for humans as well. Whereas I think other people would say if it's a painless death and they've had a happy life, that's fair enough. I would actually still go that next step. Others disagree. Yeah. So the final question that I'd like to come on to in the time we've got left available is your thoughts about the future. You've done amazing work talking about how we can take our morality into a more compassionate place beyond the structures of traditional religion. You've helped us break the species boundary and recognize that many non-humans have experiences too that mean something. With some of my guests, I guess I asked them to take a sort of utopian view where I said, look, if we could magically persuade most of the humans on the planet to be more generously compassionate and to take a more naturalistic approach to understanding the world, because I think we need both of those things. Either is by itself insufficient. What could that sort of sci-fi future look like? So I'd be interested in your view long term, but also your thoughts about more immediate priorities and things we can try and do to make the world better.

Frans de Waal: 46:17

Yeah, I would so much like that we are less in-group, out-group driven as humans. I'm talking about humans now. We dice and slice, we we are a symbolic species, and and that means that we put labels on everything. And either heterosexual or homosexual, or you are black or you're white, and we have all these labels.

unknown: 46:38

Yeah.

Frans de Waal: 46:38

And and or you're a man and a woman. That's another one. We put these labels on everyone, and everyone who falls between the cracks, or who doesn't easily fit one of these pigeonholes, we object to that. So, for example, trans people, we object to that, or uh mixed race people are categorized as either one or the other. We don't like the ambiguities, and we love it. Yeah, nature is full of ambiguities, and we're very intolerant in many ways. And so I think that's the big problem in the world today. It's both a problem within societies where certain people are not tolerated within the society, and and it's certainly a problem also between societies when we get immigrants that come from elsewhere and don't look like us and so on. I think that that's a terrible problem. And I don't know what the solution is because I think we humans are unfortunately programmed to be in-group, out-group animals, like most animals are actually.

Jamie Woodhouse: 47:39

So do you think we need some external threat? We need an alien invasion or uh that would probably help.

Frans de Waal: 47:45

It would probably help, but I'm not sure we need to get that. But we need to break down these boundaries that we've built up. And and then we were discussing here the boundary between humans and other species. That's another boundary that we have, which traditionally we have never worried about. It's only in the last 500 years or so that we even have cruelty laws and things like that. So we we've traditionally never worried about these things, but we're starting to worry about it. And I think that's a good, it's a I see that as a very positive development. But again, it's not we are not programmed to do that. We we are programmed to to look out for ourselves, not for somebody else. It's interesting that we have the capacity to expand our empathy. So our empathy is intended for the inner circle of family and friends, but we have the capacity to expand it. It's very interesting that we can do that. It it takes maybe some mental power that we need to add to it, but we have that capacity, which is really so. If you want to have my optimistic view, is that we work on that and and we are working on that at the moment, I think, and it will give a different morality than we used to have. Yeah.

Jamie Woodhouse: 48:56

Yeah. Thank you. And it strikes me that as we look at most of the problems around the world, sometimes the technical solutions aren't that difficult in a sense, whether we're talking about climate change or animal farming or poverty reduction or human health. Quite often the technical solutions are reasonably within reach. The central challenge is actually one of human psychology and social norms and in-group-out-group tribalism. And it's a fascinating mix because in the on the one hand, we've been we have this evolutionary basis of an in-group-out group tribalism, but we also have the evolutionary basis that's given us that empathy and that potential for compassion and the cognitive ability to question and extend and improve and broaden our sphere of moral consideration.

Frans de Waal: 49:39

But you I think we should also put some uh pressure on the philosophers. The philosophers have given us for two million years a philosophy where humans are set apart from the rest of nature.

Jamie Woodhouse: 49:52

Yeah.

Frans de Waal: 49:53

And there are exceptions to it, but most of them have emphasized how special humans are, how unique humans are, how we are actually not animals. Uh, and and if you look now at the pandemic that we have, the which is based on eating bats, people think. Uh we have noticed that this whole idea that we dominate nature, we can do whatever we want with nature because we are these superior beings, we don't need to care about nature, that has given us the climate change problem, has given us the pandemic, has given us all sorts of problems. And I think the philosophers need to change their tune. And the philosophers have always emphasized human uniqueness. And as a biologist, I can tell you humans are animals, absolutely. And our brain is not different. Our brain is bigger, but it's really not different from a monkey brain. And so the philosophers need to change the way they think about these things. And philosophy came out of theology, came out of religion. So there's this whole connection with Christianity and the problem of the soul and the mind-body dualism that they bought into. And I think since we're talking about human morality, and the philosophers always have been very prominent in the discussion of human morality, many of them need to start to change differently. And not all philosophers have been like that. So, for example, if you read David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, yeah, who was before Kant, before Kant got involved in morality, we had David Hume, who said that we have moral sentiments, who emphasized the emotions and the role of the emotions in morality. And so not all philosophers have been dualistic in the sense of between humans and animals.

Jamie Woodhouse: 51:39

And can they suffer?

Frans de Waal: 51:41

Yeah. So not all of them have been like that, but many of them have emphasized the differences more than the similarities.

Jamie Woodhouse: 51:48

Yeah, agree. Thank you. It's been an absolute inspiration to talk to you. You've helped, I think, so many people recognize the deep, ancient, even pre-human roots of our empathy and compassion. And you're also helping break down that human exceptionalism around the boundaries between the species as well. So it's been a real privilege to talk to you. And if you need any tips going vegan, then let me know and I can I'll get you one of these sweatshirts, one of these t-shirts. Okay, welcome. You're welcome. So thank you. Uh, what's the best way of people following you, finding more about your work? I'll include links in the show notes, of course.

Frans de Waal: 52:19

I think my last book, uh Mama's Last Hug, is maybe the best way to because I do discuss uh sentience there and issues like that. Yeah.

Jamie Woodhouse: 52:27

Yeah, great. Excellent. I'll include the links to uh all of your other resources and your website as well. Thanks for listening. You're helping to normalize rational, compassionate thinking. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us some stars or a review. You can visit sentientism.info to find out more, and you'd be very welcome in any of our online community groups. The biggest is on Facebook. If you like what we're doing, why not tell your friends about us?

James Hodgson (Intro): 59:04

Animal ethics. What was it that I said? Um sentientism, which brings together the virtues and values of humanism with those of the animal ethics movement. Which brings together the virtues and values of humanism with animal ethics. Which brings together the virtues and values of humanism with animal ethics. Okay, I think that's all I need. Thank you, Luca.