Morally Responsible Swans

Swans, from a distance, appear to be serene creatures. They glide across the water, with little sign of any effort. They seem happy just to be. But close up, they’re not quite so placid. Throwing food to the swans at the local park, for instance, shows another side to their nature – dare I say, an ugly side. The pond has one pair of swans and their grown-up chicks from the previous year. Food encourages a lot of snapping between all of the swans. But one day, something a bit more alarming occurred. The crowd of ducks that were swimming around amongst the swans, trying to catch some crumbs of food was frustrating one of the young swans. The young swan grabbed one of the ducks by the neck – grabbed it and would not let go. What to do? I could, of course, have scrambled down the bank, waded into the water, and tried to wrestle the duck from out of the swan’s bill. But – I was trying to think quickly here – what if someone were to come along? They would most likely think that – rather than trying to rescue a duck – I was actually trying to force-feed it to the swan. It certainly would not benefit my street cred with the neighbours – neighbours who already refer to me as ‘the damaged one’. Anyway, by this time the swan had kind of decided there wasn’t much it could do with its captive. It dropped the duck, which by this time had gone limp. Happily though, once released, the duck simply shook its feathers and swam away, apparently none the worse. What to make of the swan-duck incident? I suspect most of us would not apportion any blame to the swan. We would rationalise that swans, along with most other creatures, are amoral – they have no sense of moral responsibility – right and wrong. I’m not going to disagree. But it does kind of lead to the question of where morality came from in the first place. Some ‘higher’ animals, such as chimps and monkeys, do seem to have at least a rudimentary sense of right and wrong. So did humans evolve to have a sense of ethics? This is the usual view – that compassion, mutual aid, a sense of fair play and even altruism has some advantage for the survival of our species. But there are other views. What if, for instance, values and morals are somehow built into the universe itself? What if value is ‘innate’? This is quite a difficult concept to get one’s head around. For one thing, it seems to suggest a number of different meanings. We could think of it as a series of ‘rules’ that somehow exist out there somewhere. Creatures like the local swans are unaware of the rules. But generally, the more intelligence that has evolved, the more awareness of the rules has developed. This idea follows a kind of pattern that is typical of our human ways of trying to understand the world. One rather strange example of this is the way we treat existence as a property that something can either ‘own’ or not own. In fact, we favour existence over non-existence – ‘somethings’ over ‘nothings’ – as if we had a choice in the matter. But actually, things either exist or they don’t – existing things don’t have a property called ‘existence’. We do the same with truth. Truth is not a property that true things own. There is no separate realm where truth resides – there is no TRUTH HQ. Things are either true or they’re not – they do not somehow ‘own’ a property called ‘truth’. So, likewise, I suggest the same is the case for moral rules. There is no separate realm of moral rules – no GOODNESS HQ. Things are either good or bad. But of course, that still leaves the problem of deciding what is good or bad. One way is to make up rules rather than seeking them somewhere in the universe. But the strange result of trying to make up rules is that we seem forced to assume that there are already values out there somewhere, to which our rules are either agreeing or not. This is another meaning for these matters to be innate – the universe has value as its primary means of expression, even although if does not somehow contain a set of specific rules. We are back to GOODNESS HQ, even although we’ve already said that it most likely does not exist. Another way to look at things is to think of people (and possibly some other animals) as having ‘virtues’. This suggests (by way of a third understanding of ‘innate’) that morality is gained by collecting good attributes. But virtue ethics falls foul of similar difficulties to the ideas discussed above. There is not some collection of virtues out there that we collect as if they are possessions – there is not a VIRTUE HQ. We are either virtuous or we are not. So perhaps virtue is never anything other than embodied – perhaps virtue is innate to us (thus a fourth meaning for innate). Everyone has a life journey and the life journey is a catalogue of virtues expressed or denied. But, well, somehow this answer doesn’t quite satisfy. So we try yet another tack. What about some kind of pragmatic approach to morality? Something that serves best for human endeavours, quite apart from whether it is described as literally good or bad? But this falls foul of yet another problem. How do we decide what is good for human endeavour? All we’ve done is push the search for value back a step. We have to assume some values in order to come to some agreement on what makes a ‘good life’ for a human. Usually this is taken to be ‘the greatest good for the greatest number of people’. That might seem plain and sensible, but in fact it’s fraught with difficulties. It would be better if it were expressed as, ‘the least harm for the greatest number of people’. But even so, it can lead to all sorts of abuse for some individuals in order to serve the interests of some majority – and so on. And also, very often, such matters are judged on the basis of individuals. If the ‘least harm’ principle were applied to whole societies, whole nations, and indeed, the whole planet, then we might be onto something. But – going back to the idea of value being somehow innate – one way to think about this is to recognise that the world is a world of choices rather than a world of facts. Even the swans are ruled by choices, albeit of the ‘aesthetic’ variety (in the broadest sense of that word). For instance, they choose a mate, choose the best location for a nest and choose the foods that they prefer. Our agency as creatures is not just some add-on that evolution has conjured up for ‘survival’ purposes. Our agency is what defines us as conscious, moral individuals. When it comes to justice and laws, we are forced to adopt a pragmatic approach – something along the line of the modified ‘least harm’ principle discussed above. But again, it’s best to be mindful that value lies at the back of this. But there’s no reason that innate value has to mean static value. The derivation of morality, justice and law from values can be an ongoing conversation – in fact, this seems unavoidable. The thing we miss, very often, is to get a clear divide between values that come to us as a result of our evolutionary inheritance and values that come from the much later – and purely human – ability for rationalism. The former often stems from seeing – we can see what’s a fair share, for instance. The latter stems from language. To get a handle on this, think of the difference between equality and equity. Equality is often visually obvious, but equity takes a lot of discussion and a lot of working out. Many of our problems as people stem from this division between instinctive drives (adopted as values) and rational values. It’s good to know and understand both – even if just to understand ourselves a bit better. This is why ‘innate’ is such a difficult word – and likewise the related term – intuition. We might, for instance, have an intuitive grasp of moral precepts that come to us from outside the universe (from GOODNESS HQ!). Or we might have an intuitive grasp of moral precepts that are built into the universe. Or we may use the word ‘intuition’ to refer to those values that have their origins in our instinctual drives from our evolutionary past. Rather though, I’d tentatively suggest, if we’re going to use the word intuition then we might be better served by using it to refer to what society and culture are trying to tell us – as well as the natural world around us. We are more than just a collection of individuals – and an eco-system is more than just the plants and animals it contains. Something emerges from our great conglomerations of life and consciousness – something with more wisdom than we might muster by individual effort. So, I’d go as far as saying that there is a VALUE HQ, but she does not dwell within us, she is out there in society and our eco-systems and she is a complex beast! That’s why the conversation on morals will never reach an end. And what of the local swans? Well, shortly after the duck-strangling incident, mama and papa swan settled down to raising a new batch of chicks. All three safely hatched and their fluffy presence brought joy to the pond. For a few days. But then one chick fell down the weir at the end of the pond and into a steep-sided ravine where a fast stream hurtles down the hillside towards the nearby river. I arrived to find the stranded chick desperately trying to scramble up the banking back to pond level. Meanwhile, all the other swans were gathered at the head of the weir, too big to fly down into the ravine, and anyway, probably not able to execute a rescue, even if they could get down to the stranded chick. I set aside any apprehension of neighbours’ disapproval, scrambled down the steep bank of the ravine, cupped the chick in my hands and placed her safely back up onto the pond. Mama swan looked me in the eye and gave a series of squawks – sounds I’d never heard a swan make before. Had she understood that this was a rescue? It was difficult to tell, but well, wasn’t there at least some responsibility there for the safety of her chick? Morally responsible swans. I went back up to the pond a few hours later, to check everything was okay. The swans were gliding serenely, well away from the weir. All three chicks were safely asleep on their mama’s back. Swans, you see – serene from a distance! And humans? Maybe we could learn to be serene close up. Maybe we could learn to converse properly, and talk our way towards better ways of living. The story continues in ‘The View from the Mountaintop’.