Those damn monkeys are turning out to be something of a Rorschach test. As I discussed here, an interesting recent research report suggests that monkeys have an innate sense of fairness. In the experiment one monkey would clearly demonstrate displeasure when his fellow experimentee was, without reason, given a more desirable treat in return for the same token.
I, of course, saw this as conclusive proof that racial preferences violate not only human but animal nature. The New York Times, for some reason, saw something entirely different. Twice.
Yes, twice. The Sunday Week in Review has two separate articles on the monkeys. Nicholas Wade looked at those monkeys and saw an idylic state of nature, an innate inclination to share, to engage in altruistic behavior.
So perhaps morality is embedded in the genes. Perhaps we are born with original virtue and it’s from our culture we learn depravity.
Adam Cohen looks at the same monkeys and comes away reaffirming the traditional liberal notion of fairness.
There is, certainly, a risk of reading too much into the feeding habits of 10 research monkeys. But in a week when fairness was so evidently on the ropes — from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, which poor nations walked out of in frustration, to the latest issue of Forbes, reporting that the richest 400 Americans are worth $955 billion — the capuchin monkeys offered a glimmer of hope from the primate gene pool.
The fact that the richest 400 Americans are worth $955 billion itself provides a Rorschach test all of its own. It can and does mean different things to different people — hard work, luck, lucky choice of parents, an incredibly productive economic engine, poor tax policy, etc., etc., etc. But one response is entirely predictable: when a liberal like Cohen sees that fact, all he can see is … unfairness. And an indictment of conservatives. That’s why the monkeys give him hope.
The study’s implication that we are, to some extent, hard-wired for fairness speaks with special force to the legal system. American law has undergone a transformation in recent years, led by conservative Supreme Court justices and scholars, away from a focus on broad principles of fairness and toward a willingness to subject people to treatment that might be unjust, on the grounds that it is legal. The monkey study suggests, however, that fairness might be more than a currently unfashionable legal concept. It may be integral to who we are.
If only this were funny Cohen might look forward to a career as a stand-up comic. But since it isn’t, it’s merely breathtaking in its self-righteous pomposity.
Conservative justices have abandoned fairness, or at least “broad principles of fairness,” and subjected people to treatment that “might be unjust” merely because such treatment is legal! Incredible.
Cohen obviously believes that the justices should have shielded the unnamed victims from treatment that was not even necessarily unjust even though it was legal.
Why do I suspect that Cohen would be happy living within reach of judges who acted on such “broad principles of fairness” only if they were appointed by his friends?
When society opts for conservative (as opposed, I guess, to “broad”) prinicples of fairness, liberals like Cohen discover a new affection for the state of nature.
Legal philosophers have long debated whether there is such a thing as natural law — higher principles of fairness that trump the rules enacted by man — and if so, from where it is derived. To natural law proponents like St. Augustine, who said an unjust law is no law at all, the answer was God. The capuchin monkey study suggests, however, that part of the answer may be biological. It hints that, as Mr. de Waal [one of the researchers] puts it, “a lot of the notions we use in our moral systems are much older than our species.”
I think these monkeys have made monkeys out of all of us, but I’m sticking with my fairness–indicts–preferences interpretation. And I’m waiting for someone to reply that I’m minimizing the fact that the monkeys under review were all capuchin monkeys. I expect someone will argue that if the monkeys being studied were, in the term so favored today, “different,” i.e., from the monkey equivalent of different racial/ethnic groups — not just capuchins but baboons and howler monkeys and snow monkeys and spider monkeys and vervet monkeys, etc. — then there would have been no objection to providing tastier rewards to monkeys from groups less favored in the past.
Such an argument would be based on the assumption that monkey differences are more important than common citizenship in monkeydom, a view that alas has leaked out of the zoo and become quite common.
