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Hi guys,

    I really enjoyed our discussion on tuesday on morality and thought that some really thought provoking and challenging ideas were brought up during the period (I especially thought the incest example was pretty interesting and made me think twice about my response).  While reading through the comments I found some interesting points about the presence or absence of an animal morality.  This is a topic that is actually fairly involved with the thesis work that I am doing with Wendy Sternberg, Amelia and Alex.  We are studying behavioral correlates of empathy in mice, specifically in response to another mouse in pain.  There is really a wealth of studies and anecdotal examples of the presence of empathy in animals, that is, their ability to understand the pain of another animal and react in an appropriate manner (by caring for the animal or protecting the animal)  Even mice have been shown to exhibit empathic behaviors, and I am pretty sure that if any of you attended the talk by Dr. Jeffrey Mogil earlier in the year you heard him talk about the presence of empathy in mice. 

So as far as I am concerned it seems pretty certain that animals are able to exhibit empathy, which I think may have been one of the key words that Ian and Rebecca displayed under the heading of morality.  However, although I think there is ample evidence to say that animals can be empathetic, I'm not sure whether this is actually moral action as their motivation for such actions seem more motivated by ideas of inclusive fitness and survival of the species than by an actual understanding of right and wrong.  I thin kin the end this is really what seperates our sense of morality from an animal's, because even though I do feel that human morals in their most fundamental sense are intrinsically linked to evolution (not killing other humans probably evolved from an idea of survival of the species etc) I think nowadays, with more and more actions deemed a-moral for purely religious or otherwise non-life or death reasons, we are defining morality less in terms of its basic evolutionary sense.  Because animals do not seem to have actions which are punished or avoided that are not involved in some way with the survival and well-being of the species, I would say that animals do not have a moral structure, at least in the human sense of the word.