It might be morally OK to eat your dead pet dog
We spend our lives as human beings worrying about doing the right thing, avoiding doing the wrong thing, and judging others on the basis of whether they are good or bad people. And some things about morality seem especially objective — killing another person is a universal, fact-like moral wrongness. Every country in the world has some legal sanction on murder. Morality doesn’t feel arbitrary, and in fact, psychology is here to tell us that morality is rather objective in nature — we are programmed as human beings to respond to moral situations based on a predetermined set of moral genes that operate outside of our own awareness. That makes morality biological and universal which suggest that morality is objective.
Research since the end of the twentieth century in the field of moral psychology has shown that people make more judgments of the basis of very little information using their feelings as a guide. We start with some gut feeling about a situation or person that is accompanied by a feeling of maybe moral anger or outrage that then takes us to the point of expressing a judgment — “that is wrong!”. And the wrongness that we express is hard to justify — we often lack substantial reasons when trying to explain our judgments — “it’s wrong, because it is just wrong!”.
Let’s take a classic example from psychology literature illustrating this phenomenon — consider a person whose beloved pet dog died of natural causes, let’s say the dog died of old age. Afterwards, the owner decides to cook up the dog and eat it for supper. Now, you probably feel a bit unwell thinking about thisl. But, is it morally wrong to eat your dead pet dog? Your knee-jerk reaction would probably be to say “yes”, that’s not something people should do (should implying a moral consideration). You may feel a bit disgusted, and you probably wouldn’t be keen to be friends with this person. If you had to justify why, you might begin to struggle. You might even begin to realize that there’s no transgressor or victim in this situation, no harm done at all. And you may then be left with a circular explanation that eating one’s dead pet dog is morally wrong just because it is!
If you can relate to the above, then you are not dissimilar to research participants in a study that explored this exact phenomenon using these kinds of victimless violations. The results showed that by and large, many participants judged the actions in these kinds of scenarios to be morally wrong, but not on the basis of reasons, rather on the basis of feelings. And these feelings were also expressed in the form of an intuition — just knowing something without really fully knowing why.
The intuitive nature of morality
Moral psychologists today believe that this kind of phenomenon demonstrates how intuitive morality is. If morality is intuitive, then it isn’t something that we can think very much about because we may not even fully know the basis for these intuitions. We intuitively know that hurting another person is wrong, that cheating is wrong, that sleeping with a sibling is wrong, etc. We just know, and we just know because morality is actually programmed into us.
How is morality programmed?
According to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, individuals’ traits that increased the odds of surviving to reproductive age were then passed down to the next generation, and traits that decreased the odds of surviving to reproductive age were not passed down, or in effect, selected for by nature, hence disappearing from the species. Those traits favoring an individual’s survival eventually (throughout a long course of evolutionary history) become commonplace in a particular species, and are therefore expressed universally among that species. For example, the genetic traits responsible for humans’ pincer grasp (the precise way in which we use our forefinger and opposable thumb) make it easier to grab hold of, and manipulate things in the environment. This allowed us to make and use tools in a way that greatly benefited our species in protecting us from predators and helping in securing food. The traits would then aid in the chances of members of our species reaching reproductive age and passing down these traits to their offspring. Over centuries, our species adapted such that we all are born with the capability of using a pincer grasp.
With respect to morality, we see the same thing perhaps. Having a sensitivity to threat such that we can quickly and automatically detect threatening things in our environment allows us to react quickly and effectively in protecting ourselves. If there are certain traits that provide us with an automatic and efficient way of judging what is bad (also what is immoral) then we are better placed to fight back or flee, and then reach reproductive age such that we can pass these traits on to our offspring. So perhaps that flash of disgust you felt very quickly and automatically in response to the thought of someone eating their dead pet dog makes sense evolutionarily. Perhaps having this kind of moral intuition was beneficial in our primitive past and is now part and parcel of our current biological makeup as a species. If this the case, then morality is so real, it lives in your DNA!
Morality is constantly being negotiated
Let’s go back to murder for a minute. While murder is universally considered immoral for the most part, he definition of what constitutes murder is quite variable — in Switzerland, assisted dying is legal, in the Philippines, murder of a cheating spouse is legal, and it’s even legal to kill a Scotsman in York if they are in possession of a bow. In fact, the actual definition of murder is an unlawful homicide, suggesting that taking another life is not the universal moral wrong, it’s whether or not the taking of that life is in violation of a country’s agreed upon legal standard. So there is some negotiation involved in deciding whether taking a life is, in fact, morally wrong.
In addition to the variability in legal definitions of murder, there are always contextual factors to consider. In times of war, taking a life in the name of a political agenda is considered to be acceptable. During the American Civil War, lives were lost in an effort to abolish slavery — something we would consider today to be an entirely justified act in the name of the greater good. In times of conflict whether social or interpersonal, taking a life to protect ourselves or vulnerable others is entirely justifiable. If a person broke into your home with a gun and threatened the safety of your children, killing that person would be an entirely justifiable act. What this tells us is that there are always contextual and negotiable factors to consider when deciding whether or not something is morally wrong, and what this then tends to create is a sense that morality is rather arbitrary.
Even with respect to our dog eating friend, we see the same kind of variability. Participants in these studies are not universal in their responsiveness to this scenario — coming from a relatively high socio-economic status might make you less likely to find this upsetting and hence morally wrong, and coming from a high educational background also makes you less responsive to this situation. In fact, earlier this year, I gave a talk to a group of philosophers at a conference and presented them with the same moral scenario to which the room erupted in a chorus of questioning — was the person eating his dead dog hungry? Did he have anything else to eat? Was he from a part of the world where this is normal? And speaking to the last question, we know there are countries in the world where consumption of dog is highly normalized (e.g., parts of rural China). Even in countries where the practice of consuming dog meat is uncommon or even frowned upon, there are certainly parts of the world and groups of people who feel less attached to animals than others, or who see animals more as a utility than others. Take, for example, farming communities. It’s very possible that people living in a farming community would feel less morally outraged by this harmless scenario. Or older generations who didn’t grow up around the designer dog era of dressing your dog in outfits and taking it on the train with you — it’s entirely possible that this scenario would elicit far less outrage in them. People living in many Muslim countries see dogs as functional — they can be beloved by their owners, but they are not family members and they are not akin to humans, they serve a function which is to guard and protect the home. These are all situations whereby people may find it less outrageous or upsetting or even wrong to consume a dead pet dog. And this tells us that morality is variable, contextual, and agreed upon. It seems less likely to be the result of some non-conscious genetic expression based on a primitive function for survival, and more the result of ever-changing and evolving social practices, customs, and social decisions.
So is morality just a social construct?
The trouble is that this makes morality more subjective than the objective genetic basis for morality, and that calls into question whether or not morality is just a social construct. I would suggest that morality is real, but it’s not real in the sense of being part of the physical makeup of members of our species. It is real for us and by us, but not independent of us. But the realness does not lie in physical facts of the natural world in the same way that we understand gravitational pull — for morality, we argue, agree, disagree and negotiate constantly what is right and wrong against a wider social, historical, economic and political canvas that makes morality real for a given context, in a given time, in a given place. If you take that context away, there is no objective answer to what you do with your dead pet.
About the Author
This post is written by Nina Powell. Nina is faculty in the psychology department at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Yale-NUS. Her work involves theoretical and empirical research on morality and ethics, the nature of consciousness and human development. She is the co-founder of Cognitive Handshakes.
