Aping our way to the moral high ground

Jared Moore and David Gottlieb

Objective

To explain to ourselves the wonderful acheivement of our quotidian cooperation

Burning House

A painting by Edvard Munch depicting a house on fire

You’re on your way home from a hard day’s work at the station. At first you tell yourself it is nerves—smoke from the fires you’d been inhaling all day. After all, you’d made it a game with the kids how to open the flu, where to fetch water—what with you going at it alone now. You start to feel it next. No, it must be the long walk home that has you flushed. But then you see it, dancing in its awesome fury right there above your neighbor’s oak. Then you’re running, slamming through the door, leaping up stairs to your apartment. You barely notice as your buddies’ engine sidles up, them pouring into the collapsing structure, strangers wailing.

Who do you save first?

(Choices: strangers, buddies, kids.)

Sympathy

reciprocal altruism

A picture of a common vampire bat

In this view, emotional reciprocity is most accurately characterized as mutual investments among interdependent friends, who help one another not in order to pay back past acts but in order to invest in the future (Tomasello 2016)

Male baboons are very protective of their female friends’ infants. Betelgeuse grunts to Lizzie’s infant, Zoe.

Cheney and Seyfarth (2008)

natural selection has favored individuals who develop theories of social life. (Cheney and Seyfarth 2008, 117)

mutualism


Tomasello (2019)

Chimps let you cheat!

Namely, they would let you play “demand-9” on divide-the-dollar.

In all three studies the result was identical: subjects virtually never rejected any nonzero offers. Presumably they did not because they were not focused on anything like the fairness of the offer, only on whether or not it would bring them food (Tomasello 2016)

“Sharing”


http://www.becoming-human.org/public/html/chapter-8-1-v1.phtml

“Sharing”


http://www.becoming-human.org/public/html/chapter-8-1-v5.phtml

Perspective taking

Two young juvenile baboons huddle together anxiously as they watch the group initiating a water crossing.

Cheney and Seyfarth (2008)

Individual intentionality

This doesn’t give us morality as we know it. It doesn’t give us fairness.

The participants are not working together so much as they are using one another as “social tools” to maximize their own gains. (Tomasello 2019)

Cooperation
(in the context of competition)
Prosociality Sympathy
Cognition Individual Intentionality
Social interaction Dominance
Self-Regulation Behavioral Self-Regulation
Rationality Individual Rationality

Who do we save in the fire?

Tomasello (2016)

Why aren’t chimps moral agents?

They can tell what other chimps are thinking. They can be motivated to help each other. They can recognize each others emotions. They can control their impulses.

So what gives?

Fairness

Are humans violent?

Number of killings per year for each community versus number of males and population density.

The countries with the most homicides per unit population are generally countries with small populations (very narrow rectangles in chart, 2021)

Chimpanzees are around 30 times more likely to die from homicide than the “most violent” humans.

Wilson et al. (2014)

Force is a physical power, and I fail to see what moral effect it can have (Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 1762/1968, p. 52).

Quoted in Tomasello (2016)

How did it get started?

The benefits of cooperation

during the dry season in central Brazil, Kayapó men wade into the shallow currents of the Xingu river where they release a fish poison by beating bundles of a plant called timbo. stunned or suffocated by the timbo sap, fish float to the surface and are easily gathered by women and children who wade in with baskets at the water’s edge. such high-value food sources were out of reach of our prehominin ancestors but became accessible once hominins with stone-age technologies began to understand one another’s goals well enough to coordinate complex activities.

[In a foraging society] once every 17 years, caloric deficits for nonsharers would fall below 50 percent of what was needed 21 days in a row, a recipe for starvation. By pooling their risk, the proportion of days people suffered from such caloric shortfalls fell from 27 percent to only 3 percent. (Hrdy 2009)

Tomasello describes how scavenging the kills of lions and hyenas is a “stag hunt.”

Hrdy (2009)

Imitation – Cooperative Childcare

A man sticking out his tongue, opening his mouth, and puckering his lips.

A baby imitating the man’s facial expressions.

A chimpanzee imitating a similar man’s facial expressions

A composite of Meltzoff and Moore (1977) and Myowa‐Yamakoshi et al. (2004)

Sympathy and Perspective Taking


  • How did you feel when watching that video?

  • What happened?

  • “Smithian” sympathy: How would I feel if I were in your shoes?

http://www.becoming-human.org/public/html/chapter-3-3-v2.phtml

Joint Commitment


Notice the lack of violence!

http://www.becoming-human.org/data/chapter-7-3-v4.html

It’s a good idea to cooperate with other cooperators

This is a world without language. I can’t say, “don’t play with him, he isn’t nice.” Besides your own experiences, you don’t have a sense of who would be good to gather food with versus who wouldn’t.

Hence you don’t stand to gain by being unfair. (Because then they won’t cooperate with you later and you need all the food you can get.)

Rational agents feel instrumental pressure to act toward their goals (desires) given their perceptions (beliefs), so each partner in a collaboration feels instrumentally rational pressure to help her partner as needed to further their joint enterprise (Tomasello 2016)

What happens to free riders?

You can’t say you’re one of us if you would do that!

“we” was a moral force because both partners considered it legitimate, based on the fact that they had created it themselves specifically for purposes of self-regulation, and the fact that both saw their partner as genuinely deserving of their cooperation. (Tomasello 2016)

Notice the Kantianism here! We are applying a maxim. We are treating each other as ends

Recall:

How many times can you insult your friends until you become a bully?

Joint intentional activity in which two second-personal (2P) agents with cooperative identities (ID) use their powers of joint intentionality and cooperative communication to make a joint commitment to create a supraindividual “we” based on normative trust (two dotted arrows pointing up to the triangle) that serves legitimately to self-regulate (solid arrow pointing down) the collaborative activity (horizontal, bidirectional arrow). The joint commitment is to act in accordance with their commonground role ideals that define their and their partner’s contributions toward joint success; that is, the commitment is to act responsibly toward their joint goal.

Tomasello (2016)

Cooperation
(in the context of competition)		 Second-Personal Morality
(obligate collaborate foraging w/ partner choice)
Prosociality Sympathy Concern
Cognition Individual Intentionality Joint Intentionality
- partner equivalence
- role-specific ideals
Social interaction Dominance Second-Personal Agency
- mutual respect & deservingness
- 2P (legitimate) protest
Self-Regulation Behavioral Self-Regulation Joint Commitment
- cooperative identity
- 2P responsibility
Rationality Individual Rationality Cooperative Rationality

Who do we save in the fire?

Tomasello (2016)

Culture (third-person morality)


Tomasello (2019)

Children acquire beliefs and values about farming from their parents. Then, as they grow older, their beliefs and values may also be affected by other adults. Next, as adults, they marry and choose a career. Those who abandon farming and leave the community have no further effect on the values in the community.

Richerson and Boyd (2005)

A collective commitment to do the right thing created or affirmed by (dotted arrows going up) and self-regulated by (solid arrows going down) cultural agents with cultural identities (ID). Cultural agents feel obligated to their compatriots to choose right over wrong ways of doing things (i.e., to follow social norms) and to make sure that others do as well (bidirectional arrows). Internalization of the process constitutes moral self-governance reflecting a group-minded cultural rationality and normativity.

Tomasello (2016)

Cooperation
(in the context of competition)		 Second-Personal Morality
(obligate collaborate foraging w/ partner choice)		 “Objective” Morality
(life in a culture)
Prosociality Sympathy Concern Group Loyalty
Cognition Individual Intentionality Joint Intentionality
- partner equivalence
- role-specific ideals		 Collective Intentionality
- agent independence
- objective right & wrong
Social interaction Dominance Second-Personal Agency
- mutual respect & deservingness
- 2P (legitimate) protest		 Cultural Agency
- justice & merit
- third-party norm enforcement
Self-Regulation Behavioral Self-Regulation Joint Commitment
- cooperative identity
- 2P responsibility		 Moral Self-Governance
- moral identity
- obligation & guilt
Rationality Individual Rationality Cooperative Rationality Cultural Rationality

Who do we save in the fire?

Tomasello (2016)

Formalizing

Egocentric views of the same environment, at the same time, for the tall (left) and short (right) agents. Left: The tall agent can distinguish between, and pick, fruit from both trees and shrubs, but all fruits look the same (all fruit looks red). Right: The short agent can distinguish between types of fruit but not the height of trees versus shrubs (all vegetation looks like shrubs), so the agent is unaware of where it can pick from.

A plot demonstrating how helping behavior of the tall agent decreases as the distance between fruit patches increases (i.e., as cost increases). We evaluate three different agents, each trained with advantageous inequity aversion, which was parameterized as 𝛽 = 0.75, 0.5 and 0.25 for agents ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’, respectively

An equation to show the loss function for the tall agent, where 𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑙 (𝑠𝑡 ) is the extrinsic environmental reward of the tall agent at time 𝑡, and ˜𝑟𝑥 (𝑠𝑡 ) = 𝜆˜𝑟𝑥 (𝑠𝑡−1) + 𝑟𝑥 (𝑠𝑡 ) is the temporally smoothed reward of agent 𝑥. That is, they prefer not to let their own rewards too far outstrip those of their partner.

Mao et al. (2023)

  • How do we formalize the “ecologically structured experience characteristic of human and animal development” (Buckner 2024, 311?)

  • Do our models have to satisfy tests to…

    • gaze follow
    • help and share
    • adopt the perspective of another, of a culture
    • etc.?

  • What would it mean to satisfy those tests?

Can AI feel guilty for breaking a promise? (Should it?)

  • Can we seriously say that an LLM prompted to play a game has the same kind of social milleu as an ape?

Do we want AI that does what is right or do we want AI that does what we want?

(Are these different questions?)

(In this context, what would it mean to “align” AI?)

Exit Ticket

Guilt trip

Think of a time that you established a joint commitment with someone you know (not a stranger). Perhaps you both decided to play tennis. You went to a party together. You collaborated on a group project.

Furthermore, try to think of a time when that commitment was broken. Did the commitment end cleanly? Did you or the other party ask to end it? If not, did one of you protest (“guilt trip”) the other?

What happened? How did you feel?

References

Buckner, Cameron J. 2024. From Deep Learning to Rational Machines: What the History of Philosophy Can Teach Us about the Future of Artificial Intelligence. Oxford University Press.
Carter, Gerald G., Damien R. Farine, Rachel J. Crisp, Julia K. Vrtilek, Simon P. Ripperger, and Rachel A. Page. 2020. “Development of New Food-Sharing Relationships in Vampire Bats.” Current Biology 30 (7): 1275–1279.e3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.055.
Cheney, Dorothy L., and Robert M. Seyfarth. 2008. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. University of Chicago Press. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=584929.
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 2009. Mothers and Others. Harvard University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c84czb.3.
Mao, Yiran, Madeline G. Reinecke, Markus Kunesch, Edgar A. Duéñez-Guzmán, Ramona Comanescu, Julia Haas, and Joel Z. Leibo. 2023. “Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason: Evaluating Artificial Moral Cognition by Probing Cost Insensitivity.” arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18269.
Meltzoff, Andrew N., and M. Keith Moore. 1977. “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates.” Science 198 (4312): 75–78.
Myowa‐Yamakoshi, Masako, Masaki Tomonaga, Masayuki Tanaka, and Tetsuro Matsuzawa. 2004. “Imitation in Neonatal Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes).” Developmental Science 7 (4): 437–42.
Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. 2005. Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. The University of Chicago Press. http://archive.org/details/RichersonBoyd2005NotByGenesAloneBook.
Tomasello, Michael. 2016. A Natural History of Human Morality. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674915855.
———. 2019. Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Belknap Press. https://viewer-ebscohost-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/EbscoViewerService/ebook?an=1913272&callbackUrl=https%3a%2f%2fresearch.ebsco.com&db=nlebk&format=EB&profId=eds&lpid=&ppid=&lang=en&location=edm&isPLink=False&requestContext=&profileIdentifier=byabd2&recordId=hs7akrbnuf.
Wilson, Michael L., Christophe Boesch, Barbara Fruth, Takeshi Furuichi, Ian C. Gilby, Chie Hashimoto, Catherine L. Hobaiter, et al. 2014. “Lethal Aggression in Pan Is Better Explained by Adaptive Strategies Than Human Impacts.” Nature 513 (7518): 414–17. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13727.