DEEP Ethics

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Animal Human Welfare

DEEP Ethics
Neil greenberg
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An ETHOLOGICAL Approach to the Ethics of
human-animal interactions

• Causes and consequences of behavior are both
  proximate and ultimate
• Complementary questions representing relevant
  biological variables (DDEEP ETHOLOGY)
• Epigenetic cascade of interacting biological and
  environmental influences

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Domains of Ethology

• Morphology
• Development
• Ecology
• Evolution
• Physiology
• DEEP ethology

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The Ethological Perspective

• The most proximate is the neuromuscular junction
• (neural, endocrine, information flowing through
  the organism)
• The most remote aspect of causation is
  evolutionary
• (traits that serve fitness are transmitted
  across generations)

• The way we relate to other individuals (of our
  own or other species) is a behavioral pattern.
• And that behavior can be best illuminated by a
  coordinated consideration of its proximate and
  ultimate causation

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BEHAVIOR is a result of INTERNAL and EXTERNAL
influences

• INPUT INTEGRATION OUTPUT
• INPUT involves stimulus, sensation, selective
  perception
• INTEGRATION involves how that information
  interacts with previous information somehow
  represented in the brain the path information
  takes
• OUTPUT involves selection of a response

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INTEGRATION

• MOTIVATION -- AFFECT -- COGNITION
• These critical functions of the brain influence
  behavior in slightly different ways.
• Their activation suggests that during
  integration, information can take different
  pathways through the brain, engaging these
  functions in varying proportion depending on the
  perceived urgencies of the moment.

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DISTRIBUTED systems INTEGRATED in the service of
behavior

• MOTIVATION
• Fundamental biological needs
• AFFECT
• Energizing action depending on perceived urgency
• COGNITION
• Modulated by cognitive processes such as stimulus
  feature detection and predicting the future
• 
  

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MOTIVATION -- AFFECT -- COGNITION

• MOTIVATION associated with fundamental needs
  the nexus for coordination is hypothalamus
• AFFECT associated with energizing influence of
  emotions the nexus for coordination is the
  limbic system
• COGNITION associated with cognition, planning,
  control of behavior coordinated at lower
  centers (instincts, impulses) the nexus for
  coordination is the prefrontal cerebral cortex

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MOTIVATION -- AFFECT -- COGNITION

• MOTIVATION / hypothalamus
• AFFECT / limbic system
• COGNITION / cerebral cortex
• These functions and their associated centers
  make more-or-less use of more-or-less OPEN or
  CLOSED programmes of responding

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DETERMINISM

• Variables determining behavior are rarely
  exclusively
• Biological (genetic or nature) or
  Environmental (nurture)
• They are
• Epigenetic reflecting the cascade of interacting
  genetic and environmental variables (Open and
  Closed Genetic Programs)

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DECIPHERING DETERMINISM

• . . . grant me the serenity to accept the things
  I cannot change,
• . . . courage to change the things I can,
• . . . and the wisdom to know the difference.
• (from Reinhold Neibuhrs adaptation of a 14th c
  English prayer)

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DECIPHERING DETERMINISM

• Although real wisdom may be beyond science
• . . . the aim of science is not to open the
  door to everlasting wisdom, but to set a limit on
  everlasting error.
• (from Bertolt Brechts Life of Galileo)

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Is Error Detection the way the brain work?

• It certainly is the way science works!
• "I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that
  don't work.
• -- Thomas Edison
• "Knowledge increases not by the matching of
  images with the real world ... but by a
  relentless bias toward the perception of error."
  
• -- Kenneth Boulding
• "When you have eliminated the impossible,
  whatever remains, however improbable, must be the
  truth.
• -- Sherlock Holmes

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An Ethical Dilemma

• The long-standing rationalist tradition in moral
  psychology emphasizes the role of reason in moral
  judgment.
• A more recent trend places increased emphasis on
  emotion.

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The Runaway Trolley

• A runaway trolley is hurtling toward five people.
  They will all be killed
• BUT you can just about reach and throw a switch
  that will steer the trolley onto a spur, where it
  will kill just one person instead of five.
• Should you throw the switch?

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The Runaway Trolley

• A runaway trolley is hurtling toward five people.
  you are standing next to a large stranger on a
  footbridge that arches over the tracks.
• Because you are small but agile, the only way to
  save the five is to push the large stranger off
  the bridge onto the tracks below it is certain
  that he will die, but his heavy body will stop
  the trolley, saving the five others.
• Should you push the stranger to his death?

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NEUROETHICS

• Using fMRI, researchers showed that individuals
  judged personal moral dilemmas using areas known
  to regulate emotion (medial frontal, posterior
  cingulate, and angular gyri).
• areas regulating working memory (middle frontal
  and parietal) were less active,
• compared with neural activity during judgments of
  nonmoral dilemmas and impersonal moral dilemmas.
• Participants also had longer reaction when making
  difficult, personal, moral decisions that
  adversely affected others.
• Greene et al. An fMRI investigation of
  emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science
  Sept 14, 2001 2932105-2108

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• Another team of researchers investigated the
  neural correlates of moral emotion in normal
  individuals using functional magnetic resonance
  imaging (fMRI).
• Because damage to the orbitofrontal cortex can
  result in a lack of empathy and antisocial
  behaviors while leaving social cognition and
  basic emotions intact, Moll colleagues
  hypothesized that this brain region would be more
  activated by the visual perception of stimuli
  evocative of moral emotions compared with
  emotional stimuli without moral content
• In addition, they predicted that basic and moral
  emotions would evoke overlapping activations in
  brain regions involved in emotional processing,
  such as the amygdala, insula, and subcortical
  nuclei.

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NEEDS

• Organisms have several more-or-less obvious NEEDS
  related to their capacity to prosper
• Behavior can be viewed as an adaptation that
  helps organisms COPE with challenges to those
  needs

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NEEDS

• Maslows need hierarchy
• Physiology (food, drink, exercise)
• Safety (security, order, protection)
• Belonging ( sociability, acceptance, love)
• Esteem (status, prestige, acknowledgment)
• Self-Actualization (personal fulfillment)

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NEEDS PHYSIOLOGY

• HOMEOSTASIS . . .
• "It is the fixity of the milieu interieur which
  is the condition of free and independent life"
• (Claude Bernard, 1878)

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HOMEOSTASIS . . .

• The highly developed living being is an open
  system having many relations to its
  surroundings.
• . . changes in the surroundings excite
  reactions in this system, or affect it directly,
  so that internal disturbances are produced. . .
• the coordinated physiological reactions which
  maintain most of the steady states in the body
  are so complex, and so peculiar to the living
  organism, that it is suggested that a specific
  designation for these states be employed--
  homeostasis" (W.B. Cannon 1929)

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NEEDS Physiology

• Food comes first, then morals (Brecht)
• Picassos Frugal Repast (1904)

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NEEDS Safety

• (security, order, protection)
• For a mans house is his castle
• (et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium Sir
  Edward Coke,
• The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of
  England, 1628)

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NEEDS Belonging

• (sociability, acceptance, love)
• He who is unable to live in society, or who has
  no need because he is sufficient for himself,
  must be either a beast or a god.
• (Aristotle, Politics bk. 1, 1253a 279)

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NEEDS Esteem

• (status, prestige, acknowledgment)
• "I have a burning wish that you should know me
  wholly, wholly. Why is it so unutterably
  beneficial, the thought that someone besides
  myself knows me?"
• (Karen Danielsen writing about Oskar Horney)

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NEEDS Esteem

• (status, prestige, acknowledgment)
• ". . . the most terrifying burden of the creature
  is to be isolated, which is what happens in
  individuation One separates himself out of the
  herd . . . . His creative work is at the same
  time the expression of his heroism and the
  justification for it. (Becker)

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NEEDS Self-Actualization

• (personal fulfillment)
• For most creatures, self-actualization is
  manifest as
• DIRECT and/or INDIRECT FITNESS
• "The aim of life is self-development. To realize
  one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us
  is here for.. . . .
• (Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray)
• Be all you can be . . . (US Army recruiting
  slogan)

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Beyond Biology? spiritual
self-actualization

• Those who hunger for illumination, those who
  see, remain on the fringe. They are derided,
  they are treated as mad. But these few rare
  souls resist and are vigilant. They have an
  obscure need for spiritual life, for knowledge,
  for progress.
• (Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944)

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Stressors and Coping ResponsesWhen needs are
not met . . .

• The organism manifests a remarkable sense of
  biological priorities
• A stressor is a real or perceived challenge to an
  organisms ability to meet its real or perceived
  needs.

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STRESS . . .

• Is both a cause and a consequence to be more
  precise, we should speak of
• STRESSORS challenge our capacity to meet our
  needs, and
• STRESS RESPONSE our body's attempt to cope with
  a stressor by evoking neural and endocrine
  compensatory mechanisms.

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Coping . . .

• STRESSORS are internal or external changes which
  by challenging an organisms ability to meet its
  needs evokes a coordinated coping response
• . . . constrained by a threshold for detection of
  the change, for attention based on real or
  perceived relevance, and capacity to respond at
  any particular level once the challenge is
  detected.

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COPING RESPONSES constraints of the system

• Input (stress can change the sensitivity of sense
  organs (e.g., Gandelman 1983) resolve
  competitive parallel afferent pathways,)
• Integration (receptive field modulation stress
  can affect arousal, selective attention (e.g.,
  Archer 1973, R.J. Andrew 1972) differential
  regional sensitivity to hormones or
  neurotransmitters (e.g., Amy Arnsten 2000)
  control of microcirculation (e.g., Palmer 1986)
• Output (resolve competitive parallel efferent
  paths to action energetic reserves and the
  ability to mobilize them)

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STRESS can drive the adaptive process

• . . . continuous assimilation of internally
  mediated consequences of the organisms action on
  the environment and the resulting accommodation
  of these action schemes into the previously
  formed structure
• (Piaget 1980)

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ADAPTATION is . . .

• The processes by which organisms or groups of
  organisms
• maintain homeostasis in and among themselves in
  the face of both
• short-term environmental fluctuations and
  long-term changes
• in the composition and structure of their
  environments. (Rappaport, 1971)

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Efficiency Many challenges, few responses

• the manifest versatility of the organisms
  coping responses presupposes a nervous system
  endowed with an unfailing sense of biological
  priorities, and is characteristic of the
  economy with which the body defends itself.
• Instead of depending on a large number of
  separate mechanisms, each one of which is
  exclusively reserved for its own particular type
  of emergency, the body improvises responses to
  the threat of injury by assembling new
  combinations of pre-existing functions.
  (Miller, 1978118).

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PATHOLOGY

• There are many systems in the body which, because
  of misuse or misfortune, may have their services
  to the organism as a whole so altered as to be
  actually harmful.
• Thus vicious circles of causation become
  established which may lead to death . . .

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Optimal Arousal

• A range of stimulation is not only tolerable, it
  is desirable (adaptive scope)
• But stimuli from different sources may contribute
  to this range
• So a stimulus is meaningful only in the context
  of possible convergence with others

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Do ethics meet needs?

• Social contract theory is the view that morality
  is founded solely on uniform social agreements
  that serve the best interests of those who make
  the agreement.

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Are ethics outside nature?

• When T.H. Huxley lectured on Evolution and
  ethics at Oxford he regarded ethics as outside
  of nature -- a human invention.
• Dawkins in The Selfish Gene appeared to agree
  . . . let us try to teach generosity and
  altruism, because we are born selfish.
• St. Augustine would agree.

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Are ethics outside nature?

• Altruism acting in a way that diminishes ones
  fitness in order to contribute to the fitness of
  another
• Direct Indirect Fitness (personal fitness
  the fitness of others with whom you share more or
  less genes)
• Is there any real altruism?