Abstract
ABSTRACT In this paper, we argue that scientists working on the animal morality debate have been operating with a narrow view of morality that prematurely limits the variety of moral practices that animals may be capable of. We show how this bias can be partially corrected by paying more attention to the touch behaviors of animals. We argue that a careful examination of the ways in which animals engage in and navigate touch interactions can shed new light on current debates on animal morality, like the study of consolation behavior, while also revealing further forms that animal morality may take that have been neglected so far, like capacities of tolerance or trust. This defense is structured as an analysis of the three main functions of touch: the discriminative function, the affiliative function, and the vigilance function.
Highlights
We argue that scientists working on the animal morality debate have been operating with a narrow view of morality that prematurely limits the variety of moral practices that animals may be capable of
We have argued that scientists and philosophers have been operating with a somewhat narrow view of the set of moral practices that animals could engage in, and that bringing the issue of touch to the discussion has the potential to uncover further moral practices, while revealing unnoticed nuances in the ones that are under discussion
Our defense of the need to pay more attention to touch has been structured as an analysis of the discriminative, affiliative, and vigilance functions of touch
Summary
We will outline how the animal morality debate can benefit from a closer look at the role of touch in the social interactions of animals. This has been prompted by Maria Botero’s work on primate social cogni tion, in which she suggests that scientists studying joint attention and theory of mind need to move away from a focus on vision because touch as “the first sense” might be an earlier facilitator of these capacities (Botero, 2016, 2018a, 2018b). This is purely for reasons of simplicity, since we do not in principle exclude that there are moral capacities that are expressed through distal touch (e.g., using a stick to probe or feel) or hybrid forms thereof (e.g., tacto-acoustic signals in dolphins)
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