Q&A: Researcher Jane Goodall’s Findings Versus the Idea of Objective Morality
Researcher Jane Goodall’s Findings Versus the Idea of Objective Morality
Question
Jane Goodall’s findings as a primatologist among chimpanzees pose a profound challenge to the idea of objective morality. Goodall showed that chimpanzees display clear proto-cultural markers, meaning stable patterns of customs, rituals, modes of communication, and even tool use that are passed down from generation to generation. These are behaviors that are not merely purely biological, but products of learning and imitation within defined social groups. Within those early cultures, behaviors also appear that among humans are considered moral, such as cooperation, care for the young, reconciliation, and concern for the weak.
At the same time, Goodall documented no less troubling phenomena. Those same chimpanzees with cultural markers also go on organized raids against rival groups, take over territories, and at times even carry out deliberate killing of isolated individuals. Behaviors that in a human context we would define as completely immoral appear in nature as part of the social strategy of a biological species, without any concept of law, value, or command.
The fact that patterns of behavior combining generosity and violence, compassion and brutality, arise within a proto-cultural framework of great apes that have no human language, theology, or philosophy undermines the assumption that binding morality stems from an objective principle. It reveals that behavior we interpret as moral appears in nature out of survival needs, evolutionary pressure, and social roles, and not out of an eternal truth that exists outside the world.
If morality, violence, cooperation, and competition all grow out of natural and cultural processes—primitive ones that do not depend on conscious decisions or absolute values—then morality cannot be seen as a binding objective truth. Morality is revealed as something changing and flexible, a product of society and circumstance, and not as a supreme law that exists independently of the world.
Answer
Goodall’s findings have nothing to do with it. One can always argue that morality appeared because it has survival value, since altruism has survival value. That is an old claim.
On the other hand, the fact that there is an evolutionary explanation does not mean morality has no validity. There is also an evolutionary explanation for the development of our eyes. Does that mean what they show us is incorrect or does not exist? Evolution helped us discover the laws of morality, which have objective validity.
By the way, the findings you described, if anything, say exactly the opposite. If morality were only a result of evolution, then why would there be a difference between apes and us? Why do they have a system that includes negative values and we do not? I do not mean negative behaviors; those certainly exist among us too. I mean negative values. There is no one who thinks that murder is a positive value. The conclusion I would draw is that we, unlike apes, are not slaves to our evolution, but add rational and moral control on top of it. We do not conduct ourselves only according to spontaneous drives, but through decision-making and ethical judgment.
Beyond all that, the fact that we all experience morality as having validity means that the burden of proof is on whoever claims that this is an illusion resulting from evolutionary construction.
Discussion on Answer
I did not skip over anything and did not miss anything. It seems that you skipped over everything I wrote, as described in the summary of my remarks. So I’ll end here.
What you wrote does not really address my argument. I am not claiming that human morality comes from chimpanzees or that their behavior explains our entire moral system. The point is much simpler. When we see among chimpanzees basic culture, cooperation, altruism, and also organized violence within the same social system, that shows that phenomena we call moral do not require an objective value or an external command in order to develop. They can take shape naturally out of social structure and evolutionary pressures. That is all. You simply skipped over that.
Your comparison between morality and the eye does not hold up. The senses develop in order to detect physical reality. They have a natural correction mechanism. Whoever perceives reality incorrectly dies. But morality is not the detection of objects in the world. It is a normative system. Evolution can select behaviors that promote survival or cooperation, but there is no evolutionary mechanism that aims us at identifying an objective value that exists outside the world. That is an entirely different category from the eye, so the analogy is simply irrelevant.
Also, what you say about negative values among apes and not among humans is not historically accurate. Human beings, throughout most of history, did in fact hold positive values toward things that today we define as completely evil: blood vengeance, child sacrifice, slavery, ritual torture, the killing of enemies as an ideal. Great apes do not hold values; they exhibit behavior patterns. And you are mixing up behavior with normative value. So the distinction you are pointing to does not hold.
When you say that we apply rational and moral control, you are describing a natural phenomenon of creatures with a more developed brain. That does not prove that objective morality exists, only that human beings are capable of producing more complex norms. Any completely natural model would expect that without needing a binding value outside culture.
And regarding the claim that we all experience morality as real and therefore the burden is on the one who doubts it: moral intuitions are to a large extent an evolutionary and cultural product. They vary across peoples, times, and situations. The inner experience of moral certainty does not prove that morality exists as an objective truth, just as the inner feeling that I have a unified “self” does not prove that this self has a separate essence. It is simply the way the brain experiences things.
In the end, I did not claim that objective morality is impossible, only that the fact that moral patterns appear without an objective system of values undermines the need to think morality must be such. The behavior of apes is not meant to explain us, but to show that morality-like phenomena do not require a metaphysical foundation in order to appear. And that is the part you missed.