Is your beloved dog really excited about a treat or is looking excited simply an evolutionary strategy to get more treats? How about our own emotions, can they be as selfish or even more so?
Our greyhound, Rosie, is by all outward appearances a very happy dog most of the time, literally hopping with excitement at the mere prospect of the treat. In fact, we have a nightly ritual. After dinner, we give her one of those longer lasting, chewable rawhide treats, but not before she goes outside for a short walk. She knows the routine down to the second and the instant we open the crate, she prances for the backdoor, scoots out, runs across the patio and does her business – usually. Sometimes, she’ll be so excited that she simply goes out and comes back in, not even crossing the patio. We can’t say quite how, but she understands this to be cheating on some level and whenever she attempts it, my wife and I will point back out the door, insisting she do her part before she gets the treat. She’ll lower her head for a second, then bolt outside again. On even rarer occasions, she might try to cheat three or even four times, but once she has successfully done her business, she runs across the kitchen to the laundry room where the treats are stored, tail wagging, wiggling around, about to burst out of her skin with what seems to be joy. At this point, I’ll frequently tease her and claim she’s really excited about daddy giving her a hug instead of any old treat. She’ll let me pet her for a moment, but will quickly slip my grasp and remain jumping around by the laundry room. Once she has the treat safely in her maw, she’ll run up the stairs to eat it in peace, free from people and the other dog. Meanwhile, our aging coonhound, Lilly, isn’t nearly so excited or appreciative, especially in comparison. To her, treats are simply every doggie’s by right and when she doesn’t get them according to her own personal schedule, she becomes furious, again by all outward appearances. Rather than hopping with joy, she plants herself, tail low and certainly not wagging, where she cannot be missed and begins barking vehemently. As she’s gotten older, she’s also gotten more discerning. Rosie will pretty much take whatever you give her short of a raw vegetable. Lilly, meanwhile, will carefully inspect what’s on offer, sniff it out, and on occasion, even turn her nose up at it, then promptly resume barking until she gets what she wants. This has become a more frequent occurrence since she began insisting on having two back to back dinners with barely fifteen minutes in between, essentially replacing her normal breakfast routine with a frenzy of food between 7:00 and 8:00 PM. Rosie, rather cleverly, has adjusted to this interruption in her treat by bringing it back downstairs with her and finishing it in her crate after the second dinner.
Nor are these the only differences in their behavior. Rosie is a far more affectionate dog in general. Known as a “leaner,” she will press herself up against you to the point where she practically falls over if you move away. She will hop up beside you on the couch, put her head in your lap, and demand attention, looking at you curiously or whining a bit if she doesn’t get it, even offering a playful yip. At night, should she decide she wants to sleep with a human, she is a female and it’s her prerogative after all, Rosie will try to crawl right on top of you, more like a cat than a dog. Lilly, however, appears to have some sense of personal space. She likes to be petted to an extent, but when she sits next to you on the couch, it’s always a couple of feet away, almost never leaning against you for comfort. Likewise, she always sleeps on the bed at night as though her life depended on it, but she stakes out her own corner, rarely, if ever, actually touching her humans. From these and other behaviors, it’s easy to get the impression that Rosie is a much happier dog than Lilly, that for whatever reason, she more fully enjoys her canine life while her sister is mired in frustration and anger. You might even say you can see it right on their face, point to it objectively and irrefutably as proof of your assumption, but there are several reasons to doubt this conclusion, even though it might seem correct on the surface. First, we cannot look into a dog’s mind to see what they really think. Second, we cannot assume they have thoughts in the first place as we would describe them. It’s not quite clear what it means to say a dog is happy or sad, excited or bored, joyful or frustrated in the human sense of the term. Dogs are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, they have the capacity to associate memories with either, and use the combination of the two to guide their behavior accordingly, but lacking self-awareness, they can’t reflect on the difference the way a person would, or explain why they prefer one or the other. To them, one is a feeling to be maximized by instinct, the other to be minimized by instinct, and they react to the stimuli presented to them accordingly. These reactions can be complicated and nuanced, but they are still simply reactions, reflexes tempered by experience. Third, dogs evolved from wolves based on their ability to manipulate humans, at least to some extent. While we were intentionally selecting them for what were considered valuable traits, we were also unintentionally selecting them for how quickly they could establish an emotional bond with their masters, that is how they could manipulate us. Puppy dog eyes do not exist because all dogs are sad. They exist because canines that had them appealed to us on an emotional level. Similarly, dogs, in general, were able to get what they wanted from us – more food, more attention, etc. – more easily by mimicking the show of our emotions. In other words, is Rosie really excited about the treat or is looking like she’s excited simply an evolutionary strategy to get more treats? The same question applies to Lilly, especially when her far angrier approach gets her the same or maybe even more treats as we try to satisfy her as best we can. In either case, we cannot say for sure.
Lest you think I’m singling out canines in particular for either lacking emotional depth or using emotions to manipulate us, the same is also true of humans. We cannot open up another person’s head to see what’s inside anymore than we can a dog. Rather, each of us is a self-aware being that experiences emotions and reflects on them on our own unbreachable island. We are mentally isolated from everyone else, but we have the ability to project our own capacity for emotion and awareness onto others, believing they smile when they’re happy and cry when sad, the same as we do. This works well enough to a point, but we also remain aware that humans experience emotions differently from one another with no two reacting the exactly the same to any stimulus, to the point where some people experience pleasure in pain, the absolute opposite of most of us, and some philosophers insist we could be unconscious zombies and still function the same. We are also keenly aware, frequently to our own detriment, that sometimes people can disguise their emotions, hiding them or outright faking them to manipulate others, knowing that we might react in a certain way if we believe they feel a certain way, just like a canine (who of course does this without awareness). While the evolution of our emotions remains a murky, near impenetrable subject, there are a few underlying facts about natural selection in general that suggest a potentially darker side to our emotions. First, evolution can only act on the genes themselves. Humans are members of a group and what benefits the group might well benefit the genes, but ultimately, it is the genes alone that are passed down from generation to generation, not the group. If something benefits an individual’s genes at the expense of the group, it will tend to persist, provided the impact on the group is not so great that it redounds to negatively affect the individual genes. Biologists refer to this as an “evolutionary stable set,” that is a set of behaviors that strikes the right balance between the population and the individual. We might imagine a world where no one lies, cheats, or steals, believing a population acting in perfect harmony with one another would be more successful than one where some in the group fall victim to others, but evolution doesn’t organize societies according to our hopes and dreams. At the same time, we can equally imagine the nightmarish opposite, where everyone lies, cheats, and steals from everyone else, and no one can be trusted. Fortunately for us all, evolution doesn’t organize societies that way either because they would tear themselves apart, dooming the individual genes. A balance between the cheaters and the honest, the hawks and the doves, and everything else must be struck.
Unfortunately, this balance means that our emotions both support a cohesive population and allow us to be exploited as both individuals and a group. We can use emotions to connect with others and for selfish purposes, sometimes at the same time. This might sound harsh or cruel, but the same is true of everything else up to and including morality and ethics. Consider a famous thought experiment. A trolley is heading down a track towards five people, sure to kill them all. The car cannot be stopped, but you can switch it to another track, where only one person would be killed. Most of us would conclude it’s morally justified to pull the lever and save four lives for the greater good, but what if it wasn’t a lever? What if we could stop the trolley only by pushing a person in front of it, killing them, but saving the five? Though the end result is the same, five lives balanced against one, most don’t feel intentionally pushing a person to their deaths is justified, recoiling from the notion of killing an innocent even if it saves five others. Why? The only possible answer is the selfishness alluded to earlier in another form. Intentionally killing a person would make us personally feel guilty even if it five people were guaranteed to live. In the abstract, we can pull a lever and bring about the death of a hypothetical person somewhere down the track, embracing the greater good, but actually pushing someone to their deaths with our hands is a bridge too far even if it serves the same greater good. Quantitatively speaking, the two outcomes are equivalent and therefore should both be ethical, but qualitatively they are very different because, much like our canine companions, we can be very selfish creatures at heart, down to our very genes.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 