Consider the ethical dimension of humanness. Though the family cat may gleefully torment a small animal causing its terrifying and painful death, few among us would consider this a moral issue concerning the cat, though whether to intervene may be a moral dilemma for us. Even when a large predator, say dog or bear, happens to maul and kill a human being, efforts to destroy the animal are not accompanied by moral outrage, just a desire to prevent further harm. But the situation is very different in cases where humans perform similar actions. It is not merely that we consider non-human predators to be guiltless because it is in their nature to kill. We hold them guiltless because we believe they lack a critical conception of the consequences of their actions on their victim’s experience. This ability to anticipate and to some extent imagine the experience of another are critical ingredients in this moral judgment.
This does not mean that other creatures are merely selfish robots. Selfless behaviors of a sort are not at all uncommon in other species. Caregiving behaviors by parents are nearly ubiquitous in birds and mammals, and what we might call prosocial emotional responses and predispositions that cause individuals to behave in ways conducive to social solidarity are especially widespread among social mammals. However, there need be little or no role played by intersubjective considerations in the generation of these emotions and their associated care-giving, protective, and comforting behaviors. And if that is so, then it may not be appropriate to consider these as moral or ethical, even incipiently.
There is good reason to believe that the capacity to represent the intentions and experiences of others is deeply dependent on human symbolic capacity. This is because it is a difficult cognitive task. It involves generating something like a simulation of oneself in different circumstances (i.e., projected from another individual’s point of view), and it must include the emotional experiences this would invoke as well. This representation is perhaps supported by recall of images from analogous past experiences, juxtaposed against the images and emotions of current experience. But the salience of direct experience, especially one’s current emotional state, poses a difficult impediment to simultaneously representing the perspective of this other simulated emotional experience. Holding such mutually contradictory representations in mind at once is a difficult task, even when there is little emotion involved, but it becomes deeply challenging when the exclusive states are heavily emotion-laden.
