CRITICAL REFLECTION AND MORAL ARGUMENT

Robert N. Bellah & Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/ Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From W. G. Runiciman, 'Righteous Rebels: When, Where, and Why?', 317-334: "Recent research in paleoanathropology, cognitive archaeology, evolutionary and developmental psychology, and brain science gives strong reason to conclude that long before the advent of written records, human beings were talking to each other in a world of myths, ritual, art, technology, and emotionally charged interpersonal relationships in which past encounters were recalled and discussed and patterns of part-cooperative, part-antagonistic behavior toward others established and sustained. Our human ancestors had inherited from their primate forbears, and shared with their primate cousins, innate mental capacities for beliefs about the workings of the world on the one hand and attitudes toward the things and people in it on the other. But, as Darwin himself had always recognized, for all the similarities between humans and other primates in quarreling, collaborating, befriending, deceiving, imitating, learning from, and showing off to one another, only human beings have the capacity to reflect, as Darwin put it, on whence we come and whither we go, on what is life and death, 'and so forth.' Thus there are numerous rebellious chimpanzees seeking to reverse the existing rank order in the troops to which they belong. But no primatologist claims that they share the ideals set out in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Although field research and laboratory experiments have combined to demonstrate that chimpanzees have mental capacities and cultural traditions of a kind that Darwin's successors were for a long time unwilling to credit them with, critical reflection and moral argument are unique to us, with our larger neocortices and modified vocal tracts and the linguistic skills made possible by them." Id. at 317-318.).