Innate Moral Awareness In The Chimpanzee

To further the argument that humans have an innate moral compass, we also much touch bases on another key contributor to morality, social awareness and evaluation. Researchers have often argued that social awareness sets the foundation for moral capacity in humans; as we often use social evaluation, just like animals to determine who is friend and who is foe (source 5) As a matter of fact, this behavior has been see in preverbal infants across numerous studies. As exemplified above in addition to other studies, pre-verbal infants have had aversion from perceived aggressors, typically choosing to avoid them in favor of a friendly individual (source 6). In addition, these trends seem to continue as children age, as preschoolers and young children …show more content…
The chimpanzee, shares 98.8 percent of their DNA with humans (Source 11), allowing us to make the fair assumption that there must be some notable similarities in between chimpanzee and human morality and social awareness abilities. Among the chimpanzees, we can find several key behaviors that align with ours. First and far most, chimps will punish of individuals who do not follow the rules and social norms, such as the sharing of food. Secondly, chimps show instances of social reciprocity by meeting the social obligations, they have established with another or through the possible penalties of failing to meet such an agreement. Both of these behaviors indicating chimps like humans have a sense of social awareness amongst them. Furthermore, chimps exhibit signs of empathetic behavior towards others through various displays of comforting gestures. Lastly, chimpanzees show signs of self-awareness, in a similar manner to humans being able to account for their previous actions and consequences (Source 12). All of these behaviors align with what we see in humans, giving way the possible theory that our common ancestor with the chimpanzee also shared similar behaviors. Obviously, these shared behaviors will have some significant variance between the humans and chimpanzees species, since researcher’s estimate their divergence occurred about 6.3 million years ago (source 13). Nevertheless, we can concluded that a common ancestor between the two species gave way to our sense of morality, demonstrating that our morals are undeniably