Episode 54 - Animal Sociality (feat. Cynthia Willett)

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán,

Ellie: 0:08

And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

the podcast where two friends

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday

Ellie: 0:18

because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

David: 0:30

Welcome everyone. This is the third and final episode of the series on animality that we have done in celebration of the publication of my book, When Animals Dream, now available on the World Wide Web for purchase, although also in brick and mortar bookstores, if you prefer.

Ellie: 0:50

Classic.

David: 0:51

Well, so far, Ellie, we have had a ton of discussions about animals and their capacities. And one question that emerges from those discussions is what kind of social lives do other animals live?

Ellie: 1:07

Yes. Now that I have been opened up to the world of animals through these episodes --listen to the first one on animal consciousness if you're confused about what I mean here-- I'm wondering about the secret lives of animals. Another way of putting this is, tell me about the secret life of pets.

David: 1:26

I am the pet whisperer. Although I should tell you that one time when I was going to England to give a paper at an animal rights conference, the agent who was checking my passport was like, why are you here? What are you doing here? And I told him like, "Oh, I specialize on animal minds." And he's like, "Oh, so you must know a lot about pets. What are you, a Mexican Dr. Doolittle?" And I was like, I kind of want that to be on my card, on my professional card.

Ellie: 1:56

Was this a Mexican border control agent?

David: 1:58

No, I was going to London. It was an English guy.

Ellie: 2:01

A British guy? Oh, cringe.

David: 2:03

Yes. Yes. I know.

Ellie: 2:05

If it was another Mexican guy that I would feel like less cringe about that, but

David: 2:08

Honestly, it was really, really funny.

Ellie: 2:10

Liked it.

David: 2:11

Oh yeah. I loved it and, uh, I, I really do want that to be my title now, Dr. Peña-Guzmán, some kind of Mexican Dr. Doolittle.

Ellie: 2:21

Okay, well then I'm going to ask you, Mexican Dr. Doolittle, to tell me about animal cultures. Although I have also, I should say I've done some research for this episode too, so it's not going to be like, literally just you telling me stuff out of nowhere.

David: 2:33

No, no, no. I, I would hope not that this is after all a conversational podcast where it goes both ways and you've been holding your own really, really well, Ellie. You've brought some really interesting questions and concerns and research to the table, so.

Ellie: 2:46

Okay.

David: 2:47

But you're right that we need to start asking about the kinds of social relations that other animals sustain. And in particular, whether those relations rise to the level of what we would call a community and even what we call culture. Are there cultures or communities only within other species or do they even happen across species boundaries?

Ellie: 3:10

Yeah. And so when it comes to, within species boundaries, one thing that I've been thinking a little bit is about the research that has been done on animal mourning, especially the morning of elephants.

David: 3:23

Mhm, yes.

Ellie: 3:24

I think I have a penchant for elephants because when, when you're a kid, all of the elephant toys are named Ellie. So it's like the Ellie the elephant.

David: 3:33

Really? Oh, that's cute. I hadn't thought about that.

Ellie: 3:36

Yeah, I just got our mutual friend Roshni, a Ellie the elephant toy for her sweet, delightful baby. So this is on my, on my mind because you often hear the elephants have really long memories, but I've also started to hear a lot more in recent years about elephant mourning. And so I trace this back to a 2013 study that was done on the death of a matriarch who was an African elephant in Kenya. And this elephant, Victoria, was really important in her community. Such that an article I read said, quote, "If this had been a wake, it would have been well attended." And what the article meant by that is that after Victoria passed away of old age, a bunch of elephants came and visited her body. And this included two of her own children who lingered longer than the others, but also over a period of a number of days, different elephants, some of whom hadn't even known Victoria, . But might have known her by scent because elephants have really, really sophisticated olfaction came to basically check out her carcass, which is a very creepy way of putting it. But, also, I mean elephants have very large bodies and it therefore takes them a very long time to decompose. And so some researchers in the field of what I found out is incredibly called comparative thanatology or the study of how different species treat death with thanatos meaning death in ancient Greek. You know, I love my etymologies. What they found is that it's likely that the long duration that it takes for an elephant body to decompose is likely linked to elephants' mourning habits. And even though it's hard to make claims about what mourning means for elephants in an emotional sense beyond just like the fact that a bunch of other elephants visited Victoria's body after her passing, there is good reason to believe that elephants share the feeling of loss. For instance, one of Victoria's daughters was seen leaving the site of her mother's body with secretions, from her temporal glands, which are usually associated with a sense of fear or aggression. Just like basically stress. Yeah.

David: 5:42

Yeah, no, the field of comparative thanatology is fascinating and I myself have published in particular about what is known as panthanatology, which has to do with the study of death, thanatos, in primates.

Ellie: 5:57

Oh my God. I didn't know that.

David: 5:58

Yeah, the way in which not only humans, but gorillas and chimpanzees experience what we call grief at the loss of a loved one. And you can see this, not just from their expression of emotion, from the way in which they be emotive in the face of death, but also from their behaviors, which take on almost a ritualistic dimension. And all this research raises a lot of questions about whether other animals have a concept of death. That is to say whether they can tell the difference between let's say an animal that is momentarily passed out or asleep and an animal that is dead and that is not coming back. So whether they understand the permanence of the fact of having died. And mourning and grief raise other questions, like whether animals are capable of performing rituals. And that's something that I really hope that we talk about today because it's one of those areas of research in the field of animal studies that on my view really pushes on the boundary between the human and the nonhuman.

Ellie: 7:06

Today, we're talking about the social lives of animals.

David: 7:10

kinds of bonds Do other animals form with one another. And what social relations do these bonds lead to?

Ellie: 7:16

animals have culture?

David: 7:19

And to what extent can social dynamics extend across species boundaries?

Ellie: 7:23

bring on philosopher, Cynthia Willett from Emory University to tell us about her research on inter-species ethics.

David: 7:33

Animals form all kinds of social groupings, both in nature and in the wild. I recently wrote an article in which I argue that some of these groups do indeed rise to the level of what anthropologists call "culture." And obviously the use of the term "culture" in connection to non-human animals is quite controversial since the term has historically been used to isolate humans from other animals. So if you ask your average anthropologist what it is that they study, they will say, well, I'm an anthropologist. I study anthropos.

Ellie: 8:07

Humans.

David: 8:07

Yeah. Which is humans. It's a Greek term for a human being. And what defines the anthropos is precisely the having of culture. So by definition, culture is exclusively human.

Ellie: 8:21

Interesting. So it sounds like for an anthropologist, it might be kind of out of bounds to use the term culture to describe animal sociality altogether.

David: 8:30

Yeah, absolutely. And in the 1990s, this huge debate happened between anthropologists and ethologists who are experts in animal behavior. And this debate now is referred to in the literature as "the culture wars of the 1990s," which was precisely about this: whether ethologists were allowed to use the term culture in relation to non-human animals.

Ellie: 8:56

So many culture wars in the nineties, but this one is a culture war about culture.

David: 9:01

Yeah.

Ellie: 9:02

You know? Cause like a lot of times there's references to the cultural wars to be like right versus left. Or you might think about the feminist sex wars. Those are culture wars, but this is a culture war about culture.

David: 9:13

Yeah, well, I mean, academics are the most tribalistic people that I know. You know, we choose our allegiances and then rush into battle in their name. I don't know if you've heard, but the movie Braveheart was inspired by real life academic disputes.

Ellie: 9:26

David, you're shitting me. I'm not falling for that one. Come on. So I take it though that you were on the side of the ethologists, right? As somebody who works a lot on animals and thinks about animals sociality. So tell us, since you think that "animal culture" is a phrase that we can comfortably use, tell us a little bit about it, because you know, I want to know about this secret life of pets.

David: 9:49

Well, I'm not sure that I can tell you a lot about the secret life of pets, in particular, because my article focuses on whales and dolphins-- what are called cetaceans. That's the taxonomic classification, you know, so hardly an animal that you can keep as a pet, even though some people have tried in the past. Um, but in the wild whales and dolphins do form these large groups that differ from one another in their cultural traditions and rituals. And so notice that I'm not here talking about different species, we're not talking about like this species of dolphin versus this other species of dolphin. We're dealing with members of the same species, forming groups that have different cultural identities by tradition because they just were born into a particular culture and they end up replicating it.

Ellie: 10:42

Ooh. So just like humans in a sense.

David: 10:45

Yeah, I think that's the argument. I know that's the argument I make.

Ellie: 10:50

I know that's like, like they have they have cultures just like humans, this circular reasoning of the anthropologist. Okay. Anyway, tell me more about whales.

David: 10:59

One really good example is whale song. In the 20th century, a number of cetologists-- that's the name for a whale expert started studying the evolution of whale song, and they noticed that these songs change a few notes here and there, but the rate at which those mutations take place is too fast for it to be explained by genetic means. So it must be changing by non-genetic channels, namely social or cultural channels. And these two whale and dolphin experts, Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell wrote a book called The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, where they talk about this. And they argue that what we are seeing when we notice that the song of a particular whale community evolves over time is that kind of cultural mutation that is similar to say the evolution of, of musical trends in humans. You know, like from like the music of the sixties, to the music of the seventies, to the music of the nineties, it's the same kind of evolution.

Ellie: 12:06

It was like, it used to be cool to be like, "Ooh, Ooh," like classical. And now it's like "who, who, who."

David: 12:12

Yeah, whales are rapping. Um, they are now incorporating spoken word poetry in certain ocean basins. Um,

Ellie: 12:21

They have their own equivalent of the Hamilton musical.

David: 12:23

Oh, gosh. Um, but I mean, speaking now that you mentioned Hamilton, one thing that Whitehead and Rendell note is that wheels from different ocean basins who sing the same whale song do so with their own regional dialect. So they intonate differently.

Ellie: 12:41

Cool.

David: 12:43

And that's just because they've spent significant time apart from one another. So there are accents and dialects in whale community.

Ellie: 12:51

Wow. This is really interesting because as you know, I've been interested in, I can't remember if it was one or both of our last episodes on animals, but definitely in at least one on the role of language here and it sounds like what you're suggesting with the whales is not only that they have a language of course, but also that they have cultural variations in that language, which makes it seem hard to deny the word "culture" to them.

David: 13:16

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And that's just one example of citation culture Whitehead and Rendell's book is packed with examples of cultural traditions in whale and dolphin communities that indicate this kind of variation including, for example, culturally specific feeding strategies, culturally specific migration routes, culturally specific greeting ceremonies, which is just super adorable. The fact that they, when they meet each other, they welcome each other. According to the norms of their specific group.

Ellie: 13:49

It's like the difference between the American hug and the Paris doubled or tripled cheek kiss, or the difference between eating with chopsticks and eating with a fork and knife.

David: 13:58

Yeah, exactly, exactly that. And so you cannot put two members even of the same species in the same pool or in the same part of the ocean and expect that they will understand one another, just because they're members of the same species. And, you know, they also mentioned tool use as an example of culture because especially dolphins do use tools in the wild and that tool use something that is not innate. It's something that they have to learn in particular from their mothers. There is this really fascinating example that I still can't wrap my head around. Which is the case of dolphin communities who co-fish with human communities and the two communities have basically created this trans-species cultural unit that has co-existed and formed this symbiotic relationship. And basically what happens is that dolphins have learned to drive schools of fish onto the nets that the humans will throw in the ocean. And then the humans will pick them up with their nets and then they will split the bounty with the dolphins. Yeah. Legit, like almost like economic transactions.

Ellie: 15:13

So we're not just talking about things like language and mourning, but we're also talking about what I think of as a really human hallmark of culture, which is the economy. That is fascinating.

David: 15:27

Yeah. And the fact that the human fishers know that if they shortchange the dolphin, the dolphins will not continue to work with them. So the interaction is ruled by this, by a set of implicit norms of what a fair exchange is. I don't think they split it 50, 50, I think the human stake a little bit more.

Ellie: 15:46

Classic.

David: 15:47

Yeah. But the humans know that they need to respect the traditional way of doing things, which includes fair splitting of the fish.

Ellie: 15:55

Wow. So there's this norm of reciprocity going on. So, David, this is all reminding me of the thing that I mentioned to you when we talked about doing an episode on animal sociality that you told me we shouldn't talk about because there's no clear research on it.

David: 16:11

My God, Ellie, are you really, are you going to go on air with this?

Ellie: 16:18

Yes, I think it is fascinating. So I'm going to open up to the listeners. Apparently, I heard this, this is hearsay. Apparently there is another human dolphin community that lives in symbiosis, but they live in symbiosis in a sexual sense. I think it's like in Hawaii, it's humans and dolphins who have sex with each other.

David: 16:40

Dear listeners of Overthink. I do not know her. I have no connection, personal or professional.

Ellie: 16:48

Well, so I- Okay. So I heard about this years ago, and then when we were thinking of this episode, I was like, oh, David, what about this thing? And you were like, Ellie, I have never heard of that. I don't think that is a thing. And I was like, well, I heard about it from somebody years ago.

David: 17:03

It is not a thing.

Ellie: 17:04

It's not a thing on the Internet. And so we, we should just, we used to just tell the listeners what happened. We were like talking about this, and then I'm on my university's wifi. And I was like, David, I'm just going to research it. So I Google dolphin human sex. Find myself on some like dolphin porn website. I was just like, oh my God. Oh my God, I can, we are backing away from this, David and I agreed not to talk about it. And now here we are.

David: 17:29

No, but you're omitting an important detail here, which is that you made me Google the same thing at the same time. So I also have this random website on my Internet history, and I had to confront the fact that there is a community of people online who systematically referred to dolphins as "wet goddesses." I just, I cannot, I cannot, Ellie.

Ellie: 17:53

That was the term?

David: 17:54

That was a term.

Ellie: 17:55

I forgot about that.

David: 17:56

Oh, it was burned into my memory. It was seared into my memory.

Ellie: 18:00

Yeah, there was like human dolphin erotica.

David: 18:03

And the fact that you were convinced that there is this community of people who are just like having sex with dolphins and that's their mode of life,

Ellie: 18:11

Well then, okay. I, asked the person who had told me about it and they were like, obviously it's not on the internet. It's a bunch of hippies, they know better

David: 18:17

They know better than what? The, to have internet?

Ellie: 18:20

Than, than to be no, than to have their community be searchable on the Internet

David: 18:25

So you're telling me that you are

Ellie: 18:26

Legit, because it's illegal.

David: 18:28

Well, yeah, I guess bestiality laws, but are you still defending that this community exists?

Ellie: 18:33

I am in a state of agnosticism about it.

David: 18:38

I will let you have this agnosticism, but I feel that, as an animal studies expert, I need to make it. known that this is fake news. This is absolutely fake news. And you are engaging in conspiratorial thinking.

Ellie: 18:52

No, I cannot. I'm not, I, like I said, I'm not putting forth that it exists, but we did find ourselves going down quite the rabbit hole of what is known as delphinophila. So it would not be surprising if there were actually a real community, given how much there is on the internet about like erotic stories and some, you know,

David: 19:09

Yeah, I don't think we went down a rabbit hole. We went down a blowhole of delphinidaephilia, which was horrifying.

Ellie: 19:19

Okay, that's a good one. Should we ask Cindy about this?

David: 19:22

No, we are not asking our guest today about whether they know anything about sex with dolphins.

Ellie: 19:30

Okay.

David: 19:30

We're keeping it. We're keeping it factual today. Just for a change.

Ellie: 19:35

I've become like a teenage boy just giggling about like stuff I found on the internet. This is embarrassing. Um, let's move on.

David: 19:41

Goddesses.

Ellie: 19:43

Our, our guest is bound to have some excellent concrete, very well-researched examples that will pull me out of this blowhole.

54 - music stem: 19:50

(music)

David: 19:51

Cynthia Willett is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. A philosopher with amazingly wide ranging areas of expertise, Cindy, as we call her, has published books on animal ethics, comedy, maternal ethics, and the philosophy of race. And she's currently working on a book about music. Today, she's here to talk about her work on the social lives of animals based on her 2014 book, Interspecies Ethics.

Ellie: 20:23

Cindy, we are so happy to have you today. You directed both of our dissertations and shaped us into the people and philosophers that we are now.

David: 20:32

And I should add, I lived above Cindy's house in her attic for two years of my graduate training so she was my advisor and also my slum lord.

Ellie: 20:43

Cool.

David: 20:43

A couple of years.

Cindy: 20:46

That is right. I tried to squeeze everything I could out of both of you all actually.

Ellie: 20:53

Everybody else in grad school was jealous that David lived above Cindy cause you're yeah, you just have like the coolest, coolest situation.

Cindy: 21:01

Well, David's always been above me in one sense or another.

David: 21:07

I really don't know how to respond to that.

Ellie: 21:13

Well, maybe we can go straight into it. David, I'm sure you've got lots of questions for Cindy, so we can just avoid the question of superiority or inferiority altogether.

David: 21:23

Uh, well, and, and, and in a sense, we are going to be talking about superiority and inferiority because in your book, Cindy, you talk about the history of humans thinking that we are superior to other animals and pave the way for a new way of thinking really about moral theory and subjectivity by looking at the ways in which different species relate to one another. So let's just go directly to the opening of the book, which I find really exciting because you open the book by talking about rogue elephants who attack human villages. And you argue that a lot of these attacks are prompted by a breakdown in social relations in elephant communities. And so I want you to talk to us about these rogue elephants, elephant normativity, and what's causing these attacks.

Cindy: 22:17

Yeah, it turns out it's very interesting that adolescent elephants respond very much like human adolescents due to the degradation of their communities, that they will often form gangs that can become violent in order to generate a sense of belonging. It's very important to understand this, that they have that strong need to belong. We often think of animals in the wild as wild, as naturally violent and irrational creatures. And that only we humans have a proper sense of morality, but it turns out other animals, social animals do have a very strong sense of ethical culture. And I take that term and part from Hegel and even think of it as more ancient than Hegel's pointing back to Greek cultures and their sense of ethics, that their elephants and their societies develop norms of cooperation. They have friendships, alliances, distinct roles, collective responsibilities, responsibilities associated with their distinct roles. And when someone violates, the social expectations, there is a sense that those violators should have be punished and elephants, they will remember. They will remember, you know, exactly who violated what rule and normally any kind of sense of retribution will be very precise. Elephants are like humans, and if they witnessed great trauma, if they've gone through the breakup of their community, then that violence can take a really tragic spiraling, downward kind of movement. Something that's been happening for a while around the world is that we'll have poachers kill elders, in particular often the matriarchs that hold together elephant society. And if they, um, you know, if these elephant societies find that their elders and matriarchs have died, they've been murdered, if they disappeared through kidnapping, then this leads to that breakdown of ethical culture. And then you tend to have that formation of the more violent gangs that can act out of blind rage. And sometimes self-injury, self destruction, destruction of all that's around them, but really in a kind of pattern that resembles, that resonates with what we know from ancient tragedy. And here, I think of not just ancient Greek tragedy, but from Toni Morrison I've really come to understand much better how these kinds of scripts of the tragic can be understood in many societies, including African societies, both human and I would say also not human.

Ellie: 25:13

Yeah, and it definitely seems, I mean, we actually earlier had mentioned before you joined us the example of elephants mourning their dead, which I think has gotten a lot of attention recently, and it sounds like whether we're mourning or whether it's adolescents, you know, forming gangs, a lot of what we think of as part of the human condition, you're arguing is also applicable to the non-human condition at least of certain other species. And so you mentioned this idea of ethical life as having a broader sense than just what we would usually think of as ethics. So I'm thinking here about, like, I usually think of ethics as the golden rule, these really abstract and strict axioms that we communicate in language, but it sounds like you have much broader conceptions of ethics and for you, ethics also evolves out of play. So for instance, you say in your book that play exercises social desires and generalized reciprocity. So tell us a little bit about what you mean by this domain of ethics and how it evolves out of play.

Cindy: 26:13

Oh, yeah. So it's very interesting that in some ways, returning from the tragic and what we can understand from tragedy about ethical culture to the comic to play. And it, let's go back and contrast a lot of our modern conceptions of morality, of the law. Modern systems of law and morality emphasize the individual and their right to property and this culminates in the right to self-ownership. That the individual owns himself. That's what we understand is autonomy and we understand violations or crimes as crimes against autonomy against property rights, first and foremost. When you look at societies that are based on strong communal connections, then tragedy and comedy can share a lot more light on the ethical culture. The more substantial basis for ethics. And I think this is where both reciprocity and a more comic sense and also more tragic conceptions of violence and revenge come in. And, and so we've, we've already talked a little bit about elephants. Elephants find that those strong webs of connection have been frayed have been violated that can lead to downward cycles of tragic violence through acts of revenge but revenge that gets out of control. That's something that the Greeks called hubris and hubris, in contrast to violations of property rights or of autonomy, hubris was understood as a violation of someone's status. It was understood as a violation of a relationship. What are the relationships that held together a community, that generated a sense of belonging was understood in terms of insult. And now let's turn to play and how play and the reciprocity we can find in play also can generate a strong sense of social norms. It was actually the study of canines where this understanding of the importance of reciprocity and in particular of play for generating that sense of reciprocity and ethical culture really appear and a lot in Marc Bekoff's work. He's been a pioneer in this kind of research. Well, let's go back and think about just our sects. You know, in our friendships, our very close friendships, with siblings, we know that a lot of what that felt connection is we have with them can be generated through joyful laughter. And a lot of that joyful laughter can be sparked by playful jabs, playful insults, not tragic hubris insults. We're talking about playful insults. Soft bites, we might say. Pretended insults. We learn, you know, not to bite too hard.

For example, not a really harsh insult: 29:16

in the African-American culture, it's called playing the dozens. But it's two, these kind of pretend bites and taking turns, knowing when we're insulting someone too hard or reaching a vulnerable spot, not to go there, you know, that we learn reciprocity and fairness. And so we think that this is very important for children, for our friendships and that the same thing appears, for example, in canines. So for canines, they too use their mouths, but not for verbal insult so much, but literal biting and in their case, very soft bites to not so much to roast, you know, their friend, but more to, um, literally for sure not, but again, a kind of playful pretend fighting. And it's that back and forth that's improvisational, that is careful, respectful boundaries, that generates a reciprocity that so many psychologists, so many cultural philosophers think is the basis for what we can call ethical culture, the basis for what holds societies together. And, and, you know, what's interesting there is that canines are very hierarchical animals. But in play, they set aside those hierarchies. So for example, a dominant dog will expose its vulnerability to the less dominant dog. And in that way, there's a role reversal giving up some power. I mean, think about it. When do we ever yield power, but this yielding of power is crucial for that playful learning of reciprocity that holds society together. And then violators, you know, same as Greek tragedy. If you're repeated violator, your exiled from dog society from canine society.

Ellie: 31:12

I'm always amazed at how dogs, especially at very different sizes will just be able to play and it looks like they're biting each other. And I'm like, there's going to be a moment at which this becomes dangerous, but then they really do usually adhere to those norms. That's, that's so fascinating.

David: 31:27

Yeah. And I think with the norms, the important thing that comes out of your work, Cindy, is that it's not as if the animals, in this case, the dogs are applying norms that they were already in possession before the act of play. It's actually that through play, they co-develop, those norms, they develop a mutual understanding of where those boundaries are, of where those thresholds are, of how much of a bite is too much in relation to this particular co-player. So I like that, for you, it's not as if we play with norms. We get norms through play. So play itself is a foundation, we could say of, of this kind of ethical normativity. And you mentioned infants. So I want to ask you a little bit about that because we see this call and response dynamic also in pre-verbal human infants from a very young age, they can develop a kind of sociality. Maybe not the same kind of play as with adult animals, but definitely a kind of back and forth with another organism, typically the caretaker, that occurs without language, without reason and without concept. So I'm wondering whether you have thoughts about how this playful sociality unfolds in the case of human infants.

Cindy: 32:50

Yes. Yeah. What's very interesting about that kind of playfulness as it happens. Early on in infancy. So very early on, there's a developing of a ethical culture between the caregiver and the infant, alerting of a kind of give and take. Again, a kind of improvisational flow that takes a form of something like a proto conversation. And I like to think of it as a call and response in part because of the musicality of the elements that are so important, especially for human nonverbal exchanges. So for humans, especially heard tones and pitches and melodies. Rhythms are important gestures that are dance-like movements that can match or can respond in some way to tones, to patterns of tones. All of those are ways of communicating back and forth. It's that back and forth that generates a sense of reciprocity, but it really depends upon that capacity for affective communication, for nonverbal communication. And that kind of understanding of nonverbal communication really is something that, uh, has been somewhat obscured for so long. Philosophers have not really paid much attention to it. Perhaps, maybe, you know, you could imagine maybe they weren't active caregivers, but not.

Ellie: 34:27

Rousseau who abandoned all five of his children? Yeah, probably not the ideal.

Cindy: 34:34

Um, so we've ended up thinking of, you know, the mother is just being essentially nothing more than a nurturer, who just feeds a child or most experiments of the 1950s. What I like to think of the surprise of the security state and the security notion of the mother, the mother touches her, holds the baby. So again, the mother is a passive nurturer. But not really understanding that the caregiver is actively creating with the child, whole creating an ethical culture

Ellie: 35:04

Mm.

Cindy: 35:05

where reciprocity and other kinds of norms that, that give texture to belonging began to get treated.

Ellie: 35:14

Yeah. And I think we can just said, Cindy also it is analogous to what David mentioned before, which is your theory that it's not that through play we are applying pre-existing norms, but rather than through play, we are co-creating them because I think you see a similar thing going on in your work on the relations between mothers and infants, a lot of philosophers, including Rousseau, thought that mothers were just at best applying the moral laws that men had come up with to their children in their relationships with their children. And, you know, to that extent, there's that idea of the passive nurturer that you're talking about. But I think one of the really important aspects of your work is to show that aspect of co-creation. And this also means really fundamentally altering the way that we're thinking about the moral subject, because one theme that your work deals with a lot that has deeply inspired me is the idea that ethics is not about individual moral agents who are exercising the laws, but instead ethics is much more of a communal practice, right? And so I think that also helps pave the way to think about ethics as happening within non-human animal species as well. And so maybe you could tell us just a little bit about how you're reorienting ethics away from this traditional emphasis on the individual and focusing more on communal connections.

Cindy: 36:35

Yes. I think the individual can have some important role to play in ethics, and certainly has become a crucial foundation or building block for modern moral theory, but modern moral theory really depends upon that major upheaval in modern societies where individuals left communities, moved to cities through the industrial revolution, lost those bonds that connected them. And instead turn to more abstract laws, abstract rules that would hold together individuals that otherwise had no sense of felt connection. And I should say, we live in highly abstract societies that these laws need to play some kind of role, but to understand that them and the conception they have of the human is an abstraction from that social animal that we are, that we are like other social animals. And that is that the very substance of our ethics is still guided by the kind of norms, the negotiation of expectations that we have through the webs of connections that form tribes, that form even interconnections between tribes, even interconnections between animal species. That that kind of negotiation of relationships has been central to- Well, for example, what we find we understand more clearly in ancient Greek culture that we know in part through the ancient tragedies and comedies where individuals were abstractions of who they were in those social relations and those communities and where the ultimate crime was not a crime against the individual's ownership of their property, of themselves as in modern law, but was a violation of those relationships that we have with each other, the violation of someone's status. They no longer felt that same sense of belonging, the kind of violation that would have an impact on everyone within that web of connection that would had the kind of replications that we read about an ancient tragedy. Well, it's not surprising that other social animals would have something very similar. That for them too, there would be this need to work out alliances, relationships, roles, they have social expectations, and that there'd be punishment for those that violated them. And that the worst punishment would also be something like exile as it was for the ancient Greeks. So that hubris is a way of understanding that crime or that danger of disturbing those relationships, that hold social animals together in a community that they need in order to thrive as an individual.

David: 39:49

And I really liked that you're using the term negotiation because I think a lot of us, when we think of negotiation, we envisioned precisely a collection of rational agents coming to a table, setting the terms in discourse. But here you're using a model of negotiation that is rooted in what you're calling, working things out in practice, right? Whether that is working out the details of a particular alliance. So here we can think about chimpanzees that are highly political animals that live in plastic social and political hierarchies, or even the working out of limits, right. Like, "Okay, this is my space and that is your space. And we learn to respect that because we've come to a tacit understanding." I have a friend who, who has a dog that I recently dogsat, and he told me like, this corner of the living room is Zeke's. Don't go there. We've sort of negotiated over time, of course not in language, territory in the house. Right. And I think people who live with animals are familiar with these kinds of non-linguistic contracts, we could say, that we make with animals. And you introduce a concept that I think is really useful for helping us articulate this kind of interspecies dynamic that you're alluding to. And the term is trans-species communitarianism. Can you tell us a little bit more about this concept?

Cindy: 41:17

Yes. And so in some ways, you know, think about. The dog that you visited and that you understand is dogsitting for that, you know, that dog has its own territory. Now we could think of that territory as just, oh, it has that sense of property, you know. But in some place, what's really behind that sense of respecting its space is the recognition of limits of power. That those who have more power shouldn't be able to abuse their power. And so a lot of what communal norms are about are limiting abuses of power. And what's interesting is that these kinds of norms can be negotiated across species as well. Between canines and, for example, donkeys. Donkeys can be prey. They can be threatened by the wolf, the dog, canines, but the predator prey relationship or drive? That can be suspended as a playful antics develop a kind of felt connection between the two, develop friendship. And again, one that's based on a kind of back and forth reciprocity, but it's also interesting that there are other ways in which the kind of sense of limits on power, on domination, on the abuse of power, um, occur across species. Remember that humans as a species, we have co-inhabited regions with other species for eons. For eons, we learn to live with other species and, uh, learning to live with them, meant in many cases, communicating nonverbally and negotiating through that communication shared norms. One interesting case, a more recent case of this ability to negotiate shared norms, comes up in an African society in Oromo culture. As I have heard about the event, baboons began eating way too much of a crop of a human village. Human farmers got mad. In effect those baboons were conveying, I suppose, that first act of hubris. The farmers reacted, they were mad. And so they denied the baboons, any of their crops and ran the baboons off of their land entirely. But this was followed by years, seven years of drought and the farmers sought out oracles, diviners that would help them understand what kind of damage had happened to their culture, to the society, to the relations with baboons. And the Oracles directed them to having a ceremony of forgiveness and healing with the baboons. So they had the ceremony, brought baboons back, gave them gifts and then reconciled with the baboons. But part of that reconciliation was to share with the baboons one part of their crops from then on. And so what they did was to make sure that they grew enough crops, they had an extra field where the baboons could eat. Well, that's an example of a kind of trans-species communitarianism. That is a sense in which norms, rituals, social expectations are shared, can be shared across species and shared through a kind of communication and shared based on a sense of a violating them would lead to some kind of destruction or some kind of damage that would harm both of them.

Ellie: 45:02

Well, thank you. That is a fascinating answer to this question. And we're so grateful to have you today. Thank you so much, Cindy, for joining us.

Cindy: 45:11

Well, it's been such a pleasure to have this conversation with both of you all, you know, it really makes me nostalgic for when you all were here. It almost me wish that I hadn't passed you all so that you could have stayed here.

Ellie: 45:25

Well, we're glad you did, but we miss you too. Enjoying this episode? Please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can also connect with us and other listeners on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. David, it was so nice to reconnect with Cindy after a long time. One thing that happened, this is just one of those weird personal anecdotes, is that my copy of Interspecies Ethics was stolen in a storage unit theft in grad school. So I actually don't have my original copy of the book with all my annotations. Yeah. Have I haven't told you about the storage unit theft?

David: 46:17

I don't think so, but I'm going to tell Cindy that you just did a whole interview with her not being ready and prepared. Then she will really wish she had failed you back in the day.

Ellie: 46:26

No, I was a good chance to return to the ebook, but I do miss my old copy because this was this time when I was in grad school, I was moving to New York and I left a bunch of books and like random thrift store clothes in a storage unit in Jersey City. And it got completely robbed, including my copy of Being in Time.

David: 46:45

Not partially robbed the whole, all the pages were robbed.

Ellie: 46:49

Well, that's, that's what the people called me and told me. It seemed like some kind of sketchy inside job, long story, but whoever ended up robbing me, found a copy of a Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Heidegger's Being in Time, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, Willett's Interspecies Ethics, and I have lost, I lost the original copies of those books that I had annotated.

David: 47:08

Oh, No. I'm sorry to hear that. Cause, you know, um, us academics, we do treat our annotated books as if they were living beings with moral standing.

Ellie: 47:17

Yeah.

David: 47:18

Like breaking the back even of one of those books, it's like breaking the back of a vertebrate. But yeah. So I am very, very familiar with Cindy's book because when she was writing it, I was her research assistant. So I actually edited that book from to end for her.

Ellie: 47:35

Oh my god. So all typos are courtesy of David Peña Guzmán.

David: 47:38

Every single one of them. Anything good was her. Anything not good? Which nothing is not good there, but if there was anything not good, it would have been because I was close to it. And then I also wrote the index. So that book, I know it back and forth. Yeah. Like, like the palm of my hand, not as if I know that from the back.

Ellie: 47:58

Well, following that, was there anything about hearing Cindy talk about it a few years later after you've now written a book on animals yourself that surprised you or that particularly struck you?

David: 48:09

Yeah, I think one of the more audacious elements of Cindy's intervention in ethics is the way in which she thinks about ethics as this call and response. Because if you look at the history of at least Western philosophy, uh, Europeans philosophy. There is a very clear pattern of people thinking, especially beginning with the modern period about morality, in terms of the application of norms and rules and doing so in an almost mechanical way, but in Cindy's work, there are a lot of references to the musicality of ethical life. She has a number of musical metaphors about rhythmicity about synchronization improvisation. And I actually don't think that those metaphors in her work are really metaphors. I think she, she wants us to take them at face value and think about ethical life as a kind of embodied musicality that we create. And so what's really interesting for me is that it means that ethics is not really something that we think about. It's something that we do through our interactions with one another.

Ellie: 49:21

Totally. And I think that's a really good way of putting not only the concept, David, but also the throughline between many different aspects of Cindy's work, because I think she's also written a book about comedy. She writes about music. She writes about Africana traditions of philosophy. She writes about feminist theory and especially maternal ethics. And I think what you see as a hinge point between all of those things, areas of interest for her is this notion that the richness of our ethical life has tended to be overlooked by the dominant Anglo American and or Western European concepts of ethics that have privileged what, in some of the work that Cindy and I have done is called homo economicus. This idea that we get, especially with utilitarianism, that the human moral agent is an individual cutoff from the rest of the world. And implicitly that tends to valorize this individual as a white, bourgeois, able-bodied, middle-aged man without close family ties. It's like the lone ranger in lone scholar concept of humanity made universal. That's like the norm and philosophy. And how cool is it to reorient us away from that and be like, that's not the case for most people. And even if it were, why is that our ethical ideal let's think instead about communal solidarity, call and response rhythmicity

David: 50:51

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's not true for any human being, not just, not for some people, right? There's no human being. Who's like a standalone mushroom.

Ellie: 51:01

Even Rousseau had the children. He just didn't do a good job of parenting.

David: 51:05

Pull in, we all came from other beings upon whom we were dependent at various points in our lives. But you know, one of the really fascinating things from a philosophical perspective here is that once you shift focus, or as you said, reorient yourself away from the individual towards a more communal way of thinking, it follows that when you think about ethically enriching interactions or potentially ethically damaging ones, as in the case of trauma, the locus of attention also switches, right? So we no longer think about harm being done to me as an individual. Like you hurt my body or you damaged my autonomy in some ways or violated my rights. Ethical violations become a violation of a social fabric of the glue that ties us together. And that means that something like ethical healing also must happen at the level of the community. And I mean, I just love the fact that Cindy takes this to trans-species ethics, right? So think back to the elephants in the case of the rogue elephants that start attacking human villagers, when their own communities are destabilized by taking out the matriarch, the only thing that can heal is the re-establishment of the communal bond of elephant culture. Right. It's not as if you can make an intervention at the level of each particular elephant and hope to see a change in behavior.

Ellie: 52:36

Let alone throw them in a prison

David: 52:38

Oh yeah.

Ellie: 52:39

And And hope that they reform, right?

David: 52:41

That's, that's exactly right. Yeah.

Ellie: 52:43

Yeah. There are pretty profound implications of this view also for the prison industrial complex and other forms of attempts to reform quote, right, or to criminalize activities.

David: 52:53

Well, and we can go to those high stake, uh, spaces, like the way in which we imprison one another the way in which we imprison animals, but it also leads us to reform more mundane interactions that we have with other animals. I mean, I love it when Cindy called me out on the term dog sitting, you know, she was

Ellie: 53:12

That was so good.

David: 53:13

When you visited another sentient being that you understood to be an act of dog sitting. Um, but you know, like in the moment I realized, yeah, I, I do use terms that, that do presuppose, to go back to that motif of superiority and inferiority, top down movement where I am at doing some kind of service to this companion animal, rather than it co-creating a world with it in the time that we have together.

Ellie: 53:40

Yeah. Which is probably how the dolphin community thinks of itself, but that's for another day. Remains to be seen, whether that was a real story or not. We may never know.

David: 53:52

I- in the span of this episode, we talked about it. I repressed it and it just came back all over again. I'm having flashbacks at the moment. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 54:16

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice.

David: 54:23

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter @overthink_pod. We want to think our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, as well as our production assistant Sunny Jeong-Eimer.

Ellie: 54:33

PK Smith, the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.