12 - The sophistication of non-human emotion

Summary

A little dose…of judgment or reason often comes into play, even in animals very low in the scale of nature.

(Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species)

INTRODUCTION

I am going to explore the nature of emotions or their counterparts as exemplified in the lives of non-human animals. Emotion is a somewhat indeterminate concept, as is that of sophistication. So I will start with a concept of emotion that I have proposed in the past as useful in human moral psychology, and with several dimensions of sophistication that we find in human emotions as so understood. Then, by considering some observations about some animals' capacities, I will estimate the degrees to which such animals approximate such sophistication.

I have proposed (R. Roberts [1988, 2003]) that the central cases of human emotions are “concern-based construals.” This conception makes emotions out to be a special kind of perception. Perception is not merely sensory reception, but reception that is so structured as to make some kind of sense of the object. The paradigm human emotions are events of receptivity structured by a synthetic unity of “factual” and “evaluative” attribution. Thus emotions ascribe some character or other to the situations they are about, and this character is both “descriptive” and “evaluative” (concern-based – a matter of care or interest to the emotion's subject).

In human beings, the sensory content of perception is subject to extreme reduction or attenuation relative to the perception's content or intentional object – what is perceived.