Book Review: The Moral Lives of Animals - WSJ.com - 0 views
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en less to such accounts than meets the eye. What appear on the surface to be instances of insight, reflection, empathy or higher purpose frequently turn out to be a fairly simple learned behavior, of a kind that every sentient species from humans to earthworms exhibits all the time.
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The deeper problem, as Mr. Peterson more frankly acknowledges, is that it is the height of anthropomorphic absurdity to project human values and behaviors onto other species—and then to judge them by their similarity to us
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Recognizing the difficulty of boosting animals, his approach is instead to deflate humans: in particular, to suggest that there is much less to even so vaunted a human trait as morality than we like to believe. Rather than a sophisticated system of language-based laws, philosophical arguments and abstract values that sets mankind apart, morality is, in his view, a set of largely primitive psycho logical instincts.
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