Read part 1: Tom Sorell on why human beings are the only animals who act morally.
Read part 2: Mark Rowlands argues that animals can act morally – we need to look at the evidence.
Read part 4: Anthropomorphism is an obsession of yesterday, replies Rowlands.

Mark Rowlands thinks that my scepticism about moral behaviour in animals is a product of “moral intellectualism”. According to moral intellectualism as Rowlands characterises it, it is necessary for moral behaviour that the agent be able to think about or describe in moral terms what he or she does when he or she acts morally. That is not quite my position. What I think is necessary for moral behaviour is acting for certain kinds of reason, where the reasons operate to produce the relevant behaviour. The reasons need not be explicitly articulable by the agent, though often they can be.

Saving someone’s life by dragging them out of the line of fire is moral behaviour if the reason one does it is that life is valuable. Here “is valuable” is short for “is a precondition of many types of well-being and a contributor to well-being in its own right”. Or suppose that instead of acting from the value of life, one acts from the thought that someone will otherwise be seriously injured. This too would be a moral reason, and if it prompts the associated behaviour, the behaviour is moral, too. The behaviour is meant to secure or protect well-being, and the value of not being injured can be appreciated from many points of view, not just that of the one who is in danger of being injured. The relative objectivity of avoiding injury or saving life as reasons distinguishes them in practical reasoning from other considerations with much more local force. Moral reasons have special authority because of their connection to well-being, because their force can be registered by many agents and because they can be expressed impersonally.