You can see if your anti-Puppy Dog filter works any better than mine by reading these paragraphs for yourself:

O, that a man might know The end of this day’s business ere it come!—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. Priests vow to remain celibate, physicians vow to do no harm, and letter carriers vow to swiftly complete their appointed rounds despite snow, sleet, and split infinitives. Few people realize that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter, or at least an article that contains this sentence: “The human being is the only animal that . . .” We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, of course, but it has to start with those eight words. Most of us wait until relatively late in our careers to fulfill this solemn obligation because we know that successive generations of psychologists will ignore all the other words that we managed to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship and remember us mainly for how we finished The Sentence. We also know that the worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those psychologists who finished The Sentence with “can use language” were particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with hand signs. And when researchers discovered that chimps in the wild use sticks to extract tasty termites from their mounds (and to bash one another over the head now and then), the world suddenly remembered the full name and mailing address of every psychologist who had ever finished The Sentence with “uses tools.” So it is for good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they just might die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.

I have never before written The Sentence, but I’d like to do so now, with you as my witness. The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. Now, let me say up front that I’ve had cats, I’ve had dogs, I’ve had gerbils, mice, goldfish, and crabs (no, not that kind), and I do recognize that nonhuman animals often act as though they have the capacity to think about the future. But as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference. For example, I live in an urban neighborhood, and every autumn the squirrels in my yard (which is approximately the size of two squirrels) act as though they know that they will be unable to eat later unless they bury some food now. My city has a relatively well-educated citizenry, but as far as anyone can tell its squirrels are not particularly distinguished. Rather, they have regular squirrel brains that run food-burying programs when the amount of sunlight that enters their regular squirrel eyes decreases by a critical amount. Shortened days trigger burying behavior with no intervening contemplation of tomorrow, and the squirrel that stashes a nut in my yard “knows” about the future in approximately the same way that a falling rock “knows” about the law of gravity—which is to say, not really. Until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone, or smiles as it contemplates its summer vacation, or turns down a taffy apple because it already looks too fat in shorts, I will stand by my version of The Sentence. We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.

You can read a few more paragraphs of Dr. Gilbert’s work for free (in fact, you’ll have to read them to find out what he thinks the human brain’s greatest achievement is) and find order information here: Stumbling on Happiness

I’ll admit that this notion is off-putting to more than a few philosophers, most notably those who seem to think, or so it appears to me, that philosophical and ethical truths are “out there,” and that it is the philosopher’s task to sniff them out, sort them out and then weigh the merits of it all, not to get caught up in the messy task of explaining how they have evolved and are evolving.

British philosopher Charlie Broad comes to mind. He was of the opinion that what goes around “out there” eventually comes around. He once wrote, “[We] can amuse ourselves, if our tastes lie in that direction, by noticing which well-worn fallacy or old familiar inadequacy is characteristic of the latest gospel, and whether it is well or ill-disguised in its new dress.”

Philosophers of such a mind strike me as being more historians of science and philosophy than philosophers. (In fact, the quote above is from a larger Broad quote at the front of Oregon State U. historian of science Paul Farber’s little book, “The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics.” Just from that title, you can tell that Farber doesn’t have a strong regard for the idea that as human thinking systems evolve, human ethics are also evolving as, in fact, “evolutionary ethics.”)

The whole idea of evolving is to get somewhere. One philosopher who takes a charming approach to this issue is D.Z. Phillips of the University of Wales and Claremont Graduate School. In his book, Philosophy’s Cool Place, Phillips says that he’s spent the whole of his career as a philosopher seeking to get exactly nowhere. He prefers to see philosophy as contemplative, not “destructively creative” in a Joseph Schumpeter sense. He thinks philosophy is on stronger moral footing being contemplative as opposed to, say, competitive. (His book—again, a little one—is quite readable and often instructively amusing. At one point, he tells about the monastic order that, desperate to be known for something noteworthy, said, “Well, at least we’re tops in humility.”).

Personally, though, I’m much more comfortable in the hands (and with the minds) of philosophers like Tufts University’s Daniel Dennett, who just refuses to see idols or icons in much of anything, including views of ethics. In books like his Freedom Evolves, Dennett, an expert on the cognitive sciences, finds the heart of the human story anchored in an ever-evolving drama.

He writes, “[It] has taken thousands of years of communication for us to begin to find the keys to our own identities. It has been only a few hundred years that we’ve known that we are mammals, and only a few decades that we’ve understand in considerable detail how we have evolved, along with all other living things, from those simple beginnings [perhaps four billion years ago, when the first simple life-forms emerged].”

Dennis argues that it is human culture, exercising choices, that has made possible the evolution of cooperation and ethical norms of free will and freedom itself. It is an ongoing process, he says.

“My aim,” he says in the closing pages of Freedom Evolves, “has been to demonstrate that if we accept Darwin’s ‘strange inversion of reasoning’ we can build all the way up to the best and deepest human thought on questions of morality and meaning, ethics and freedom. Far from being an enemy of these traditional explorations, the evolutionary perspective is an indispensable ally. I have not sought to replace the voluminous work in ethics with some Darwinian alternative but rather to place that work on the foundation it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place in nature….We are in the best position to decide what to do next, because we have the broadest knowledge and hence the best perspective [because we are the planet’s nervous system] on the future. What that future holds in store for our planet is up to all of us, reasoning together.”

May that vision, in the best sense of both words, continue to evolve, along with our ethics.

The three books mentioned above can be ordered here: “The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics”. “Philosophy’s Cool Place”. “Freedom Evolves”