An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (2 page)
Read An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics Online
Authors: Scott M. James
Tags: #Philosophy, #Ethics & Moral Philosophy, #General
Suppose it is true (as anthropologists have noted) that humans tend to discriminate against outsiders. We are, it appears, far less likely to assist strangers than those who are near and dear. Does this mean that we
ought
to discriminate against outsiders? Let's test the idea. Suppose you are visiting another country and happen to fall in a shallow pond. Because you can't swim, your life is suddenly threatened. Now, does the native observing all this have any reason to toss you the life preserver at his feet? I have a hunch that you'll say (with confidence) “Yes.” Why? Because (you might argue) the fact that you are an outsider is
morally irrelevant
to the native's reason to assist you. Indeed, we might go further and maintain that we
ought to resist
our biologically based disposition to discriminate against outsiders. But if this is right, then we must reject the idea that our moral obligations are
derived from
our biologically given dispositions. Or so some have argued.
The overarching point, however, is worth repeating: offering support to the “biologicization” of ethics settles almost nothing. Our evolutionary past
is
relevant to understanding our present moral experience (at least in the secular moral tradition), but this leaves open the precise nature of that relationship. Hence, our task is to look hard at the details – both biological and philosophical. And that's what we'll do throughout this book.
∗∗∗
The book is divided into two thematic parts, each of which is relatively freestanding. Part I explores the ways in which evolution may have shaped our
moral psychology
. We will explore some contemporary work in evolutionary psychology, anthropology, primatology, and even neurobiology. We will set to one side – as far as possible – questions about the nature of morality itself and focus instead on how the processes of evolution by natural selection could have produced creatures that not only help others, but often do so because they are, as Darwin noted, “impelled simply by the deep feeling of right or duty.”
In part II we will move to the normative or evaluative realm by asking: What actions or practices, if any, does our evolutionary past
justify
? Social Darwinists (and even some contemporary philosophers) argue that our biological past is a source of both psychological descriptions
and
moral norms. That is, evolution tells us not only how things
are
(biologically speaking), but also how things
ought to be
(morally speaking). Such efforts to derive norms from descriptive facts confront some standard objections (one of which we discussed earlier), so we will explore the extent to which these views can survive these objections.
We will also tackle in part II the question of morality's objectivity. Some of the most exciting and provocative arguments in contemporary moral philosophy contend that believing in “moral facts” is unjustified once we have a complete
descriptive
account of the origins of our moral psychology. The reason, according to some, is that evolution explains all that needs explaining. Our feeling – indeed, our thinking – that some acts are
objectively
wrong is explained by the need for cooperation among our ancestors. This, then, is supposed to undercut any
independent
reason to suppose that moral properties, such as wrongness, really exist. We'll look at some objections to these arguments and consider, too, realist (or quasi-realist) alternatives to the anti-realist view just discussed.
It is important to emphasize, however, that although discussions in one part of the book may have implications for other parts, the observations made several paragraphs back should caution us against hasty inferences. There is an impressive array of combinations in logical space. We would not want to prejudge which combination is most plausible.
∗∗∗
Let me acknowledge, in closing, several issues that one might have expected to find discussed in a book on evolutionary ethics – but which will not receive attention here. First, there exists a pervasive (some might say, regrettable) temptation to link discussions of evolution with atheism and atheism with immorality. Thus one might regard the very idea of “evolutionary ethics” as contradictory, since (a) evolution eliminates God's role in humanity's affairs, and (b) as a God-less humanity lacks any reason to be moral, the choice is evolution or ethics – but
not both
. As tempting as this bit of reasoning may be, it's deeply problematic. Neither (a) nor (b) is obvious, and efforts to make them obvious would involve considerable argumentation that would lead us into distant philosophical terrains. That, at any rate, would not be a book on evolutionary ethics, but a book on philosophy of religion and secular ethical theory. That said, it should be apparent from our discussion thus far that we
will
be assuming that the human species possesses many of its traits (including some psychological traits) by dint of evolutionary forces. But accepting this assumption does not entail acceptance of atheism or moral nihilism.
A second, perhaps more subtle, discussion one might have expected from a book on evolutionary ethics is a discussion of
biological
or
genetic determinism.
The concern, as I understand it, is as follows. Since (1) our evolutionary past determines our individual genetic makeup, (2) our genetic makeup determines our behavior, in a suitably strong sense, and (3) we cannot be morally responsible for behavior that is determined, our evolutionary past undermines moral responsibility. This argument, like the previous one, may have some initial appeal. But the reason I've decided not to include it here is that, on reflection, it goes wrong at pretty much every turn. Claims (1) and (2), as we'll see in the coming chapters, result from confusion about evolutionary theory. As any biologist will tell you, nature alone determines almost nothing – just as nurture alone determines almost nothing. These two are not competitors, they're counterparts. Even if your genetic makeup were not distinct from any other (as in fact it is), a dizzying variety of environmental differences will distinguish you from others. But setting even that aside, genes are not destiny. While evolution may (
may
) have disposed you to have certain emotions or preferences, you retain the ability to
choose
whether or not to act on those preferences.
1
You can say to yourself: ‘As much as I would like to give this job to my son, I have to be fair to all the applicants, so I had better not.’ Even (3) is not immune from criticism (though I'll leave that for another time).
Suffice it to say that the issue of genetic determinism has unfortunately become something of a bogeyman haunting discussions of evolution and human nature.
2
And while I could add one more stone to the mountain of criticism, I prefer to let that mountain speak for itself. So for the reader harboring lingering doubts about the issue, I have (alas) nothing to offer.
3
There are enough battles to sort through without revisiting that long-dormant one. As we speak, new insights into the evolutionary underpinnings of human nature are being uncovered, but the pace of moral theory is struggling to keep up. Part of the problem, as we've just seen, is running together the variety of ways in which biology might influence moral theory. Now that we've sorted that out, we can begin to close the gap that separates our biological understanding of ourselves from our moral understanding of ourselves.
From “Selfish Genes” to Moral Beings: Moral Psychology after Darwin
You get a lot more with a nice word and a gun than with a nice word.
(Al Capone) In the opening passages of
The Selfish Gene,
Richard Dawkins has us imagine a gangster (let's call him Sonny) who managed to live a long and prosperous life in the Chicago underworld. Dawkins asks us to consider the kinds of qualities Sonny must have had to survive so long in such an environment. Well, we might reasonably guess that Sonny was
not
uniformly benevolent or generous or tenderhearted. At the very least, Sonny must have been tough. He must have been keenly aware of others' loyalty. He must have been quick to spot deception and merciless with competitors. He must have been, according to Dawkins, “ruthlessly selfish” at the core. (Fans of
The Sopranos
will have no trouble getting the picture.) The point of Dawkins' story, however, is that Sonny is our mirror: insofar as we're prepared to ascribe these qualities to Sonny, we should be prepared to ascribe these same qualities to
ourselves
. We are, after all, survivors of our own rough neighborhood. Here's how Dawkins explains it.
Our genes have survived millions of years in a highly competitive environment. But this was possible only because genes are self-serving. And creative. Along the way genes developed ingenious
vehicles
to ensure their survival and reproduction. Some of those vehicles are quite simple. Others verge on the miraculous. But simple or miraculous, the underlying idea is the same: the living forms we see around us – birds and bees, ferns and foxes – are, in the end, “gene machines.” And so it is with us:
Human beings are just another kind of gene-machine
. Although we dress better than mollusks and make better sandwiches than baboons, we are in principle no different from them. We're just more sophisticated means of making more genes; after all, we are only here for
their
sake. But, as Dawkins notes, since “gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior,” we have every reason to believe that, despite appearances to the contrary, each of us is ruthlessly selfish at the core. “Scratch an altruist,” writes the biologist Michael Ghiselin, “and watch a hypocrite bleed” (Ghiselen 1974: 274). Each of us harbors our own little inner gangster. Almost apologetically, Dawkins concludes: “Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.”
And yet, when we step back and observe ourselves, there is something about Dawkins' story that doesn't make sense. For if he's correct, then people would never have an interest in doing the right thing (never mind
knowing
what the right thing to do is); people would never admire virtue, rise up against injustice, or sacrifice their own welfare to benefit strangers. If human beings are ruthlessly selfish at the core, then we should find
unintelligible
Adam Smith's observation that man possesses capacities “which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it” (Smith 2010/1759: 9). But we don't find Smith's observation unintelligible. Even the cynic has to admit that people do sometimes have an abiding interest in doing the right thing (even those who don't
know
what the right thing to do is). A surprising number of people work on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised. Consider that in 2004 private American citizens gave more than $24 billion of their own money to aid complete strangers (Hudson Institute 2007: 14). This hardly sounds like the work of a band of “ruthlessly selfish” creatures. At the very least, people seem to care about how their actions will be received by others. More striking still is the fact that people seem to care deeply about acting in accord with their own
conscience
. One of the great themes of literature is the psychic peril of “getting away with the crime”: merely knowing that we've acted wrongly can be its own punishment. So perhaps the analogy with the gangster is inapt. Perhaps humans transcend their evolutionary roots in a way that cannot be explained by biology. Indeed, perhaps we've hit upon what separates humans from the rest of the natural world: our ability to grasp a (the?) moral order. This would render biology irrelevant to the study of moral psychology.
So where does this leave us? I began with a biological picture of human beings that appeared to exclude the moral. I then presented a moral picture of human beings that appeared to exclude the biological. We thus have a decision to make. We can: (a) embrace the biological picture and
explain away
the moral part of ourselves; (b) embrace the moral picture and
explain away
the biological part of ourselves; or (c)
reconcile
the biological and moral pictures. As implausible as this last option may sound, a growing number of theorists from across the spectrum are throwing their weight behind it. (Not that the idea doesn't sound odd: “In the same way that birds and airplanes appear to defy the law of gravity yet are fully subjected to it, moral decency may appear to fly in the face of natural selection yet still be one of its many products,” writes the renowned primatologist Frans de Waal 1996: 12.) Indeed, one of the aims of this book is to defend the idea that moral decency does have its roots in biology.
In addition to the growing empirical and philosophical body of work outlining various means of reconciling our moral and biological natures, there is the cost of embracing one of the other options. On the one hand, we are moving inexorably towards a picture of human nature that is richly informed by evolutionary theory; robust trends are appearing in anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, and philosophy. It is difficult to imagine, then, abandoning biology in any serious quest to understand human nature. On the other hand, any picture of human beings that leaves out our moral sensibility is fatally incomplete. This isn't to say that we are uniformly good or even decent. It is to say that our practical lives are indelibly marked by moral thought: we make moral judgments; we deliberate over what the right thing to do is; we experience moral emotions (e.g. guilt and benevolence); we punish wrongdoers and reward the virtuous.
Hence, if we are not yet prepared (as theorists) to overlook our moral natures
or
the power of biological explanations, then we assume the burden of reconciliation: How can we bring these two pictures of ourselves into alignment? Attempting an answer to this question is the task of the first part of this book. I say “attempting an answer” because the state of the field (what might be called
evolutionary moral psychology
) is still quite young – and speculative. Although there appears to be consensus at some very basic levels, as you'll see, there remain deep disputes. Much of our work will consist in surveying these disputes. But I will also attempt to offer what I take to be more promising lines of research. After all, I have my own theories regarding the evolution of morality. At any rate, the next five chapters are united around two general questions: (1)
Why
might natural selection have favored hominids who thought and (sometimes) behaved morally? And (2)
How
did natural selection fashion – out of preexisting materials – hominids who thought and behaved morally?
