An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (25 page)

Two points of clarification. First, you might continue to believe in God's existence, but this belief will have been shown to be irrational. Think of it as an epistemic hangover. The point of the threat is not to show that we don't or won't continue to believe in God, just as the point of an optical illusion is not to show that your eye won't be fooled again. The point is to show that such a belief is unjustified, given the neuroscientific data. Second, even if the threat is real, God may nonetheless exist. Again, the threat is about knowledge – what you ought to believe given the evidence – not about the nature of the world per se. You have no reason to believe that there is a teacup orbiting Pluto, but (for all that anyone knows) it could be the case that a teacup is orbiting Pluto. Call this a cosmic coincidence.

If you were able to get traction on this example, you'll be primed for what's about to come. In the case of evolutionary ethics, Darwin's discovery plays the role of the “Persinger effect.” But let's begin with some preliminaries.

10.2 Preliminaries
Evolution has fooled you
. If (the people I'm calling) evolutionary anti-realists needed a bumper sticker, this would be it. According to evolutionary anti-realism, there are no objective moral standards, but your believing that there are is a trick of evolution. If evolutionary anti-realism is correct, then while we will, in all likelihood, continue to judge that certain actions are immoral, our judgments will be
false
, strictly speaking. To be sure, calling an action immoral may have a purpose. We might want to shame someone or punish her, and in so doing we might appeal to the (alleged) fact that she behaved immorally. But to the extent that we are interested in truth, our judgments do not track the way the world really is. Morality, on this view, is a convenient fiction.

The situation is not unlike what may be the case with respect to appeals to God. We might appeal to God – his mercy, his wrath, his wisdom – in trying to shape others' behavior. Believing that God will reward or punish you in the afterlife will very likely have a tremendous impact on how you behave. (Ask most 6-year-olds.) But if there is no God, then of course any judgment about how you ought to behave that depends on God (e.g., “You should not steal because God prohibits it”) is false. There may be a reason not to steal, but it can't be because God prohibits it. Maybe the risk of getting caught is not worth the minor gain. Maybe you'll feel bad about yourself.

Matters are the same for the evolutionary anti-realists. If their view is ultimately vindicated, then the judgment that “You should not steal because it's wrong” is, strictly speaking, false. The property that supposedly justifies the imperative not to steal (i.e., wrongness) is missing from the world – in the same way that God is missing from the world in our previous example.

Evolutionary anti-realism is a species of
moral anti-realism
, and moral anti-realism is not new. Philosophers have been flirting with the view for thousands of years. What is new is the claim that evolution by natural selection
explains
why our believing in an objective morality is not justified. This was an (alleged) insight that was not possible before Darwin's discovery. Over the course of these three chapters, we're going to look at how this claim has, er, evolved. More specifically, we're going to look at how
defenses
of this view have evolved.

I do not believe I am overstating the case when I say that among contemporary philosophers interested in the intersection of evolution and morality, evolutionary anti-realism has become – at least in print – a popular view. There is by no means unanimity. Still, the number of philosophers defending the view appears to comfortably exceed the number of those critical of the view. This is somewhat striking because the earliest efforts to defend this view were, to put it charitably, rocky. Part of the problem lay in keeping evolutionary anti-realism separate from closely related views. In this next section, we'll look E.O. Wilson's attempts to articulate something approximating evolutionary anti-realism. Matters were greatly clarified by the philosopher Michael Ruse, as we'll see in §10.4.

10.3 Wilson E.O. Wilson has appeared in several places in our discussion. I'm afraid we've not always treated his contributions kindly. I have noted at regular intervals the mistakes Wilson made. But picking out the flaws of early pioneers is an easy business; we have the luxury of hindsight. To be fair, Wilson deserves more: no contemporary thinker has done more than Wilson to bring evolutionary theory to bear on human affairs. He is, after all, the father of sociobiology, the precursor of evolutionary psychology (see §1.4). In his 1975 book
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
, Wilson laid out a program of study that has revolutionized our understanding of human beings: it is not merely our bodies that carry natural selection's mark, but our minds as well.

Of course, the seeds of this idea did not originate with Wilson. As we've seen, Darwin set in motion ideas that led naturally to human affairs. No doubt some of the early opposition to Darwin came from the recognition that if Darwin was right, we would have to admit that humans – in both body and mind – would eventually have to succumb to an evolutionary explanation. This was a radical idea to express, and Darwin went out of his way
not
to express it. Thomas Huxley, Darwin's most vocal defender during Darwin's life, explicitly
denied
the idea. While admitting that “no absolute structural line of demarcation” exists between “the animal world” and ourselves, Huxley left little doubt what his position on humans was: “no one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain that whether
from
them or not, he is assuredly not
of
them” (1863: 234). What, then, makes us so special? You guessed it: “the conscience of good and evil.” While some of Darwin's intellectual descendants may have doubted Huxley's claim, no one openly expressed these doubts. Until 1975.

In 1975 E.O. Wilson boldly took the step that most had been anticipating. Toward the beginning of
Sociobiology
, Wilson made the following claim: The biologist, who's concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions – hate, love, guilt, fear, and others – that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection.
That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers … at all depths
. (1975: 3) Whatever you want to call Wilson, you can't call him shy. He's going after big fish, fish that would seem to belong in other people's nets. According to Wilson, once we understand the natural selection of certain brain systems,
we will understand all of morality
(and, as an added bonus, moral philosophers).

Now as I've been at pains to point out, claims like these are dangerously vague. You should be asking yourself now:
What part of morality
will we be able to explain? How we evolved to think morally? How we ought to act? Something else? In these latter parts of
Sociobiology
, Wilson moves carelessly among these different senses. He speculates on how humans came to have moral emotions (what we speculated on in part I). He speculates how evolution might point to “a more deeply understood and enduring code of moral values” (what we have discussed in previous chapters). Then, without much warning, we get this: “It should also be clear that no single set of moral standards can be applied to all human populations, let alone all sex-age classes within each population” (1975: 288). It's hard to see this as anything but a rejection of a universal moral code. There is no objective standard for what we ought to do morally. At best, we have moral relativism.

With time, Wilson sharpened his critique. He joined forces with the biologist Charles Lumsden, and together they complained that “philosophers and theologians have not yet shown us how the final ethical truths will be recognized as things apart from the idiosyncratic development of the human mind” (Lumsden and Wilson 1983: 182–3). To paraphrase,
ethics is all in your head
. Of course, if it's all in your head, then it's not in the world. And if it's not in the world, then there's nothing “out there” for us to grasp – there's nothing to measure our moral judgments against. If I say that your action was unethical, what I've said is no more correct than if you say your action was ethical. The reason is, actions are not, in reality, ethical or unethical. Ethics, like Santa Claus, is a figment of our imagination.

Although Wilson's claim was fairly unambiguous, the same could not be said for the
argument behind
the claim. Wilson showed great enthusiasm for the idea that natural selection played a decisive role in shaping our moral minds. While not as developed as the story we recounted in §3.2 (Wilson did not have the benefit of much recent work in developmental psychology and neuroscience), the idea shared the same basic components. But why should this idea undermine moral objectivity? That is, why should this developmental story about our minds lead us to think that rightness and wrongness are mere figments of the mind? Presumably, there are steps that lead from one idea to the next, but Wilson fails to spell them out – at least in a way that would help us evaluate the truth of evolutionary anti-realism.

10.4 The Argument from Idiosyncrasy Not long after
Sociobiology
appeared, Wilson teamed up with the philosopher Michael Ruse. The image they presented was that of “philosophers' hands reaching down … to grasp the hands of biologists reaching up” (Ruse and Wilson 1986/1994: 430). What their teaming up meant was a more careful treatment of the question of ethical objectivity. And their conclusion was straightforward enough: based on “the scientific interpretation of moral behavior … there can be no objective external ethical premises.” I take this to be a form of what I've been calling evolutionary anti-realism.

The first argument that Ruse and Wilson introduce I'll call the
Argument from Idiosyncrasy
. It goes like this: the value we ascribe to things like justice and fairness and compassion and tolerance – not to mention the sense of
obligation
that seems to be the hallmark of the ethical realm – arises from cognitive processes that were themselves the “
idiosyncratic
products of the genetic history of [our] species and as such were shaped by the particular regimes of natural selection” (1986/1994: 431). In other words, “ethical premises are the peculiar products of genetic history.” The key word here is
idiosyncratic
, which my dictionary defines as an “individualizing characteristic or quality.” What Ruse and Wilson are saying is that the thoughts and feelings constitutive of our moral sense happened to favor (in one way or another) the survival of early hominids confronting idiosyncratic problems. (This is not far from the thesis explored in part I.) Here's where things get interesting. If these cognitive processes were the result of idiosyncratic products of our genetic history, then we could have had
different
cognitive processes, had our genetic history been different. (And recall from chapter 6 that our genetic history could have been substantially different than it was.) But if we could have had different cognitive processes, then we could have had different ethical beliefs. Ruse and Wilson invite us to imagine an “alien intelligent species,” whose path of evolution led its members to value “cannibalism, incest, the love of darkness and decay, parricide, and the mutual eating of feces.” Members of this species feel passionately that these practices are “natural and correct” – indeed, just as passionately as we feel that justice and compassion are “natural and correct.” Obviously, their “moral values” cannot be translated into ours and vice versa. From this, Ruse and Wilson conclude that “no abstract moral principles exist outside the particular nature of individual species” (1986/1994: 431). It just so happens that killing people for fun is wrong for creatures like us, but the status of this claim is like the status of the claim that sleep is an important part of our mental health. It didn't have to be this way, and in fact features of our species could change that render the claim false. Let's turn now to Ruse and Wilson's second argument: the
Argument from Redundancy
.

10.5 The Argument from Redundancy Let me come at this argument by way of a quick detour into
epistemology
(that is, the philosophical study of knowledge). You believe that at this very minute you are reading a book. Indeed, you might insist on something stronger: you
know
that you are reading a book at this very minute. Asked to justify your belief, you might cite your perceptual experiences – how it
feels
in your hands, how it
looks
under different lighting, perhaps even how it
smells
and
tastes
. All these perceptual experiences are best explained by the fact that there is a mind-independent book that you are at this very minute reading. It's really there (or here) and you're detecting it.

Moreover, your belief is connected in an important way to the following
counterfactual
(that is, how things
could have been
): had you not been reading this book at this very minute you would not have believed that you were. Had you not been reading this book at this very minute, you would not be having the perceptual experiences cited above. If you tried to spell this out, you might say that you stand in a particular kind of causal relation to the book, such that the book
causes
you to feel and see the way you do. And if you did not stand in this causal relation to the book, you wouldn't be having those experiences. The point is: if it
was
the case that you would believe that you are reading a book at this very minute
whether or not you were actually reading a book
at this very minute, then this would undermine your justification for believing the book really exists. Why? Well, your belief is no longer evidence that you're reading a book at this very minute. Your belief has been disconnected from the book's (alleged) existence.