An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (9 page)

A fourth observation we might make from our abortion example is that we expect a tight link between the students' moral views and their
motivation
. Consider, for example, how mystifying it would be to see one of the student activists, later that same day, on her way into the abortion clinic.

“What – did you change your moral view?” you ask.

“No,” she says. “Abortion is still murder.”

“But you're having an abortion anyway?”

“Sure,” she says.

“Because … it's an absolute necessity?” you ask.

“Nope. Just 'cause.”

Three things seem possible here. Either she's
lying
about her moral view of abortion, or she's a shameless hypocrite (with, perhaps, sociopathic tendencies), or she simply fails to grasp the concept of murder. What does not seem possible here, given our implicit understanding of morality, is the combination of the following three things: (a) she sincerely believes that abortion is murder; (b) she understands that murder means wrongful killing; and (c) she is not motivated in the least bit to refrain from having an abortion. This combination seems impossible because sincerely believing that abortion is murder entails the belief that one should not have one, and believing that one should not have one implies – if not entails – that one is
motivated
, however slightly, not to have one. This is not the same thing as saying that one will not, as a matter of fact, have an abortion. After all, people regularly act in ways that they regard as immoral. But someone who acts immorally, without the least bit of reluctance and without a hint of regret or shame or guilt, should make us seriously doubt that she sincerely believes that that act is immoral. What this suggests is that a sincere moral judgment is somehow connected to motivation. We have a hard time making sense of someone who repeatedly insists that abortion is murder but could not care less whether she has one.

A fifth feature of morality that emerges from our abortion example is this: someone who knowingly violates a moral prohibition – in this case, a prohibition on abortion –
deserves
(at least in the minds of our protesters)
punishment
. Whether or not she is actually punished is a different matter. The point is that in judging that abortion is prohibited, the students are implying that punishment would be justified. To sharpen the point, Joyce has us imagine creatures who regularly assert that some acts must be done and other things must not be done, but when someone refuses to act as she must, there is no sense among the creatures that she should “pay” for what she has done. No one thinks that the violation
demands
retribution. Joyce suspects, therefore, that “these creatures must … lack a central element of the notion of
justice:
the element pertaining to getting what one deserves” (2006: 67). Part of what makes moral creatures moral, then, has to do with thinking that acting in ways that are forbidden
deserves
punishment while acting in ways that are (for example) selfless
deserves
praise.

This is not the case with a wide range of other acts we think should or should not be done. Suppose I tell you that you shouldn't go see the movie you're contemplating seeing because (let's say) the acting is terrible. Suppose you see the movie anyway. I might regard your decision as imprudent or dumb, but I wouldn't think that you deserve to be punished for going. When you tell me that I ought not to build my house so close to the ocean shore because it will be threatened by a storm surge, you might think me unwise for going forward with my plans, but you wouldn't think me sinful. Moral “oughts,” however, are different. When we assert that you morally ought not do something, this implies that we (or at least someone) would be warranted in punishing you for your deed. If wrongdoing was not tightly connected to punishment in this way, then we should have no trouble at all imagining our abortion protesters feeling entirely neutral about someone who willfully decides to have an abortion. But this would be quite surprising indeed.

In the background of this observation is a distinction that needs underlining. Believing that an action will
provoke
hostility is distinct from believing that an action
merits
hostility. This distinction may not be obvious, so let me spell it out. Believing that an action will provoke hostility requires only that one should believe that a given type of action is normally followed by another type of response – in this case, hostility. It is merely the recognition of a
regularity
, not unlike the recognition of other regularities: for example, thunder regularly follows lightning. It would be silly to think that lightning
justifies
or
warrants
thunder; the two are merely “regularly conjoined.” The point is that we can easily imagine creatures that can recognize social regularities (actions of type T are normally followed by hostility), but fail to recognize that hostility is justified or warranted. In short, the recognition of social regularities, by itself, does not presuppose morality.

Someone could believe that abortion is regularly followed by hostility
without
believing that abortion is morally prohibited. How? Well, maybe she does not believe abortion is murder! Or maybe she's an expert on human behavior but simply lacks a moral sense (maybe she's a psychologist from another galaxy). The upshot, however, is that among the distinctive features of our moral sense is the recognition that some responses are merited or deserved. Joyce (2006: ch. 2) sees the distinction this way: it is one thing to understand that an action is
accepted
, another thing to understand that it is
acceptable
. (Give that distinction a minute to play out in your mind.) An important implication of this distinction is that even if creatures display the recognition of social regularities (and we see this in lots of higher mammals), it does not automatically follow that they are moral creatures. For that, they would need to recognize more than behavioral regularities; they would need to recognize that some behaviors are “called for.”

Finally, in connection with the previous point, creatures like us appear to internalize the attitudes of others. This internalization is part of what we think of when we think about the feeling of
guilt
: we feel that our wrongdoing
deserves
punishment. Indeed, the feeling itself can be its own punishment. This is what we mean we say that someone must suffer the pangs of his own conscience. “How can you live with yourself?” we ask of someone unrepentant in his wrongdoing. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” Part of being a moral creature, then, appears to involve norms of feeling: guilt or shame are appropriate feelings in response to one's own (acknowledged) wrongdoing. To say the least, we regard with suspicion those who feel no guilt or remorse for their crimes. It is perhaps not surprising that such individuals are commonly classified as
antisocial
or
sociopathic
, for at least one of the checks on immoral behavior is missing: the pangs of one's own conscience. (More on this in the next chapter.) It is important to note as well the behavioral element associated with guilt. When we feel guilty about something we've done, we desire, if only slightly, to
make amends
. We feel the need to apologize, to repair whatever damage we've caused. Our pride may stand in the way so that we do not carry through with the reparation, but the feeling is undeniable. And it is often the case that the feeling does not dissipate
until
we've made amends. Criminals who for years have gone unidentified commonly express a sort of relief upon being caught; part of the relief, evidently, consists of no longer having to live under the weight of the guilt. Thus an explanation for our moral sense, within the context of evolution, should also illuminate the fact that guilt compels us to make things right.

A quick review. What makes moral creatures moral apparently involves a number of things. The following seem to represent some conceptual truths about the making of moral judgments. (1) Moral creatures understand prohibitions. (2) Moral prohibitions do not appear to depend on our desires, nor (3) do they appear to depend on human conventions, like the law. Instead, they appear to be objective, not subjective.
³
(4) Moral judgments are tightly linked to motivation: sincerely judging that some act is wrong appears to entail at least some desire to
refrain from
performing that act. (5) Moral judgments imply notions of desert: doing what you know to be morally prohibited implies that punishment would be justified. (6) Moral creatures, such as ourselves, experience a distinctive
affective
response to our own wrongdoing, and this response often prompts us to make amends for the wrongdoing.

3.2 The Evolution of Morality For those theorists who believe that evolution played a central role in the development of our moral sense, a general storyline has developed. The aim of this section is to trace that storyline. However, instead of approaching our subject directly, I'm going to ask you to consider an analogy, a case that, though drawn from evolutionary psychology, is entirely unrelated to morality. The point of the analogy of course is to get you primed for the evolution of morality. More specifically, I want to rehearse a common evolutionary lesson: sometimes what we – as biological organisms – regard as intrinsically good (call it A) is not what natural selection “regards” as intrinsically good (call it B). However, given the contingencies of our environment, the pursuit of A has the reliable effect of securing B. This can explain why our attitudes toward A evolved. This phenomenon is probably more common than we think. So here's the analogy.

For sexually reproducing creatures such as ourselves, it is important that individuals do not waste time mating (or attempting to mate) with non-fertile members of the opposite sex. Considering the substantial efforts one might expend attracting and securing potential mates, we can thus expect that organisms developed means of
discriminating
between worthwhile mates and, well, less-than-worthwhile mates. It would only be a matter of time before those individuals who couldn't make those discriminations lost out to those individuals who could. So how might this general constraint have affected early humans? Let's take early males. If it is fair to assume that the peak fertility of ancestral females resembles the peak fertility of contemporary females (i.e., ages 19–25), then males who selectively pursued females
outside
the years of peak fertility would fare worse than males who selectively pursued females
within
the years of peak fertility, since mating with females outside those years would (all things being equal) result in fewer viable offspring. Hence, there would have been adaptive pressure on early males to attract and pursue only the most fertile females.

But this raises a new problem. How would early males know when females in their vicinity were most fertile? After all, early females did not wear labels announcing their relative fertility. They did not advertise their ages for the simple reason that they wouldn't have had any concept of calendar years. It's not impossible that early women released sex pheromones (an odor males might detect), but this would have required intimate contact, precisely the kind of contact early males were deciding whether or not to make. So how did early males in fact solve this problem?

Once you think about it, the answer is obvious. The most fertile females simply
look
different from most other females (that is, from pre-pubescent and post-menopausal females). Evolutionary psychologists have proposed and provided empirical support for the idea that early males distinguished between fertile and non-fertile females on the basis of specific
visual cues
. Suppose that an early (post-pubescent) male, as a result of some mutation, possessed strong preferences for females with many of the following physical traits: symmetrical face, clear complexion, full lips, small nose, big eyes, lustrous hair, full breasts, and a waist-to-hip ratio of approximately 0.7. Why these traits? Simple: women with these traits are the most likely to be healthy and fertile. The male who possessed desires for those traits (as opposed to others) and could attract females with those traits would over time out-reproduce other males precisely because those females were more likely to reproduce than females without those traits.
⁴

But let me underline the important point here: there would be
no need whatsoever
for that male with those desires to have any knowledge of – let alone, concern for – the correlation between those traits and fertility. As we've seen again and again, natural selection operates on a “need to know” basis. And, here, there's no need for males to know about that correlation. Design males to be attracted to females with those traits and reproductive success will take care of itself.

So here is an example of natural selection settling on a psychological mechanism that does not attach importance to what is, biologically speaking, good in itself, but to some other
intermediate
good instead. In other words, what males regard as intrinsically valuable (e.g., clear complexion, lustrous hair, full breasts) is not the same as what natural selection “regards” as intrinsically valuable (e.g., female fertility). Of course, if natural selection
did
equip males with a concern for female fertility
itself
, then we should expect to see males exhibiting a strong
aversion
to the use of contraception. For the point of contraception is to positively frustrate a woman's fertility by preventing her from becoming pregnant. But this is not at all what we observe. The desire for females with those traits remains (very much) in effect with or without the use of contraception. But this mismatch is tolerable since, for creatures like us, with all of our biological idiosyncrasies, pursuing females with those traits has the reliable effect of achieving reproductive success, all things being equal.