Darwin's Dangerous Idea (87 page)

(an expert killer of supper ) from a bad hunter (who scared away the prey), It would be a mistake to read Hobbes as a would-be historian who was they had no concept of a good or just person, a moral person, or a good act, a simply speculating irresponsibly. He surely knew that there was no hope of moral act—or their contraries, villains and vices. They could appreciate that finding the birthplace of civilization with the tools of history (or archeol-some people were more dangerous than others, or better fighters, or more ogy—a discipline not yet invented ), but that was not his point. No doubt the desirable mates, but their perspective went no farther than that. They had no actual prehistoric sequence of events was more muddled, and distributed, with elements of quasi-society (of the sort we see among herds of ungulates concept of right or wrong because "They are Qualities, that relate to men in and packs of predators), quasi language (of the sort we see among alarm-Society, not in Solitude." Hobbes called this epoch in our prehistory "the state calling birds and monkeys, and even among foraging bees ), and perhaps of nature," because it resembled in its most important features the plight of all even elements of quasi-morality (of the sort reputedly evidenced by the other animals in the wild, to this day. In the state of nature, "there is no monkeys,1 as well as solicitous whales and dolphins). Hobbes' rational replace for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; ... no Arts; no Letters, construction was a huge oversimplification, a model intended to illustrate the no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent essentials while ignoring the grubby and unknowable details. And, without death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." And any doubt, it was too simple even in its own terms. Today, in the wake of then, one fine day, a mutation happened to arise. One day, when yet another hundreds of investigations into the nooks and crannies of game theory, conflict arose, just like all the others that had come before it, something new Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments, and the like, we know that Hobbes was happened to happen. Instead of persisting in the myopically selfish policies of altogether too sanguine (to use a word from his vocabulary) about the mutual defection and distrust that had reigned heretofore, these particular conditions under which a social contract would be evolutionarily enforce-lucky competitors hit upon a new idea: cooperation for mutual benefit. They able. But he was the pioneer explorer of this phenomenon.

formed a "social contract." Whereas before there had been families, or herds, Following in his footsteps, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and various English or tribes, this was the birth of a different
kind
of group, a society. This was the thinkers, includingjohn Locke, offered their own rational reconstructions of birth of civilization. And the rest, as one says, is history.

the birth of society. More intricate "contractarian" Just So Stories have been How Hobbes would have admired Lynn Margulis' story of the eukaryotic exploited in recent years. The most famous, and most sophisticated, is John revolution, and the creation, thereby, of multicellular life! Whereas before Rawls'
Theory of Justice
(1971), but there are others. They all agree in seeing there had been nothing but boring prokaryotes, drifting through their nasty, morality to be, in one way or another, an emergent product of a major brutish, short lives, now there could be multicellular organisms, which, innovation in perspective that has been achieved by just one species,
Homo
thanks to a division of labor among a gang of specialist cells, could engage in
sapiens,
taking advantage of its unique extra medium of information Industry (oxygen-fired metabolism, in particular) and Arts (long-range perception and locomotion, and protective coloration, and so forth). And, 1. Wechkin ct al. 1964, Masserman et al. 1964; for discussion, see Rachels 1991.

456 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

E Pluribus Unum?
457

transfer, language. In Rawls' thought experiment about how a society ought that, however it came about, the birth of morality was a good thing
for us,
to be formed, we are to imagine a time, at the birth of society, when its but we should try not to indulge in that sort of reflection. No matter how true inhabitants gather to consider what sort of design their society shall have.

it may be, it cannot explain how these practices, for which we are They are to reason together about this until they achieve what Rawls calls retrospectively so grateful, came into existence and persisted. Group ratio-

"reflective equilibrium"—a stable agreement that cannot be upset by further nality
may not
be assumed, any more than we may assume that since we consideration. In this regard, Rawls' idea is like Maynard Smith's idea of an have benefited mightily from the eukaryotic revolution, it is thereby ex-evolutionarily stable strategy or ESS, but with a major difference: these are plained. Group rationality, or cooperation, has to be achieved, and that is a
people
doing die calculation, not birds or pine trees or other simple major design task, whether we are considering alliances of prokaryotes or competitors in the games of life. The key innovation in Rawls' scenario, de-alliances of our more recent ancestors. In fact, much of the best work in signed to ensure that undue selfishness among the participants in this exer-ethics in recent years has concerned precisely this issue (e.g., Parfit 1984, cise in reflection cancels itself out, is what he calls the "veil of ignorance."

Gauthier 1986, Gibbard 1985).

Everyone gets to vote on a favored design of society, but when you decide Before looking more closely at the human predicament in this regard, we which society you would be happy to live in and give your allegiance to, you might consider more cautiously the metaphor that Hobbes invites us to take vote without knowing what your particular role or niche in it will be. You seriously, helping ourselves to the improved perspective provided by the may be a senator or a surgeon or a street-sweeper or a soldier; you don't get Darwinian Revolution that has intervened. In what regards is a society like a to find out until after you have voted. Choosing from behind the veil of ig-giant organism, and in what regards is it different?

norance ensures that people will give due consideration to the likely effects, Multicellular organisms have solved the problem of group solidarity. One the costs and benefits, for all the citizenry, including those worst off.

never hears tales of a person's thumbs rising up in civil war against the Rawls' theory has received, and deserved, more attention than any other neighboring fingers, or of an eagle's wings going on strike, refusing to work work in ethics in this century, and, as usual, I am presenting an oversimpli-unless some concession can be wrung from the beak or (more to the point) fied version of the issues. My point is to draw attention to the placement of the gonads. And now that we have the genes-eye perspective from which to this work, and all the work that it has provoked and inspired, relative to look at the world, this can strike us as something of a puzzle. Why don't Darwinian thinking in general, and "evolutionary ethics" in particular. Note these rebellions happen? Each cell in a multicellular organism has its own especially that, whereas Hobbes presented a rational reconstruction of strings of DNA, a complete set of genes for making a whole organism, and if something that actually happened—something that must have happened—

genes are selfish, why do the genes in the thumb cells or wing cells so Rawls presents a thought experiment about what, if it did happen, would be docilely cooperate with the rest of the genes? Don't the DNA copies in the
right.
Rawls' project is not speculative history or prehistory, but an entirely thumbs and wings count as genes? (Are they denied the vote? Why do they put up with it?) As the biologist David Sloan Wilson and the philosopher of normative project: an attempt to demonstrate how ethical questions
ought
to biology Elliot Sober (Wilson and Sober 1994) have suggested, we can learn be answered, and, more particularly, an attempt to
justify
a set of ethical a lot about our social problems of defection (e.g., promising and then norms. Hobbes hoped to solve the normative problem about what ethics reneging on the promise) and Hardin's tragedy of the commons (see chapter
ought
to be—Rawls' problem—but, greedy reductionist that he was, he tried 9) by considering how our ancestors, going back to the first eukaryotes, to kill two birds with one stone: he also wanted to explain how such a thing managed to achieve "harmony and coordination of their parts." The lessons as right and wrong came into existence in the first place, an exercise of to be learned are tricky, however, because the cells that compose us belong imagination in the Darwinian mode. Needless to say, life is more com-to two very different categories.

plicated than that, but it was a nice try.

Hobbes' account in the
Leviathan
has a fine Panglossian ring to it—in both An average human is normally host to billions of symbiotic organisms exapted senses of that popular word. First, by presupposing the rationality (or belonging to perhaps a thousand different species.... His phenotype is not Prudence, as he called it) of the agents whose mutual solution society is determined by his human genes alone but also by the genes of all the supposed to be, he viewed the birth of society as dictated by reason, a forced symbionts he happens to be infected with. The symbiont species an indi-move, or at least strongly endorsed by reason, a Good Trick. In other words, vidual carries usually have a very varied provenance, with only a few being Hobbes' tale is an adaptationist Just So Story—and none the worse for it.

likely to have come from his parents. [Delius 1991, p. 85.]

But, second, by appealing as it does to our sense of
the good of our own
Am I an organism, or a community, or both? I am both—and more—but
species,
it is apt to lull us into overly sanguine models of how it must have there is a tremendous difference between the cells that are officially part of come about—and this is a serious criticism. It may occur to us 458 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

E Pluribus Unum?
459

my body, and the cells, many of them just as important to my survival, that are not. The cells that compose multicellular me all share an ancestry; they Neither sort of cell is a thinking, perceiving, rational agent, of course. And are a single lineage, the "daughter cells" and "granddaughter cells" of the egg neither sort is significantly more cognitive than the other. That is not where and sperm that united to form my zygote. They are
host
cells; the other cells the fulcrum of evolutionary game theory is located. Redwood trees are not notably clever either, but they are in conditions of competition that force are
visitors,
some welcome, some not. The visitors are outsiders, because them to defect, creating what is, from
their
point of view (!), a wasteful they have descended from different lineages. What difference does this tragedy. The mutual cooperative agreement whereby they would all forgo make?

growing tall trunks, and abandon their vain attempts to gain more than their This is extremely easy to lose sight of, especially in contexts in which we fair share of sunlight, is evolutionary unenforceable.

treat all these "parties" as intentional systems—as we should, but with The condition that creates a choice is the mindless "voting" of
differential
extreme caution. Unless we are careful, we are apt to miss the fact that there reproduction. It is the opportunity for differential reproduction that lets the are crucial moments in the careers of these various agents and semi-agents lineages of our visitors "change their minds" or "reconsider" the choices they and hemi-semi-demi-agents when opportunities to "decide" arise, and then have made, by "exploring" alternative policies. My host cells, however, have pass. The cells that compose my bulk have a shared fate, but some in a been designed once and for all by a single vote at the time my zygote was stronger sense than others. The DNA in my finger cells and blood cells is in a formed. If, thanks to mutation, dominating or selfish strategies occur to genetic cul-de-sac; in Weismann's terms (see chapter 11), these cells are part
tbem,
they will not flourish ( relative to their contemporaries ), since there is of the
somatic
line (the body), not the
germ
line (the sex cells). Barring scant opportunity for differential reproduction. (Cancer can be seen as a revolutions in cloning techniques (and ignoring the strictly limited, short-selfish—and vehicle-destructive—rebellion made possible by a revision that lived prospects they have for giving way to replacement cells they help does permit differential reproduction.)

create), my somatic-line cells are doomed to die "childless," and since this The philosopher and logician Brian Skyrms has recently pointed out was determined some time ago, there is no longer any pressure, any normal (1993, 1994a, 1994b) that the precondition for normal cooperation in the opportunity, any "choice points," at which their intentional trajectories—or strongly shared fate of somatic-line cells is analogous to the cooperation the trajectories of their limited progeny—might be adjusted. They are, you Bawls tried to engineer behind the veil of ignorance. He calls this, aptly, the might say,
ballistic
intentional systems, whose highest goals and purposes

"Darwinian Veil of Ignorance." Your sex cells (sperm or ova) are formed by have been fixed once and for all, with no chance of reconsideration or a process unlike that of normal cell division or
mitosis.
Your sex cells are guidance. They are totally committed slaves to the
summum bonum
of the formed by a different process, called
meiosis,
which randomly constructs body of which they form a part. They may be exploited or tricked by visitors,
half
a genome-candidate (to join forces with a half from your mate) by but under normal circumstances they cannot rebel on their own. Like the Choosing first a bit from "column A" (the genes you got from your mother) Stepford Wives, they have a single
summum bonum
designed right into them, and then a bit from "column B" (the genes you got from your father) until a and it is not "Look out for Number One." On the contrary, they are team full complement of genes—but just one copy of each—is constructed and players by their very nature.