An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics

Scott M. James

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781444329520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

Offering the first general introductory text to this subject, the timely Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics reflects the most up-to-date research and current issues being debated in both psychology and philosophy. The book presents students to the areas of cognitive psychology, normative ethics, and metaethics.

• The first general introduction to evolutionary ethics
• Provides a comprehensive survey of work in three distinct areas of research: cognitive psychology, normative ethics, and metaethics
• Presents the most up-to-date research available in both psychology and philosophy
• Written in an engaging and accessible style for undergraduates and the interested general reader
• Discusses the evolution of morality, broadening its relevance to those studying psychology

Part I

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?

Chapter 1

Natural Selection and Human Nature

In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.

(Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea)

To be human: To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)

In order to get some traction on the question of natural selection's role in the development of our moral psychology, we first need to refresh ourselves on the basics of Darwin's theory. In this chapter we review some of the basic features of evolution by natural selection. We will not bother too much with the details. What's important is to highlight the general principles that have led some moral psychologists to claim that evolution played a critical role in shaping our moral mind. I'll start with the general story, which is actually quite easy to tell. Then, with that story firmly in place, I'll dispel some common misconceptions about the view. In the final sections, I'll explore the ways in which this story has been extended to psychology, where it is claimed that, like our bodies, our minds contain specialized adaptations.

1.1 The Basic Story

At the center of what might be called the Darwinian Revolution, amid the myriad details and disputes, refinements and revisions, field tests and computer models, is a very simple, very elegant idea. Here's a glimpse of it in Darwin's own words:

More individuals are born than can possibly survive. A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die, – which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct. (Darwin 2003/1859: 467)

Buried in this passage are three conditions on which the entire edifice of evolution by natural selection stands: variation, differential reproduction, and inheritance. Let's look closely.

One background assumption, left unstated in the passage, is that the number of reproducers in a given population will eventually outgrow an environment's resources; hence, “more individuals are born than can possibly survive.” But, Darwin implies, all individuals are not created equal: speed, strength, coloration – these vary within a population. Some (but only some) of these variations – in the particular environment individuals inhabit – will over time alter an individual's reproductive success; there will be, that is, differential reproduction within a population. For example, the individual moth that happens to be grey tends to be overlooked by predators in her environment, whereas the individual moth that happens to be white makes for an easy meal in that same environment. That tiny difference in color, that “grain in the balance,” may well affect not only that individual's chances of survival and reproduction, but the makeup of the species as a whole. Why? Because if we assume that variation in color can be inherited, then offspring will tend to exhibit that color variation as well. And since grey moths have a small reproductive advantage over white moths, grey moths (all things being equal) will come to dominate the population. Mother Nature will “select against” white moths in that environment. In sum, some variations that occur naturally among reproducing organisms improve an individual's rate of reproductive success in relation to its neighbors; when these fitness-enhancing variations are passed on to offspring, you have evolution by natural selection.¹

As simple and mindless as this process may sound, its power is hard to overstate. The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky went so far as to claim that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (1964: 449). First, the theory offers a direct and uncluttered explanation for much of the diversity of organic structures we observe across time and across the biological world, an explanation that does not draw on anything more controversial than, say, the workings of genes. With enough time, the pressures of an unforgiving environment – together perhaps with picky neighbors – will yield any number of exotic forms, from flying squirrels to jellyfish to redwoods.

Second, the theory delivers what was once thought undeliverable: an explanation of design that does not depend on a designer. Who could deny that the human eye or the finch's beak is exquisitely suited to its environment? It would seem from any commonsense perspective that that fit had to be the result of some kind of engineer, someone who understood both how the design would integrate with the other workings of the organism and how it would mediate the organism's interaction with its environment. But that perspective is distorted by, among other things, our place in time. Were we capable of “rolling back the tape” and observing each generation, with its incremental alterations and minor reproductive successes, we would find the development of the human eye, for example, almost unremarkable. The philosopher Daniel Dennett (1995) compares the process to selecting a tennis champion. How does every tennis tournament always select a champion? Easy, she's the last person standing after all the rounds. Remember: we do not see the 99 percent of genetic mutations that do not advance an organism's fitness; we only see the “winners.” Success in design is inevitable and ubiquitous for the simple reason that creatures ill suited to their environment have, as the philosopher W.V. Quine put it, “a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind” (1969: 126).

Finally, the core logic of evolutionary explanations is not limited to the shape of organs or the strength of bones, but extends rather smoothly to observable behaviors. Beginning in the 1960s, biologists following the work of Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen developed methods of analyzing the underlying structure of animal behavior, a field that came to be known as ethology. Here, critical focus was directed on the adaptive purpose(s) of certain behaviors, for example, the phenomenon of “imprinting” observed in ducklings.² The assumption among ethologists was that there existed a series of evolutionary events – or adaptive pressures – that ultimately led to the behavior. This would explain, if anything did, what the behavior was for. And this in turn might aid in understanding the developmental influences that lead to the expression of the behavior in individuals.

From here, it is only a few short steps back to our main subject: the human moral sense. (For the time being, think of a moral sense as a tendency to make moral judgments and experience moral sentiments.) If – and I stress the if – one wanted to argue that our moral sense is the product of evolution by natural selection, the general shape of the argument must look something like the following. Through the process of genetic variation, some individual (presumably some early hominid) developed something approximating a moral sense. While perhaps only slightly distinct from its evolutionary precursor, that sense enabled its possessor to survive and reproduce at a rate that exceeded, if only slightly, the rate of her neighbors. Left unchecked, the process of natural selection yielded a population dominated by individuals who possessed this moral sense.

Let me emphasize, however, two things: first, this argument amounts to little more than a general schema; all of the details needed to make this argument remotely plausible have been left out. In later chapters we will explore these details. Second, one could maintain that evolution by natural selection contributed to the development of our moral sense, but only indirectly. Two positions present themselves.

One of the positions that we will discuss later asserts that our moral sense was, if you will, a “by-product” of some other system that was directly selected for. As a point of comparison, consider the color of human blood. No one seriously believes that the redness of human blood was directly selected for. What was directly selected for was the oxygen-carrying properties of blood; the redness “came along for free.” That was an accidental property of blood.³ In the same way, some wish to claim that our moral sense was an accidental property of other cognitive adaptations – for example, our capacity to reason about the consequences of our actions.

A distinct but related position states that our moral sense did evolve according to the laws of natural selection; however, the function that our moral sense originally served has been replaced (due to changes in environmental circumstances) by a more recent function, which in turn can alter its structure. A popular example of this kind of biological sleight of hand is the structure of the human lungs. Some biologists insist that human lungs originally evolved, millennia ago, to aid predatory fish in pursuing prey (Farmer 1997). But once the ancestors of these fish began their forays onto land, those “swim bladders” were well suited to respiration. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction: A Philosopher and a Biologist Walk into a Bar ...
• Part I From “Selfish Genes” to Moral Beings: Moral Psychology after Darwin
• Part II From “What Is” to “What Ought To Be”: Moral Philosophy after Darwin
• Notes
• References
• Index