An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (13 page)

As persuasive as this objection may initially seem, its force is largely the result of underestimating the sophistication of our moral sense. First, it has already been shown that natural selection would have favored, in creatures like us, other-regarding feelings toward those we assume to be relatives. Because uncertainty would have inevitably surrounded the question of who in fact counts as a relative, our ancestors would have developed a general, though limited, disposition to feel empathy toward those around them. Thus the population of individuals out of which morality allegedly evolved was not one of cold, calculating individualists, as the objection seems to assume.

Second, any realistic modeling of social interactions among our early ancestors must assume
iterated plays
– that is, multiple chances to interact with the same core group of people. As I tried to demonstrate above, a year-long series of Prisoner's Dilemma games would quickly reveal the reputation of its participants. And reputation is everything. So add to the adaptive pressures on our early ancestors the pressure of maintaining the appearance of, for example, benevolence and trustworthiness. But what is the cheapest, most reliable means of appearing benevolent and trustworthy?
Actually being
benevolent or trustworthy! Never forget that evolution will favor the quick and dirty solution if the benefits outweigh the costs. Since the flexibility of practical deliberation will occasionally divert us from the kinds of behavior that are in our
long-term interests
, natural selection needed a means of selectively overriding this system: a moral conscience. Written into our genes, therefore, is the imperative to act in ways that others would find acceptable. From our perspective, this is a categorical rule; it has no exceptions. This is a pretty cheap means of achieving important results. From nature's perspective, however, the rule was actually contingent on the ways in which creatures like us interacted over time.

But won't a general disposition to act in socially appropriate ways also attract those who seek to exploit me? Perhaps. But we must remember several things. First, generally speaking, I retain the power to
choose
with whom I interact, and I can retaliate against those who abuse my trust. Second, presenting myself as trustworthy will also serve to attract other
cooperative
individuals who seek mutual advantage. So if I seek out “like-minded” individuals and also advertise a disposition to retaliate (e.g., refusing to cooperate after another's defection), I can decrease the chances of being exploited and capitalize on long-term cooperative relationships.

Game theorists have identified a strategy that embodies this approach. They call it “tit-for-tat.” In a Prisoner's Dilemma game, the tit-for-tat strategy is simple: cooperate on the first round, and then, on future rounds, mirror what your partner did on the previous round. Let's assume you and I agree to play. I begin by cooperating. If you cooperate as well, then on the next round, I cooperate again. So long as you play me straight, we reap the benefits of mutual cooperation and, over time, establish an enduring, mutually beneficial arrangement. But the moment you defect, I defect on the next round. In other words, the moment my trust is abused, our relationship is broken. I'll either return the “favor,” or leave the relationship. True, you'll benefit on that particular round, but the costs of losing that relationship will very likely exceed that momentary benefit. So the individual with a moral conscience is not a lamb among lions, as the objection seems to assume. A moral conscience does not preclude avoiding or even punishing cheaters (“Vengeance is Mine,” says the Lord, “I will repay”). Nor does it mean taking all comers: no one has a moral duty to sacrifice herself to those who wish to do her harm.

4.6 An Explanation for
All
of Morality?

The evolutionary sketch just offered does a fair job of explaining why humans are disposed to regard some acts as morally wrong. The sorts of acts that immediately come to mind are: breaking a promise for no reason, killing a neighbor for no reason, lying to advance one's self-interest. According to the evolutionary account, these acts have the potential to undermine social harmony and trust; they threaten the kind of atmosphere necessary for mutual cooperation. By thinking of them as
wrong
, and hence prohibited, each person is strongly motivated to refrain from doing them. As a result, everyone benefits more than they would if no one thought of them as wrong or if people thought of them as merely unattractive.

But there are some attitudes, some feelings, that seem to deserve to be called
moral
but are not apparently linked to the preservation of social harmony. For example, one might plausibly maintain that we have moral duties to
ourselves
. For example, you have a duty to develop your talents, to care for your health, to take an interest in your future, and so on. Failing to carry out these duties without justification can expose you to moral condemnation. But it's far from clear why these self-directed moral attitudes would do anything to preserve social harmony. Feeling bound to develop one's talents, say, might plausibly be regarded as something good, but why should it be regarded as a
moral
good? The evolutionary story doesn't say.

Alternatively, consider our moral attitudes toward the unborn or the terminally ill. If the evolutionary story is correct, we should not view harming the unborn or hastening the death of a terminally ill patient as a moral matter, since the unborn and the terminally ill cannot exactly participate in the sorts of reciprocal relations at the heart of the evolutionary story. This is important. The evolutionary account was premised on how our actions might influence those with whom we interact or will interact in the near future. This means that the
content
of our moral thinking should be restricted to potential partners in reciprocal relations. But if this is right, then we should be morally neutral about such things as physician-assisted suicide and even abortion, since how the terminally ill and embryos are treated doesn't seem to bear on our cooperative relations. But it's pretty obvious that people
aren't
morally neutral about such issues. Indeed, if one pressed on in this way, it may possible to uncover a range of moral issues that are not easily captured by the evolutionary account. As a sampling, consider: famine relief, child prostitution, civil rights, disability rights, animal cruelty, pollution and environmental degradation, and genetic enhancement. There appears to be quite a distance, for example, between feeling bad about defecting in a Prisoner's Dilemma-style game and feeling bad about favoring a white person over a black person for a job or feeling bad about genetically altering your child. The worry, then, is that the evolutionary story is notably
incomplete
.

Of course, there are worse fates than being incomplete. After all, defenders of the view might begin working to fill in the details, assuming such details are there to be filled in. And work has already begun. The standard approach is to show that, for each of the problematic cases above, our moral attitudes somehow
derive
from the basic evolutionary story. It might be shown, for example, that blatant disregard for the environment is linked to a general disregard for public goods, but someone who exhibited no concern for public goods would run the risk of diminishing her reputation as a “socially conscious” person. Prohibitions on animal cruelty might be explained by the connection people tend to draw between the disposition to harm an animal for fun and the disposition to harm a person for fun. Wanton cruelty to animals has a way of repelling people. But this can be explained, at least in part, by what such cruelty elicits in onlookers:
What kind of person would do that?
This is important because when we consider the kind of person with whom we would want to enter into a cooperative relationship, we'll generally avoid individuals disposed to wanton cruelty. Thus, cruelty to animals (like wanton cruelty in general) will come to be regarded as morally wrong. Now this is little more than an outline. What remains to be seen is whether evidence can be mounted in its defense.

An even more tantalizing proposal stems from recent work in evolutionary psychology. To put it crudely, generosity pays. In one study (Iredale
et al.
2008), the focus was on female mate preference. According to the study, females exhibit a preference for generous males. Females, write the authors, “seem to like heroic types for short term relationships, but
altruists
for long term relationships.”
⁵
The authors speculate that “generosity could be a way for men to show their suitability to invest in a relationship and help in rearing offspring.” If this is right, then it might be possible to explain the fact that, for example, donating to famine relief, assisting the homeless, and donating blood are generally regarded as admirable. If ancestral females exhibited a preference for males who displayed a tendency toward generosity, then, all things being equal, males who developed that trait would come to dominate the population. This might also explain why such
acts
of generosity are thought of a morally good – at least among female onlookers.

But this is not all. Martin A. Nowak, the director of the Evolutionary Dynamics program at Harvard, recently produced mathematical models of Prisoner's Dilemma-style games that indicated that (again) generosity pays. He writes: Mathematical analysis shows that winning strategies tend to be generous, hopeful, and forgiving. Generous here means not seeking to get more than one's opponent; hopeful means cooperating in the first move or in the absence of information; and forgiving means attempting to re-establish cooperation after an accidental defection. (Nowak 2008: 579) So, contrary to the old adage that goodness is its own reward, goodness may in fact deliver other, biologically critical, rewards. Nowak's research indicates that “if I am willing to let others have a slightly bigger share of the pie, then people will want to share pies with me. Generosity bakes successful deals” (2008: 579).

It's of course far too early to say whether or not this hypothesis succeeds; still, the direction of research indicates that the evolutionary approach potentially has the resources to meet the incompleteness objection. There remains, however, a more serious problem confronting the evolutionary approach.

4.7 Universal Morality or Universal Reason?

There is a concern among some theorists that the evolutionary account does not explain what it seeks to explain. One way to spell out this concern is as follows. If, through the processes of natural selection, our early ancestors evolved the capacity to think morally, and if all extant people have the same ancestors, then we should expect all people to display similar moral beliefs. We should observe, that is, a kind of
universal morality
, according to which people generally make the same moral judgments about the same things wherever they happen to live. We should observe not only a moral consensus across our own country, but across all countries. So whether you're Aborigine or American, Brazilian or Balinese, you should think that killing is generally wrong, charity is good, and so on.

But even someone with a passing familiarity with other cultures knows that this claim is in trouble. There is, it turns out, a breathtaking diversity in moral attitudes across the globe. Even apart from differences in moral attitudes toward such things as food and dress and religious rites, very basic moral differences remain. Take killing for example. While in many parts of the world women are ascribed the same moral rights as men, in some Arab cultures killing a woman who has had sex outside of marriage is not only morally permissible, but morally
obligatory
(Hauser 2006). Among the Ilongot of Luzon, initiation rites require that boys decapitate an innocent person from the nearby village (Rosaldo 1980). Indeed, cannibalism has been a regular part of some cultural traditions for centuries. Name a practice that you're positive is prohibited around the world (infanticide, patricide, brother–sister incest), and the ethnographic record will very likely prove you wrong. When it comes to morality, the world is a mixed bag. One man's vice is another man's virtue.

This diversity is a critical reason why some theorists think our moral minds have a different origin. Evolution, as the philosopher Neil Levy maintains, only “gave us the
preconditions
of morality.” But evolution itself is insufficient. “It is only as a result of the
cultural elaboration
of this raw material that we come to be moral beings” (Levy 2004: 205). Thus the real force behind human morality (to the extent that there is a universal human morality) is
human learning
. We learn from those around us which acts are right and which acts are wrong, just as we learn which numbers are odd and which numbers are even. The philosopher William Rottschaefer and his biologist colleague David Martinsen elaborate on this idea, citing “imitation or symbolic learning and reasoning, [and] the inductive moral training” discussed by the psychologist Martin Hoffman. “In inductive techniques, parents point out to their children the beneficial and harmful effects of their action on others in a manner appropriate to their ages” (Rottschaefer and Martinsen 1995: 167). On these proposals, natural selection's role is demoted to that of provider of raw materials.

A position that occupies a sort of middle ground between the evolutionary account and (what I'll call, somewhat misleadingly) the
learning
account is one recently proposed by the philosophers Chandra Sripada and Stephen Stich. Unlike the evolutionary account, the Sripada and Stich (S&S) model denies that humans are innately disposed to think morally, and unlike the learning account, the S&S model denies that humans develop their moral minds from “all-purpose” reasoning mechanisms. What Sripada and Stich propose is that humans are innately endowed with a sort of “rule-detection” system, what they call a
norm-acquisition system
. For the purposes of our discussion, we can think of norms as social rules dictating what can and cannot be done. Stich describes the system in starkly mechanical terms: The job of the Acquisition Mechanism is to identify the norms in the surrounding culture whose violation is typically met with punishment, to infer the content of those norms, and to pass that information to the Execution Mechanism, where it is stored in the Norm Data Base. The Execution Mechanism has the job of inferring that some actual or contemplated behavior violates (or is required by) a norm, and generating intrinsic (i.e. non-instrumental) motivation to comply and to punish those who do not comply. (Sripada and Stich 2008: 228) So a mind equipped with this system will generate a set of moral beliefs that are uniquely keyed to its environment. At the same time, such a mind will generate a set of rules that may (or may not) be classified as moral, but which nevertheless play a constraining role in one's local community (for example, bow to your elders in passing). The reason is that, on the S&S model, evolution has not selected us to be sensitive to
moral
rules; it has selected us to be sensitive to a more general class of rules, call them
social
rules. If the adaptive value of rule-following is great enough, then it's less important that one should discriminate between moral rules and other rules of the community.