An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (18 page)

Suppose an idea is backed by a strong emotion. Take our response to rotting meat.
Disgusting!
Someone floats the idea that rotting meat contains invisible spirits that seek to invade our bodies. In certain environments, that idea would make a certain kind of sense. It would make, if you will, powerful
emotional
sense. In any event, the norm “Do not eat rotting meat” enjoys potent emotional support. Thus it's not hard to imagine that, like a good jingle, once you hear it, you can't help but remember it. You're more likely to tell others, and they, like you, immediately resonate to the idea. And so on until the idea becomes firmly embedded in our culture. So it's no surprise that someone (like Mikhail or Hauser) might
think
that morality is innate: after all, it
does
seem to show up in every culture. But that's misreading the evidence, according to Nichols and Sripada. Morality is not innate. Specific biases or (as Nichols describes them) “affective resonances” are innate. The connections between biases and morality are forged by one's environment – in particular, the transmission of emotionally powerful ideas.

One advantage of this view is that innate biases do not strictly rule out the acceptance of quite exotic rules. To be averse to a given rule (e.g., “killing innocent humans”) does not mean that you can't accept it. It may just require increased cultural pressure. The pressures of conforming to your environment, along with repeated exposures to the stimulus, may suppress – if not ultimately extinguish – whatever innate aversion you possess toward some practice. So the accounts offered by Sripada and Nichols appear to have the resources to explain the key data. They can explain, first, how it is that children rapidly develop a “moral grammar” despite having no formal training. Second, they can explain both the moral similarities and the extreme moral differences across the globe.

5.6 Non-Nativist Doubts But even this conservative view of morality is too much for the philosopher Jesse Prinz. Prinz is not convinced that non-nativist accounts of morality cannot account for the data just mentioned. A less negative way of putting the same point: Prinz thinks the data are perfectly compatible with a non-nativist story. Let's begin with the case of so-called moral universals.

According to Prinz (2008b: 372), the moral nativist has to show at least three things to prove her case. First, she must show that there really are similar moral rules that appear in all cultures. This would be equivalent to showing that there is a Universal Moral Grammar, akin to the Universal Grammar posited by Chomsky. Second, the nativist must show that there are no plausible
non-nativist
ways of explaining those universal moral rules. If a non-nativist story can adequately explain the data, then unless there is some
other
reason that we must accept nativism, we should go with the simpler story: children learn the rules of morality in the same way that they learn so many other aspects of life. Finally, the nativist must show that the innate machinery responsible for making moral judgments is
specific
to morality; that is, she must show that this machinery is not the result of (merely) innate general-purpose cognitive mechanisms. After all, non-nativists like Prinz are not opposed to the idea that certain general-purpose learning mechanisms are innate. It's hard to see kids learn
anything
without some inborn capacity to form theories about their experiences. Despite the efforts of nativists like Hauser and Sripada, Prinz doubts that the nativist can show
any
of these things – much less
all
of them.

As far as the existence of universal moral rules goes, Prinz thinks the evidence is “depressingly weak” (2008b: 373). A little tour through the world's cultures quickly reveals that, for example, the
toleration of harm
is “as common as its
prohibition
.” Take the Yanamomo of the Amazon region, or the Ilongot of Luzon, or the highland tribes of New Guinea, or the Aztecs, or even sub-cultures within large-scale industrial societies: all reveal quite permissive attitudes toward violence. Some people are not only not averse to killing others; they celebrate it. Of course we like to think that pretty much everyone judges that harming others is wrong. But an honest appraisal of the world's people, says Prinz, casts serious doubt on the idea that there is a universal moral prohibition on harming others.

It may be responded that all cultures prohibit harm for no good reason. But the non-nativist can readily account for this universality. What good, asks Prinz, is harming someone if it serves no personal end? Indeed, it's often the case that harming others brings with it steep social costs. Children learn early on that misbehaving has its consequences. So to explain the (alleged) fact that all cultures prohibit harm for no good reason does not require positing an innate moral system. All it requires is the capacity to learn which things elicit negative reactions in others and perhaps the disposition to avoid those things. But this is a far cry from an innate morality. Prinz is prepared to accept the notion that we are biologically disposed to care about each other. He's also prepared to accept the idea that there may be “universal constraints on stable societies.” But these dispositions do not require an innate moral sensibility.

But what of the moral poverty of the stimulus argument? Recall that the non-nativist has to explain how it is that children distinguish between moral rules and conventional rules without the aid of explicit training. According to Prinz, it's quite possible that children can learn the distinction without the aid of explicit training. He cites evidence that suggests that caregivers
do
in fact exhibit different styles of “disciplinary intervention” depending on the kind of rules at issue. When it comes to enforcing moral rules, caregivers use “power assertions” and appeals to rights. When it comes to enforcing conventional rules, caregivers reason with children and appeal to “social order.” If this is right, then the data do not force us to accept moral nativism after all.

5.7 Conclusion The science of virtue and vice has barely moved beyond its infancy. What we
do
know about how humans come to have the moral beliefs and emotions they have is overshadowed by what we do
not
know. The focus on child development remains intense. The dispute that separates the moral nativist from the moral non-nativist hinges critically on (a) what the child knows at a young age and, more importantly, (b) the possible paths that could have plausibly led to that knowledge. If closer investigation reveals that a child's moral knowledge is quite rudimentary – that is, it's nothing like the kind of highly sophisticated knowledge that grounds human language – then the nativist's case begins to look weak. But if that knowledge is as rich as moral nativists claim, then the pressure is on the non-nativist to show how a child could have arrived at such knowledge. This may require observing very closely the natural social environments of children. But such observations face steep obstacles. For one thing, it would require three to four years of intense observation because – remember – the nativist's claim is that the child has not been exposed to enough moral stimuli to form the kind of judgments she comes to form. But the only way to know this is to observe
everything
a child has been exposed to during her upbringing. Moreover, scientific observations are often intrusive. What we need to see is the
natural
environment, and this may be hard to do. If you know scientists are observing your behavior, this may alter, perhaps unconsciously, how you behave.

Returning to themes that occupied us in the earlier parts of the chapter, we can at least feel more comfortable about the basics. Nobody seriously maintains that humans come into the world utterly blank – morally or otherwise. Even most non-nativists accept the idea that we're hard-wired to respond to the distress of others. A bit more controversial is the idea that we're hard-wired to develop, at around the age of 4, the ability to take on the perspective of others. It's clear that children come to use this information to make more sophisticated moral judgments, judgments that appear to be sensitive to an agent's intentions.

But the claim that morality (properly understood) is a product of evolution depends critically on the question of nativism. Is there enough evidence to show that moral thinking is innate? To show this, researchers must continue to study
what
children know and
how
they came to know it. This line of research rests on the reasonable assumption that if children possess a body of knowledge that did not come from their environment, then it must be innate. Another approach to the question of nativism is cross-cultural: Is there a Universal Moral Grammar that cuts across the human family? This line of research rests on the (perhaps shakier) assumption that traits that appear in all cultures, despite local differences, arise from a common human developmental program. Of course, even if both lines of research were to deliver powerful evidence in support of nativism, the case for the evolution of morality would remain incomplete. Is there enough evidence to show that morality was
selected for?
Belly-buttons, after all, were not selected for, but every person in every culture, despite their upbringing, has one. Maybe morality was a by-product of, say, bigger brains. Maybe morality was instilled in us by some supernatural power. The upshot of all this is that we're nowhere close to a settled view of the matter. The science of virtue and vice has yet to issue its final verdict.

We have reached the end of part I. Our journey has taken us from Darwin and selfish genes to ancient human communities to modern boys and girls in their first struggles with morality. Guiding us along the way has been the idea that morality is in our genes, that the same forces that shaped the structure of the human heart shaped the structure of the moral mind. In part II, our interest turns from how we think about right and wrong to the nature of right and wrong itself. Do the forces of Darwinian selection not only explain why we might judge that, say, premeditated murder is wrong, but also
justify
our judgment that it's is wrong? Can biology tell us what is good, what is bad? Should we guide our lives in accordance with evolutionary principles? These are some of the questions we'll tackle in the next part.

Further Reading Boehm, C. (2000) Conflict and the Evolution of Social Control.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
, 7, 1–2: 79–101.

Carruthers, Peter, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich (eds.) (2005/6)
The Innate Mind
, vols. 1 and 2 (Oxford University Press).

Chomsky, Noam and Carlos Peregrín Otero (2004)
Language and Politics
(AK Press).

Cima, Maaike, Franca Tonnaer, and Marc Hauser (2010) Psychopaths Know Right from Wrong But Don't Care.
Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience
. Advanced access:
http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/01/06/scan.nsp051.full
.

De Waal, Frans (2005)
Our Inner Ape
(Riverhead).

De Waal, Frans (2006)
Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
(Princeton University Press).

Eisenberg, Nancy and Paul Henry Mussen (1989)
The Roots of Prosocial Behavior in Children
. Cambridge Studies in Social and Emotional Development (Cambridge University Press).

Haidt, Jonathan (2006)
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
(Basic Books).

Hauser, Marc (2006)
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
(Ecco).

Mikhail, John (2009) The Poverty of the Moral Stimulus. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.),
Moral Psychology: The Evolution of Morality
, vol. 1 (MIT Press).

Nichols, Shaun (2004)
Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment
(Oxford University Press).

Pinker, Steven. (1994)
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
(Morris).

Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (ed.) (2008)
Moral Psychology: The Evolution of Morality
, vol. 1 (MIT Press).

Tancredi, Laurence (2005)
Hard-Wired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality
(Cambridge University Press).

Warneken, F. and M. Tomasello (2007) Helping and Cooperation at 14 Months of Age.
Infancy
, 11, 271–94.

From “What Is” to “What Ought To Be”: Moral Philosophy after Darwin
The truly dangerous aspect of Darwin's idea is its seductiveness.

(Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea) The move is effortless. We make it half a dozen times a day. And it's almost always unconscious. We hear “all natural,” “nature's own,” “naturally grown,” and we think
good
. Why? To say it's because we're suspicious of the
artificial
only reignites the question: Why do we regard what's natural as better for us than what is artificial or unnatural? Maybe we assume that our bodies (and our minds?) evolved under, if you will, “all-natural conditions.” So if we are the product of nature, it only makes sense that we should use “natural” products, no? We assume a kind of harmony must exist between the conditions that led to our being the way we are and the kind of things that can support our being the way we want to be.

Innovation is no doubt exciting. But too much innovation too quickly unnerves us. Consider some responses to genetically modified foods. Or cosmetic surgery. Violations of nature! When
in vitro
fertilization became a viable reproductive option in the 1970s there was (and in some corners there remains) a critical backlash. Some of the criticism was measured: Do we know what the long-term health risks are? Will the public discriminate against “test-tube babies”? But some of the criticism went much deeper: Do we know how this affects our very humanity? Arguably, the issue that inflames the most passionate response of this kind is human cloning. The bioethicist Leon Kass does not dawdle around the edges, but goes right for the heart of the matter: “We are repelled by the prospect of human cloning … because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. We
sense
that cloning represents a profound defilement of
our given nature
” (1997: 21). The political philosopher Michael Sandel invokes a similar kind of argument in his case against genetic enhancement. According to Sandel, the “danger” of genetic enhancement ultimately lies in the human attitudes that prompt it: “they represent a kind of
hyperagency
– a Promethean aspiration to remake nature, including human nature, to serve our purposes and satisfy our desires” (2004: 893). Like those who draw a connection between “all natural” and good, Sandel and Kass both assume that what is natural and what is good are closely aligned.

This sets the stage for the second phase of our inquiry: What is the relationship between values and nature? Between what is good and bad, on the one hand, and what is natural, on the other? And it's a short step from here to this question: What's the relationship between the natural forces that led to our species' existence and morality? Is it possible that some of the products of human evolution – not only things like competition, but also cooperation and love – also determine what is morally right? This question is independent of the one that occupied us in the previous chapters. For even if human moral thought was
not
selected for, we might still insist that
biological imperatives determine moral imperatives
. In the next several chapters we will explore the checkered history of this idea. The point of this exploration is primarily pedagogical: the lessons we learn from the early failures of evolutionary ethics directly influence its current shape. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with evolutionary ethics knows of its bad odor. Some, for example, will recognize its association with some of the most abhorrent social movements of recent memory: for example Nazism. The extent to which evolutionary theory influenced the social policies of early twentieth-century totalitarian regimes remains a hotly contested issue among historians. But our task is not historical so much as philosophical. Our task is get clear on why almost all efforts to use evolution as a guide to how we ought to behave are misbegotten. The move from “all natural” to “all good” is dangerously confused.

Darwin's discovery was, first and foremost, a
biological
discovery. And that's how most people regard it today. It's an idea that circulates among biologists and among more daring social scientists. Darwin himself made no serious effort to see his idea as anything but a biological discovery, a description of how species evolve. He even mocked the idea that his discovery represented a
prescription
, that is, guidance on how we ought to live our lives. Herbert Spencer had no such reservations. He was the first (and, arguably, the most enthusiastic) philosopher to regard Darwin's discovery as a
moral
discovery. The term
Social Darwinism
has come to be associated with the view that evolution by natural selection provides moral or practical guidance on how we ought to live our lives.

A contemporary of Darwin, Spencer was optimistic about the natural progression of the human race. As we'll see in chapter 7, the publication of Darwin's
Origin of Species
confirmed what Spencer had suspected: that social harmony is our natural state. It is where evolution naturally leads. And because it is our natural state, it is morally desirable. The idea that our natural state constitutes what is right still resonates today, whether we're talking about cloning or hair coloring. After all, to say that something
goes against nature
amounts to a criticism. At the time of Spencer's writing, Darwin's discovery represented the first
scientific
explanation of why going against nature was wrong. And who wants to argue with science?

Of course Spencer would have had more success had he gotten the science right. But, as we'll see, he didn't. Evolution by natural selection does not work in the way Spencer had assumed, so it's no wonder that Spencer went astray. In chapter 7 we review the first of two separate but related attacks on the supposed connection between rightness and nature. According to the first criticism (sometimes referred to as
Hume's Law
, after the Scottish philosopher David Hume), no moral claim follows logically from purely non-moral claims. Insofar as Spencer believed evolution
by itself
justified conducting our lives in this or that way, his thinking was fallacious. In chapter 8, we consider a related criticism (the so-called
Naturalistic Fallacy
) introduced by the philosopher G.E. Moore: any attempt to identify goodness with some other property (like social harmony) is bound to fail. According to Moore, goodness cannot be reduced to anything more basic since it
is
basic. For most philosophers, Hume's Law and the Naturalistic Fallacy decidedly closed the door on Social Darwinism. There was nothing more to say. If that's what E.O. Wilson meant by “biologicizing ethics,” then there was no good reason to remove ethics “from the hands of philosophers” since biology is simply not in the moral rule-giving business.

More recent philosophical thinking has perhaps been a bit more open-minded. In chapter 9 we revisit Moore and Hume. We put their criticisms under the microscope to see if in fact they're as fatal as some believe. As we'll see, some philosophers doubt that Hume and Moore showed what they claimed to show. Some offer ways of bridging the so-called
Is/Ought Gap
. Hume's Law, it's argued,
can
be broken. Others suspect that Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy is itself a fallacy, pointing to cases where his argument gives the incorrect answer. If these philosophers are right, then Social Darwinism may, in the end, live to fight another day. Of course, to remove two objections to a view does not in itself make that view correct. Even in the absence of explicit criticisms, defenders of Social Darwinism still owe us an argument as to why we should think the view is plausible, if not correct. Arguably, that argument has yet to materialize.

More recently, evolutionary ethics has taken on a different cast. As we'll see in chapters 10 and 11, contemporary philosophers have drawn a different lesson from Darwin: “biologicizing ethics” means reducing ethics to an illusion. Ethics (like beauty) is only in the eyes of the beholder, according to these philosophers. We
believe
that right and wrong are objective – or real. But we have evolution to thank for that, not the (so-called) objective moral order. On this approach, we don't believe that right and wrong are objective because we apprehend the
real
moral order. We believe it only because evolution has tricked us into believing it. In chapter 12, I'll suggest some possible ways to resist this line of attack. This is an important undertaking. For to take evolution seriously, while at the same time maintaining that some acts are objectively immoral, requires responding to this anti-realist argument. Some philosophers don't believe you can have it both ways. I'll lay out some options for those who believe you can.