An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (26 page)

Mixing my metaphors, I would offer this. Imagine that there's a short-circuit in the dashboard display panel of your car that causes an “engine warning” light to go off and on arbitrarily. Imagine further that the light is in no way connected to the engine itself. So the next time the light goes on, there's no reason to believe that there
really is
an engine problem – even though that's what we normally think. Believing so is (as we might say) redundant. We already know everything that needs to be known about why the light is going on. The light goes on whether or not there's an engine problem. Of course, there
could
be an engine problem, but that would be a total coincidence. And as far as believing it goes, we would need evidence from a source other than the engine warning light itself. Likewise in the case of the book: if you would believe that you were reading a book at this very minute whether or not you were, then – in the absence of evidence from a source other than the belief itself – there's no justification for believing that there really is a book in front of you now.

This is the thrust of Ruse and Wilson's Argument from Redundancy: “The evolutionary explanation makes the objective morality redundant, for even if external ethical premises did not exist, we would go on thinking about right and wrong in the way that we do” (1986/1994: 431). Like the dashboard warning light, our moral sense “goes on” not because we are registering some independent moral realm. It “goes on” because it was installed by a process that rewarded survival and reproduction – nothing more. In other words, the point is not to detect a separate realm of moral facts. The point is
reproductive success
. In Ruse and Wilson's language, we would come to believe that some acts are immoral
whether or not
those acts really were immoral, given the facts of Darwinian evolution. This moves us in the direction of a theme that underlies most arguments for evolutionary anti-realism: explaining the
causes
behind our tendency to make moral judgments undermines any
reason
to believe in an objective morality. Let's spend time on this idea.

10.6 Causation, Justification, and … a Rotting Corpse Suppose the long-winded story we told in part I is correct. Suppose, that is, that the reason we tend to judge that some acts are wrong is fully explained by that tendency's impact on individual fitness: those who think and behave morally, generally speaking, make more babies (than those who don't make such judgments). If this is correct, then our moral beliefs are not the result of responding to a separate moral realm. Instead, our moral beliefs are the result of a causal process unconnected to any moral realm at all. And what does this imply? Well, once we have a causal story that does not require the existence of morality, then what reason do we have to seek out a
justification
for our moral judgments? Apparently none. In this case, once we know what caused our moral judgments, there's no need to investigate whether those judgments are
true
. To do so is to confuse causation and justification. With the help of (yet another) analogy I think we can get straight on this difference between what I'll call the
Explanatory Project
and the
Justificatory Project
. As Ruse emphasizes, offering an explanation of our moral sense (the Explanatory Project) makes justifying moral principles (the Justificatory Project) “inappropriate” or unnecessary.

Imagine stumbling upon a rotting corpse in a city alleyway. “Oh,
gross
! Disgusting!” Your response would be immediate and involuntary. And I would wager that individuals in every culture on the planet would have just the same response to a rotting corpse. I would even wager that small children would react similarly. Now what best explains this uniformity of response? As a matter of human psychology, why are humans so prone to these “gross-judgments” in response to rotting corpses? If the question is posed at the level of the species, the answer is not hard to come by. An Explanatory Project that addresses our “gross-judgments” should be easy to complete.

We know now quite a lot about the parasites and bacteria associated with rotting corpses, so physical proximity to them can be a serious health hazard. And so it was hundreds of thousands of years ago. This then would have been an adaptive problem faced by our distant ancestors: how to avoid rotting corpses. But the solution is obvious. That early ancestor (who most likely pre-dated hominids) who was innately equipped with the tendency to regard corpses as “gross” out-reproduced his neighbors who did not have that tendency, all else being equal. Equipping early humans with a tendency to regard some things as gross would have been cheap and highly effective. Completing this Explanatory Project would require spelling out how our “gross-judgments” are particularly attuned to certain perceptual cues, but there's nothing terribly mysterious about how this might go. We would not need to know anything about grossness
itself
, for the simple reason that “grossness” itself is not the issue. That, we might say, is a useful fiction. The issue is explaining the causal process that triggers those judgments. All we need to do is assign a team of cognitive psychologists to the task of explaining the causes behind our judgments.

But now imagine this. Imagine that you aren't alone when you come upon that rotting corpse. A friend sees (and smells) what you see (and smell). But, quite remarkably, your friend does
not
respond as you do. She looks curiously at the corpse as you recoil in disgust. Perplexed, you ask your friend: Don't you think that that's gross? She responds flatly: “No.” No seriously, you say, that's
gross
! “No, it's interesting,” she replies. Your friend appears to be sincere. But clearly she's made a mistake, you think. And so you point out to her (in case she missed it) the putrefying flesh, the rancid odor, the blind, busy work of maggots. “Yes, I see all that, but I don't find it gross,” she says. You're dumbfounded. She's clearly mistaken, you think. She's made an
error
. There's something about the scene that she has failed to grasp, namely, that that corpse is gross. The corpse has the property
being gross
, and your friend – despite perceiving its
other
properties: its odor, its appearance – has failed to perceive
that
property.

So you attempt to
justify
your judgment, to show why your judgment that the corpse is in fact gross is
true
while her judgment (that it's not gross) is false. You accept the evolutionary account of why people tend to make the judgments they make in response to rotting corpses, but you think there's an additional account, an account of what
justifies
the judgments that something is gross. This account can help decide who's correct and who's incorrect in their “gross-judgments.” Here we can hire a team of “grossologists” (from – where else? – the Department of Grossology) to determine whether or not grossness is objectively present in the corpse. This would be the Justificatory Project.

All this of course is silly. The Justificatory Project in this case is wrongheaded. What makes the project wrongheaded is that, on reflection, “gross-judgments” are not the kind of things that need justification. Furthermore, we don't think of them as the kind of things that can really be true or false. They're really just a matter of taste – or should I say
dis
taste? They're not like judging that the Eiffel Tower is 180 meters tall or that the United Nations is ineffective. In these cases, we have some idea of what the world would have to be like in order for the judgment to accurately represent the world. But “gross-judgments” are not like this. When you judge that some object is gross, there's no need to spend too much time investigating the object, as if by looking closely enough (perhaps under a microscope) we'll detect that elusive property of grossness and thus justify your judgment. A better use of our time would be to investigate
you
. What is it about you – your genetic makeup, your upbringing, and so on – that
explains
why you made that judgment? After all, you could have had an unusual experience as a child that explains, for example, why you find spaghetti gross. Regarding our earlier example, your friend could be a forensic pathologist with a long history of examining corpses, and this would explain why she doesn't find the rotting corpse gross.

Recall the upshot of the Explanatory Project. We can explain all that needs to be explained about our “gross-judgments” without ever having to assume there
really are
things with a special property – grossness – that humans are uniquely capable of perceiving. Thus, there's no reason to go hunting for reasons why our “gross-judgments” are true. Since we know everything we need to know about why the judgment is made, we need not bother with asking: But is the judgment justified? Did the person have sufficient grounds for thinking the judgment true? In the case of evolution and ethics, the Explanatory Project makes the Justificatory Project inappropriate. Here's how Ruse makes the point: “sometimes when one has given a causal analysis of why someone believes something, one has shown that the call for reasoned justification is inappropriate – there is none” (1998: 124). This is the same point Ruse was making more than ten years earlier (1986: 102): “All one can offer is a causal argument to show why we hold ethical beliefs. But once such an argument is offered, we can see that that is all that is needed.”

10.7 Conclusion Wilson and Ruse have revived evolutionary ethics, but not at all in the shape that Spencer (and perhaps Rachels) imagined. The critical response to Spencer gave the impression that evolution had no bearing on substantive ethical issues. The domain of
what is
cannot influence
what ought to be
. And so it was thought that evolutionary ethics perished in a blaze of bad philosophy. Ruse jokes that all one needed to do was “murmur the magical phrase ‘naturalistic fallacy’” in order to turn the page and move on to another topic.

But Wilson and Ruse envisioned a new relationship between evolution and ethics. Spencer thought that evolution
supports
ethics. Wilson and Ruse think evolution
destroys
ethics (at least in the sense that ethics consists in objective rules). The change in approach to evolutionary ethics is best reflected in the following: The evolutionist is no longer attempting to derive morality from factual foundations. His/her claim now is that there are no foundations of any sort from which to derive morality … Since, clearly, ethics is not nonexistent, the evolutionist locates our moral feelings simply in the subjective nature of human psychology. At this level, morality has no more (and no less) status than that of the terror we feel at the unknown – another emotion which undoubtedly has good biological value. (Ruse 1986: 102) To support their view, Wilson and Ruse offer several arguments. According to the Argument from Idiosyncrasy, our moral beliefs are the result of an idiosyncratic process, and had that process been different, our moral standards would have been different. But one implication of moral objectivity is the idea that moral standards do
not
change. What's wrong is wrong – no matter what your beliefs and background. According to the Argument from Redundancy, believing in the objectivity of ethics is redundant since we would believe in the objectivity of ethics
whether or not
ethics was in fact objective. This can be further understood by distinguishing the
causal
processes that led to our moral beliefs, on the one hand, from the (alleged)
justification
of those beliefs, on the other. Ruse argues that understanding the causal processes makes justifying our moral beliefs unnecessary. There are no objective moral properties in the world – just as there are no objective gross properties in the world. We believe and talk as if there are, but this can be explained without referring to such things. Our explanation need only point out biological and environmental causes. Evolution has, in the end, fooled us.

Further Reading Sober, Elliott (ed.) (1994)
Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology
, 2nd edn. (MIT Press).

Wilson, E.O. (1975)
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
(Harvard University Press).

The availability of a non-moral genealogy appears to leave us with no reason to think that any of our moral beliefs are true.

(Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality) In 2006 Richard Joyce published a book-long defense of evolutionary anti-realism, arguably the most comprehensive to date. The structure of that book parallels the structure of this book. He begins by defending the “provisional and to a degree speculative” hypothesis that human morality is innate. This is the hypothesis we explored in part I. Joyce then asks what the philosophical significance of this hypothesis is. Does it
vindicate
morality, as Spencer
¹
supposed? Or does it
undermine
it? Joyce defends the latter hypothesis. Like Ruse, Joyce denies that morality has an objective basis. Joyce's discussion of evolutionary anti-realism is the most recent and most thorough, so it's worth spending some time piecing together his argument. In chapter 12 we'll consider some responses to Joyce's argument.

11.1 Napoleon Pills To motivate his argument for evolutionary anti-realism, Joyce conjures up the following thought-experiment. Imagine that there exists a pill that, if taken, will cause you to believe that Napoleon
lost
the battle of Waterloo. And imagine that there exists a pill that, if taken, will cause you to believe that Napoleon
won
the battle of Waterloo. Finally, imagine that there exist corresponding antidotes. So, for example, if you were to take the “Napoleon lost the battle”
antidote
(after having taken the pill that causes the belief that Napoleon lost the battle), you would no longer believe that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo. You wouldn't believe that it's
false
that Napoleon lost the battle. Rather, you would neither believe nor disbelieve that Napoleon lost that battle. You would be agnostic. (Incidentally, these pills leave the rest of your beliefs intact.) Now imagine that you become convinced that, as a young person,
you
were surreptitiously given the pill that causes the belief that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo. Let's say that you have unimpeachable evidence that you yourself were slipped that pill (suppose your family physician produces medical records under the threat of legal action). Of course, you assume that you “learned” that Napoleon supposedly lost that battle in school, but you can't honestly say how you came to have this belief. What is clear now, however, is that (a) you believe that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo and (b) this belief was caused by taking the relevant pill. Take a second to let this sink in.

The question Joyce poses at this point is this:
Should you take the antidote?
Should you take the pill that extinguishes the belief that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo? In case there's any question about your motives, let's make it clear that (as you do now) you have a standing interest in having justified true beliefs – or, if you prefer, knowledge. So, should you take the antidote? Joyce thinks
of course
. At the very least, your belief that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo should be “placed on the dubious list.” You should be agnostic about Napoleon's efforts at Waterloo. Should you believe that Napoleon
won
at Waterloo? No. According to Joyce, you should withhold all judgments regarding Napoleon at Waterloo. You are not justified in holding any belief regarding
what really happened
at Waterloo.

Why? What lesson is this example supposed to uncover? Joyce thinks the lesson is this: “on some occasions knowledge of a belief's origins can undermine it” (2006: 179). As in Joyce's example, if a belief does not originate in the “normal” way, we ought not to accept it. What do we mean by “normal”?

Let's unpack the lesson this way: if the belief that
p
(where
p
just stands for some proposition like “Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo” or “Today is Monday” or “Two plus two equals four”) is not caused directly or indirectly by
the fact that p
, then you are not justified in holding that belief. This is not the most perspicacious definition but it'll do for now. In Joyce's example, your belief that Napoleon lost at Waterloo was not caused by directly perceiving the event (obviously), but nor was it caused indirectly – by, say, a chain of testimony linking you to the event. Instead, your belief about Napoleon was caused by something
entirely unrelated
to the (alleged) fact. It was caused by a pill. This should short-circuit your confidence in the belief's truth.
²
Here we have a situation in which knowledge of the origins of the belief undermines it. So to the extent that you care about having true beliefs, you should care about the fact that your belief about Napoleon was caused by something other than the (alleged) fact itself. Hence, you should take the antidote.

If Joyce is right about all this, what follows about morality? Well, suppose it's true that our moral beliefs were caused, by and large, by the long processes of Darwinian selection. But we have learned in chapters 6 to 10 that these processes were not guided by what is morally better or morally worse. Our explanations of why we have the moral beliefs we do, do not refer to the moral realm. Our explanations are purely
descriptive
. Darwinian explanations do not indicate how things
ought
to be or identify some forms as
good
or
bad
. As far as our moral minds are concerned, Joyce argues that “the function that natural selection had in mind for moral judgment was [nothing] remotely like
detecting a feature of the world
, but rather something more like
encouraging successful social behavior
” (2006: 131). Contrast this with our visual system. Our visual system was selected for because its apparent purpose (visually detecting objects in our environment) was identical with its actual purpose (visually detecting objects in our environment). In other words, we can't explain why our visual system evolved without mentioning
the actual things we visualized
. Evolution did not fool us into believing there were actual mind-independent objects in our midst. Such objects really are in our midst (the skeptics be damned).

According to Joyce, we
can't
say the same thing about our moral minds. In that case, we
can
explain why our moral system of beliefs evolved without mentioning actions
actually being right or wrong
. In this case, evolution has fooled us.

Let's put all this together. Our moral beliefs were not caused by the (alleged) moral facts, but by processes entirely unrelated to those (alleged) facts. But the example of the Napoleon pills supposedly showed that if the belief that
p
is not caused directly or indirectly by
the fact that p
, then you are not justified in holding that belief. Thus the evolutionary anti-realist's conclusion: as far as our moral beliefs are concerned, we are not justified in believing in them. We should take the morality antidote. We should withhold beliefs about what our moral duties
really are
. Indeed, Joyce suggests that we “keep an open mind about whether there exists anything that is morally right and wrong, [and accept] the possibility that describing the world in moral terms is in the same ballpark as taking horoscopes seriously” (2006: 181).

In all likelihood we'll continue to
use
moral language. But, like Santa Claus language, it will be for purposes other than describing how things really are in the world. That is, we may talk
as if
Santa Claus delivered presents last night, but saying such things won't be construed (at least by those of us old enough to know better) as a bona fide attempt to explain how the presents really appeared. Saying such things, one might argue, is a useful way to perpetuate a valuable cultural tradition. On this analogy, then, moral language might be used for all sorts of things. But if the evolutionary anti-realist is correct, one thing it
cannot
be used for (at least by those who know better) is to describe the way the world really is. In the final analysis, nothing in the world is objectively right or wrong or good or bad. Believing as much is a trick of evolution.

11.2 A Darwinian Dilemma About the time that Richard Joyce was developing his arguments for evolutionary anti-realism, Sharon Street was developing a line of argument that came, more or less, to the same conclusion. Street drew attention to a dilemma confronting the moral realist. A dilemma in this context means that one has two choices in responding to a challenge, but neither choice looks good. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't. The dilemma, in Street's eyes, has to do with the
relationship
between the evolutionary forces that played a “tremendous role” in shaping our moral minds, on the one hand, and the (alleged) independent moral truths, on the other. The moral realist can either
deny
that there is a relationship or
explain
that relationship. According to Street, neither choice looks promising.

Like Ruse and Joyce, Street moves from speculations about how our moral sense evolved to “what might be said philosophically.” And what might be said philosophically, according to Street, is this: “realist theories of value prove unable to accommodate the fact that Darwinian forces have deeply influenced the content of human values” (2006: 109). As such, realist theories of value should be abandoned. Instead, we should adopt
anti
-realism. If anti-realism turns out to be true, then there are no moral facts or truths that hold independently of our attitudes. This means that morality is all in our heads.

The outlines of Street's argument should by now look familiar. She begins with the same set of ideas we rehearsed in part I. She asserts that “natural selection has had a tremendous
direct
influence on … ‘our more basic evaluative tendencies,’ and these basic evaluative tendencies, in their turn, have had a major influence on the evaluative judgments we affirm” (2006: 119–20). The processes of evolution have made us
prone
to accepting some moral judgments over others. (Think about our gustatory preferences: we naturally prefer brownies over broccoli.) Echoing a point made by Wilson and Ruse, Street maintains that, had these basic evaluative tendencies been different, the
content
of our evaluative systems (that is, the things we actually value) would have been different. Street is hitching her wagon to the same horse Wilson and Ruse and Joyce (and plenty of others as well) have: evolution shaped our moral minds.

Now what is the moral realist supposed to say in response to this? Remember the moral realist insists that there are moral facts or truths that hold
independently
of what we think or feel or desire, that is, independently of our evaluative attitudes. As a comparison, think of the earth's shape. The earth's roundness does not depend on how you or I or anyone judges the matter. The earth was round before we believed it, and it'll still be round (barring cosmic collisions) even after there's no one around to believe it. Indeed, had the planet been entirely devoid of sentient life, the earth
still
would have been round.
³
Analogously for the moral realist, moral truths hold independently of all our evaluative attitudes. For example, killing others for fun is wrong no matter what anyone happens to believe or feel or desire. It was wrong before we believed it and would have been wrong even if none of us believed it. The challenge to the moral realist, then, is to say what the relationship is between these truths, on the one hand, and the idea that evolution shaped our moral minds, on the other.

The first option is to
deny
that there is any relationship at all. The moral realist might maintain that the evolutionary forces that shaped our moral minds have nothing to do with the existence and structure of these independent moral truths. However, as Street suggests, this seems to imply that these evolutionary forces exerted a “purely distorting influence” on our evaluative judgments. She likens the situation to trying to sail to Bermuda, but leaving yourself entirely at the mercy of the wind and the tides. The wind and the tides are uninterested in where you want to go and, in all likelihood, will push you in the wrong direction. Of course, should you wash up on the shores of Bermuda, this would be a remarkable coincidence to the say the least. What worries Street is that if you accept the premise that evolutionary forces indeed had a tremendous influence on our moral minds, then most of our beliefs about what is right and wrong, good and bad, are “in all likelihood mostly off-track.” After all, they're “utterly saturated and contaminated with [an] illegitimate influence” (2006: 122). But it seems quite implausible to say that we're mostly mistaken about the things we take to be good and bad, right and wrong. Surely we have a pretty good handle on these things. According to Street, since denying any relationship at all (between the evolutionary forces that shaped our moral minds and independent moral truths) leads to this skeptical result, the moral realist had better abandon the option. The moral realist ought to tackle the other option. And the other option – you'll recall – is to try to explain what that relationship is.

The most obvious way to explain this relationship is by way of a
tracking account
. On this account, some acts have the objective property of being prohibited, and we evolved a mental faculty to “track” that property. This account is modeled on other mental systems. The reason we have a visual perception system, for example, is because there exist objects in the physical world that happen to reflect ambient light, and our visual perceptual faculty evolved to track those objects. Doing so was biologically beneficial. In the moral case, the reason we are disposed to make moral judgments is because such judgments are, by and large,
true
, and our moral faculty evolved to track those truths. Doing so was biologically beneficial. We reviewed these matters in chapter 3. Being able to recognize what is morally prohibited or morally required, all things being equal, confers greater reproductive advantages on an individual than being unable to recognize such things. Seeing the moral truth, like seeing the edge of a cliff, is good for you – and for your offspring.