An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (29 page)

Attempts to naturalize Aristotle, to offer a scientifically grounded virtue ethics, are just beginning to circulate among moral philosophers. It is too early, therefore, to know how successful these offerings will be. We do know, however, what one of the major players in the debate, Richard Joyce, thinks about naturalizing virtue ethics. We'll consider his response at §12.5. Let's look first at one final option for the moral realist.

12.4 Option 4: Moral Constructivism Perhaps Prinz was on to something. Recall that Prinz wanted to make room for moral facts but in a way that is perfectly compatible with (if not strongly dependent on) an evolutionary account of moral development. His solution was to adapt response-dependency views in a way that could accommodate the emotional basis of morality and moral realism. Moral facts are real, though mind-dependent. I believe that this is, in general, the way morality ought to be understood. Unlike Prinz, however, I believe that my account of morality yields the conclusion that moral facts are objective, not relative. Furthermore, my account is a straightforward
tracking account
, in the sense that our practical minds evolved in the way they did because they were tracking the moral facts. Had the moral facts been different, so would our moral minds.

My proposal has two parts. The first part involves a refinement of the story we told in part I about how we evolved to think morally. I argue that we developed a special sensitivity to how others would view our behavior (from a particular standpoint). The second part is a metaethical story, that is, a story about what moral judgments are and about what makes true moral judgments
true
(and, yes, I believe some moral judgments are indeed true). As I argue, these two stories together could be read to imply that the evolution of our particular moral sense was the result of the recognition of facts about
hypothetical agreement
. An early human, disposed to judge that others could reasonably object to what she was intent on doing and motivated by that judgment, enhanced reproductive fitness partly because such judgments were sometimes
true
. And this, by the way, constitutes a moral realism worthy of the name – or so I maintain.

First, we evolved a disposition to consider how others would likely react to our behavior. The adaptive pressures of social living would have put a premium on making judgments – often situated within emotions – to the effect that others could
reasonably disapprove
of some bit of conduct. An early human who cared deeply about how others who shared a particular social standpoint might respond to her action enjoyed the benefits of more cooperative exchanges than those early humans who did not. And this in turn conferred a reproductive advantage on that individual. Someone who did not consider and/or care about how others might respond to her behavior would not make for a trustworthy partner. After all, she would not restrain herself from performing acts that may harm or threaten others' interests.

But keeping track of how each of one's neighbors might respond to a range of behaviors would be difficult. And a miscalculation could be costly. For example, if you mistakenly think that Ogg doesn't mind being cheated (when it is actually his brother Agg who doesn't mind), you run a serious risk of being ostracized from the group. As I see it, an obvious – not to mention cheap – solution would be the adoption of a default standpoint: if your counterpart here were only seeking principles that all could agree to live by, would he have any reason to condemn your behavior? Bear in mind that the process leading up to this stage, like the processes leading up to mastery of syntax, say, would have been gradual. Over successive generations, the object of practical deliberation becomes increasingly abstract, to the point at which one is concerned with the evaluations of a
hypothetical observer
. Thus, by the time modern humans arrive on the scene, they have evolved moral minds that place special weight on how others – from a particular standpoint – would respond to proposed courses of action.

Of course it's one thing to speculate from the “armchair.” How might contemporary research bear on this story? Several lines of empirical research provide indirect support for the view. First, psychologists have for some time now maintained that the mind is innately equipped with a “theory of mind” (TOM) module or system, whose function is to ascribe beliefs and desires to conspecifics as a means of explaining and predicting behavior (see Baron-Cohen 1995; Carruthers
et al.
2005–6). While disputes remain about how to understand the TOM module (see Goldman 2006), a consensus has developed around the idea that our social understanding of the world is erected around a core set of assumptions about the mental states that move other people. But a TOM module is precisely the sort of cognitive precursor one would expect if one were independently drawn to the view that our moral sense is attuned to the evaluative attitudes of others. (And the fact that this ability develops quite early in children supports the adaptation hypothesis.) If the outputs of this module interface with one's first-person set of hypotheses about what sorts of experiences lead to what sorts of mental states, then through induction one can generate hypotheses about the sorts of evaluative attitudes others are likely to have under a range of circumstances.

Second, one of the more unexpected features of both many primate societies and extant hunter-gatherer tribes is a strong tendency toward
egalitarianism
(Binmore 1998; Boehm 1999; de Waal 1996). One explanation for this tendency is that “humans are singling out competitive or predatory behaviours that are likely to cause conflict, and, by suppressing them, they are, in effect, damping conflicts pre-emptively” (Boehm 1999: 85). Boehm thus supposes that “the first behaviour to be outlawed and controlled by a human group may well have been the expression of dominance” (1999: 97). It should be obvious then that an individual in such a climate would be careful to conform his behavior to standards his conspecifics could accept. After all, as we saw in chapter 4, people punish individuals who attempt to exploit or cheat other members of the group. Indeed, they will
pay
to do so. But these observations lend support to the prediction that individuals would be strongly inclined to govern themselves in ways that escape the condemnation of members of the group.

Third, in tandem with the previous studies, some biological anthropologists and game theorists argue that the earliest (recognizably) moral communities exemplify the social contract tradition of morality since, in the absence of a dominant ruler (or philosopher-king), decisions affecting the welfare of individuals in a group would have to be made collaboratively (see Binmore 1998; Skyrms 1996). Indeed, some experimental results show that when individuals across a wide cultural range are asked to choose principles of distributive justice, they almost always fix on the same principles that survive the constructivist approach sketched below (Frohlich and Oppenheimer 1993).

Finally, if, as I have argued, selection would have favored individuals who adopted a particular standpoint in evaluating the permissibility of a given action, a standpoint marked by hypothetical agreement, then one should expect to see evidence of this perspective embedded in cross-cultural norms. There is a presumption in favor of such evidence. From Buddhism (“Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find harmful”) to Judaism (“What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man”) to Islam (“No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself”), core social norms appear to be constrained by considerations of fairness: one extends to oneself only those principles for social living that others could accept (see Hauser 2006: 357ff.). Apparently, even among divergent cultures, where a variety of norms obtain, there will remain a fixed deliberative point that commands our attention in practical matters.

So much for genealogy. The second part concerns the nature of morality itself. Recall Prinz's version of moral wrongness: an action is wrong just in case that action tends to produce feelings of disapproval in observers. This version of wrongness relies crucially on how things would be (or would have been) under normal conditions. Philosophers refer to this as a
counterfactual
. Counterfactuals, I believe,
do
play a crucial role in moral judgments. However, not exactly the role Prinz supposes. On my account, an action is wrong just in case others – who have an interest in general rules governing behavior –
would
tend to object to that action. This account extends the pioneering work of the philosopher T.M. Scanlon, who was himself following in the footsteps of the philosopher John Rawls. Scanlon argues that acts are wrong just in case they could be reasonably rejected by anyone seeking principles everyone could live with. Morality, therefore, is a construction or procedure. Right and wrong is whatever survives this hypothetical procedure.

Emotions, while they may regularly attend such judgments, need not. According to this “Scanlonian” picture, that someone
could reasonably object
to a particular behavior is enough to make that action wrong.
Moral constructivism
is the name some philosophers use to describe the view that facts about how others would respond to one's conduct constitute moral facts or truths themselves. On the constructivist account, moral facts are determined by, very roughly, the principles that would survive scrutiny from a particular standpoint. Evolutionary theory, then, does not undermine moral realism. I contend that evolutionary theory explains why moral realism is likely to be true.

There remain thorny questions here about realism and objectivity. Is the view I am proposing
realist
, in the sense that it identifies moral facts? Here I believe the answer is straightforward: yes. It's not difficult to suppose that, on some occasions at least, there
is
a fact of the matter as to what someone could reasonably object to, someone (that is) interested in finding rules everyone could live by. Moreover, moral facts are distinct in important ways from the attitudes people happen to have on a given occasion. What justifies a given moral principle
P
is
not
that
we think P
withstands scrutiny from the relevant procedure of construction, but that
P
withstands scrutiny from the relevant procedure,
whether or not anyone has bothered to consider the matter
. By virtue of depending on counterfactuals (i.e., what agents
would
agree to under certain conditions), at least some moral truths can be strongly mind-independent, obtaining even when evaluated against worlds in which there are no rational agents.

But what of objectivity? This is a more complicated question. On the one hand, the view does not support (what I'll call)
local relativism
, according to which moral facts are determined by what I or you happen to think or feel on this occasion. Indeed, moral facts are more independent still: even if
everyone
happened to think that a particular action was permissible, they could be wrong. They could be wrong because no one happened to consider whether that action could be rejected from the standpoint described above. This leads me to construe this view as a species of moral objectivity. We can actually discover which acts are wrong, and this discovery could demonstrate that we were all previously mistaken about its moral status. On the other hand, the view does not rule out (what might be called)
transcendental relativism
, according to which moral facts are relative to facts about human nature as we find it. Thus, if we can conceive of a world in which an act could not be reasonably rejected, although it
could
be reasonably rejected here in this world, then it would seem that the moral facts could change. It would be permissible there but impermissible here. It's hard to wrap one's mind around this possibility, but I don't see how to deny the possibility. Does this render the view relativistic? Well, as noted above, that might ultimately depend on the terms we use, not on the world itself. In the end, I suppose it's up the reader to make this decision.

12.5 Objections to the Realist Options How promising are these options? Should the moral realist rest content that there
is
a place for moral facts in the world after all? The answer depends of course on how well these various options survive careful scrutiny. Richard Joyce has given what he considers close scrutiny to these options and is not persuaded. We have already discussed the virtues and vices of the first option – denying moral nativism. Joyce focuses his attention on the remaining options: response dependency, naturalized virtue ethics, and moral constructivism. In this final section, I'll present in brief Joyce's concerns about each.

Joyce lumps response dependency and moral constructivism into the same philosophical heap, on the grounds that they both see moral facts as determined by how certain observers would respond to certain acts. I myself noted the similarities between Prinz's view and my own, so this is not an entirely unwarranted move on Joyce's part. Joyce sees three problems facing (so-called) response-dependent views: the incompleteness problem, the practical relevance problem, and the content problem.

The incompleteness problem, according to Joyce, refers to the incomplete specification of the circumstances under which judges or observers make their responses. Joyce fixes his discussion on Prinz (though his objection presumably extends to my constructivist position). Joyce asks: “Moral wrongness (for [someone]
X
) is whatever would cause
X
disapprobation in circumstances of
full information
? of
impartial attention
? of
calm reflection
? or what?” (2008: 252). The reason this matters is because what would tend to cause disapprobation in
X
, if
X
is fully attending to the issue, is likely to be different than if
X
is somewhat distracted. And this matters because this means that whether or not some act is wrong will vary quite widely (not to mention arbitrarily). But even if we insist that wrongness depends on what would cause disapprobation in
X if X were fully attending to the matter
, there will still remain variation in what would cause disapprobation in
X
if
X
were raised in the wilds of Zambia or if
X
were a despondent American teen or if
X
were an elderly Jew in Tel Aviv. All this seems to introduce a degree of relativism far more extreme than initially supposed. According to Joyce, “the monster looming over Prinz's version of naturalism is relativism of the most radical and rampant rank” (2008a, 2008b: 252).