Evolution and Morality

1. Evolution and Morality Some history & some arguments…

2. Evolution as anti-moral • Many Victorians (and creationists/ intelligent design proponents today) saw evolution as a threat to morality. • “If we evolved from fish, then either fish have souls or we have none.” (Miller, 1847). • But without a soul, why should we be concerned to ‘square our conduct’ with the moral code?

3. Darwinians • On the other hand, the Darwinians themselves seemed a pretty convincing counter-argument: • They were serious, reliable people. • They were hard-working. • They were respectable and honest and …

4. Still… • But the issue never went away. • In general the facts are often relevant to what’s right or wrong, whatever your ethical views are. • So if evolution is true, it very probably does have some moral consequences, even if they aren’t the ones Victorians (and some of our contemporaries) feared. • Ruse considers genetic counselling and the sickle-cell anemia gene as an example.

5. Evolutionary ethics • A much more controversial view is the claim that evolution, in some way or other, actually constitutes the basis of (real) moral values. • The standard version of this view holds that evolution is a good thing, and that we should do what we can to ensure it continues. • This is tied up with the ideology of progress: If evolution leads to progress and progress is a good thing, then evolution is the source and cause of good things. • This is easily confused with the fact that we ourselves (surely a good thing!) are the products of evolution. • Better yet, it’s tied up nicely with ideas about the virtues of competition and imperialism and capitalism.

6. Darwin • Darwin was certainly in favour, broadly, of capitalism. • But he also favoured vaccination. • This seemed to be in conflict with the special moral status of evolution, since it prevents those ‘weak enough’ to be vulnerable to smallpox from being ‘weeded out’– that is, it puts a stop to some selective pressures, changing the path of evolution.

7. Huxley • Huxley was even more explicit in opposition. • The vision of nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ seemed to Huxley to be in direct opposition to what we regard as moral behaviour. • “Cosmic evolution…is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before” (1901). • This leaves the question, where do we get our values (what is the ‘meaning of life’)?

8. Sociobiology • Efforts to link evolution to the meaning of life continued. • More recently (1970s & on) sociobiologists have argued for a link between ethics and evolution. • Our brains have evolved to have the structures they now have: “That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths.” (Wilson, 1975)

9. For comparison • “Have we the right to counteract, irreversibly, the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years, in order to satisfy the ambitions and the curiosity of a few scientists?” (Chargaff, 1976) • Ruse portrays this as (coming from an opponent of Wilson) another endorsement of the special status of evolution in ethics. • I’m not so sure (the point may be more a matter of healthy caution in messing with things than a literal endorsement of the ‘wisdom’ of the ‘blind watchmaker’).

10. The philosophers respond • We largely buy Thomas Huxley’s view: • Evolution is not, in itself, a good thing. After all, evolution can select for more virulent diseases as well as for healthier children! • More generally, evolution is a matter of fact about how life has developed. • But matters of fact, as Hume argued, simply don’t have implications for right or wrong, or for what’s good or bad. • Worse (and less philosophically contested) taking evolution to be in principle good leads to bizarre and false conclusions. • We work to alter the course of evolution all the time– the eradication of smallpox is an obvious example– and it is often a good thing! • The eradication of polio, if we can manage it, will be a good thing too. • Our values are obviously not in agreement with reverence for the course of evolution and all its products.

11. Human evolution • Even if we restrict what we treasure in evolution to human evolution, it can’t work. • First, it seems arbitrary. • Second, it runs into the smallpox/polio/etc. objection. • Third, we are not (and do not think we are) moral paragons ourselves– yet our mixed and conflicted nature is the product of evolution. Worse yet, what’s adaptive doesn’t necessarily fit with other important values (pain is very adaptive, happiness is often not very adaptive…)

12. Reproduction • If we declare instead that we must aim for evolutionary ‘success’ (for ourselves or for our species), the results are no better. • My values don’t make me want to maximize my reproductive potential. • And it would be disastrous for the entire world if people in general acted on that basis. • So we have values that just don’t jive with the notion that evolution in this sense should dictate our values. • Even when it comes just to human survival, there may be cases where we should think better of it…

13. What is vs. what should be • Here Wilson is pretty sharp: The ‘what is’ in human nature is to a large extent the heritage of a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer existence. When any genetic bias is demonstrated, it cannot be used to justify a continuing practice in present and future societies. (1975)

14. A different direction • Properly understood, Ruse says, evolution still has a lot to teach us about ethics. • In a sense, ethics itself should be regarded as a product of evolution. • Ethics is a common trait, broadly understood, appearing in all human communities. • There must be some evolutionary explanation for such a universal human trait. • So the question to start with is, how did/ how could we have come to evolve the sort of ethics we have?

15. What ethics is that? • Hmmm. It can be hard to say what we share, ethically speaking. • After all, it’s part of the background– what we notice are the things we differ about: cultural practices that are accepted in one place and time but rejected in others (slavery, infanticide, debtors’ prison, drug prohibition…) • But there are widely shared elements of ethics– one central element of these is altruism.

16. The evolution of altruism • Kin selection (Hamilton). • Reciprocal Altruism. • Evolutionary strategies and game theory (prisoner’s dilemma and the challenge of cooperation and trust). • Evolution provides insight into these, and these are clearly linked to our ideas about ethics!

17. The ethical illusion • Does this picture of how our ethical ‘tendencies’ came to be suggest that our ethical beliefs are some kind of collective illusion, something driven solely by ‘evolutionary expedience’? • Evolutionary ‘interests’ conflict (between male and female, young and old, etc.). • So our ethics are driven by some kind of (power-weighted) compromise between these, and continually in tension because of the tensions. • Worse yet, individual desires/ interests also conflict. The illusion may serve us collectively, but as individuals it might be better to be free of it!

18. The garden path • This line, though, simply endorses the pursuit of self-interest, ignoring the fact that ethical ideas (and their evolutionary roots in our biology) actually reconcile and often constrain (in successful ways) how we work out such conflicts. • Moral relativism at the level of different societies ignores how much is shared in the moral codes even when customs and conditions vary widely. • If evolution of ethics points towards moral relativism, would the evolution of our senses and consequently our beliefs/ ‘knowledge’ of the world point towards relativism about science, too?

19. The Evolution of Ethics I. Two key premises: • Animal social behaviour is ‘under the control of genes, and has been shaped into forms that give selective advantage’. • This holds for humans in particular. • Two extreme cases of altruism: • The ant-model: hard wired. • The ‘super-brain’ model: all calculation.

20. Human altruism • A limited game of chess- heuristic rules for openings instead of full searches! • But it works– such machines can now beat every human player; it won’t be long before no human can even compete with them. • Epigenetic rules: these are tendencies, rooted in genes and normal development. They make it easy to learn/acquire certain patterns of behaviour.

21. Examples • Fear of snakes, heights (spiders?). • Avoidance of incest. • Perhaps similar rules contribute to altruistic behaviour, making it an expression of our genes that emerges from normal development. • How can such rules compete with (also evolution-based) impulses to selfish behaviour?

22. The illusion theory • “Nature, therefore, has made us (via the rules) believe in a disinterested moral code, according to which we ought to help our fellows…In short, to make us altruistic in the adaptive, biological sense, our biology makes us altruistic in the more conventionally understood sense of acting on deeply held beliefs about right and wrong.”

23. What do R&W claim for this view? • Such is the modern scientific account of morality; at least the one most consistent with biology. • Does this lead to an agreement with some religious code, or an ethicists quasi-mathematical, human-independent notion of the moral code? • Biologically, ‘we function better because we believe (in an objective moral code).” • But on this view, ‘morality or, more strictly, our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends’. • Ethics (like Macbeth’s dagger) ‘serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance’. • Unlike the dagger, though, it is a collective illusion.

24. Illusions? • The illusion theory of ethics holds that evolution has led us to accept the existence of universal moral imperatives, even though there really aren’t such things. • But what is an illusion, anyway? • The notion of an illusion is contrastive: it involves a contrast between illusions and somehow similar states that are not illusions. • When we describe something as an illusion, we have a notion of what it is to not be an illusion.

25. What would objective moral imperatives be? • This is a tough question for Ruse and Wilson. • Their account of ‘epigenetic rules’ seems to suggest that the notion that any such rule is objectively morally constraining is (has to be) an illusion, fostered on us by the force of natural selection. • So what is it that we mistakenly take these rules to be? What is an objective moral imperative for Ruse and Wilson? • Mere divine commands fall to the Euthyphro objection, and I can’t think of a response that fills this gap in their account.

26. Worse • Do the rules Ruse and Wilson offer (for humans and for their intelligent termites) really strike you as ethical rules? • Do the pronouncements of Ayatollahs (human or termite) really tell us what we should take human or termite ethical rules to be? • Biological determinism of this sort seems to mis-categorize moral ideas, grouping them together with all kinds of ‘socially healthy’ habits and patterns… • It equates opportunistic, species-specific rules with more general principles governing the social behaviour of intelligent organisms.