On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection

[The] history of human societies from hunting and gathering to early industrialism is, in many ways, a history of structural elaborations that imposed constraints on individuals and that legitimated these constraints with ideologies.

In Darwinian Politics, Paul H. Rubin made repeated references to a book by Alexandra Maryanski and Jonathan H. Turner called The Social Cage – Human Nature and the Evolution of Society published in 1992. The present book from 2008 is by the same two authors and (from what I understand) revisits some of the same themes. Compared to Rubin, Maryanski and Turner discuss some of the same topics and even reach somewhat similar conclusions. However, they do it from very different perspectives. Rubin is an economist, while Maryanski and Turner are sociologists. Though anchored in their own academic discipline, On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection is as much a book in biology as it is in sociology and contains some powerful internal critique of sociology and the social sciences in general. Maryanski and Turner reject the so-called Standard Social Science Model that has downplayed biological and evolutionary perspectives and led to a "social constructivist" outlook in sociology and elsewhere in the social sciences. On the other hand, Maryanski and Turner also distance themselves from what they take to be “the other extreme”, that culture and social structure is to be explained largely by biology – “a mistake that early sociobiologists once made”.

As its title indicates, the book traces the evolutionary origins and transformations of human societies. The discussion is incredibly detailed and goes back to the very beginnings more than 65 million years ago to find the common ancestor of monkeys and apes. The first human societies (hunter-gather societies) do not enter the scene until chapter six. Chapters seven, eight and nine discuss horticultural societies, agrarian societies, and industrial (and post-industrial) societies respectively. By far the most interesting chapter of the book is the tenth and final one, entitled "Strangers in a Strange Land: Evolved Apes Living in Sociocultural Cages". This concluding chapter can be read by itself, and for many readers this will be all they need.

Rather than starting out with ideological assumptions or utopian presuppositions about "the good society", Maryanski and Turner ask "What behavioral propensities did natural selection install in hominids over the long course of their biological evolution?", and by answering this question they can answer another: "What patterns of social organization are compatible or incompatible with these propensities?" The general conclusion they reach is that industrial (and post-industrial) societies are far more compatible with human nature than any other societal formations since hunting and gathering.

For many generations, social critics of many stripes have held a highly romanticized view of pre-industrial societies as pleasant places to live. Whatever the hypothesized pathology of industrial society - alienation, marginality, egoism, anomie - early sociologists never questioned the validity of their comparisons of individuals living in pre-industrial to those in industrial societies. In fact, they tended to have a collectivist view of human nature that fit monkeys more than apes.

... criticisms of modernity are based on a flawed view of human nature. Humans are not the descendants of monkey ancestors, as most sociological criticisms of modernity imply. A monkey might like the world that sociologists hypothesize existed before industrialism [...] In contrast, an ape would find pre-industrial societies after hunting and gathering highly constraining. And, if we look at the historical record, humans left pre-industrial formations of horticulture and agrarianism as quickly as they could, once another option presented itself.  

In contrast to the chronological disposition of the book, I will opt for a more thematic approach and comment on a number of the themes in the book.

On human nature

Maryanski and Turner note that "many sociologists reject the idea of talking about human nature, even as they incorporate untested assumptions about human needs". The authors insist that by ignoring biology, "we miss important insights that can add a great deal to sociological explanations". They appealingly suggest that we view human nature as "a weak but persistent pressure, manifesting itself as individual preferences or a sine qua non to behave in certain ways". These "subtle and persistent pressures from humans’ biological nature have always been present", they write, "pushing sociocultural formations toward those more compatible with humans’ ape ancestry". After all, humans are animals that evolved like all other animals, and

... despite the spectacular, if not dangerous, cultural systems and social structures that our large brains allow us to construct, these do not obviate the influence of biology on human behaviour and social organization, now or in the distant past.

On individualism

The authors point out that "even with some hardwired bioprogrammers for sociality, there can be little doubt that the great apes (and the common ancestors of the great apes and hominids) revealed clear behavioral propensities for individuality". Humans are "programmed to feel comfortable in fluid, weak-tie groups". They further note that humans are indeed "far more individualistic than many sociologists feel comfortable admitting, given their collectivist ideological biases". Interestingly, the conflict between individualism and collectivism may, they think, "be lodged in human neuroanatomy, as much as in cultural ideologies" and that, "given a choice, humans appear to gravitate to sociocultural formations that give them choice and options".

On social cages

The history of human societies is, in many ways, a history of constraints imposed on individuals. Maryanski and Turner call these (systems of) constraints "social cages". They stress that there was not just one social cage, but many, and that they were often successively embedded in each other. They talk about the cages of kinship and power:

• The cage of kinship was based on kinship-units like nuclear families, lineages, clans, phratries, and moieties, successively encompassing the entire population and leading to individuals being "trapped in a web of kinfolk".
• This cage of kinship was eventually replaced the cage of power. A bureaucratic structure was first superimposed over the kin-based structure, eventually replacing the kinship system with a more bureaucratized state.

These social cages came increasingly in conflict with human nature as they

... limited individualism and mobility, imposed pervasive systems of authority from which there was no escape, and converted community into yet another cage that restricted rather than facilitated individualism and free movement.

On the evolution of the state 

Once the economy could generate a surplus of resources over and above those needed for survival, this surplus could be taxed. As power was consolidated and centralized, more of the economic surplus was usurped and used to support elite privilege and repress dissent over the perceived unfairness. Ideologies are employed to legitimate the power of leaders and to convince subordinates of their obligations to conform. Religious beliefs also began to legitimate power, with leaders being seen as god-like or as sanctioned by the supernatural. Religious elites often entered into "unholy" alliances with political elites to justify and legitimate the use of political power to maintain elite privilege.

Later on, law was also used as a more secular alternative to religious edicts to increase the power of the state: "law increasingly gave polity the rights to regulate and control. When law was effective, it could bestow legitimacy on the state".

The authors emphasize that once political leadership was given, it could not so easily be taken away. Once consolidation of power was initiated, "it continued because those with power used their power to gain more power". As the state evolved, the options of individuals to escape the cage of power declined. They may have migrated when possible, "but they typically left one cage and entered another".

In the end, it remains somewhat unclear whether they see government as arising as a response to some societal need, or if governments took control simply because they could. They repeatedly talk about governments growing in response to "selection pressures from regulation", but never explain what they mean in detail.

On capitalism 

It was possible to see trends that provided an escape from the many social cages which humans had been forced to live in: "The most significant trend revolved around the gradual expansion of economic activity outside the landed estates and the rise of markets". Over time, this emerging capitalist system "changed people’s cognitive orientations and beliefs, leading them to believe that it was their right to pursue, as individuals, the opportunities generated by markets."

A capitalist system [was] preferable to an evolved ape [over] the feudal system [with its] subordination to elites on landed estates [and] to clergy bent on controlling the masses for their own power and privilege.

However, Maryanski and Turner also think that capitalism was guilty of some “horrific early abuses”, mentioning the “truly degrading conditions” under which people had to work in factories during the early days of industrialism. The only reference provided for this claim is a quote by Friedrich Engels (sic)!

On money

Maryanski and Turner point out that governments "increasingly had a vested interest in controlling the coinage of money and its viability in markets generating the wealth needed to finance government and elite privilege". Indeed, money became yet another aspect of the symbolic base of political power.  

I recently listened to a podcast from Econtalk in which George Selgin talks about this subject. In his book The Theory of Free Banking: Money Supply Under Competitive Note Issue, Selgin writes

States monopolized their coinage early in history. But this does not mean that they were the best makers of coin or that coinage is a natural monopoly. Rather, state coinage monopolies were established by force. Once rulers had set up their own mints they prohibited private issues, making their coins both a symbol of their rule and a source of profits.

On democracy

Maryanski and Turner also argue that as markets grew and as more people in a society "became part of the market system as consumers, wage earners, or capitalists (large and small)", pressures thereby increased for new democratic forms of politics: 

Once individuals have choices in new arenas within the economy, they begin to seek choices in political leaders [and in doing so] they begin to exercise resistance to the cage of power.

They point out that "humans have a desire to determine who their leaders will be and to have some ability to limit the power of these leaders". But they fail to note that, in a democracy, some people inevitably choses for others, which obviously entails that, in fact, only some will determine who their leaders will be, while most will be ruled by the leaders chosen by others. 

On inequality

Another slightly annoying aspect of their discussion is that they seldom distinguish between inequality of wealth and inequality of political power. They rightly point out that humans have a strong propensity to want to limit the power of dominants (as can be seen in hunter-gatherer societies, for example). But, as Rubin argued, this propensity is useful only when applied to power and it becomes wasteful and counterproductive when applied to material inequality. I think that Maryanski and Turner could learn a lot from Rubin's book in general, but their own book is worth reading as a compliment. 

Why People Are Irrational about Politics

Why is politics a subject matter about which there is widespread, strong, and persistent disagreement? In this paper, the philosopher Michael Huemer (following Bryan Caplan) argues that the phenomenon of rational irrationality is (a large part of) the answer to this question. In short, the idea behind rational irrationality is that people can rationally adopt irrational beliefs because acquiring rational beliefs involves a "cost" that exceeds its benefit. There are certain things that people want to believe "for reasons independent of the truth of those propositions or of how well-supported they are by the evidence". Given this there is a cost to thinking rationally, "namely, that one may not get to believe the things one wants to believe". The idea is that "most people will accept this cost only if they receive greater benefits from thinking rationally". And since there are almost no benefits to be received from thinking rationally about political issues, we can predict that many people will often be irrational about politics (and it is easy to find examples where this prediction holds true).

Elaborating on the theory of rational irrationality, Huemer appeals to the distinction between instrumental rationality and epistemic rationality. Roughly, while instrumental rationality consists in choosing the best available means to the ends one has, epistemic rationality consists in forming beliefs in a truth-conducive manner (accepting only things that are well-supported by evidence, revising beliefs in the light of new evidence, avoiding contradictions and logical fallacies, etc.). With this helpful distinction at hand, Huemer says that the theory of rational irrationality holds that it can be instrumentally rational to be epistemically irrational.   

In order to explain why some people adopt irrational beliefs, we need only assume that these people prefer to believe certain things to a higher degree than they prefer to be epistemically rational. Huemer points out that for some people, being epistemically rational may itself be preferred with sufficient strength to outweigh whatever preferences they might have with respect to their beliefs, but for many people this will not be the case. Huemer argues that the phenomenon of rational irrationality is particularly common when it comes to political beliefs.

As argued by Caplan, voters have systematically biased beliefs about economics. The policies that voters choose are, for example, systematically less free market and more anti-immigrant than what would serve the those voters own ends. But because of the miniscule chance that a single vote makes any difference to the outcome, it can be rational for the individual to indulge in irrationality in the political domain. Like Caplan, Huemer considers the competing explanations for political disagreement and concludes that neither of them (separately or jointly) can fully explain the salient features of political disagreement (without appealing to the phenomenon of rational irrationality). The commonly given explanations include that political issues are unusually difficult, that people are ignorant, and that people have different fundamental value systems. No doubt, these things are true as well (at least the second two), but they are not sufficient to explain disagreement. Commenting on the view that disagreement might be due to there not being any objectively true answers to value questions, Huemer boldly states that "value questions are objective, and moral anti-realism is entirely unjustified". I strongly disagree with him on that point (I think it is realism that is unjustified), but I agree that many political disagreements cannot be fully explained that way.

The irrationality hypothesis is superior to alternative explanations of political disagreement in its ability to account for several features of political beliefs and arguments: the fact that people hold their political beliefs with a high degree of confidence; the fact that discussion rarely changes political beliefs; the fact that political beliefs are correlated with race, sex, occupation, and other cognitively irrelevant traits; and the fact that numerous logically unrelated political beliefs—and even, in some cases, beliefs that rationally undermine each other—tend to go together. These features of political beliefs are not explained by the hypotheses that political issues are merely very difficult, that we just haven’t yet collected enough information regarding them, or that political disputes are primarily caused by people’s differing fundamental value systems.

Why do people have preferences over beliefs? Huemer's answer is that

The beliefs that people want to hold are often determined by their self-interest, the social group they want to fit into, the self-image they want to maintain, and the desire to remain coherent with their past beliefs. People can deploy various mechanisms to enable them to adopt and maintain their preferred beliefs, including giving a biased weighting of evidence; focusing their attention and energy on the arguments supporting their favored beliefs; collecting evidence only from sources they already agree with; and relying on subjective, speculative, and anecdotal claims as evidence for political theories.

Here I feel that this otherwise excellent paper tells only half the story. It is reasonable to ask why people are self-interested (and besides, it is in general not true that they are, especially not in the voting booth); why people want to fit into social groups; why we are more prone to be biased in certain directions (and not in others), etc. Our cognitive biases and preferences are not random and there is an evolutionary story to be told about how and why they came about (as Caplan noted). As Steven Pinker said in The Blank Slate,

Our minds keep us in touch with aspects of reality – such as objects, animals, and people – that our ancestors dealt with for millions of years. But as science and technology open up new and hidden worlds, our untutored intuitions may find themselves at sea.

For many domains of knowledge, the mind could not have developed dedicated machinery, the brain and genome show no hints of specialization, and people show no spontaneous intuitive understanding either in the crib or afterward. They include modern physics, cosmology, genetics, evolution, neuroscience, embryology, economics, and mathematics. It’s not just that we have to go to school or read books to learn these subjects. It’s that we have no mental tools to grasp them intuitively.

Therefore:

Understanding in these domains is likely to be uneven, shallow, and contaminated by primitive intuitions. And that can shape debates in the border disputes in which science and technology make contact with everyday life. […] with all the moral, empirical, and political factors that go into these debates, we should add the cognitive factors: the way our minds naturally frame issues. Our own cognitive makeup is a missing piece of many puzzles, including education, bioethics, food safety, economics, and human understanding itself.

Huemer does provide a nice list of things we can do to try to overcome our biases, but learning about the evolutionary origins of our cognitive biases should be added to his list as it may well be essential to overcoming bias. Still, Huemer's paper is very well worth reading in addition to Caplan's excellent book The Myth of the Rational Voter.   

Here is a short clip where Huemer talks about why people are irrational about politics:

The Believing Brain - From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

This book supposedly sums up 30 years of research. Michael Shermer argues that we form beliefs first (for non-rational reasons) and then we attempt to rationalize the beliefs we already hold. Our brains manifest a host of cognitive biases that continually confirm our beliefs as "true". We are, for example, prone to seek and find patterns everywhere, even where there are no patterns to be found (patternicity). And we are prone to infuse those patterns with meaning and intentional agency (agenticity). Why we do this has a simple evolutionary explanation. Ignoring genuinely meaningful patterns can be fatal, but reading meaning and agency into meaningless noise is often more or less harmless. Thus, those with a weaker tendency towards patternicity and agenticity were less likely to survive and leave offspring. Today, this can lead people to believe in all sorts of things (gods, aliens, conspiracy theories, etc. are considered). Science is argued to be our only hope of overcoming innate biases.

The Believing Brain is an easy read and some are bound to be familiar with many if not most of the results presented. It functions well as an introduction to common sense scepticism, but those hoping for a deeper analysis of the brain might perhaps be slightly disapointed. The book is somewhat similar to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan in that it mixes autobiography with argument in (primarily) epistemological issues.  

For me, the most interesting chapter is that on politics (despite that it largely overlaps with this article from which the quotes below are taken). Shermer refers to Thomas Sowell’s distinction between the unconstrained and the constrained vision of human nature, later discussed by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate under the alternative labels of the utopian and the tragic vision. Shermer states his reasons for rejecting the utopian vision:

An unconstrained utopian [which in its original Greek means “no place”] vision of human nature largely accepts the blank slate model and believes that custom, law, and traditional institutions are sources of inequality and injustice and should therefore be heavily regulated and constantly modified from the top down. It holds that society can be engineered through government programs to release the natural unselfishness and altruism within people. It deems physical and intellectual differences largely to be the result of unjust and unfair social systems that can be re-engineered through social planning, and therefore people can be shuffled across socioeconomic classes that were artificially created through unfair and unjust political, economic, and social systems inherited from history. I believe that this vision of human nature can be achieved in literally No Place.

Shermer then formulates a kind of middle-ground between these two views of human nature that he calls the realistic vision:

Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories of constrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of human nature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let’s call this the Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold a Realistic Vision of human nature.

He goes on to specify what he takes the realistic vision to involve. He says that

human nature is relatively constrained by our biology and evolutionary history, and therefore social and political systems must be structured around these realities, accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures. A Realistic Vision rejects the blank slate model that people are so malleable and responsive to social programs that governments can engineer their lives into a great society of its design.

Egalitarianism, Shermer points out, "only works (barely) among small bands of hunter-gatherers in resource-poor environments where there is next to no private property". One of the most telling modern-day examples of the consequences of basing political policies on the unconstrained or utopian vision is the failed communist and socialist experiments around the world throughout the previous century. These social experiments

revealed that top-down draconian controls over economic and political systems do not work.
The failed communes and utopian community experiments tried at various places throughout the world over the past 150 years demonstrated that people by nature do not adhere to the Marxian principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Humans are just not like that! We are not infinitely malleable blank slates waiting to be shaped by society. The realistic vision of human nature is well supported by the evidence from psychology, anthropology, economics, and especially evolutionary theory. Shermer lists many features of human nature that seemingly cannot be changed by environmental factors including the inherited differences among people in size, strength, speed, temperament, personality, cognitive ability, mathematical talent, spatial reasoning, verbal skills, emotional intelligence, etc. that translate into some being more successful than others; the importance to us of family ties; the universal principle of reciprocal altruism and moralistic punishment; the almost universal propensity for aggression and dominance (within and between groups), and the almost universal desire of people to trade with one another.

Shermer believes that even if most moderates on both the left and the right (especially those educated in the biological and evolutionary sciences) can embrace a realistic vision, this vision of human nature is best represented by the libertarian political philosophy. Specifically he holds that attempts to equalize natural inequalities by governmental redistribution programs cannot and will not work given the facts about human nature. Several similar points (and many others) are made by Paul H. Rubin in his very good Darwinian Politics which offers a much more in-depth evolutionary study of politics.

In a follow-up piece to the article mentioned above, Ronald Bailey continues on the same trail and focuses on the evolutionary origins of the intuitions lying behind non-libertarian views.

Modern progressives are motivated by an old instinct to restore the primitive egalitarianism that characterized human social relations when people lived in intimate hunter-gatherer bands, corresponding to the Marxian notion of primitive pre-state communism. For their part, modern conservatives intuitively dislike the socially disruptive character of markets and free speech and want to protect their group from outside competition and cultural corruption. These atavistic longings are part of the bio-psychological heritage of humanity and must be constantly resisted if the ambit of liberty is to thrive and expand. Liberalism (libertarianism) rises above and rejects the primitive moralities embodied in the universalist collectivism of progressives and the tribalist collectivism of conservatives. In doing so, it made the rule of law, freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and modern prosperity possible. 

Shermer wrote a friendly response to Bailey making the Hobbesian point - not made in the book itself - that the natural state of humanity is abject violence and stressing the grave importance for liberty (and science) of coming to terms with violence. Shermer again cites Pinker who argued in his The Better Angels of Our Nature that we have already come a long way towards eradicating violence since our days as hunter-gatherers. Like Pinker, Shermer too follows Hobbes in assuming an essential role for government in the production of peace. But, again like Pinker, he is rightly worried about government power getting out of hand and stifling the very liberties it supposedly should defend.

Like so many other writers, Shermer too takes a naive view on liberal democracy (the oxymoron that gives this website its name). He says that it is "the best system yet devised" giving people "a voice to speak truth to power". If Shermer ascribed some of the large number of cognitive biases he describes in the book explicitly to voters (like Bryan Caplan did in his brilliant The Myth of the Rational Voter), he would no doubt be less optimistic about democracy. 

Future Imperfect - Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World

David D. Friedman considers various possible futures in this invigorating book. He applies economic, legal, political, philosophical, historical, and evolutionary perspectives to a large class of possible future technologies and helps us to think rationally about how technological change will affect us and how we can change our lives and institutions to adapt to it.

The laws we have, the ways we do things, are not handed down from heaven on tablets of stone. They are human contrivances, solutions to particular problems, ways of accomplishing particular ends. If technological change makes a law hard to enforce, the best solution is sometimes to stop enforcing it. There may be other ways to accomplish the same end – including some enabled by the same technological change. The question is not how to continue to do what we have been doing but how best to achieve our objectives under new circumstances.

Friedman prudently avoids trying to be a prophet and his purpose is not to predict which future we will actually get (in anything but the broadest of outlines). What he does is rather to raise a substantial number of issues that anyone seriously interested in the future ought to contemplate and he draws attention to what is at stake in each debate. He wisely limits his discussion, with few exceptions, to the next thirty years or so: “Beyond that my crystal ball, badly blurred at best, becomes useless; the further future dissolves into mist.”

To make plans for the world of a century hence today based on today’s technology and practice makes no more sense than it did in 1900, when a man with a prudent eye to the future might have worried about avoiding a collapse of the transportation system due to a shortage of hay and outs. 

Future Imperfect is wise and responsible and its analyses are careful and well considered. There is a lot of “on the one hand..., but on the other hand” type of reasoning that such a difficult subject matter requires, but without making the conclusions trivial or uninteresting. Friedman is visionary, but a visionary constrained by reason. He is not afraid to tackle controversial topics or to make bold claims, but he is not one of those annoying authors who are attracted to controversy for its own sake. I found myself agreeing with almost every word, which is very unusual. The book is also very well written with almost no spelling or grammatical mistakes to be found which is also rather unusual.

The book is divided into six parts and 22 chapters. Among the many diverse topics considered we find surveillance technology and privacy, intellectual property, doing business online (ecash), computer crime and law enforcement online, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, biotechnology, genetic engineering, life extension, cryonics, teleportation, and even space colonization. Friedman considers each issue from several angles and avoids being overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. There are risks with all technologies, but some risks are more worthy of being taken seriously than others. People in general often worry about the wrong things to the wrong degrees. Overpopulation and global warming are two examples of things that we probably worry about way too much. The outlook adopted by Friedman puts current scares into a much needed perspective without dogmatically dismissing them outright. He says about global warming that it is

… a problem that at some point we may want to deal with, but not a problem we ought to deal with now. We do not know enough. Working that far ahead risks wasting valuable resources solving problems that will solve themselves sometime between now and then or, worse, spending our resources pushing the world in what will turn out to be the wrong direction. 

Some of the technical details concerning computers and the Internet are bound to become out of date sooner rather than later, and for the casual reader there are perhaps a few pages too many spent on encryption technology, but the broader issues raised (especially those of parts five and six of the book) are bound to be relevant for many years to come. It is also in these later parts of the book that he ventures further into philosophical territory. He touches upon the nature of consciousness, personal identity, pleasure, and happiness, among other things.

My own copy of the book is the paperback from Cambridge University Press, but the whole book is available online for free on the author's website. I read Friedman's classic first book The Machinery of Freedom (first published in the early 1970's) several years ago, but remember being somewhat less impressed by it. I now intend to re-read that one and also to read his other books. 

Anyone interested in the future should read this book.

The Evolution of Morality

There are quite a few books touching upon the topic of how moral behavior might have evolved in humans (and other animals), but very few such books are written by moral philosophers. Richard Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality is explicitly written from the perspective of moral philosophy and is thus a much needed addition to the literature. I am convinced that moral philosophers need a better understanding of evolution and that evolutionary theorists equally need a better understanding of philosophy. In a way this book bridges the gap between moral philosophy and evolutionary psychology.

Joyce sets himself two main goals: the first is to argue that human morality is innate and the second is to draw the philosophical (particularly the meta-ethical) implications of this fact. Specifically, does the innateness of morality vindicate it in some sense, thus staving off the threat of moral skepticism and undergirding some version of moral realism? Or does it instead undermine the authority of morality? Joyce is a follower of John L. Mackie’s moral skepticism and attempts to launch an “evolutionary debunking of morality”. In several ways, Joyce’s argument enhances and reinforces that of Mackie’s Ethics – Inventing Right and Wrong by injecting it with biological insights. Mackie himself was deeply interested in the evolution of morality and he even wrote a couple of articles on these topics (The Law of the Jungle: Moral Alternatives and Principles of Evolution (1978) and Genes and Egoism (1981)). Joyce also makes heavy use of Gilbert Harman's influential argument (see his The Nature of Morality) that moral judgments might be epistemologically undermined on the grounds that they can be explained entirely without invoking their truth (just as religious beliefs can be undermined on the grounds that we can explain the fact that people have these beliefs without invoking the truth of the beliefs).

In the brief introduction, Joyce discusses human nature generally and defends sociobiology and evolutionary psychology from some of the misguided critique that has been directed towards it. He says that “Broadly speaking, no sensible person can object to evolutionary psychology” and that “the idea that the human mind is nothing but all-purpose flexibility is obviously wrong. In reality, the thesis of the human tabula rasa (blank slate) has never been held in pure form by any serious thinker.” He then goes on to discuss altruism and selfishness in chapter 1 and provides some much needed clarity on matters that are often misunderstood. Various forms of reciprocity are then discussed with a little help from game theory. The story is familiar, but important. At the end of chapter 4, he concludes that humans have an innate moral sense for which reciprocity is particularly important:

Evidence from primatology, experimental economics, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and anthropology suggests that the human mind bears the traces of a past in which reciprocity played a big role. The human interest in acquiring knowledge of others’ reputations and in broadcasting one’s own good reputation, our sensitivity to issues of distributive fairness in exchanges, our capacity to distinguish between accidental and purposeful harms (and our inclination to forgive the injuries of the former kind), our sensitivity to cheats and our antipathy toward them (and our eagerness to punish them even at material cost to ourselves), and our heightened sense of possession – all of these arguably innate tendencies suggest a mind built for reciprocation.

It is very important for Joyce to separate the ability and propensity to behave morally from the ability to make moral judgments. He argues that while other animals can have moral emotions and behave morally, only humans make moral judgments. He is particularly interested in explaining how natural selection might have brought about the capacity to make moral judgments: “What might have been done to our brains to get us thinking in terms of obligations, fairness, desert, property, cheating, and so on?”, he asks. His answer is that we can plausibly understand this transition in projectivist terms. He says

… mere aversions and inclinations will not suffice for such thinking; to dislike an outcome is very different from disapproving of it. What is needed is a movement from desiring something to finding it desirable, from feeling contempt for something to judging it contemptible, from praising something to regarding it praiseworthy, from not accepting something to considering it unacceptable, from demanding something to deeming it demanded. This is precisely the changeover that projectivism is well placed to explain.

Joyce holds that an understanding of the process of natural selection sits very comfortably with a projectivist interpretation and thus lends some prima facie support to projectivism. Adopting projectivism as a working hypothesis “may prove fruitful in our bid to understand what our ancestors’ brains started doing that allowed them to make moral judgments” and that this lends some credibility to the projectivist view.

The final two chapters of the book discuss the philosophical implications of the previous four chapters. Joyce here makes a distinction between descriptive and prescriptive evolutionary ethics. He takes what he has been doing in the first four chapters to be of the former kind. Another way in which a descriptive evolutionary ethics might influence moral thinking is by bringing to light empirical facts that are of importance to ethical decisions.

Just as ethical decisions can be influenced by facts about the consequences of certain economic policies, by facts about the degree of unhappiness that a course of action will produce, by facts about the motivations with which an action was performed, and in principle by facts of any kind at all, so too they may be influenced by facts about human evolution […] It is conceivable, for example, that the results of studying human evolution may support specific hypotheses about what kinds of things cause us happiness and unhappiness.

It is precisely this kind of project that, for example, Paul Rubin engages in (applied specifically to the political domain) in his Darwinian Politics. Joyce has no objections to this kind of project, but he claims to be agnostic about how much influence descriptive evolutionary ethics may have in this respect.

Joyce gives us a good treatment of the so-called naturalistic fallacy, something that has very often been misunderstood by both philosophers and non-philosophers. The sweeping idea that the naturalistic fallacy somehow makes any kind of prescriptive evolutionary ethics impossible is not accepted by Joyce who goes on to consider various attempts to vindicate morality on evolutionary grounds. The theories of Robert Richards, Richmond Campbell, Daniel Dennett and William Casebeer are all individually discussed and found wanting. Richards and Casebeer is claimed to locate the wrong kind of “ought” (the wrong kind of value) in evolutionary theory. This criticism is entirely successful, I think (though I have not read these authors). Campbell and Dennett, on the other hand, try to vindicate morality in instrumental terms. And this, Joyce insists, “would leave morality ‘unvindicated’ in the most important sense”.

For all they have said, morality might have the status of an expedient falsehood: practically useful while still being massively mistaken (as is often the atheist’s attitude toward religious discourse, and seems to be Mackie’s attitude toward moral discourse).

Showing that having moral beliefs is socially and individually advantageous does not, Joyce insists, amount to a justification. Nothing in such an instrumental “justification” of morality prevents the skeptic from seeing morality as a useful fiction. I think that Joyce is right to point out the important distinction between the two very different types of justification and that a justification of the one sort does not amount to a justification in the other. But I don’t agree that providing an instrumental justification of morality would be uninteresting or even less interesting. On the contrary! Indeed, once we have realized the futility of any attempted justification intended to show that there are objectively prescriptive moral facts and values, it seems reasonable to ask for an instrumental justification. Morality is, after all, ultimately about practical matters.

There are many more interesting points made in this book, some of which I am discussing in my work-in-progress dissertation. Overall, I think that this is a book that both moral philosophers and evolutionary theorists ought to read.