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.

Before the Dawn - Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

In this book, Nicholas Wade seems to be doing precisely what Edward O. Wilson recommended in his Consilience. Namely, to try to unify knowledge in a way that bridges the gaps between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. Wade is doing a kind of consilient history of the human species by drawing on results from a wide range of scientific disciplines including paleoanthropology, archeology, population genetics, historical linguistics, primatology, social anthropology and evolutionary psychology. There is a special emphasis on the contributions of geneticists and how recent results from genetics can fill in many gaps in our history and adjudicate several important scientific disputes in other disciplines. Somewhat surprisingly, the human genome seems to contain an excellent record of the recent past that provides an interesting parallel to the written history.

Before the Dawn is a kind of scientific book of “Genesis” that traces our ancestors all the way back to the chromosomal “Adam” and the mitochondrial “Eve” who lived in the historical garden of “Eden”. It then follows our ancestors through our “Exodus” out of Africa and onwards to every corner of the planet. Along the way, Wade compiles answers to many questions regarding what the first humans were like, how they lived, what size of groups they lived in, what kind of language they might have spoken, their degree of sociality and aggressiveness, and many others.  

In some ways this book is similar to Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Both books start at a very early stage in human history and follow our species to the present day and beyond - both books end with some empirically based speculations about the future. Both also adopt an evolutionary or “Darwinian” approach. But the two books are also very different in that Wade’s book is more purely descriptive, while Ridley is more prone to advance normative theses. Wade clearly has an agenda, but it is scientific, not political, economical, or ethical.

One central insight, though, that Wade shares with Ridley is the importance of settlement in human history. Settlement was a significant event as it made possible the division of labor and specialization of roles which led to increased productivity. Wade observes that

Productivity creates surpluses, and surpluses of one commodity can be traded for another with a neighboring group. Settlement, specialization, property, surplus, trade – these are the sinews of economic activity, setting humans at long last on a separate path from living off nature’s bounty like all other species.

From chapter eight onwards, the chronological nature of the book is somewhat sidetracked and a more thematic approach is adopted. Sociality, race and language are given chapters of their own. The chapter on sociality was of particular interest for me. Here he talks about the evolutionary basis of social behavior and violence. Echoing Steven Pinker, Wade points out that archeologists and anthropologists often have downplayed the prevalence of warfare in the past and thereby obscured the important and surprising fact that “modern societies have succeeded in greatly reducing the frequency of warfare”. He says that

The savagery of wars between modern states has produced unparalleled carnage. Yet the common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent. As far as human nature is concerned, people of early societies seem to have been considerably more warlike than people are today. In fact, over the course of the last 50.000 years, the human propensity for warfare has probably been considerably attenuated.

He also stresses the importance of reciprocity in human emotions and behavior.

Many common emotions can be understood as being built around the expectation of reciprocity and the negative reaction when it is made to fail. If we like a person, we are willing to exchange favors with them. We are angry at those who fail to return favors. We seek punishment for those who take advantage of us. We feel guilty if we fail to return a favor, and shame if publicly exposed. If we believe someone is genuinely sorry about a failure to reciprocate, we trust them. But if we detect they are simulating contrition, we mistrust them.

The instinct for reciprocity, and the cheater-detection apparatus that accompanies it, seem to be the basis for a fundamental human practice, that of trade.

Trade is a foundation of economic activity because it gives the parties to a transaction a strong incentive to specialize in making items that the others find valuable. But trade depends on trust, on the decision to treat a total stranger as if he were a member of the family. Humans are the only species to have developed such a degree of social trust that they are willing to let vital tasks be performed by individuals who are not part of the family. This set of behaviors, built around reciprocity, fair exchange and the detection of cheaters, has provided the foundation for the most sophisticated urban civilizations, including those of the present day.

I would like to read this as implying that humans are natural contractarians. Wade, a science reporter, is not interested in arguing for any specific view in ethics. But insights such as these (not in any way original) seem to support the social contract view in moral theory, or at least to support the claim that any normative ethical theory that intends to guide human social behavior that does not give a central role to reciprocity is thereby flawed or incomplete. (The utilitarian view seems to suffer from this problem, for example, as it can at best give reciprocity a subordinate role.)   

As recognized by all social contract theorists, there is also a serious problem with trust. Wade observes that

Trust is an essential part of the social glue that binds people together in cooperative associations. But it increases the vulnerability to which all social groups are exposed, that of being taken advantage of by freeloaders. Freeloaders seize the benefits of social living without contributing to the costs. They are immensely threatening to a social group because they diminish the benefits of sociality for others and, if their behavior goes unpunished, they may bring about the society’s dissolution.

Wade then argues that

Human societies long ago devised an antidote to the freeloader problem. This freeloader defense system, a major organizing principle of every society, has assumed so many other duties that its original role has been lost sight of.

It is indeed very tempting to assume that he is talking about government here. Or maybe morality. But no! Wade claims it to be religion! He follows this claim by a whole section devoted to the social function of religion, but somewhat strangely he does not explicitly discuss government or morality. This, I think, constitutes a serious flaw in the book. I don’t doubt that religion has had a part to play in human social relations, but government and morality would have played their parts as well, and I am inclined to think that the latter two played much larger roles than did religion. Apparantly, Wade's latest book deals exclusively with the topic of religion and maybe he there develops this line of reasoning further? Richard Joyce’s highly engaging book The Evolution of Morality, is one example of a book that deals with the social function of morality.

Overall, Before the Dawn is an inspiring book with more to offer than I have mentioned in this brief review.  

The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature

In this important book, Steven Pinker makes a compelling case against three persistent and mutually interconnected myths that he calls “the blank slate”, “the ghost in the machine” and “the noble savage” respectively. The first is the idea that we are all born “empty”. That is, without any innate features. The second covers the idea of a (immaterial) “soul”, the idea or a (contra-causal) “free will”, and the idea of a “me” as something over and above brain and body. The third is the idea associated with Rousseau that man is a peaceful and moral being in his natural state, and that he has somehow been corrupted by society. Collectively, he calls the three ideas “the holy trinity” (but unholy trinity would perhaps be a better term!). In every case, Pinker shows that these ideas (both in their naïve and in their more sophisticated versions) are simply untenable in the light of reason and modern science. He appeals extensively to what he calls the sciences of human nature that include cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology.    

The book has five parts. In the first, Pinker presents the three myths and debunks them. In parts two (Fear and Loathing) and three (Human Nature with a Human Face), he argues that abandoning the blank slate and its two sister ideas is entirely benign and does not deserve neither fear nor loathing nor do they imply or legitimate inequality, imperfectability, determinism or nihilism (in any pernicious senses of these terms). Indeed, he argues that it is the blank slate, the ghost in the machine and the noble savage that are the pernicious (and often socially, politically and scientifically dangerous) ideas. Where one stands in this debate turns out to be highly relevant for the social and political sciences. Pinker is highly critical (and rightly so) of postmodernism, cultural relativism and so-called “radical science” – the preposterous idea to base science on Marxist principles. He is equally critical (and equally rightly) of crude Social Darwinism. Indeed, he shows that utopian political ideologies on the left (Communism) and on the right (Nazism) have a great deal in common (both in theory and in practice). Religious ideologies also share the same type of utopian features that have led to many mass killings in the past.

For some people, Pinker’s message will probably be controversial and provocative (despite Pinker’s subtle and humble prose) while for others it will be obvious and almost trivial. I did read the first three parts of the book with great pleasure, but in honesty I did not need much convincing. In part four, entitled Know Thyself the book moves from agreeable to highly interesting. Chapter 13 in particular should be read by everyone who knows how to read! Here, Pinker points out that there may be a mismatch between the purposes for which our cognitive faculties evolved and the purposes to which we put them today.

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.

These ways of knowing and core intuitions are suitable for a lifestyle of small groups of illiterate, stateless people who live off the land, survive by their wits, and depend on what they can carry. Our ancestors left this lifestyle for a settled existence only a few millennia ago, too recently for evolution to have done much, if anything, to our brains. Conspicuous by their absence are faculties suited to the stunning new understanding of the world wrought by science and technology. 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.

Pinker then goes on to discuss just these things in more detail. We are not cognitively well equipped to understand modern science. The blank slate and the noble savage leads to bad policies regarding education and the treatment of criminals; the ghost in the machine distorts debates about abortion and euthanasia; “essentialist” beliefs lead to irrational fears of artificial and genetically modified foods, etc. There are simply too many interesting points here to comment on, but let me focus on our “intuitive economics” for a while. Pinker points out first that people are prone to commit “the physical fallacy”: “the belief that an object has a true and constant value, as opposed to being worth only what someone is willing to pay for it at a given place and time”.

The belief that goods [and, I would like to add, services] have a “just price” implies that it is avaricious to charge anything higher, and the result has been mandatory pricing schemes in medieval times, communist regimes, and many Third World countries [as well as minimum wage laws in many countries today]. Such attempts to work around the law of supply and demand have usually led to waste, shortages, and black markets.

The same fallacy is involved in the (stupid) practice of outlawing interest. Pinker points out that the reason why people borrow money at one time to repay it at another is that the money is worth more to them at the time they borrow it than it will be at the time they repay it. “So when regimes enact sweeping usury laws, people who could put money to productive use cannot get it, and everyone’s standard of living go down.” This is, of course, old news to say the least. What might be new is that we now can show why people still have these counterproductive biases centuries after they were first identifies as clear examples of economic fallacies; simply, human beings make bad economists.

Because money lenders and middlemen do not cause tangible objects to come into being, their contributions are difficult for us to grasp, and these productive actors are perceived as parasites and skimmers. Pinker further points out that “ghettoization, confiscation, expulsion, and mob violence against middlemen, often ethnic minorities who learned to specialize in the middleman niche” is a recurring and tragic theme in human history.  The Jews in Europe is a familiar example. One obvious way to counteract the cognitive biases with which we are born is education and Pinker concludes that a modern education should give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, probability theory and statistics. I would like to add critical thinking and argumentation analysis to his list.

Another all too common and tragic human fallacy is that of Malthus; that natural resources will run out as our populations grow larger. Pinker writes that:

The immediate problem with Malthusian prophecies is that they underestimate the effects of technological change in increasing the resources that support a comfortable life. […] needs don’t have to be satisfied by increasing the availability of physical resources. They can be satisfied by using new ideas – recipes, designs, or techniques – to rearrange existing resources to yield more of what we want.

At least in principle, the exponential power of human cognition works on the same scale as the growth of the human population, and we can resolve the paradox of the Malthusian disaster that never happened.

As Pinker wisely points out, this does not license complacency. But it does show “that our understanding of humans’ relation to the material world has to acknowledge not just our bodies and our resources but also our minds”. Again, that Malthus was wrong is not news at all. The puzzle is thus not that the Malthusian disaster has not happened the puzzle is rather that people still widely commit the same fallacy over and over, often in the face of having had it pointed out to them more than once. The first step towards a solution is to resolve this latter puzzle. And we can begin to do so by raising awareness of the reason for which we commit such fallacies: we are prone to do so in virtue of our human nature; in virtue of innate mental faculties that evolved in a time very different from that of the modern world in which we now live.   

Another thing that Pinker discusses is equality. He observes that

It is a brute fact that greater rewards will go to people with greater inborn talent if other people are willing to pay more for the fruits of those talents. The only way that cannot happen is if people are locked into arbitrary castes, if all economic transactions are controlled by the state, or if there is no such thing as inborn talent because we are blank slates.

He quotes Hayek saying that if we treat people equally the result must be material inequality and that the only way to get material equality is to treat people differently - equality before the law and material equality are, therefore, not only different but in conflict with each other. Examples of unequal treatment in the name of equality mentioned by Pinker are progressive taxes on the rich, quotas that favor certain races, prohibitions against private medical care or other voluntary transactions. Pinker notes that Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Robert Nozick have made similar points. One could add to this that this is the reason why equality of opportunity is an impossible and therefore spurious ideal. The only way to realize equality of opportunity would be to make it the case that we are all identical both in innate talent and in our environment, which would require (if it is possible at all) extremely draconian measures. Indeed, Pinker points out that many atrocities have been committed in the name of egalitarianism, “targeting people whose success was taken as evidence of their criminality”.

To continue further on this line of thought, we ought to conclude that the only ideal of equality that is realistic given the kind of creatures we are and the kind of world in which we live is that of equal (negative) rights (that is, the equal right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, as it is often called). Since innate talents (and luck) are unequally distributed, equal rights will inevitably lead to material inequality. This we will have to live with. But not only is this something that we have to live with, in a free market economy (in virtue of its positive-sum nature) it is better for all of us as talented people will use their talents to provide goods and services that otherwise would not exist.

It would be a mistake though to think that Pinker is arguing for libertarianism. He argues only that

A nonblank slate means that a tradeoff between freedom and material equality is inherent to all political systems and that the major political philosophies can be defined by how they deal with the tradeoff. The Social Darwinist right places no value on equality; the totalitarian left places no value on freedom. The Rawlsian left sacrifices some freedom for equality; the libertarian right sacrifices some equality for freedom. While reasonable people may disagree about the best tradeoff, it is unreasonable to pretend there is no tradeoff. [Knowledge about innate differences among people] might help us decide on these tradeoffs in an intelligent and humane manner.

Indeed, he is concerned to show that insights from the sciences of human nature are compatible with a progressive politics (referring to Peter Singer’s book A Darwinian Left in chapter 16) and feminism (in chapter 18) and does not, by itself, lead to or legitimate discrimination. He is concerned to show that progressive politics and feminism are not necessarily in opposition to the application of evolution, genetics and neuroscience to the human mind despite being seen as such in much of modern intellectual life. He admirably points out, though, that discrimination is not always wrong. One could add that discrimination is a necessary component of all choice and that prohibiting some discrimination is equivalent to reducing choice. The fact that people sometimes make choices on grounds that in others’ eyes are not the best ones does not automatically give them the right to restrict their freedom of choice. Insofar as we are liberals in the broad sense, we ought to acknowledge that any person has the right to make choices on whatever grounds she sees fit (without restricting the similar rights of others). Pinker does not explicitly embrace this view, presumable since he wisely does not want to commit himself to any controversial claims over and above the main theses of the book. 

In chapter 15, Pinker talks about our moral sense. He says that

The design of the moral sense leaves people in all cultures vulnerable to confusing defensible moral judgments with irrelevant passions and prejudices.

Such irrelevant passions and prejudices can, he argues, lead people to condemn so-called “victimless crimes”. He does not, however, apply this latter insight to the abovementioned tradeoff between freedom and equality. I think we can say more than just that we will have to make a tradeoff between equality and freedom. A large part of the intuitive appeal of equality is, I take it, based on just such “irrelevant passions and prejudices” that are present in our innate moral sense, primarily envy. Once we see this, I think, the (substantial) ideal equality loses much of its appeal.

Overall, this is a rich and significant book full of important insights into human nature. We can no longer pretend as if these insights into who we are does not bear on a whole range of moral, social, political and scientific issues.