Evolution and Morality

Should we worry that an evolutionary account of morality debunks it, i.e., that it undermines its objectivity or authority?

First, it’s important to keep in mind the different kinds of questions we can ask about morality

(a) Normative questions: What is the moral truth? I.e., what’s right? What’s wrong? What ought I to do? E.g., is it morally right to lie to protect my friend’s feelings?

(b) Metaethical questions, i.e., questions about the nature of moral truth. What makes what’s right, right and what makes what’s wrong, wrong? Presumably, it is a moral truth that I ought not to accept money from students in exchange for grades. But why is this the moral truth? “Ethical theories” (e.g., divine command theory, utilitarianism, ethical naturalism, Kantianism) are attempts to answer this metaethical question about the ‘ground’ of moral truth. So are the various versions of moral relativism. We hope that the proper account of the nature of moral truth will provide us with compelling reasons to act in accord with it.

(c) Questions of moral psychology, e.g., What moral sentiments and what moral concepts do we have, and how did we acquire them? What sort of moral reasoning do human beings engage in, and how did we acquire the capacity to do so?

I assume that an attempt to come up with a scientific explanation of morality, as some evolutionary psychologists have, belongs to category (c) and has little or nothing to do with normative moral questions. On the other hand, a scientific explanation of morality, while not as such a metaethical project, may well constrain the plausible answers to metaethical questions about the nature of moral truth.

1. Human beings tend to regard certain actions as morally good, i.e., as something one should do no matter what, even if doing so is contrary to one’s interests, and certain actions as morally bad, i.e., as something one should avoid doing no matter what, even if it would be in one’s interests to do them. Evolutionary psychology says that we have these dispositions principally because we are descendents of ancestors who were reproductively successful in part because their genes disposed them to behave in this way. If the evolutionary history of our species had been different, we might regard as morally good things we now regard as morally bad, and we might regard as morally bad things we now regard as morally good. Similarly, there could be rational, social creatures elsewhere in the universe with quite different ideas of what’s morally right and wrong.

2. If evolutionary psychology is right about the origins of human moral judgment, then the moral goodness or badness of an action is not an objective feature of that action. It is analogous to the bad taste of Friskees “Tuna Delight,” a food much desired by Puff the cat to whom, apparently, it tastes delightful. However, human beings find the taste exceedingly vile, as I accidentally discovered one night. Does the stuff in the can have an objective property, tasting good, that cats have the capacity to detect? Or does it have the objective property, tasting bad, which human beings can detect?

3. Who’s right about the taste of “Tuna Delight,” felines or humans? A silly question: neither tasting bad nor tasting good are objective properties of things. Instead, we “project” our preferences onto the world, treating what is in fact merely the way we respond to something as though it were a feature of the world. Some things taste good to current members of a species because in the deep past wanting to eat them was adaptive, and some things taste bad to current members of species because wanting to avoid them was adaptive. (Of course, what was adaptive for the ancestral population might not be adaptive now. Contrast this with misunderstandings of evolutionary psychology that ascribe to people conscious or unconscious calculations about what sort of behavior will enhance fitness.)

4. However, the evolutionary psychological explanation of our moral preferences contrasts sharply with cultural and individual relativism. Our evolved dispositions to moral emotion, cognition, and behavior are human universals, though like most human universals their detailed manifestation varies across time and space. Individuals and cultures can be wrong about morality; the moral truth is not a function of what individuals believe is right, nor is it a function of a society’s customs. The truth about morality in this regard resembles objective truth: how things are doesn’t depend on what we think. Yet in another sense, the truth about morality is relative; it depends on the species. What’s right or wrong for the human species might be different for other species. The truth about morality is in this sense like the truth about color. It makes no sense to ask, “Is x really yellow?” except relative to a species. If ripe bananas produce in normal Martians a sensation very different than the sensation we call yellow, it makes no sense to wonder who’s right. The moral badness of doing something, like the bad taste of the cat food, like the yellowness of the banana, is not ultimately a feature of objective reality, in contrast to how we categorize and respond to that reality.

5. Of course, if natural selection has crafted a species to project a quality upon the objective world, there must be something really there, something such that responding to it one way rather than another in the ancestral environment made an evolutionary difference. Natural selection presumably tracked features of human behavior necessary for social life. But that feature of the world might correspond to nothing that has a place in a purely objective account of the world. There might be nothing all the things we categorize as yellow have in common beyond the fact that they reflect or produce light in one of the ways that causes us to have the sensation we label yellow. Similarly, there might be nothing all the acts we categorize as morally wrong, and respond to as such, have in common beyond the fact that we descend from creatures whose chances of reproducing their genes were enhanced by responding to them in this way. We might call such properties anthropocentric properties; they’re visible to humans, but do not appear in a completely objective description of the world.

6. We are rational, self-reflective creatures. This too is part of our evolutionary legacy. But once we know that our dispositions toward the moral emotions, judgments, and behavior are not responses to ultimately objective features of reality, but part and parcel of our anthropocentric categorizing of what is objectively there, their hold on us might lessen. I have, for example, an innate tendency, due ultimately to the fact that it was adaptive in the Pleistocene, to like the taste of fatty foods. That behavioral disposition was healthy for my stone age ancestors, who led active lives and for whom fat was hard to come by. However, it’s not healthy now that we live sedentary lives and have access to the unlimited amounts of fat made available by the “recent” invention of agriculture and industrial production and marketing of good-tasting fatty foods. But perhaps understanding its origins will empower me to weigh this desire against my rationally considered self-interest, and in so doing come better to resist it. Maybe my innate tendency to experience the goodness of French fries as a compelling feature of reality, rather than a mere preference I can ignore, will be subverted by knowledge of its evolutionary origins. If so, good.

7. But now the debunker speaks: We should welcome a similar effect on our moral dispositions. Our moral nature is, in essence, a set of evolved dispositions to engage in behavior, some of it altruistic in the ordinary sense, some of it reciprocally altruistic, i.e., cooperative. I have a robust tendency to engage in these patterns of behavior even when doing so is not in my own interest. I have a tendency to want to help others even when it costs me and I get little or nothing out of it. I am, for instance, disposed to sacrifice my interests on behalf of my children. And I have a tendency to want to cooperate with others, even when I have a chance to reap the benefits of others cooperating by pretending to cooperate when really cheating. I feel guilty if I keep the extra change when the cashier makes a mistake. Now that I am aware of the origins of my moral tendencies, and know that what appear to be matters of objective moral fact are just my projections of my evolved moral responses onto the world I can strive to become a more rational person, not letting the legacy of my “selfish genes” get in the way of what I know to be in my self-interest. The “selfish genes” built organisms with big brains that can reason and thereby rebel against the genes that built them, escaping the altruistic tendencies they have instilled in us.

8. Questions for the debunker:

(a) Why assume rational reflection upon the nature and origin of my altruistic and cooperative moral instincts will generally lead me to try to weaken them in favor of self-interest? One important tradition in ethical thought argues that reason demands universalizability, i.e., if something is a good reason for treating one person a particular way then it’s a good reason for treating anyone else that way, unless there’s a relevant difference between them. If I want to be treated well, yet treat other people badly, but cannot supply a difference between me and them that justifies the difference in treatment, I am acting irrationally. That doing something is in my interests is a reason to do it. But it is not obvious that there are no other reasons for doing things, for instance, it would be irrational not to do them.

(b) Indeed, why won’t rational reflection on our moral instincts lead us to purify and refine, rather than abandon, them? E.g., I realize that my altruistic sentiments are quite limited; while I care a lot about people who are close to me, and similar to me, I don’t care much about people that are different or far away. Reason might show me that this is unreasonable, and that I should try to expand the circle of my moral concern, rather than narrowing it so as to include only myself. Or on reflection I come to regard certain of my moral responses as irrational, e.g., the feeling that homosexuality is evil, or that it is bad for some persons to be richer than others, and I strive to excise them from my moral reasoning.

(c) Why assume the difference between objective and “anthropocentric” properties matters when it comes to my having reasons to act? Suppose x is pink and weighs 4500 pounds: x’s color, a species-relative property, might nonetheless be a good reason for me to act a certain way, while its weight might not matter at all. (Suppose x is a car someone is trying to sell me: that it weighs 4500 rather than 4600 pounds might not matter to me, but its being pink rather than red might matter a lot.)

(d) The debunker imagines his self-interest standing over against his moral sentiments, and advocates getting rid of them so as to better get what he wants. But one of the things he now wants is, e.g., to help people who need his help. This desire might, of course, conflict with other desires and he might, on reflection, decide that the aims his moral sentiments conflict with are more important to him than his altruistic desires. But why assume this?

(e) We find ourselves wanting certain things and, upon rational reflection, we endorse some of these desires and identify ourselves with them, accepting a self-image that has them as components. E.g., a mother finds herself loving her child and, typically, endorses that desire, regarding it as part of what makes her her. Other desires that we find within ourselves we do not endorse; if we could do so we’d make them disappear. E.g., a chain smoker wants to smoke, but at the same time might want to not want to smoke; he rejects and resists the desire, or at least wants to resist it. (One compatibilist theory of freedom is that a person is free insofar as she acts upon the “first-order” desires for which she has a “second-order” desire.) Knowing herself as an evolved, material being, a person knows that all her desires have come about by way of a complicated history of natural selection and environmental influences—no one directly chooses what to want (no one is ultimately self-created!); so this can’t be a reason to reject some desires and embrace others. Why assume that knowing the evolutionary origin of our moral desires should lead to our rejecting them?