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 whats
  right or wrong, whatever your ethical views are.
• So if evolution is true, it very probably does
  have some moral consequences, even if they arent
  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, its 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 evolutionis 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.
• Im 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 Huxleys 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 dont
  have implications for right or wrong, or for
  whats 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 cant 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,
  whats adaptive doesnt 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 dont 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 dont 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, its 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.

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The evolution of altruism

• Kin selection (Hamilton).
• Reciprocal Altruism.
• Evolutionary strategies and game theory
  (prisoners 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 wont 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.

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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 fellowsIn 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 RW 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 Macbeths 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 arent 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 cant 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.