Evolutionary Moral Realism

Michael Stingl, John Collier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032084398
• eBook ISBN: 9781000761108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Against standard approaches to evolution and ethics, this book develops the idea that moral values may find their origin in regularly recurring features in the cooperative environments of species of organisms that are social and intelligent.

Across a wide range of species that are social and intelligent, possibilities arise for helping others, responding empathetically to the needs of others, and playing fairly. The book identifies these underlying environmental regularities as biological natural kinds and as natural moral values. As natural kinds, moral values help to provide more complete explanations for the selection of traits that arise in response to them. For example, helping in an aquatic environment is quite different than helping in an arboreal environment, and so we can expect the selection of traits for helping to reflect these underlying environmental differences. With the human ability to name, talk, and reason about important features of our environment, moral values become part of moral discourse and argument, helping to produce coherent systems of moral thought.

Combining a naturalistic approach to morality with an equal emphasis on moral argument and truth, this book will be of interest to philosophers and historians of biology, theoretical biologists, comparative psychologists, and moral philosophers.

1
Evolutionary moral realism

Evolutionary biology and the nature of morality

“If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields.” These lines from a well-known poem by Robert McCrae, a Canadian physician, poet, and soldier in the First World War, suggest that breaking faith with those who have sacrificed themselves so that we may survive and prosper is a bad thing to do. It is, the poem suggests, morally wrong. Maintaining bonds of social trust in such circumstances – and remaining loyal to the cause for which the sacrifice was made – is morally good. Many of us would share this intuition.

But where do beliefs about moral values come from, and what makes them correct or incorrect? We contend that morality may be a general biological phenomenon grounded in the evolution of intelligent, social species. Morally bad actions generally lead to unhappiness and misery, and morally good ones generally have opposite effects on human well-being, both individually and socially. These effects are generally linked to further biological consequences, such as survival and reproduction. Nevertheless, nothing is morally good simply because it is the product of evolution. This book develops a naturalistic approach to morality that we call evolutionary moral realism (EMR) in Collier and Stingl (2013). We begin with the intuitive idea that certain kinds of things existing in an organism’s environment may be naturally good for that organism before the organism develops any sort of a capacity to detect or respond to them. We focus on one group of naturally good things that we call natural moral goods, and we pay particular attention to one kind of organism, humans, for which normatively robust moral ought-claims seem appropriate. But we also consider other kinds of organisms that we think are capable of detecting natural moral goods that arise in their environments, sometimes in ways that enable these organisms to respond in morally appropriate ways. Moral goods may guide the behaviour of such organisms, and so these goods may have a normative function, even if it is incorrect to say that the organisms are following explicit norms that tell them how they ought to behave.

Unlike most other evolutionary approaches to ethics, EMR begins with an empirical hypothesis that invokes a particular form of moral realism. Loosely speaking, moral values are morally good or morally bad kinds of things that regularly arise in the environments of species that are social and intelligent. Morality is not ultimately based in behaviour patterns that have survival value or in psychological capacities that might lead humans to believe that certain things are morally good or morally bad. EMR’s theoretical commitment to moral realism is not intended as a metaphysical postulation but as the guiding hypothesis of an empirical research program that we argue is both plausible and interesting. We should be clear from the outset that all we are trying to establish in this book is the initial plausibility and theoretical interest of this hypothesis. More conclusive arguments in its defence will require more empirical development. But this is as it should be: we are advancing EMR as an empirical theory of morality, and at this early point in its development, the very beginning of such a theory.

A key question the book seeks to answer is how we might get from EMR’s hypothesis about natural moral goods to the ought-claims of human moral codes. Drawing together arguments from earlier chapters, our final chapter focuses on the empirical relationship between what we are calling natural moral facts and normative moral values, arguing that EMR makes no logically fallacious move from “is” to “ought.” The nature of the relationship from “is” to “ought” is central to EMR’s success as an empirical theory of morality, because we can only be sure that we are offering an account of what we humans call “morality” if EMR is able to offer plausibly linked accounts of moral justification and moral truth. To get to the endpoint of moral justification and moral norms in the way that we do, we start empirically with the idea that morally good things, as well as morally bad things, may initially arise in the biological world as natural kinds of things in the environments of certain sorts of species.

Consider a biological kind like a lion. This kind of thing appears as a regularly recurring structural feature of the environments of certain other kinds of creatures, some of which may benefit greatly from being able to detect this particular feature of their environment and to respond to it appropriately, that is, as a predatory kind of thing.

According to EMR, we should suppose something similar for moral goods: they arise in the material world as natural biological kinds, something like regularly recurring predatory patterns like lions. We do not, however, think that moral kinds are species kinds, a point we will clarify in Chapters 2 – 4. Our point here is that in their simplest forms, natural moral goods are regularly recurring structural features of particular environments, features that might come to matter greatly to the organisms in those environments. To see what we mean here, consider three quick examples.

Build a rat trap that rats can be trained to open. Put an untrained rat in the trap and then in a cage place the trapped rat, a trained rat, and some food. The trained rat will often free the trapped rat before both rats then eat the food (Bartal, Decety, and Mason 2011).

If you are drawing a picture with a marker and drop it where you cannot reach it, both small children and chimps will hand the marker back to you. They will not do this if you have thrown the marker down (Warneken et al. 2007).

Small children are watching a puppet that is apparently trying to get a brightly coloured rattle out of a box. A second puppet sits on the lid of the box so that it cannot be opened. A third puppet helps to open the lid of the box. If you offer the latter two puppets to the children, they are most interested in the puppet that helped (Hamlin and Wynn 2011).

Although it may be realized in different ways, the possibility of helping someone in need would seem to be a regularly recurring structural pattern in the environments of rats, chimps, and humans. This pattern is interesting and important to these creatures. Just as it is good to be able to detect and respond to predatory patterns in their environments, it is good for organisms like rats, chimps, and humans, and for their genes, for them to be able to detect and respond appropriately to natural moral goods. Consider two other experiments.

If you reward capuchin monkeys with highly desirable grapes when other capu-chins have been receiving less desirable cucumbers for the same task of returning tokens to you, the monkeys getting the cucumbers will stop cooperating. They will refuse the cucumber, throwing it on the ground or back at you (Brosnan and de Waal 2003).

In play fighting, juvenile rats follow a fifty-fifty rule in knocking each other down and going after each other’s throats (Pellis, Pellis, and Reinhart 2010, 405–406). The rats stop playing with playmates who do not allow them an equal chance to fight back, and as adults, rats left out of such play tend to behave too aggressively in unthreatening social circumstances and not aggressively enough in threatening circumstances.

The possibility of playing fairly, like helping someone in need, is a naturally recurring pattern in the environments of certain sorts of creatures. These kinds of good things arise in similar environments and are connected to other kinds of good things, like trusting and caring relationships, in mutually supporting kinds of ways. EMR calls such things natural moral goods. It may be that the natural moral goods group together as a single, more general kind of thing, or alternatively, that they form a matrix of closely related kinds of things. Either way, they are what EMR calls natural moral goods. Patterns of things that are morally bad, like cheating, may form a similar class of natural moral values, in this case negative moral values.

EMR thus treats human morality as a particular instance of a more general biological phenomenon. Things that are morally good for us are also good for other kinds of organisms, and some of these organisms are able to respond to these goods in ways that are appropriate to the kind of good thing that they are. Humans evolved to be able to talk and argue about these good kinds of things, and such talk and argument has led, culturally and historically, to carefully articulated sets of moral norms.

This evolutionary approach to morality immediately raises three important questions. First, what makes morally good things morally good, on this naturalistic account? Second, why does moral goodness, on this approach to morality, not simply reduce to what is good for our genes? And third, how exactly are natural moral goods supposed to be related to moral oughts? In particular, does EMR commit the logical fallacy of inferring normative claims from factual claims? In the chapters to follow we offer extended answers to these questions on behalf of EMR. Given their importance to the general argument of the book, we begin here with a sketch of how we intend to answer them.

What makes natural moral goods morally good?

Nothing. EMR’s answer to this question may initially seem disappointing. According to EMR, natural moral goods are nothing more than the naturally occurring good kinds of things that they are. As in the famous epigraph of G.E. Moore’s (1903) Principia Ethica, everything is what it is and not something else. If EMR is right, it turns out that at its beginning, morality is a general biological phenomenon. Some things are morally good and others are not. Helping another and playing fairly are what that they are, and there is no more foundational a source of moral goodness to tell us why this is so. Moral goods may have some sort of biological function, such as regulating conflicts between individual and group goods, but even if this is part of what makes them the natural kinds of things that they are, it is not what makes them moral kinds.

More metaphysically inclined philosophers like Moore might still ask: supposing that the kinds of things in question exist as natural kinds, what is it about them that makes them moral kinds? To such philosophers, it might look as if EMR is simply begging the question in favour of its evolutionary answer to the question, What is morality? In some ways, we may be begging this question, but not, we think, in any way that is fatal to the success of EMR.

We aim to make plausible the idea that morality may ultimately turn out to be a particular natural kind or a cluster of closely related natural kinds. So we do face an immediate challenge in the form of Moore’s open question argument: how do we know that this natural kind, whatever it turns out to be, is a moral kind? If this is indeed an open question, EMR has yet to tell us what morality really is. But our response to this challenge is just as immediate: the open question argument only works if we assume “morality” is not originally a directly referential natural kind term. We can ask, philosophically, if water really is H₂O; but if we have an empirical theory that tells us that what we call “water” does indeed turn out to refer to H₂O, the philosophical openness of the question about what water “really is” loses much of its point. “Water” might still have important connotations not directly tied to its reference, but given the kind of thing it refers to, any cultural connotations humans might want to give it will need to take its referential meaning into account.

In other words, the fundamental meaning of morality might already be fixed by its objective referent in the world. If we defend EMR in this way, we may still appear to be open to the philosophical objection that we are simply assuming “morality” is in its most basic use a natural kind term. There are plenty of philosophical arguments that morality is something else, or even nothing at all, other than a cognitive and emotional illusion that evolution has built us humans to fall prey to.

These alternative approaches to morality may of course raise open questions of their own. Nevertheless, what are we to say about the problem for EMR? Our response to EMR’s version of the open question argument is that we are not simply assuming that key moral terms are directly referential but actively developing an empirical theory of morality that treats them as if they were. We think the theory has enough initial plausibility to be taken seriously and that it may be empirically testable. In this book, we are not yet in a position to state the theory fully or to test it. But if we can establish that EMR has some degree of initial plausibility, philosophical arguments that EMR is unnecessary or impossible become correspondingly less interesting as theories of morality. Existing approaches to morality are mostly if not entirely speculative, they do not agree with one another, and they are not testable in their current forms. Our development of EMR in this book does not provide specific arguments that might refute any of them, but it does promise to stay within the bounds of empirical testability.

In developing our argument for EMR, we will not be reviewing competing approaches to morality, one at a time, trying to show where and how they might be mistaken. They might not be. EMR may instead be mistaken, but if it is, the mistake will be an empirical one. On the other hand, if we can show that EMR has some level of empirical plausibility, taking on other speculative arguments about what morality might be does not seem like a particularly pressing task at this early point in EMR’s development.

A central claim of EMR is that rats, monkeys, chimps, and small children can detect and respond to moral goods when they are present in their environment. They cannot of course name these kinds of things or talk or argue about them. They cannot detect ways in which the different goods might be connected to one another in mutually reinforcing ways, and they cannot generalize from observations of the goods across different contexts, either as the goods might separately arise or as they might arise in conjunction with each other.

This might seem to be an immediate and significant empirical problem for EMR. On most other evolutionary approaches to ethics, morality begins with the human capacity to name, talk, and argue about aspects of our social interactions with one another. “This is (morally) good” and “do (or promote) this” mark out aspects of our social situation to which enough of us are willing to extend joint approbation. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Good. What makes things morally good is our capacity and willingness to recognize them as such, not the fact that they are good in themselves. The target, then, for most other approaches to evolutionary ethics, their explanandum, is to explain why we have such tendencies to group together and promote these nominal moral values. This human tendency may be related to more rudimentary psychological capacities in other species, but there is no such thing as morality in the world until humans evolve to create it.

EMR turns this idea on its head. In the beginning were the naturally arising moral goods. The Word came much later, with the human development of language and argument; and if the Word was indeed good, this was at least in part because it allowed humans to talk and argue about naturally occurring moral goods. In the beginning, these goods made it advantageous, in certain environments, to be able to detect them in ways that were directly connected to behaviour. Once the goods appeared in the environment of a creature, capacities to detect and respond appropriately to them became possible, given the requisite biological variation arising within the creature’s existing developmental constraints. If the environment favoured such capacities, they could be selected for. Initial capacities might lead to more discriminating capacities and perhaps to new forms of moral goodness. In the right sorts of environments, more discriminating capacities might disclose aspects of moral goodness invisible to less discriminating capacities, and more discriminating capacities might create new social possibilities that might bring with them new forms of moral goodness. In such a virtuous feedback loop, moral goods might affect trait selection, and in affecting trait selection, they may further affect group selection including species selection.

EMR takes moral goods to be causally significant structural features of the biological world that help explain the various kinds of capacities that arise in response to them. This includes how and why similar capacities arise in species that are not closely related to one another (convergent evolution) or differ across related species. In treating human morality as a specific instance of a more general biological phenomenon, EMR is offering a hypothesis that unifies and simplifies at a more general level related explanations of what appear to be similar behaviour patterns across a wide variety of species.

Why not suppose, perhaps even more simply, that the capacities arose all by themselves, without reference to anything objectively good? In a well-known thought experiment, Gilbert Harman (1977, 4) asks us to imagine that we have just come across a group of hooligans engaged in setting a cat on fire. In this scenario, Harman asks us where it is simpler to locate the apparent moral badness of the situation: out in the material world with the match and the flames and the screaming cat, or in our own inner revulsion at the hooligan’s delight in the screaming cat engulfed by flames? The apparent badness, says Harman, is most simply accounted for in terms of our emotional response. We simply do not like this kind of thing. And if we look back to human evolution, we can see how it would have been beneficial to social and intelligent creatures like us to have exactly this sort of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Evolutionary moral realism
• 2 The moon in the water
• 3 Moral trajectories
• 4 Moral sense theories
• 5 Reason, rational contracts, and selfish genes
• 6 Natural moral values and moral progress
• 7 Partial and impartial moral reasons
• 8 Moving from is to ought
• Conclusion
• Index