The Biology of Moral Systems

Richard Alexander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351329293
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1987, this book discusses the life and natural history of moral systems as seen through the eyes of a biologist. The volume offers a comprehensive introspective of the biology of a moral system by examining the evolutionary approach from perspectives of sociobiology and ideology. Morality in relation to conflicts and confluences of interest among humankind are further evaluated, with particular emphasis on the human psyche and the ontogeny of moral behaviour. Philosophical meets biological with insightful commentary on the morality of law and democracy. The book concludes with an epilogue, bibliography and name and subject index. It is clear, concise and contemporary and would be of use to those studying Biology, Philsophy and many other social sciences.

1
Biology and The Background of Moral Systems

The Evolutionary Approach

Introduction

Moral systems are societies with rules. Rules are agreements or understandings about what is permitted and what is not, about what rewards and punishments are likely for specific acts, about what is right and wrong. Although moral rules are somewhat different from legal rules, or laws, the two are not unrelated and frequently overlap.

Moral behavior, in general, consists of following the rules—of not “cheating.” But this is where the problems begin, rather than where they end. Few would accept that following the rules that prevail in society at any particular time is necessarily the most moral thing that one can do. Rules change. They are sometimes imposed by tyrants. There is probably no rule that everyone agrees with.

Moreover, we have come to regard morality—in the sense of concern for others—as something above and beyond rules per se, an ideal to be striven for even if there is no real hope of achieving it in its purest form. Many people believe that morality is an absolute, that there are general rules of moral behavior that are unchanging, and even that such rules are “natural laws” or God-given. I wish to examine such seeming absolutes, how they might have arisen, how hard we really strive toward them, what are the consequences of our striving, why we have failed so far, and how all of these questions are affected by an evolutionary viewpoint.

I will argue that the concepts of moral and ethical arise because of conflicts of interest, and that—at least up to now—moral systems have been designed to assist group members and explicitly not to assist the members of other competing groups. Because between-group competition and aggression are major concomitants of within-group cooperativeness, moreover, I will also argue that moral “advances” are not necessarily related to the philosophical ideal of morality as either indiscriminate or self-sacrificing beneficence or producing the greatest good for the greatest number. Although not necessarily denying the feasibility of achieving or approaching such ideals, I will argue that failing to distinguish them from what has really been going on in the world has been—and still is—the main source of confusion and mystery with respect to moral and ethical considerations.

If there had been no recent discoveries in biology that provided new ways of looking at the concept of moral systems, then I would be optimistic indeed to believe that I could say much that is new. But there have been such discoveries. They are the advances in evolutionary theory developed principally by William D. Hamilton (1964), George C. Williams (1966b), and Robert L. Trivers (1971). These refinements, which were systematically reviewed in Darwinism and Human Affairs (Alexander, 1979a; see also Dawkins, 1976; Alcock, 1984; Chagnon and Irons, 1979; Symons, 1979) have been incorporated into the research and teaching of hundreds of young biologists active in fields like ecology, animal behavior, and population biology (e.g., see Alexander and Tinkle, 1981; Clutton-Brock and Harvey, 1978; Hunt, 1980; Krebs and Davies, 1981, 1984; Trivers, 1985; and biological journals like The American Naturalist, Animal Behaviour, Ecology, Evolution, and Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology). They have also been used by a small group of biologists and social scientists, probably fewer than 100 so far, in renewed efforts to apply evolutionary biology to the human understanding of humans (Alcock, 1984; Alexander, 1979a; Alexander and Tinkle, 1981; Betzig, 1986; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981; Chagnon and Irons, 1979; Daly and Wilson, 1983; Dawkins, 1976,1982; Hull, 1978; Lumsden and Wilson, 1981; Pulliam and Dunford, 1980; Ruse, 1979; Strate, 1982; Symons, 1979; Trivers, 1985; Wilson, 1975, 1978. See also, especially: Ethology and Sociobiology, Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Journal of Social and Biological Structures, Human Ecology).

The interpretations of different authors with regard to the recent advances in evolutionary theory often vary considerably. Aside from the pages that follow, my own views are most completely expressed in the first chapter of Darwinism and Human Affairs. With respect to humans my views probably coincide most closely with the general statements of Alcock (1984), Daly and Wilson (1983), Irons (1979), Symons (1979), and Trivers (1985). Otherwise, I recommend that the reader return to the original writings of Hamilton, Williams, and Trivers, which have now been reprinted many times (e.g., Clutton-Brock and Harvey, 1978; Krebs and Davies, 1981; Hunt, 1980). The central point in these writings, separated from all of its consequences and ramifications, is that natural selection has apparently been maximizing the survival by reproduction of genes, as they have been defined by evolutionists, and that, with respect to the activities of individuals, this includes effects on copies of their genes, even copies located in other individuals. In other words, we are evidently evolved not only to aid the genetic materials in our own bodies, by creating and assisting descendants, but also to assist, by nepotism, copies of our genes that reside in collateral (nondescendant) relatives.

During the past few years, I have heard several people suggest that the above-mentioned refinements of evolutionary theory represent the greatest intellectual advance of the century. I agree, in the sense that significant improvements in the theory that explains our underlying nature must always command special attention. I think that almost every concept relevant to human sociality (such as rationality, conscience, guilt, consciousness, altruism, and egoism) has its meaning changed—or made more precise—by applying the new refinements of evolutionary theory. I also feel that the true realization of intellectual advances in biological theory comes from their eventual application to human conduct: from their effect on humanity’s view of itself, and, in turn, the effect of changes in self-views on human conduct and, consequently, the future of all existence. In this case the changes in self-vie ws involve principally two items: First, is a more precise awareness of the nature of the long-term history that has shaped our life interests, most especially the idea of fulfillment through relatives and their surrogates. Second, is the realization that ethics, morality, human conduct, and the human psyche are to be understood only if societies are seen as collections of individuals seeking their own self-interests (albeit through use of the the group or group cooperativeness, and given that, in historical terms, the individual’s self-interests can only be realized through reproduction, by creating descendants and assisting other relatives). In some respects these ideas run contrary to what people have believed and been taught about morality and human values: I suspect that nearly all humans believe it is a normal part of the functioning of every human individual now and then to assist someone else in the realization of that person’s own interests to the actual net expense of those of the altruist. What this “greatest intellectual revolution of the century” tells us is that, despite our intuitions, there is not a shred of evidence to support this view of beneficence, and a great deal of convincing theory suggests that any such view will eventually be judged false. This implies that we will have to start all over again to describe and understand ourselves, in terms alien to our intuitions, and in one way or another different from every discussion of this topic across the whole of human history. It is also a goal of this book to contribute to this redescription and new understanding, and especially to discuss why our intuitions should have misinformed us.

A major illustration of what this redescription means involves the resolution of the problem of duality (selfishness and altruism) in human nature, paradoxical to the earliest philosophers and not resolved in any writings that do not take modern biology into account. We have every reason to believe that our view of human nature can now be reunified, with David Hume’s (1750) “elements of the serpent and the wolf” referring to the serving of our own interests by assisting ourselves at others’ expense, and his “particle of the dove” representing the serving of our own interests through (1) relatives who carry our genetic materials and (2) friends and associates who may be expected to reciprocate our kindnesses with interest.

Only six authors (Alexander, 1979-1985; Campbell, 1972-1983; Singer, 1981; Mackie, 1978,1982; Ruse, 1979-1986) have previously made extensive attempts to apply recent evolutionary theory to the study of ethical questions, although several (e.g., see Barash, 1977; Boehm, 1979; Caplan, 1978; Dawkins, 1976, 1982; Stent, 1978; E. O. Wilson, 1975, 1978; Richards, 1982-1986) have discussed the topic briefly. One author, Kitcher (1985), criticizes extensively what he sees as E. O. Wilson’s (1975, 1978) and Lumsden and Wilson’s (1981) views on evolution and ethics (and their and my more general views of how evolution has affected human behavior). Flew (1967) and Richards (1986a,b) review a good part of the literature on evolution and ethics that preceded the recent refinements of evolutionary theory (see also Ebling, 1969). I see the outstanding efforts by older authors to relate evolution and ethics as those of Darwin (1871), Thomas H. Huxley (1896), and Sir Arthur Keith (1947) (see pp. 168-177).

Sociobiology and Ideology

A caution is necessary, especially for the nonbiologist audience. As I see it, the greatest distortions of the recent advances in evolutionary biology are discussed under the label “sociobiology,” whether by its most enthusiastic supporters or (more especially) its most severe critics. These include implications that behavioral causation can sometimes be reduced to genetic factors alone; undue emphasis on the sterile dichotomy of innate versus acquired (or genetic versus learned, social, or cultural); suggestions of identifiable but unchangeable limits on human learning in the conduct of social and ethical activities; implications that one or another brand of social Darwinism deserves reviving; casual, careless, or otherwise flawed imputations of function; and arguments for some version of the naturalistic fallacy (see pp. 165-168). Opponents of sociobiology argue that most or all evolutionary biologists support these errors and fallacies.

Some people asked why I did not use the label of sociobiology in my 1979 book; the main reason is that distortions by both proponents and opponents, which are involved in most so-called sociobiological writings about human behavior, detract from the real issues. The other reasons are: (1) outside biology the label is more closely associated with certain views of behavioral ontogeny and ethics (which I often do not share—see Alexander, 1979a), than with advances in evolutionary theory per se; (2) those efforts to apply evolution specifically to analyses of human behavior, which parade the adjective “sociobiological,” have sometimes been the least scholarly (especially in the sense of distinguishing hypotheses from conclusions or “explanations”); and (3) even if sociobiology were to be accepted as simply “the study of the evolution of social behavior” (rather than someone’s view of the developmental or genetic background of behavior), the label does not suggest any clear or logical boundaries for a discipline. Thus, it is not easily seen to include applications of evolutionary theory to apparently “nonsocial” topics like senescence, sex ratios, and life histories. I believe it is confusing to suggest that refinements of evolutionary theory create new disciplines, that they can be restricted to something like social behavior, or that they are properly part of one particular approach. This confusion has contributed to the term sociobiology becoming a target of derogation and ridicule by nonbiologists, and this has almost certainly delayed the acceptance and use of evolutionary principles by human-oriented scholars (Alexander, 1987). The attachment of labels like sociobiology to advances in evolutionary thinking that explicitly concern human behavior tends to create ideologies and to divide the intellectual world into proponents and opponents. Too many of those involved in the ensuing “debates” do not trouble themselves to understand the underlying issues, drawing their conclusions instead from the popular literature and what they (or popular writers) see as the political or social implications. This is characteristic of ideological as opposed to scientific arguments.

The label “sociobiology” also seems to have suggested to some social and political scientists, and philosophers, that there is an easy shortcut into a deep understanding of biology. If that is true, one only needs to examine the rash of publications by nonbiologists under the label of sociobiology to see that very few have discovered the shortcut. I believe, instead, that the route to appropriate understanding of organic evolution is through a broad understanding of basic biological principles, and that significant curricular revisions will be required, introducing biology where it is now often completely absent, in the training of human-oriented scientists, lawyers, philosophers, and others. It is this general absence of deep understanding of biology that has caused most of the controversies about “genetic” determinism, and about the relationship of evolution by natural selection to behavioral development, learning, and culture (cf. Flinn and Alexander, 1982; Irons, 1979). Nonbiologist readers may view the first section of this book as something that can be skipped over, in order to get directly to the topic of moral systems. On the contrary, I believe that unless the arguments in this chapter, and those in the first chapter of Darwinism and Human Affairs, are understood thoroughly, what I say in the latter parts of this book is virtually certain to be misinterpreted.

Paradoxically, within biology, terms like sociobiology are not particularly controversial. This is partly because most biologists understand genetics, development, and physiology well enough not to make the naive mistakes of both critics and enthusiasts from outside biology. And it is partly because no one is very upset if someone is wrong about the developmental basis of behavior in a frog, a bird, or an insect. To be similarly wrong about humans, however, can have decidedly pernicious effects.

Three decades ago Konrad Lorenz also tried to name a “new field” which he also said consisted of the evolutionary study of behavior. The label he used, “ethology,” also came to be associated with his particular views concerning the physiology, development, and inheritance of behavior and as a result eventually became obscure and less frequently used. The label “sociobiology” appears to be suffering a similar fate; and I suspect that the causes of evolution, biology, and especially humanity’s understanding of itself, will thereby be served. The reason is that whatever arguments from biology are useful in understanding human behavior will then melt more easily into the human-oriented disciplines and not be held outside in an artificial subdiscipline, thus perpetuating hostilities and impeding the flow of understanding.

Meanings and Misinterpretations

It is necessary that I comment further on definitions, because even the words in the title of this book have some likelihood of being misinterpreted.

Biology and Biological

The word “biology” has diverse meanings, especially for people from different disciplines. For many (especially in the social sciences, philosophy, and medicine) biology translates as “genetic” or “physiological,” and is contrasted with “psychological,” “social,” or “cultural.” I do not so mean it, and, indeed, I reject these usages. People who have fallen into this erroneous and, I believe, harmful dichotomy are often those who search for ways to alter human behavior. In their professions they are required to ask more or less continually: can I alter this behavior by changing only the psychological, social, or cultural environment, or must I (by some other means) alter the internal physiological, chemical, or hormonal environment, or even use a genetically different individual to get a different behavior? It is understandable that this kind of problem leads them to ask whether or not a behavior is “biologically” determined. But the dichotomy is misleading. Biologists also study what social scientists call “psychological” and “cultural” aspects of behavior, even in nonhuman organisms, and not merely physiological and genetic aspects: examples may be found in nearly every paper published in journals like Behaviour, Animal Behaviour, Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie, and Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Biologists, moreover, have no justification for being more deterministic than others in their view of behavior, or for neglecting ontogenies, plasticity, or psychological, social, and cultural stimuli and causes. Learning, after all, is essentially universal among animals, and prominent behavioral variations in even simple organisms—such as those of the different castes of social insects, and indeed the morphological and physiological uniqueness of the castes—are determined by environmental not genetic variations.

My dictionary defines biology first as the science of life, and the central question of this science is the evolutionary background or adaptive function of traits and tendencies. I mean to ask: How can biology, the science of life, contribute to our understanding of moral systems? What procedures, information, concepts, and theories from the science of biology may be useful to human-oriented scholars? In what ways are moral and ethical questions related to our background in organic evolution? What has been the natural history of moral systems? One aspect of this usage that distinguishes it from the use of “biology” by many nonbiologists is that it explicitly includes environmental as well as genetic effects, and, indeed, it always includes the interaction of genes and environment. When the Harvard paleontologist Steven J. Gould said on the television news program “60 Minutes” (broadcast on April 22, 1984) that the human mind is so flexible and the potential scope of human behavior so broad that “it scarcely behooves us to consider biology at all,” he was obviously using “biology” as many nonbiologists use it—to refer to genetic variations. If he interpreted biology, as I do, to mean evolutionary background (i.e., to refer to the more or less common heritage of genes and culture given to us across all of history), he would surely have been hesitant to make the same comment. Similarly, Lewontin et al. (1984) state (p. 7) that “Biological determinism (biologism) has been a powerful mode of explaining the observed inequalities of status, wealth, and power in contemporary industrial capitalist societies, and of defining human ‘universals’ of behavior as natural characteristics of these societies.” Deterministic views have undoubtedly so been used, but biologists, whether they are dealing with humans or nonhumans, are in no way restricted to universals or to variations that correlate with genetic variations: natural selection also f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Biology of Moral Systems
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 BIOLOGY AND THE BACKGROUND OF MORAL SYSTEMS
• 2 A BIOLOGICAL VIEW OF MORALITY
• 3 MORALITY AS SEEN BY PHILOSOPHERS AND BIOLOGISTS
• 4 APPLYING THE BIOLOGICAL VIEW OF MORALITY
• 5 CONCLUSIONS
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index