Evolution, Human Behaviour and Morality

The Legacy of Westermarck

Olli Lagerspetz, Jan Antfolk, Ylva Gustafsson, Camilla Kronqvist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367596156
• eBook ISBN: 9781317138211
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book highlights the recent re-emergence of Edward Westermarck's work in modern approaches to morality and altruism, examining his importance as one of the founding fathers of anthropology and as a moral relativist, who identified our moral feelings with biologically-evolved retributive emotions.

Questioning the extent to which current debates on the relationship between biology and morality are similar to those in which Westermarck himself was involved, the authors ask what can be learnt from his arguments and from the criticism that he encountered. Drawing on Westermarck's manuscripts and papers as well as his published work, the authors show the importance of situating debates, whether modern or classical, in their correct methodological and philosophical context.

This volume is a rigorous assessment of the ways in which morality is connected with human biological nature. It plays close attention to the development of debates in this field and will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and philosophy.

1
Introduction

Westermarck and modern evolutionary approaches to morality

Olli Lagerspetz

The relation between morality and human biological nature is a research theme that holds out many promises. It is also one that must be approached with care. The present collection of essays contributes to the methodology of applying evolutionary frameworks to morality. Evolutionary psychology in its present form is a recent example of the research endeavour we will be discussing, but it belongs to an ongoing tradition.

Methodology, in brief, is about matching research questions with research methods. Thus, it concerns not only techniques of investigation in a narrow sense, but also the status of the questions posed to the material. The crucial element here is the inter-relatedness of questions, techniques and data. On the one hand, a given question suggests certain ways of looking for an answer. On the other hand, the methods at one’s disposal tend to influence one’s understanding of the question. In this way, settling for a method of looking is always also to settle for a particular interpretation of what one is seeking.

Relations between ‘morality’ and ‘biology’ have been a theme for several academic disciplines as well for other spheres of culture, including literature, art and religion. Philosophy, sociology, evolutionary theory, psychology and psychoanalysis have all contributed to the scholarly debate. In advancing their responses to it, the different participating disciplines have also been subtly or not so subtly reformulating the issue of ‘morality and biology’. Discussing the methodology of applying evolutionary frameworks to morality thus requires addressing ways in which the crucial questions and concepts have been understood and reinterpreted – how arguments have been put forward, or sometimes just tacitly assumed, for the reformulations suggested.

Methodology in this full-fledged sense can be described as the study of how research can be conducted, understood and revisited. This means not only assessing methods in current research, but also putting past research into perspective. The editors of this volume embrace three major starting points:

1. Understanding relations between human biological evolutionary history and morality calls for conceptual clarification of some kind. It is at present often unclear what is meant by the two things that we are expected to relate to each other – ‘biology’ and ‘morality’.
2. We believe that this kind of clarification may and often must involve a historical element. We can more easily understand the terms deployed in current controversies if we look at their development, as well as at the cultural, philosophical and political concerns that have shaped the debates over the years.
3. Finally, all contributors to this volume use the work of Edward Westermarck (1862–1939) as the central point of reference. Westermarck counts as one of the founding fathers of social anthropology as we know it today. He also put forward a theory of the emotional basis of morality. For him, morality was rooted in reactions of a specific kind, which in turn had a background in human biological evolution. Today Westermarck is celebrated as a precursor of evolutionary psychology. In particular, modern evolutionary psychologists have focused on his theory of incest avoidance, known as the Westermarck effect.

Methodology as self-reflexion

As to the first point (1): The idea of explaining moral behaviour is a central element in the debate on morality and evolution. But there is no agreement on exactly what should be required of a successful explanation of human behaviour. On this issue, we encounter the classical contrast between two conceptions regarding the status of the human sciences; between what one may call the Unity of Science view and the tradition of Geisteswissenschaften (see von Wright, 1971, Chapter 1). Whole libraries have been written on this conflict, and we must now confine ourselves to a brief characterisation of it. On Hempel’s (1965) influential formulation of the Unity of Science view, scientific explanation consists of demonstrating that a phenomenon (the explanandum) is a local application of a general regularity or covering law (sometimes described as a ‘law of nature’). Thus, if a specific type of human behaviour – say, altruistic behaviour – is to be explained, the evolutionary explanation might be that it is a species of the more general category of adaptive behaviour. The full evolutionary explanation of morality would involve showing in what ways specific types of moral behaviour are adaptations shaped by natural selection or, in some instances, by-products of such adaptations. In contrast, the tradition of Geisteswissenschaften describes the primary task of the humanities and the social sciences as one of ‘understanding’, not of ‘explanation’. To put this another way, understanding takes the place of explanation because to understand fully the considerations and concerns that shape an agent’s meaningful behaviour is to have an explanation of it. To ‘explain morality’ in this sense is to describe the meaning of morality in human life – finding descriptions that do justice to the concerns and considerations expressed in it.

The idea of Geisteswissenschaften implies a conception of the human sciences as an instance of cultural self-reflection. With regard to the task of ‘explaining morality’, this suggests the following view. A central part of the explanatory activity should consist of questioning received opinions about what morality is generally ‘about’ – not in the spirit of advocating reforms of existing moral practices, but as an attempt to see whether the moral concerns that typically engage us in our personal lives are adequately reflected in the theoretical debate. For instance, are our most important moral concerns recognisable in the kinds of general statements to which many of us are prone to assent when questions about the meaning of morality are addressed? Crucially, morality is ‘about’ us, about the meaning that we find in our own relations with others.

Conceptualisations of human behaviour in terms of evolutionary theory and a biologically determined human nature tend to bring along an entire baggage of mostly unacknowledged assumptions about the essence of morality. They typically involve the use of terms of art such as altruism, reciprocity and sympathy, to name a few central ones.¹ These words owe their first origin to quite specific theories of motivation, even though, after decades of dissemination, they have also found their way to everyday speech and popular theorising about behaviour. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that our personal understanding of the concerns and problems that shape our moral lives is both more nuanced and more chaotic than might be captured by a theory of altruism. Which leads to the question: What happens along the way when moral concerns are transposed onto an evolutionary theory of behaviour? Evolutionary explanations of morality easily run the risk of, so to speak, streamlining away the thing that they hope to explain. There are perhaps circumstances in which a rationally streamlined morality might appear a good thing, but an explanatory endeavour is, by definition, committed to preserving whatever is to be explained, not replacing it with an improved variety. This is, on the other hand, not to deny that philosophical and theoretical confusions are often solved by finding novel descriptions of the phenomena at issue.

Another possible response makes use of the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations (see Antfolk, Chapter 6, this volume).² One might say that evolutionary theory is not supposed to explain the moral thinking of any given individual, but only the general, large patterns of human interaction and that of some of their nonhuman precursors. In other words, by applying evolutionary reasoning, scholars seek to find general laws for human behaviour – laws that may or may not apply to specific cases. For instance, Westermarck’s ultimate explanation of human incest avoidance made use of the idea of a process of natural selection, but his explanation at this level did not (and as a matter of principle, could not) involve any claim to the effect that human beings as individuals wish to improve their fitness. Selective pressure, however, gave rise to motivational structures in individuals which in practice tend to increase their fitness. From the point of view of Geisteswissenschaften, however, the assimilation of individual moral motivation with causal influences at the proximate level still seems to involve conflation of causality and intentionality. For the present, we should simply note the character of the methodological disagreement. It concerns not only the preferred explanations or the preferred methods of explaining, but also the identification of the very phenomenon (‘morality’) to be explained.

By focusing on the human being as an embodied biological being, evolutionary approaches to morality have given new prominence to an idea that may serve as a corrective to traditional moral philosophy. It is the suggestion that human moral life should not be seen merely as the application of an intellectually coherent system of precepts, but rather as the outcome of natural reactions of one living being to another. This was the central motif of Westermarck’s theory of the origin and development of morality. Today, neosentimentalist moral theories have capitalised on some of the insights included in Westermarck’s theory. We will return to this issue in a moment.

The historical context

As to the second point (2): The issues just mentioned are, of course, complicated – philosophically, culturally and politically – more so than what is for the most part allowed by contemporary proponents or critics of evolutionary approaches to behaviour. The ramifications of these issues at the level of the general worldview can be traced by looking for cultural and other concerns that originally gave rise to the debate. This book reflects the conviction that historical analysis is essential for understanding what the discussion today is about. Without some grasp of this background of ideas, there is a distinct risk that participants of the current round of debates literally do not know what they are saying.

The attempts today to find links between evolution and morality are to some extent fuelled by the increase of technical sophistication in the applications of evolutionary theory. But the enterprise as such is not new. Evolutionism has experienced several second comings in the last 150 years or so. A persistent battle is being fought for the soul of ‘real’ Darwinism, and the debate constantly spills over to ideology. Because many of the arguments have remained the same over the years, we will do well to look at them in their original contexts. One thing we learn is that Darwinism is not a single ideology, but more like a toolbox, a set of resources that lend themselves to different, even contradictory, uses.

Anthropological theory developed initially, to a great extent, as a response to nineteenth-century philosophical debates concerning the ‘basis’, ‘sources’ or ‘origins’ of morality. For early anthropologists, the question of how morality emerged during human prehistory was at the same time a question about the essence of morality in the present situation. Was morality an expression of human nature, and hence ‘natural’? Or should it be seen as a set of culturally imposed constraints on human nature? For instance, was sexual taboo the outcome of human natural instincts, or was it due to the repression of precisely those instincts by society? Westermarck responded to these questions by creatively applying evolutionary theory and the moral psychology of eighteenth-century British sentimentalists.

Several modern authors (such as E.O. Wilson, Frans de Waal, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby) explicitly acknowledge their indebtedness to Westermarck and claim to be developing his work. On the other hand, modern criticism of evolutionary approaches to morality is often reminiscent of the critique directed at Westermarck by his contemporaries. That includes responses by Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud and the mostly implicit criticism found in the work of Westermarck’s student Bronisław Malinowski. At this juncture, it will be valuable to look at the roots of recent debates. Are they simply a replay of the old ones, or are there new elements? And, given the existing similarities and documented influences, to what extent are Westermarck and more recent evolutionary approaches to morality vulnerable to similar kinds of criticism?

As a preliminary answer, it seems to us that Westermarck indeed was a predecessor of evolutionary psychology. He shared many of its theoretical assumptions, including the commitment to looking for a unitary human nature, and privileging explanations in terms of instinctive emotional responses over cultural explanations. At the same time, he demonstrated a degree of philosophical awareness that could be helpful in modern attempts to address the same issues. Moreover, he was alive to the value of anthropological fieldwork.

Edward Westermarck

Finally, to the third point (3): a few words are needed here to explain who Westermarck was. Edward (Edvard³) Westermarck is usually associated with those great names of late Victorian social anthropology, Sir James Frazer and Edward Burnett Tylor (see Lévi-Strauss, [1945] 1982). All three of them were evolution-ists and advocates of the approach known as the comparative method. After his graduation from the University of Helsinki (Helsingfors), Westermarck took the steamship to London in 1887, entrenched himself in the British Museum Library and started his scholarly career as an armchair anthropologist. His thoroughly researched volumes on the history of human marriage (HHM, 1891) and the origin and development of the moral ideas (ODMI I-II; 1906, 1908) gained him entry to the emerging research community of British social anthropologists. These volumes were still wholly (HHM) or overwhelmingly (ODMI) based on written sources. However, the comparison with Frazer only partly captures Westermarck’s contribution to research. Unlike Frazer, he was also a fieldworker. From 1898 onwards Westermarck spent several years in Morocco and carried out field research of previously unsurpassed magnitude (summarised in RBM I-II; 1926). He was the first anthropologist to stress the importance of an extended stay in the field and of acquiring fluency in the local languages. He also passed on these insights to his students. Westermarck’s anthropological life work thus has both traditional and forward-looking aspects. On the one hand, he used the comparative method to create syntheses from a large mass of secondary sources in the style of his nineteenth-century predecessors. On the other hand, he conducted meticulous research of his own with local informants.

Through most of his adult life, Westermarck held teaching positions in both Finland and Great Britain at once. He worked as a professor of philosophy at the University of Helsinki (1906–1918) and Åbo Akademi University (1918–1932) and as a teacher of sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (lecturer 1904, professor 1907–1930). At the London School of Economics he was strategically placed at a time when social anthropology was a novel discipline, soon to expand vigorously in Britain and in the Commonwealth. Many of his students became prominent social scientists (including Bronisław Malinowski, Raymond Firth, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Talcott Parsons, Rafael Karsten, Gunnar Landtman, Uno Harva and Hilma Granqvist). However, his influence was eclipsed by that of his star pupil, Malinowski. Modern treatments of the history of social anthropology tend to downplay Westermarck’s role in shaping the discipline. In Westermarck’s declining years, the younger generation already considered his evolutionism to be a thing of the past. The evolutionists were above all criticised for their neglect of social context. ‘New anthropology’ no longer concerned itself with the past origins of social institutions, but with their function in their present environment.

In Westermarck’s youth, the social sciences had not yet properly gained their independence from philosophy. His comparative work on the development of morality (ODMI) starts with a theory of the moral concepts; the subsequent chapters are designed as detailed illustrations of the theory. Westermarck’s later work Ethical Relativity (ER, 1932a) is a restatement of his position in the earlier book, now with more focus on philosophical argument. Westermarck argued that ethics cannot be a normative discipline. Normative ethical systems that claim rational grounds, such as Utilitarianism and Kantianism, in fact, reach their conclusions on the basis of feeling. Scientific ethics must be reconstituted as the study of the emotions that give rise to moral judgements. Westermarck belongs to the few authors to have presented an elaborate philosophical defence of relativism. Most philosophers would rather see relativism as the obvious thing to avoid. In contrast, in social anthropology, some ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Westermarck and modern evolutionary approaches to morality
• PART I Westermarck and the emergence of twentieth-century social anthropology
• PART II Westermarck as a precursor of evolutionary psychology
• PART III The emotional origins of morality
• PART IV Evolutionary psychology and morality: critical perspectives
• Bibliography
• Index