Evolution of Morals

An Interdisciplinary Inquiry into the Nature of Human Behavior

Carlos Stegmann

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9783752636963
• eBook ISBN:
  9783753419169
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Carlos Stegmann is a civil engineer whose disposition always led him to have a main interest in the multidisciplinary overview of large and complex planning studies, a subject on which he accumulated a 40-year experience, having acted as coordinator of many such studies. It was this diposition, this innate tendency always to strive for the composite whole, and the application of his experience to the subject of morals, which originated the interdisciplinary insights of his thesis of moral evolution, which is the subject of this book. It is important to stress this interdisciplinary experience, for to be able to produce credible results, an attempt to explain something as pervadingly inclusive as human behavior must include all the manifestations of this behavior, from the cognitive to the physiological. No other work on human morals offers such an interdisciplinary approach, and the inquiry presented in this book may be considered the first of this kind.

VII - EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION

(Critical Discussion of Evolutionary Epistemology as presented in Evolution and
Cognition, Special Issue in Honor of Donald T. Campbell, 1997/Vol. 3/No. 1)⁶²

1.- INTRODUCTION

The object of biological evolution is the order-building information of life. The creation of order within the general tendency of decay and increasing disorder in the universe, is the distinguishing mark of life. It has been shown in Chapter II that the only means of creating information is the mutation-and-selection mechanism which operates in the genome. Everything that we can know is the result of this mechanism. In the human species the mechanism succeeded in creating the cognitive apparati through which we are able to recognize information about the environment: the apparatus of objective cognition which recognizes information related to objects, and the apparatus of moral cognition which recognizes information related to behavior in the social environment. The operation of these apparati has originated two additional, or proximate (secondary) lines of evolution (the ultimate or primary being the genetic evolution), specific of the human species: the evolution of objective information - information about objects and about means of achieving purposes, and the evolution of the behavior-regulating moral information - information about institutions (end values) and norms (instrumental values). In the same chapter, through the attempted explanation of the human behavior instinct, a mechanism has been proposed to explain the evolution of moral information, and its relation to objective information. In Chapter III, based on the epistemology of Immanuel KANT and Rudolf CARNAP, some distinguishing features of objective cognition have been formulated, related to analytic (a priori) and synthetic (a posteriori) cognition. It is of interest to compare the described conceptual framework with the present tenets of Evolutionary Theory of Knowledge, or Evolutionary Epistemology, a recently initiated line of research which is devoted to reconcile the findings of biology, especially evolutionary biology, with the more ancient or conventional philosophical doctrines related to the subject. The occasion for this arose with the special issue of Evolution and Cognition where most of those tenets are exposed and commented.

Evolutionary Epistemology is closely associated with the name of Donald T. CAMPBELL who developed many of the basic tenets of this theory which are followed today, mainly in the area of the social sciences (CAMPBELL was a social psychologist by training). His paper From Evolutionary Epistemology Via Selection Theory to a Sociology of Scientific Validity, which contains a retrospective view of his ideas, was prepared, according to its editors, for a different occasion, but he prepared a revised and enlarged draft for the commented issue of E.&.C. The work was finished by the editors, as death surprised him on May 6, 1995. Besides CAMPBELL'S paper, the referred issue of E.& C. contains fourteen essays by authors related to the theory of knowledge with comments on several aspects of CAMPBELL’S paper.

The conceptual framework of the present inquiry is consistent with: the “somatic marker” theory developed by Antonio DAMASIO; HAYEK's political and social theories; the physical-science interpretation of KANT's moral theory; FREUD's Super Ego theory; William JAMES’ theory of emotions; Gilbert RYLE's philosophy of mind; KANT and CARNAP’s epistemology; Information Theory based on the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and its interpretation related to the order of life formulated by Erwin SCHRÖDINGER and Rupert RIEDL; Judith HARRIS’ thesis of “group socialization”; and with Adolf HESCHL’s thesis exposed in his The Intelligent Genome. It is also consistent with, and may be regarded as an explanation of, historically documented human attitudes.

In the present Chapter the question is examined of whether that conceptual framework is also consistent with tenets of Evolutionary Epistemology as exposed in the special issue of E&C. It is not. The following sections contain an examination of the main inconsistencies.

2. TWO FIELDS OF COGNITION VS. UNDIFFERENTIATED “KNOWLEDGE”

Since KANT there has been a sharp discrimination between pure and practical reason, or, as HAYEK put it in the motto of this book, between reason and morals. The separation between objective and moral cognition is a main feature of the theoretical analyses presented in Chapter II. CAMPBELL, however, treats “knowledge” as something physically non-defined, undifferentiated and all-encompassing. To him, the only valid “knowledge” is “scientific knowledge.” Whenever some other, obviously non-scientific kinds of information appear, he rejects these as lacking “scientific validity,” as when he says:

The many efforts to model the ‘evolution’ of scientific knowledge on the principles of biological evolution [are] epistemologically irrelevant, [because such a model] would equally well explain the cooperation of the members of a religious sect or of a group bound together by a common political or artistic program... [or] the Appalachian Bible-belt of free churches.... (My italics)

This is confirmed by Linnda CAPORAEL, a long-time associate of CAMPBELL’S, who says (CAPORAEL 1997) that “CAMPBELL...believed it was impossible to justify any differentiation [between science and other belief systems], so he recommended a course of believing (without justification) that science produced more valid knowledge than other belief systems.”

CAMPBELL’s doubts refer to the “Demarcation Problem,” the problem of separating science from other cognitive fields. Karl POPPER (1976) put it in terms of separating science from "astrology and other lore." CAMPBELL puts the problem in terms of a value judgement. POPPER, although he too departs from a value judgement, introduces falsifiability as criterion of demarcation: science is always tentative, falsifiable; astrology and other lore are not. Nevertheless, falsifiability is not a valid criterion, since, as Larry LAUDAN (1988) very clearly demonstrates, it applies also to many other, clearly non-scientific fields. According to the theory of conscience and formation of beliefs, however, the demarcation which applies in the conditions set by reality is not one between science and “pseudoscience,” “other belief, or social, systems” or “astrology and other lore,” but one between objective and moral cognition. Objective cognition encompasses all thinking related to an object or purpose, where the conditions set by reality are such that this object or purpose lies within well defined boundaries which make predictions and their criticism possible. This encomp asses many fields, and thus the question as to which of them should be attributed the designation "science" is rather a matter of arbitrary definition or choice. These fields include such disciplines as several kinds of engineering, business administration, sociology, economics and the legal and political sciences, that is, all those fields related to the planning of activities to attain certain objectives or aims, to which all the applied sciences have to be added. Larry LAUDAN (op.cit.), arrives at a similar conclusion:

[The question, what makes a belief scientific?] is both uninteresting and...intractable. We ought to drop terms like ’pseudo-science’ and ’unscientific’ from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases...our focus should be squarely on the empirical and conceptual credentials for claims about the world [i.e.: the question: what makes a belief well founded (or heuristically fertile)?]. The ’scientific’ status of those claims is altogether irrelevant.

LAUDAN, however, did not have at his disposal a theory such as the theory of conscience and formation of beliefs, and thus his use of the verb "to believe" (transitive acceptation, "to uphold or maintain, to believe in the truth of a statement”) is general, it refers to any kind of statement. He thus could not know that a demarcation does exist, the demarcation between objective and moral statements, but not one between "science," and "pseudoscience" or "astrology and other lore,"⁶³ which I too regard as senseless: it can only be based on value judgements, which vary according to the moral beliefs of the individuals/groups who make them. The real demarcation is between moral (irreversible) beliefs held about standards, which include aims (end-values) and norms of behavior (instrumental values), whose effects on the extended order of society are unpredictable and uncriticizable, and objective (reversible) beliefs, which refer to predictions about facts related to objects or to the attainment of purposes, and are criticizable.

From this point of view no information can be epistemologically irrelevant since all of it was created by the phylogenetic evolution which was responsible for the emergence of the cognitive apparati of reason and conscience which distinguish our species. CAMPBELL, however, does not treat moral information, as a category of human cognition, but, applying concepts of sociobiology, as something resulting from biological evolution:

Biological evolution has, presumably, selected our erogenous sense organs, our hedonistic sweets and bitters, pleasures and pains, in such a way as to increase genetic inclusive fitness. It has no doubt also selected for long-term rational hedonistic calculation, which weighs future rewards and punishment against present temptations. If cultural evolution can lead credulous believers to extend this hedonic calculus to include rewards and punishments in an afterlife (heaven, reincarnation), this supports obedience even in the face of death, and sacrifice of pleasures even in the absence of observers and sanction systems. (Emphases in the original)

CAMPBELL refers to biological and cultural evolution, i.e., the same expression of RYLE’s “fundamental error of category” which has been discussed in several parts of this book. In the six pages of Section 7 of his paper, devoted to “cultural evolution,” he tries many ways of explaining it, often resorting to analogies with biological evolution, but ends the section with the statement: “I recognize these explanations to be weak.”

The only possible way of seeking for an objectively valid explanation of cultural evolution is the recognition of the fact that this evolution too is included in the physical world of nature and seek for the natural laws which govern it, as done in the present inquiry.

In relation to the religious sentiments to which CAMPBELL refers in the quoted paragraph, the interpretation given by the theory of the human behavior instinct is quite different. Human behavior is not based on automatic instinctual programs. A rational “hedonistic calculus” cannot be inferred from the inclusive fitness (of prehuman irrational beings) determined by genetic evolution. Religious beliefs (in heaven, reincarnation) are not “hedonic calculuses” of an objective/rational nature. According to the account of the present inquiry there exists a genetically evolved predisposition in the new behavioral control apparatus conscience possessed by the human species, for the irreversible imprinting of beliefs in moral values and corresponding behavioral maxims which correspond to KANT’s categorical imperative. Since these values and maxims, because of the nature of the imprinting, must be taken to possess the attribute of absolute, indispensable rightness, the objective part of the human cognitive apparatus claims for a rational justification of the “why” these values and maxims exist and have to be obeyed. The psychological phenomenon of rationalization thus follows, in attributing to them a supernatural, or religious, cause, which satisfies the rational part of our cognitive apparatus.

Referring to cultural evolution⁶⁴ CAMPBELL says that “the selective process could be pure emulation by unsuccessful groups of the successful, ... or it could be the forcible imposition of the victor’s culture upon the vanquished.”

This is not possible. The behavior of groups and of the individuals which compose them (one-and-the-same thing) is carried by deeply engraved irreversible beliefs and cannot be changed by simple rational (heteronomic) decisions. Moral beliefs will die out, exactly like the “hopeful monsters” created by genetic evolution, if they prove to be unadapted to the environmental reality. They will be substituted by other moral beliefs, supported by groups/individuals with a different creed. For the same reason, it is also not possible to forcibly impose “the victor’s culture upon the vanquished.” Groups/individuals will rather die than relinquish their beliefs. History is full of examples of failed attempts at “forcible impositions of culture.” It must also be kept in mind that the objects of selection are the beliefs, i.e., the information stored in the beliefs, and not the groups/individuals which carry them.

It is possible to give a concrete example about the evolution of a moral belief. If one reads Vaclav HAVEL's essay The Power of the Powerless (1991), one loses any feeling of surprise or astonishment at the fact that the socialist ideal has crumbled in the Eastern Countries like a house of cards. This, the information about the non-adaptiveness to reality of the socialist/communist ideal, is ex-post-facto information which results from the trial-and-error process of evolution. Friedrich HAYEK, one of the most profound thinkers of our times in the area of the social, political and economic sciences, who devoted a great part of his life to combat "the errors of socialism," was not able to convince even a single socialist of the "error" of his or her creed. Creeds simply cannot be criticized, they are upheld with ontomoral stubborness. But more and more persons whose minds were not yet "made up" adopted the new liberal (free market), democratic, and anti-imperialist ideals (moral beliefs) which are the expression of the Zeitgeist of our times, to the formation of which HAYEK, POPPER and other scientists and philosophers contrib...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Presentation
• Further information
• Table of Contents
• I. Introduction: The Big Jigsaw Puzzle
• II. Elements For An Evolutionary Theory of Morals
• III. Categories of Moral Behaviour (Physical-Science Interpretation of Kant’s Elements for a Metaphysics of Morals)
• IV. On Objective Facts And Fatal Conceits (Hayek’s Ideas on Morals and The Theory of Formation of Beliefs)
• V. The Inference of Facts From Standards (“Der Schluss Vom Sollen Auf Das Sein”)
• VI. Conscience And Instincts
• VII. Evolution of Information (Critical Discussion of Evolutionary Epistemology as presented in Evolution and Cognition, Special Issue in Honor of Donald T. Campbell, 1997/Vol. 3/No. 1)
• VIII. The Genome Of Intelligence (Critical Discussion of Adolf Heschl’s Work The Intelligent Genome)
• IX. Nature And Nuture (Critical Discussion of Judith Harris’ work The Nurture Assumption)
• X. The Open Society and Its Friend (Critical Discussion of Karl Popper’s Attitude Concerning Liberal Authoritarian Polities)
• XI. Critical Rationalism And The Growth of Ethical Knowledge (Critical Discussion of Karl R. Popper’s Essay Facts, Standards and Truth: A further Criticism of Relativism)
• XII. On Objectivity In History (Critical discussion of E.H. Carr’s work: What is History?)
• XIII. Proposals For Historical Case Studies
• XIV. Conclusion
• Copyright