Evolution and Morality

NOMOS LII

James E. Fleming, Sanford V. Levinson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814738436
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica del derecho

Can theories of evolution explain the development of our capacityfor moral judgment and the content of morality itself?If bad behavior punished by the criminal law is attributableto physical causes, rather than being intentional or voluntaryas traditionally assumed, what are the implications for rethinkingthe criminal justice system? Is evolutionary theoryand “nature talk,” at least as practiced to date, inherentlyconservative and resistant to progressive and feminist proposalsfor social changes to counter subordination and secureequality? In Evolution and Morality, a group of contributors from philosophy,law, political science, history, and genetics addressmany of the philosophical, legal, and political issues raisedby such questions. This insightful interdisciplinary volumeexamines the possibilities of a naturalistic ethics, the implicationsof behavioral morality for reform of the criminal law,the prospects for a biopolitical science, and the relationshipbetween nature, culture, and social engineering.

PART I
NATURALISTIC ETHICS

1

NATURALISTIC ETHICS WITHOUT FALLACIES

PHILIP KITCHER

History, if viewed as more than a repository of anecdote and chronology, might reform the image of ethics by which we are possessed.¹

1.

Naturalism about ethics is a notoriously problematic position, possibly the worst of all, except for its available rivals. Naturalists, when they are not viewed as being so crude as to be beneath notice, are typically charged with committing well-known fallacies. I shall outline a version of naturalism that will, I hope, escape the familiar accusations, and also challenge philosophical disdain.

“Naturalism” means many things to many people, and it will be well to begin by explaining what I do not have in mind. Some writers have understood naturalism as a claim about the omnicompetence of their favorite science and have concluded that ethical statements are derivable from the principles of that science—evolutionary biology or neuroscience, say.² These ventures do fall foul of familiar fallacies and are problematic in many respects.³ More philosophically nuanced are approaches that suppose that fundamental ethical properties (like goodness) can be characterized in straightforwardly natural terms (say as “pleasure and the absence of pain”) or that maintain that, although these properties cannot be so characterized, they can nonetheless be apprehended by familiar human faculties.⁴ The former option is the historical source of many versions of the charges that naturalism invariably commits a fallacy. The latter, as we shall see, evades the accusations, but at the cost of engendering epistemological and metaphysical mysteries.

What, then, can naturalism consist in, if it diverges from the most well-known incarnations of the view? My answer begins from the concern just voiced about sophisticated contemporary programs, often advertised under the label “Moral Realism” (or related titles: “Projectivism,” “Quasi-realism,” “Noncognitivism,” and the like). Fundamental to naturalism is the desire not to multiply mysteries—not beyond necessity but not at all. Naturalists are determined that (in Nelson Goodman’s witty inversion of Hamlet) no more things should be dreamed of in their philosophies than there are in heaven and earth. This does not entail that the inventory of things they accept is restricted to the list of entities countenanced by current science. Any sophisticated naturalist should recognize that our scientific findings are provisional and incomplete, that, just as our forebears have split the atom, discerned quarks within “fundamental” particles, and now tantalize us with strings and branes, so our descendants may warrantedly introduce denizens of nature beyond our current imagination. The important point is that they will have evidence for doing so.

The naturalism I champion—pragmatic naturalism, to give it a name—is not narrowly scientistic. There are many rigorous forms of inquiry, practiced in academic institutions and other research centers that specialize in disciplines ranging from anthropology and art history to zoology. Naturalistic philosophy should begin from the picture of the world collectively provided by these diverse investigations, and, where it extends that picture, it should do so in ways that accord with the methods and standards of current inquiry or with methods that would convince current investigators that they improved on the contemporary versions. Pragmatic naturalism allows philosophers to advance new ideas and even to expand ontology, but they have to live up to the standards our most rigorous investigations set for themselves. There are to be no spooks. That means that invocations of the Forms, or of Natural Law, or of Processes of Pure Practical Reason, or even of Moral Properties accessible to ordinary human faculties all have to be shown to accord with standards of reliable inquiry—or they have to go.

To provide a more positive face for pragmatic naturalism, it is useful to consider one of the great naturalists and inspirations for contemporary naturalism. Darwin outlined a program for connecting the ethical practices of our species with the behavior of our closest evolutionary relatives,⁵ and many brilliant scholars since have endeavored to work out that program.⁶ In my judgment, however, they have been inspired by the wrong aspect of Darwin’s work. A central achievement of the Origin⁷ was its strategy for explaining facets of the contemporary organic world in terms of the history of life. Pragmatic naturalism proposes that we adopt the same strategy in the case of ethics.

Dewey pioneered the way. In his part of the textbook he co-authored with James Tufts, he writes:

Moral conceptions and processes grow naturally out of the very conditions of human life. (1) Desire belongs to the intrinsic nature of man; we cannot conceive a human being who does not have wants, needs, nor one to whom fulfillment of desire does not afford satisfaction. … (2) Men live naturally and inevitably in society; in companionship and competition; in relations of cooperation and subordination. These relations are expressed in demands, claims, expectations. (3) Human beings approve and disapprove, sympathize and resent, as naturally and inevitably as they seek for the objects they want, and as they impose claims and respond to them.⁸

Combining Dewey’s guiding idea with Darwin’s methodological insight (understand contemporary phenomena in terms of the processes that have given rise to them), we can approach ethics by investigating how it has grown—or might have grown: the distinction is important—out of the primitive conditions of pre-ethical animals. How did we get from there to here?

Pragmatic naturalism conceives of ethics as a project, something in which human beings have been involved for most of our history as a species. It is not complete but, rather, something that has grown in various forms, something contemporary people have to decide how to continue. To arrive at a clear, nonspooky view of what we have been up to, we can do no better than to try to identify the route that has led from the pre-ethical condition of our ancestors to our complex contemporary ethical practices. As I shall suggest, we can be relatively confident about the starting point and even about some of the transitions that have occurred, but there will be places at which the evidence is insufficient to discriminate among various possible scenarios. That is unworrying, provided there is some naturalistically approved way of understanding all the necessary steps. Pragmatic naturalism seeks a replacement for the fictitious histories: those in which ethical truth is conveyed on large pieces of granite, or in which a brilliantly innovative thinker discerns the Moral Law Within, or in which ordinary people ordinarily perceive some New Moral Fact.

As we shall see, parts of the evolution of ethical practice are accessible, and these supply the basis for a warranted naturalistic meta-ethical stance. By taking the history of ethical practice seriously, pragmatic naturalism also puts pressure on rival philosophical accounts—they, too, need some historical narrative that will fit with their nebulous claims. Dewey concluded his own precis of ethics by making the issue of ethical change central.

Special phenomena of morals change from time to time with change of social conditions and the level of culture. The facts of desiring, purpose, social demand and law, sympathetic approval and hostile disapproval are constant. We cannot imagine them disappearing as long as human nature remains human nature, and lives in association with others. The fundamental conceptions of morals are, therefore, neither arbitrary nor artificial. They are not imposed upon human nature from without but develop out of its own operations and needs. Particular aspects of morals are transient; they are often, in their actual manifestation, defective and perverted. But the framework of moral conceptions is as permanent as human life itself.⁹

Unfortunately, Dewey never fully articulated the approach to ethics toward which he gestures here. Pragmatic naturalism attempts to make good on his promissory notes. The following sections fill in some details, but they are inevitably an abbreviation of a far longer treatment.¹⁰

2.

Once upon a time, our human—or hominid—ancestors were not yet engaged in the ethical project. On the basis of investigations of the sites where they left traces of their presence, archeologists and anthropologists can construct a picture of how they lived. The population was divided into small bands, each containing between 30 and 150 members, and these bands were mixed by age and sex. Essentially, human social life resembled that of contemporary chimpanzees and bonobos in these respects.

For animals to live together in this way, a capacity for psychological altruism is required. Because the concept of altruism has fascinated researchers working in different disciplines, a number of variant notions have been proposed, and it is well to be clear and explicit. Biological altruism is a technical concept of great importance in evolutionary studies: a biological altruist is an organism that acts to augment the reproductive success of another organism at reproductive cost to itself. Psychological altruists, by contrast, are animals with a particular type of structure in their psychological lives: when they come to believe that their actions will have consequences for other animals, they adjust their preferences to align those preferences more closely with those they attribute to the others, and they do so without expectation that their subsequent actions will promote the wishes they previously had. Finally, behavioral altruists are animals who act like psychological altruists: they look as though they are aligning their wishes with those of their beneficiaries, although their reasons for doing so may result from a desire to promote their prior ends (they may be thoroughly Machiavellian).¹¹

Primatologists have strong evidence for supposing that our evolutionary cousins, the chimps and bonobos, are psychological altruists in this sense.¹² That provides some basis for supposing the trait was also shared by our hominid ancestors and has been transmitted to contemporary human beings. Further, an analysis of the preconditions for social life in small groups mixed by age and sex strongly supports the hypothesis that psychological altruism is a necessary condition for bands of this sort to endure.¹³ Among Dewey’s “conditions of human life” are a particular type of social structure and a pre-ethical psychological capacity that makes that social structure possible.

Psychological altruism is a complex, multidimensional notion. Altruists can give more or less weight to the wishes they attribute to their beneficiaries: they can, for example, make only a minimal gesture, or they can subordinate their prior wants to the preferences they take the others to have, or they can treat others’ desires exactly as their own. They can respond to some individuals and not to others. For the individuals to whom they do respond, they can adjust their preferences in some contexts but not in others: you may be willing to share with someone but not to sacrifice your life for that person. They can be variously discerning of situations in which their planned actions have consequences for others and variously adept at fathoming the preferences of those others. Each of us has an altruism profile, identified by the intensities of the responses we make to others across a range of actual and possible contexts.

If this were all human beings had to work with in fashioning our social lives, then those lives would be very different than they are. Psychological altruism enables chimpanzees and bonobos to live together, but it does not permit them to cohabit easily. Observations of chimpanzee and bonobo troops, in the wild and in the seminatural habitats that allow for easier supervision (the Arnhem colony, the San Diego Wild Animal Park), makes it abundantly clear that social life is often on the verge of decomposition. Almost daily, tensions arise, and they have to be dealt with by elaborate mechanisms of peace-making.¹⁴ The grooming huddles, so familiar even to casual observers, occupy a far larger portion of the day than is needed for any hygienic purpose—usually at least three hours and, at times of social unease, as many as six hours a day. The social fabric is frequently torn and needs careful mending. In consequence, the band sizes are limited, and many opportunities for cooperation are missed.

Once this was our situation, too. Our ancestors lived in small groups, breaking up and making up on a daily basis, and that style of social life might have persisted, as it has for the chimps and bonobos. Yet, the descendants of those ancestors, even by eight thousand years ago, had learned how to live in far larger communities (more than a thousand people lived together at Çatal Hüyük and at Jericho). By the time writing was invented, five thousand years before the present, they had elaborate systems of rules for conduct. Among the earliest texts we have are documents providing codicils to much larger bodies of law, signaling an activity of rule-giving that had plainly gone on for thousands (indeed, tens of thousands) of years.

We can recognize similar activities of rule-giving in those preliterate societies embedded in an environment most similar to that of our pre-ethical ancestors. Bands of hunter-gatherers have complex rules for defusing social tensions—in fact, for avoiding just the sorts of problems that threaten the stability of chimp-bonobo social life—rules they work out together in discussions among the adult members of the band around the campfire. Rule-giving and rule-following seem to go very deep into the human past.

Even this cursory presentation of some central points about that past should inspire an obvious hypothesis. Human beings were able to transcend the predicament common to the societies of chimpanzees, bonobos, and our pre-ethical ancestors by acquiring a capacity to formulate and follow rules. Psychological altruism—in its pre-ethical form—enabled us to live in a particular way. The limitations of our capacities for psychological altruism caused difficulties and restrictions for that way of life. The ethical project, centered on what I shall call normative guidance, liberated us.

My formulation slides in one theme that has not yet been explicitly developed: I have taken the troubles of chimp-bonobo-hominid social life to stem from the limitations of altruism. To understand that idea, recall my emphasis on the multidimensionality of altruism, specifically the possibility that the intensity of response may vary with context, even to the point of vanishing. Animals living together may respond to the wishes of others in situations of perceived threat: we all band together when the neighbors attack. They may also promote the preferences they attribute to others when the costs are relatively small: my foraging has gone well, and it would not hurt much to offer you a small part of the spoils. When resources are scarce, however, trouble can easily erupt. This is exactly what is observed among contemporary chimpanzees and bonobos, where apparent allies (even “friends”) suddenly desert one another.

It is useful to introduce the concept of an altruism failure. Suppose two animals, A (altruist) and B (beneficiary), belong to the same social group. For a range of contexts, A forms preferences that are psychologically altruistic with respect to B. Now, in context C, A does not align preferences with those attributed to B. A’s behavior in C constitutes an altruism failure. Chimpanzee and bonobo social life are rife with altruism failures, and these are the causes of the long bouts of grooming and the restrictions on band size and cooperation.

Normative guidance replaces altruism failures with (at least) behavioral altruism. Being susceptible to normative guidance involves an ability to formulate a command to yourself and to act on that command. You are tempted to do something that would constitute an altruism failure, but the command overrides the wish that would have been expressed in your action: instead, you act in a way that looks, from the outside, as though you are accommodating the wishes of the beneficiary. Perhaps your commitment to the command has indeed turned you into a full-fledged psychological altruist. More probably, certainly in the earliest stages and with respect to many situations even in present human life, your motives do not arise from anything like sympathy with the individual you aid.

The roots of normative guidance likely lie in the ability of our ancestors to perceive regularities in actions and consequences, to observe that following particular desires led to trouble, trouble for themselves. Acquiring a disposition to inhibit conduct of that sort saved them distress. The ethical project would thus seem to have been born in fear, and thinkers with Kantian predilections will suppose that the earliest ventures in restrain...