Evolution and Morality
Some history & some
arguments…
Evolution as anti-moral
• Many Victorians (and creationists/
intelligent design proponents today) saw
evolution as a threat to morality.
• “If we evolved from fish, then either fish
have souls or we have none.” (Miller,
1847).
• But without a soul, why should we be
concerned to ‘square our conduct’ with the
moral code?
Darwinians
• On the other hand, the Darwinians
themselves seemed a pretty convincing
counter-argument:
– They were serious, reliable people.
– They were hard-working.
– They were respectable and honest and …
Still…
• But the issue never went away.
• In general the facts are often relevant to what’s
right or wrong, whatever your ethical views are.
• So if evolution is true, it very probably does have
some moral consequences, even if they aren’t
the ones Victorians (and some of our
contemporaries) feared.
• Ruse considers genetic counselling and the
sickle-cell anemia gene as an example.
Evolutionary ethics
• A much more controversial view is the claim that
evolution, in some way or other, actually constitutes the
basis of (real) moral values.
• The standard version of this view holds that evolution is
a good thing, and that we should do what we can to
ensure it continues.
• This is tied up with the ideology of progress: If evolution
leads to progress and progress is a good thing, then
evolution is the source and cause of good things.
• This is easily confused with the fact that we ourselves
(surely a good thing!) are the products of evolution.
• Better yet, it’s tied up nicely with ideas about the virtues
of competition and imperialism and capitalism.
Darwin
• Darwin was certainly in favour, broadly, of
capitalism.
• But he also favoured vaccination.
• This seemed to be in conflict with the special
moral status of evolution, since it prevents those
‘weak enough’ to be vulnerable to smallpox from
being ‘weeded out’– that is, it puts a stop to
some selective pressures, changing the path of
evolution.
Huxley
• Huxley was even more explicit in opposition.
• The vision of nature ‘red in tooth and claw’
seemed to Huxley to be in direct opposition to
what we regard as moral behaviour.
• “Cosmic evolution…is incompetent to furnish
any better reason why what we call good is
preferable to what we call evil than we had
before” (1901).
• This leaves the question, where do we get our
values (what is the ‘meaning of life’)?
Sociobiology
• Efforts to link evolution to the meaning of life
continued.
• More recently (1970s & on) sociobiologists have
argued for a link between ethics and evolution.
• Our brains have evolved to have the structures
they now have: “That simple biological
statement must be pursued to explain ethics and
ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and
epistemologists, at all depths.” (Wilson, 1975)
For comparison
• “Have we the right to counteract, irreversibly, the
evolutionary wisdom of millions of years, in order
to satisfy the ambitions and the curiosity of a few
scientists?” (Chargaff, 1976)
• Ruse portrays this as (coming from an opponent
of Wilson) another endorsement of the special
status of evolution in ethics.
• I’m not so sure (the point may be more a matter
of healthy caution in messing with things than a
literal endorsement of the ‘wisdom’ of the ‘blind
watchmaker’).
The philosophers respond
• We largely buy Thomas Huxley’s view:
• Evolution is not, in itself, a good thing. After all, evolution can select
for more virulent diseases as well as for healthier children!
• More generally, evolution is a matter of fact about how life has
developed.
• But matters of fact, as Hume argued, simply don’t have implications
for right or wrong, or for what’s good or bad.
• Worse (and less philosophically contested) taking evolution to be in
principle good leads to bizarre and false conclusions.
• We work to alter the course of evolution all the time– the eradication
of smallpox is an obvious example– and it is often a good thing!
• The eradication of polio, if we can manage it, will be a good thing
too.
• Our values are obviously not in agreement with reverence for the
course of evolution and all its products.
Human evolution
• Even if we restrict what we treasure in evolution
to human evolution, it can’t work.
• First, it seems arbitrary.
• Second, it runs into the smallpox/polio/etc.
objection.
• Third, we are not (and do not think we are)
moral paragons ourselves– yet our mixed and
conflicted nature is the product of evolution.
Worse yet, what’s adaptive doesn’t necessarily
fit with other important values (pain is very
adaptive, happiness is often not very adaptive…)
Reproduction
• If we declare instead that we must aim for evolutionary
‘success’ (for ourselves or for our species), the results
are no better.
• My values don’t make me want to maximize my
reproductive potential.
• And it would be disastrous for the entire world if people
in general acted on that basis.
• So we have values that just don’t jive with the notion that
evolution in this sense should dictate our values.
• Even when it comes just to human survival, there may
be cases where we should think better of it…
What is vs. what should be
• Here Wilson is pretty sharp:
The ‘what is’ in human nature is to a large
extent the heritage of a Pleistocene
hunter-gatherer existence. When any
genetic bias is demonstrated, it cannot be
used to justify a continuing practice in
present and future societies. (1975)
A different direction
• Properly understood, Ruse says, evolution still
has a lot to teach us about ethics.
• In a sense, ethics itself should be regarded as a
product of evolution.
• Ethics is a common trait, broadly understood,
appearing in all human communities.
• There must be some evolutionary explanation
for such a universal human trait.
• So the question to start with is, how did/ how
could we have come to evolve the sort of ethics
we have?
What ethics is that?
• Hmmm. It can be hard to say what we share,
ethically speaking.
• After all, it’s part of the background– what we
notice are the things we differ about: cultural
practices that are accepted in one place and
time but rejected in others (slavery, infanticide,
debtors’ prison, drug prohibition…)
• But there are widely shared elements of ethics–
one central element of these is altruism.
The evolution of altruism
• Kin selection (Hamilton).
• Reciprocal Altruism.
• Evolutionary strategies and game theory
(prisoner’s dilemma and the challenge of
cooperation and trust).
• Evolution provides insight into these, and
these are clearly linked to our ideas about
ethics!
The ethical illusion
• Does this picture of how our ethical ‘tendencies’ came to
be suggest that our ethical beliefs are some kind of
collective illusion, something driven solely by
‘evolutionary expedience’?
• Evolutionary ‘interests’ conflict (between male and
female, young and old, etc.).
• So our ethics are driven by some kind of (powerweighted) compromise between these, and continually in
tension because of the tensions.
• Worse yet, individual desires/ interests also conflict. The
illusion may serve us collectively, but as individuals it
might be better to be free of it!
The garden path
• This line, though, simply endorses the pursuit of selfinterest, ignoring the fact that ethical ideas (and their
evolutionary roots in our biology) actually reconcile and
often constrain (in successful ways) how we work out
such conflicts.
• Moral relativism at the level of different societies ignores
how much is shared in the moral codes even when
customs and conditions vary widely.
• If evolution of ethics points towards moral relativism,
would the evolution of our senses and consequently our
beliefs/ ‘knowledge’ of the world point towards relativism
about science, too?
The Evolution of Ethics
I. Two key premises:
1. Animal social behaviour is ‘under the
control of genes, and has been shaped
into forms that give selective
advantage’.
2. This holds for humans in particular.
II. Two extreme cases of altruism:
1. The ant-model: hard wired.
2. The ‘super-brain’ model: all calculation.
Human altruism
• A limited game of chess- heuristic rules for
openings instead of full searches!
• But it works– such machines can now beat every
human player; it won’t be long before no human
can even compete with them.
• Epigenetic rules: these are tendencies, rooted
in genes and normal development. They make it
easy to learn/acquire certain patterns of
behaviour.
Examples
• Fear of snakes, heights (spiders?).
• Avoidance of incest.
• Perhaps similar rules contribute to
altruistic behaviour, making it an
expression of our genes that emerges
from normal development.
• How can such rules compete with (also
evolution-based) impulses to selfish
behaviour?
The illusion theory
• “Nature, therefore, has made us (via the
rules) believe in a disinterested moral
code, according to which we ought to help
our fellows…In short, to make us altruistic
in the adaptive, biological sense, our
biology makes us altruistic in the more
conventionally understood sense of acting
on deeply held beliefs about right and
wrong.”
What do R&W claim for this view?
• Such is the modern scientific account of morality; at least
the one most consistent with biology.
• Does this lead to an agreement with some religious
code, or an ethicists quasi-mathematical, humanindependent notion of the moral code?
• Biologically, ‘we function better because we believe (in
an objective moral code).”
• But on this view, ‘morality or, more strictly, our belief in
morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further
our reproductive ends’.
• Ethics (like Macbeth’s dagger) ‘serves a powerful
purpose without existing in substance’.
• Unlike the dagger, though, it is a collective illusion.
Illusions?
• The illusion theory of ethics holds that evolution
has led us to accept the existence of universal
moral imperatives, even though there really
aren’t such things.
• But what is an illusion, anyway?
• The notion of an illusion is contrastive: it
involves a contrast between illusions and
somehow similar states that are not illusions.
• When we describe something as an illusion, we
have a notion of what it is to not be an illusion.
What would objective moral
imperatives be?
• This is a tough question for Ruse and Wilson.
• Their account of ‘epigenetic rules’ seems to
suggest that the notion that any such rule is
objectively morally constraining is (has to be) an
illusion, fostered on us by the force of natural
selection.
• So what is it that we mistakenly take these rules
to be? What is an objective moral imperative for
Ruse and Wilson?
• Mere divine commands fall to the Euthyphro
objection, and I can’t think of a response that fills
this gap in their account.
Worse
• Do the rules Ruse and Wilson offer (for humans and for
their intelligent termites) really strike you as ethical
rules?
• Do the pronouncements of Ayatollahs (human or termite)
really tell us what we should take human or termite
ethical rules to be?
• Biological determinism of this sort seems to miscategorize moral ideas, grouping them together with all
kinds of ‘socially healthy’ habits and patterns…
• It equates opportunistic, species-specific rules with more
general principles governing the social behaviour of
intelligent organisms.