Ethics as an evolutionary trap: A provocation
Darragh Hare and Tauriq Moosa
The moral group
The moral group is expanding. We can chart this expansion quite clearly over the past few hundred
years. It has been non-linear, irregular and punctuated by some retrograde and lamentable aberrations.
Nevertheless, the direction of travel is clear; while at one point the interests of a select few were elevated
above all others, the moral group is now far more inclusive. Through a series of struggles, widespread
acceptance of previously-excluded individuals and groups has been achieved. Historically excluded
groups are now firmly included in our collective moral considerations. Most recently, the moral group has
expanded in such a way that non-human animals are at its margins and in some cases within its borders.
Of course, these historically excluded individuals and groups were capable of making and being affected
by moral decisions prior to their widespread social acceptance, but it is this very acceptance – their
interests achieving parity with the interests of others, for example through legislation, emancipation and
enfranchisement – that marks their inclusion in the moral group. And this is one way in which we judge
the moral health of societies: by their endorsement of and compliance with ethical principles such as the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The moral group’s gradual progress toward inclusion can be seen as an application of Enlightenment
values and liberal democratic ideals. However, there is some disagreement about exactly which types of
individuals should be included in the moral group and what the criteria for inclusion should be. One
possible solution to these questions is that any being which is capable of recognizing itself over time and
is capable of suffering should be considered a person1, and all persons merit inclusion in the moral group.
There is a secular and consequentialist basis for the expansion of the moral group according to this
conceptual approach. Only those individuals which meet the Lockean criteria for personhood have
interests – wants, hopes, desires, preferences, etc.—and it is by virtue of these interests that they are
entitled to moral consideration. This approach is consistent with the Harm Principle, a cornerstone of the
liberal democratic tradition and an influential guide to individual and collective action. By asking Jeremy
Bentham’s question, ‘Can it
1 Here we are borrowing directly from the work of John Locke and Jeremy Bentham, and indeed others who have carried on their traditions.
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suffer?’2 we can immediately ascertain whether a particular entity is a member of the moral group3.
But this only addresses one side of what we usually consider relevant to ethics. It gives us guidance as
to the types of beings whose interests should be taken into consideration by moral actors, but it does not
equip us to identify who these moral actors are. Which individuals or types of individual are capable of
making moral decisions? Not all persons have the capacity to do so. For example, we might accept that a
pet cat meets the Lockean criteria for personhood, and therefore we should consider its interests when
making decisions which could affect its well being. But should we expect the same degree of moral
consideration and ethical standards from the cat, or from the other non-human animals with which we
share a habitat? Probably not.
The importance of agency
The issue of agency in bringing about desirable or undesirable consequences is extremely important to
any theory of ethics. An interesting distinction can be made between those states of affairs which result
from the behavior of moral agents and those which result from other factors. Consider the following two
scenarios.
A) A meteorite strikes a village in the French countryside, killing 85 villagers, maiming 30 others, killing all
of their livestock and obliterating the natural environment within aradius of 3km from the impact zone.
B) A megalomaniac intentionally fires a missile into a village in the French countryside, killing 85 villagers,
maiming 30 others, killing all of their livestock and obliterating the natural environment within a radius of
3km from the impact zone.
In both scenarios, the damage and loss of life are to all intents and purposes identical. But are the
scenarios morally identical? In terms of consequences, yes: we can say that both states of affairs are bad
in that they involve significant suffering, damage and loss of life. However, example B contains an
additional element: the deliberate actions of a moral agent. While both scenarios are bad, we can say that
only scenario B involves wrong action; its causal antecedents include the megalomaniac’s decision, and if
he had chosen to do otherwise these harmful consequences could have been avoided. There is no such
deliberate action in example A. This distinction between preventable and
2 Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation (1823).Chapter XVII, Note 122.
3 If the answer to this is negative, that does not mean that the particular entity in question is not morally relevant. It could be relevant in an
instrumental sense.
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unpreventable harm has significant implications for our attitudes toward praise, blame, culpability and
responsibility.4 Moreover, it is crucial to how we view the asymmetrical reciprocal responsibilities of
members of the moral group.
How ought we to view the states of affairs brought about by members of the moral group without the
capacity for the type of reasoning necessary for agency? It may be clear that we cannot consider meteorite
strikes as ‘wrong’, because the meteorite has no control over its actions. Similarly, the symptoms of a
bacterial infection might be bad or harmful to its carrier, but there is no accusation of ‘wrong’ on the part
of the bacteria. These are relatively clear-cut cases demonstrating that bad things can happen
independently of any wrong action, but there are some extremely difficult gray areas. What of the
behavior of the family dog who bites the postman, the whale which capsizes a fishing boat, the circus
lioness who mauls her tamer, or the four-year-old child who beats his infant brother? These are all
persons in the Lockean sense, and we must therefore have consideration for their interests. But what
consideration can we expect in return? What is the relationship between personhood, agency, and the
capacity for moral reasoning? Locke and Bentham provide us with guidance on who we should consider
members of the moral group. But which members should be considered agents? Could there be degrees of
agency which mirror a person’s capacity for moral reasoning?
Traditionally, these questions have been pre-empted by recourse to a distinction between humans on the
one hand and nature on the other. Various iterations of this distinction have dominated Western discourse
for centuries. A common version was derived from the metaphysics of Descartes, which conveniently
made sense of existing – predominantly religious – worldviews. Under the human-natural distinction,
humans are the only relevant beings in ethical calculations. Human interests are certainly the most
important and perhaps the only relevant interests in moral calculations; we therefore have no obligations
to members of other species.
The human-natural distinction has come to pervade western culture to such an extent that it is
axiomatic. Even to question it is to make a profoundly strange inquiry. It is, however, demonstrably false.
The human-natural distinction is based on the assumption that humans are categorically different from
all other species and moreover have dominion over them. This categorical difference, according to
Descartes, consisted in humans being the
4 For a thorough and clear discussion of how we ought to think of responsibility, see Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (London:
Penguin Books, 1990), Ch. 7.
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only species to possess a soul, an observation which was erroneously derived from Descartes’s cogito.
This was entirely consistent with the Genesis story and prevailing contemporary attitudes regarding the
place of humans in the world. It has subsequently been used to place human interests above those of any
other individuals and to inflict and then justify an incalculable amount of preventable suffering.
We will not join with Descartes in positing the existence of souls, far less in ascribing them to some
species and not to others. However, we can legitimately ask whether there any other properties which
might justify the continuation of the human-natural distinction.
Differences of degree, not of kind
A common attitude is that humans, as the purported pinnacle of evolution, have certain capacities that
set them apart from all other species. If true, this could very well serve as a justification for the humannatural distinction. But do humans really occupy this privileged position? Are we really that special? It is
true that humans have some very advanced capacities, and we can manipulate the world around us to
great effect. But there are other capacities which are very poor in humans compared to other species, and
others which we lack entirely. How good are humans at identifying individual molecules in the air by
smell, breathing unassisted under water or navigating using the Earth’s electrical field? Moreover, the
capacities which are well-developed in humans, for example language, cooperation, building complex
structures, and hunting with weapons, are not uniquely human – they are all observable to some degree in
other species5. There are no categorical distinctions between the capacities of humans and those of other
species– merely evolutionary gradients. The human-natural distinction is unsupportable on these grounds.
Furthermore, even within the human species there are individuals who lack the very capacities put
forward as evidence for human exceptionalism. For example, infants lack speech, self-consciousness, and
so on. Indeed, there are adults with severe physical or mental disabilities who lack many of the capacities
said to set humans apart. Compare Washoe, the famous talking chimp who could communicate using
sign-language, and a day-old infant.6 Who is more “exceptional” in terms of sophisticated capacities? In
moral considerations, capacities are more important than biological taxonomy. If we are to apply this
proposition consistently,
5 See, for example, Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996).
6 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Ch. 5.
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we might sometimes be required to treat infants and severely mentally disabled adults in the same way
that we treat non-human animals. If we are willing to accept that because animals lack certain capacities
we can exclude them from the moral group, consistency would require that we exclude all individuals,
including human beings, who lack these capacities. If we are unwilling to accept this logic we must
search for another basis for the human-natural distinction. To be clear: this is not intended as an argument
for the ill-treatment of some humans, but as an argument for better treatment of some non-humans.
We must also recognize that any argument based on capacities will in any case be anthropocentric. The
very capacities we might identify to show how we are different from other species will necessarily be
those which we find most useful for understanding the world from a particularly human perspective. To
suggest that humans are the pinnacle of evolution is absurd, since other species have evolved different but
equally sophisticated capacities. It just so happens that the capacities we have evolved have allowed us to
become recently (and perhaps temporarily) dominant. This anthropocentrism is illustrated beautifully by
Richard Dawkins:
It makes no more sense (and no less) to aim our historical narrative towards Homo sapiens than towards
any other modern species — Octopus vulgaris, say, or Panthera leo or Sequoia sempervirens. A
historically minded swift, understandably proud of flight as self-evidently the premier accomplishment of
life, will regard swiftkind — those spectacular flying machines with their swept-back wings, who stay aloft
for a year at a time and even copulate in free flight — as the acme of evolutionary progress. To build on a
fancy of Steven Pinker, if elephants could write history they might portray tapirs, elephant shrews, elephant
seals and proboscis monkeys as tentative beginners along the main trunk road of evolution, taking the first
fumbling steps but each — for some reason — never quite making it: so near yet so far. Elephant
astronomers might wonder whether, on some other world, there exist alien life forms that have crossed the
nasal rubicon and taken the final leap to full proboscitude.7
Human capacities differ from the capacities of other species only in degree, not in kind. This is of
crucial importance to the field of ethics, since some of those capacities which humans have developed
particularly strongly in comparison to other species are the very capacities which make complex moral
reasoning possible. Empathy, conceptions of justice, the ability to formulate intricate rules and to analyze
behavior, motives and likely consequences are not uniquely human, but as far as we can tell are more
sophisticated in humans than in other species. Our ethical obligations stem not from the fact that we are
able to choose what actions
7 Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (London: Orion Books, 2005), 6.
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we take but from the fact that we can predict and analyze the likely outcomes of different futures and
judge their moral worth accordingly. This crucial difference between humans and other species accounts
for the fact that while many species should be included in our ethical decisions by virtue of their having
interests, it seems that only humans can hold moral obligations by virtue of our combination of
sophisticated capacities. It is important to stress, however, that this difference is one of degree, not one of
kind.
Ethics as an evolutionary trap
The idea of a categorical distinction between humans and other species is unsupportable. Yet it
pervades contemporary policy, ethics and social norms. Humans should rightly be understood as a part of
nature, not apart from nature. But what would it mean for us to recognize this fully in the way that we
treat one another, other animals, and the rest of the world around us? How might an ethic which eschews
the human-natural distinction and acknowledges our obligations toward other species play out?
Competent adult humans might have the strongest responsibilities in regards to ethical behavior, but it
does not follow that they can expect any special treatment when it comes to deciding courses of action in
which their interests conflict with those of others. Consider the following example:
A highly contagious virus evolves which thrives in the digestive systems of mammals. In some mammals it
has very little effect. In most mammals it has hugely beneficial effects, strengthening their immune systems,
increasing longevity and enhancing fertility. In humans, the virus is deadly, causing a short and painful
death. There is no way of inoculating humans against the virus and, once a human has contracted it, he or she
cannot be cured. However, the virus could be contained and eradicated entirely using existing compounds.
Eradicating the virus would save humanity from certain extinction but would prevent significant benefits
accruing to many other species. Should we eradicate the virus?
If the interests of humans do not automatically trump those of other species, what justification can there
be for prioritizing human interests above all others? A system of ethics which recognizes the interests of
non-human individuals will sometimes require us to place the interests of other species above our own.
Indeed, we already do this quite regularly and with good reason, for example in banning cruel sports or
denying planning permission for environmentally harmful construction in ecologically valuable areas.
However, we are inconsistent in this regard and continue to indulge in practices which seriously harm
animals in order to satisfy trivial human interests.8 The example asks us to consider how we might
consistently apply such a system of ethics in an extreme situation in which the interests of humans are
detrimental to those of other species.9 The asymmetry here indicates that putting the interests of humans
first would decrease the amount of
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total suffering or, put another way, negate a guarantor of increased well being. That suffering and well
being are not experienced solely by humans is the foundation of this system of ethics. This means it is not
only human suffering or well being that is taken into consideration but the total amount of suffering or
well being experienced across species. Therefore, while it might be better for humans to eradicate the
virus, it would severely deplete well being or increase suffering in total.
What are we to make of this possibility? Might it be that the evolutionary adaptations that have allowed
humans to engage in moral reasoning will eventually be a disadvantage? Could ethics be an evolutionary
trap? What would be so wrong with human extinction? Would we be morally obliged to prevent it? Might
it be possible that we are obliged to accept it? There might be strong evolutionary reasons for us to resist
this possibility, but ethics is very often about denying or eschewing evolutionary imperatives in favor of
right action. Such a decision would test our commitment to ethical consistency to its absolute limits.
Darragh Hare graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2001 with an MA (Honours) in philosophy and worked
for some years in government and public policy in Scotland and the UK. For the last four years he has held research
positions in a number of UK Universities, including Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cambridge. From August 2011 he will
be a doctoral student in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University in the USA, where he will
explore pluralism as an approach to complex ethical and policy challenges.
Tauriq Moosa is currently an M.Phil student at the Centre for Applied Ethics, Stellenbosch University. He is also a
Tutor at the University of Cape Town. His research interests are medical ethics and the ethics of war. He has
written for Free Inquiry, Skeptic, the James Randi Education Foundation, and other publications. He is a
contributing editor to Secular Humanist Bulletin and a columnist at 3quarksdaily.com.
8 James Rachels portrays this view powerfully. “[Consider] the treatment of the civet cat, a highly intelligent and sociable animal. Civet cats are
trapped and placed in small cages inside darkened sheds, where fires keep the temperature up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. They are confined in this
way until they die. What justifies this extraordinary treatment? These animals have the misfortune to produce a substance that is useful in the
manufacture of perfume. Musk, which is scraped from their genitals once a day for as long as they can survive, makes the scent of perfume last a
bit longer after each application… To promote one of the most trivial interests we have, animals are tormented for their whole lives.” See James
Rachels, “The Moral Argument for Vegetarianism,” in Can Ethics Provide Answers? and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (London: Rowman
and Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 100.
9 For arguments about consistency in ethics leading to questions about the continued existence of the human species, see David Benatar,
Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gregory S. Kavka, “The Paradox of
Future Individuals,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 11, no. 2 (1982).