Morality and Evolution

Two related misconceptions:

1. Since the appearance of The Origin of Species, some have claimed that one of the consequences of the Theory of Evolution is that might makes right because evolution is “red in tooth and claw” and therefore favors the more powerful over the less powerful. However, this is a clear misconception because:

· It is not always true that evolution favors the more powerful, however, “powerful” is interpreted; evolution favors those features (genetic or cultural) that have the greatest Darwinian fitness, namely that leave the greatest number of descendent. How this correlates with power, in the common understanding of the term, remains to be discussed

· Even if the most powerful (those with biggest claws, biggest bank accounts, or whatever) were evolutionarily advantaged, nothing would follow about the morality of the claim “might makes right.” Darwin’s theory is descriptive (crudely, it tells you how the world is), and from merely descriptive statements one cannot simply derive prescriptive ones. One cannot derive ‘ought’ from ‘is,’ as the saying goes.

2. If we are the product of billions of years of evolution, then altruism (benefitting others at a cost) is a chimera because in the struggle for survival egoists are advantaged. Hence, at most one might try to appear to be an altruist while in reality one is, by constitution, an egoist. In other words, Psychological Egoism is true. So, to the extent that morality demands some form of altruism, it grates against our nature: the only type of morality that fits what we are is Moral Egoism. However, this is a misconception as well because:

· It simply assumes that human evolution favors egoism over altruism. In reality, we know that evolutionary processes can favor altruism and there is good evidence that it actually did.

· As often people act in seemingly altruistic actions, the burden of proof fall on Psychological Egoism, whose explanation of such actions are, at best, strained.

Morality

There is a narrow and a broad understanding of human morality.

• The narrow understanding considers those aspects of morality dealing primarily with our relations with others, involving, for example, cooperation, beneficence, non-maleficence, and penalties for transgression.
• The broad understanding, in addition, involves directives on how to live a good life and what activities are especially worthwhile.

The two are related, because a moral system will try to make sure that they are compatible, as it won’t do to present as an ideal life one that is incompatible with cooperation, for example. Here we focus on the narrow understanding of morality because presumably it has evolutionary priority.

Human morality has three connected aspects:

1. Engaging in prosocial behavior, namely offering help and avoiding harm to another.
2. Having a cluster of emotions and feelings such as sympathy, ‘righteous’ anger, shame, guilt, and pleasure capable of producing or favoring prosocial behavior. Let’s call this moral emoting
3. Thinking of behavior in terms of motivating moral judgments, namely judgments involving concepts such as obligation, duty, desert, or punishment. Let us call this moral thinking.

Note that

· (1) does not presuppose (2) or (3); for example, bees are very prosocial, but they don't engage in moral thinking or (presumably) emoting. There is ample evidence that large-brained social animals have some of the moral emotions. This is particularly true of non-human great apes. Whether some of them engage in moral thinking is a complex issue we do not address here. What is very likely is that other members of the genus Homo such as Neanderthalensis or Floresiensis did.

· (2)-(3) say little about the material contents of moral thinking. Different groups might systematically reach different moral conclusions about the same state of affairs even under ideal circumstances.

· While (1) is a necessary condition for morality, it’s unclear what extent of (2) and (3) are required. For example, a Kantian would claim that (3), if the relevant judgments are rational, is required while (2) is an impediment resulting in mixed motives that weaken the autonomy of morality. By contrast a Humean would claim that (2) is essential to human morality.

· (1)-(3) make no appeal to any version of philosophical morality.

Some terminology:

· Prosociality: a disposition to act in ways that favor members of the group one belongs to.

· Helping: engaging in behavior that benefits someone else.

· Cooperation: engaging with others in beneficial activities to one or both parties. There are 2 main types of cooperation:

1. Mutualist: all cooperators obtain an automatic net benefit (rowing together because that’s the only way to cross the river and both value crossing over not-rowing)

2. Altruist: some cooperators undergo a net cost compared to not cooperating. There are different types of altruism, of which more later.

· Strong reciprocity: altruistic cooperation plus altruistic punishment of free riders (altruistic because at one’s net cost).

· Culture is the ensemble of beliefs and preferences obtained by means other than genetic transmission or individual learning. Hence, 3 levels of information acquisition:

1. Genetic

2. From individual learning

3. Cultural

What could morality be, in terms of evolution?

When thinking about an evolutionary account of morality several possibilities come to mind. Morality could be

1. An adaptation increasing the fitness of prosocial individuals relative to competing individuals.
2. An adaptation increasing the fitness of the group relative to competing groups but not necessarily that of prosocial individuals.
3. A neutral trait, like hair color.
4. A byproduct of an adaptive trait, like our ability to appreciate music (the adaptive trait here is the ability to use language). The phenotypic expressions of pleiotropic genes are a clear biological example.

Note that:

· (i) and (ii) are compatible. Morality might increase individual fitness with respect to the population average and diminish it with respect to population segments while at the same time increase group fitness relative to other groups.

· for both (i) and (ii) morality has been directly selected by evolution. Contrast this with (iii) and (iv)

In studying the evolution of morality, we follow B&G, who make two basic claims:

1. We cooperate not only for self-interested reasons but also because we have moral sentiments (social preferences) that push us to

· be concerned about the welfare of others

· try to uphold social norms

· value ethical behavior for its own sake.

2. Such moral sentiments are the result of evolutionary pressures that favored individuals who had them because, being in groups of individuals with such traits, they tended to do better than the average.

Moral sentiments produce high levels of altruism that persisted and flourished because during the late Pleistocene and the early Holocene:

1. We devised methods (shunning, ostracism, ‘righteous’ violence) to protect altruists and punish free riders, thus providing intra group leveling.

2. We have long periods of socialization in which we internalize cooperative norms because we are docile (teachable)

3. Inter-group competition for resources was intense, often degenerating in war

(1)-(3) are possible because of human

· cognitive abilities: formulate norms and internalize them, erect social institutions fostering them, develop non-kin sense of belonging.

· linguistic abilities: communicate such norms and alert others of violations

· physical abilities: throw projectile weapons, thus lessening the cost of punishment

Procedures

The evolution of morality can be studied by two main interconnected methods (there are others, but we focus on these two):

1. One may look at existing non-human hominids (existing non-human great apes), and see whether they display morality, or something like it, and argue that the building blocks of morality are to be found in our evolutionary ancestry. Of course, this is a complex enterprise because often it’s not easy to determine what motivates ape behavior.

(This is the path chosen by De Waal)

2. One may try to construct an empirically satisfactory gene-culture evolutionary model for prosociality and morality. The fundamental models are agent-based, and agents operate on the basis of:

i. Beliefs, one’s representations of the causal structure of the world

ii. Constraints, limitations placed on one’s feasible action by the situation

iii. Preferences, sentiments or mental features leading to the evaluation and ranking of the possible outcomes of one’s action

iv. The maximization of preference functions, namely, choosing the action with the highest evaluation; this is not a psychological explanation of human behavior in that it need not represent the actual thought processes going on in one’s mind, only the outcome

(The models we study are by, or based on, B&G).

While going gone though these two lines of investigation, it will be also necessary to engage in philosophical considerations to determine what are the necessary prerequisites for an action to be considered moral, and to what extent the results obtained shed light on the genesis and nature of morality.

Evolutionary dynamics

To provide an evolutionary model of human prosociality and possibly human morality, we need to look at evolutionary processes at a rather abstract level. The main mechanism of evolution is natural selection. Its formal requirements are simple. Imagine a population of individuals with different traits such that

• Individuals replicate and make reasonable copies of themselves, transmitting traits to their progeny; this is called “replication”
• Different traits produce different levels of reproductive fitness in the individuals carrying them; this is called “differential fitness”

Things to which replication and differential fitness apply are replicators. Note that replication and differential fitness are substrate neutral: they occur both with RNA and DNA based organisms. They also occur in the case of cultural items such as words (Darwin’s example), ideas, rituals, behaviors, institutions, and tunes, in which case they are called “memes”.

The evolutionary process occurs because differential fitness will favor some traits and disfavor others, thus altering their frequencies in the population. Of course, if no new traits were to appear and the environment never changed, the evolutionary process would eventually become negligible; hence, a third requirement must be satisfied:

· New traits arise randomly and with sufficient frequency; this is called “variation”

Note that evolutionary accounts provide a story in terms of remote, not proximate, causes for a trait. For example, why do many humans punish transgressors even at a cost? The probable answer in terms of proximate causes is: because when they do so the pleasure centers of the brain are activates. The answer in term of remote causes is: because doing so allows intra-group cooperation that raises the fitness of such punishers above the population average.