Evolutionary Morality

Aaron Snell has offered a good hypothetical pushback for the point made in my last post. The question at hand is: How do selfless human virtues like heroism shoehorn into Darwin's theory of survival-of-the-fittest?

I'll begin by restating Aaron's reply, which I call "hypothetical" because he is not advancing it as his own belief.

Humans are social animals, and as such their social interactions are the context in which morality evolved. When practiced in such a social context, altruism has certain social benefits that ensure a better chance of offspring survival. This then translates into an evolved moral impulse.

As for your objection about the converse "selfish streak", I have seen two counter-arguments offered: 1) this is an evolutionary hold-over from our pre-social past; and 2) individuals sometimes benefit from selfishness in certain social situations, which means both can be present in the behavior of a biologically-programmed human animal.

And here are my thoughts:

When was this pre-social time in our past where anti-social behavior was supposed to be advantageous? All creatures are social creatures to some extent. What is it that makes a prior behavior less valuable to survival simply because we become more verbal and intelligent? I think the unintended implication is that humans are now self-conscious and able to know good from evil — that we have risen to some higher metaphysical plane where we are attuned to true virtue. But as another commenter (Duane) points out, in an amoral, purely material world, there is no good and evil or better and worse in the sense we generally mean those words.

If morality is only evolutionary, then there is no higher morality that stands above whatever evolution delivers. This means that the only thing that could be said to be good is whatever lends a survival advantage. "Good" would be, by definition, whatever successful organisms happen to do. However, we find various creatures acting in many ways, some of which we would think of as very "bad" were it imitated by humans. Consequently, there is no reason to even think of our own behaviors, such as heroism, as objectively more virtuous than the diverse behaviors that we see in other successful creatures.

Evolution only has to do with replication and survival. If it could be said to produce morality it would only be related to what is most advantageous to the survival and dominance of any given species, and it does not care about ethics in its pragmatism. For evolution, any means is justified by the ends. And it seems we could get along just as well by evolution's reckoning if we ate our genetically inferior offspring and killed off our elderly once reaching a certain age. This doesn't fit the model of virtue and heroics as we think of it, since we regard some of the most heroic acts to be on behalf of the weak and defenseless.

Mutations do not appear in communities, which could all share in the benefits of cooperation and heroism; they appear in individuals, and if those individuals do not reproduce, then that characteristic will be lost. Even if heroism may add theoretical value to the community, it still has to be established as a characteristic in that community. Those with the strongest heroic traits would seldom manage to pass their genes on, while those in need of rescue would be perhaps more likely to dilute the gene pool.

We tend to think of some behaviors as being morally superior to others, for example, being heroic, practicing equal human rights, and living in peace and harmony with your neighbors are all considered to be good. But this type of environment is not conducive to allowing the superior genes to dominate. Bacteria are supposed to have evolved by means of the more fit organisms crushing out its competition. It could easily be seen as more advantageous to allow weak and helpless victims to die than to allow the virile gene-carriers to lose their lives in the efforts to save them. Practicing equal rights, welfare, pacifism, and heroism does not seem to be consistent with the spirit of evolutionary progress.

To say that some supposedly bad behaviors are a carryover of primitive times only works if we can say that those behaviors are in a different category from our newer behaviors. For example, we might only be aggressive toward others while we are good toward our own offspring and spouse. Perhaps we can develop the new in one area while retaining the old in some other; like a dolphin is supposed to be a land mammal, which retained its old lungs while developing new swimming apparatus. It seems problematic to the theory to have both the new and the old in the same area, but that is exactly what we find in the area of morality. We find loving parents and abusive parents, heroes and cowards, lovers and rapists, pacifists and warmongers, philanthropists and swindlers.

It might make sense to say that morality can be evolving along a continuum, like legs slowly forming into flippers, but that would imply, for morality, that we were fairly consistent in our moral expressions, wherever we happened to be on the scale. Experience shows that humans exhibit moral behavior along every point of the scale, from heroic to monstrous. Some of us still have legs while others have fully developed flippers, so to speak.

Perhaps moral character could be controlled by something like genetic alleles, which determine eye and hair color, among other things. This would imply that there could be "good" people and "bad" people, just like blondes and brunettes, or at least people who are good and bad in certain areas of morality. This seems a very testable notion, since by this reckoning we should expect to find solid and predictable patterns among kin and, especially, identical twins. But I think it has been difficult enough to establish that things like personalities and preferences are determined by genetics at all; and if not by genetics, then we aren't really talking about evolutionary morality in the first place.

Alleles can also be bred out of the genetic stock, so we might expect to see tribes of incorrigibly noble aboriginals or irreformably wicked savages, as we see blue-eyed Scandinavians and dark-skinned Africans, and their children would be expected to be cut from the same cloth. But we seem to find that there is no race whose infants consistently surprise or disappoint us if we adopt them into our "mainstream" society. And if we claim that this is not so then we can be assured of facing charges of racism.

In the end, this is an idea that sounds good in theory, but it turns out to be circular reasoning: we happen to value certain moral behavior and so we imagine that there is an evolutionary advantage for those who practice it. Unfortunately, it begs the question as to the true source of morality, why we should exalt human morality, and why evolution would have us be repulsed by social practices that would actually improve our genetic stock. If, as Tennyson said, nature is red in tooth and claw, then why should we expect to escape the breeding and discipline of our own Mother?