In his recent New York Times Magazine article on the evolutionary and biological underpinnings of morality, Steven Pinker acknowledges the nihilistic shadows nearby, and, like other popularizers of Darwinian naturalism, reassures us that we needn’t worry. I think he’s right — we needn’t — but not for the reasons he suggests.
Pinker writes:
“[M]orally corrosive’ is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested ”” to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. The explanation of how different cultures appeal to different spheres could lead to a spineless relativism, in which we would never have grounds to criticize the practice of another culture, no matter how barbaric, because “we have our kind of morality and they have theirs.’ And the whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry. In reality, none of these fears are warranted, and it’s important to see why not.
So morality will keep its place as a “transcendent principle”? Well, that may depend on what you mean. First, Pinker takes a look at the notion that even the most selfless behavior is in fact motivated merely by our “selfish” genes.
Genes are not a reservoir of our dark unconscious wishes. “Selfish’ genes are perfectly compatible with selfless organisms, because a gene’s metaphorical goal of selfishly replicating itself can be implemented by wiring up the brain of the organism to do unselfish things, like being nice to relatives or doing good deeds for needy strangers. When a mother stays up all night comforting a sick child, the genes that endowed her with that tenderness were “selfish’ in a metaphorical sense, but by no stretch of the imagination is she being selfish.
Nor does reciprocal altruism ”” the evolutionary rationale behind fairness ”” imply that people do good deeds in the cynical expectation of repayment down the line. We all know of unrequited good deeds, like tipping a waitress in a city you will never visit again and falling on a grenade to save platoonmates. These bursts of goodness are not as anomalous to a biologist as they might appear.
In his classic 1971 article, [Robert] Trivers, the biologist, showed how natural selection could push in the direction of true selflessness. The emergence of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which lets organisms trade favors without being cheated, is just a first step. A favor-giver not only has to avoid blatant cheaters (those who would accept a favor but not return it) but also prefer generous reciprocators (those who return the biggest favor they can afford) over stingy ones (those who return the smallest favor they can get away with). Since it’s good to be chosen as a recipient of favors, a competition arises to be the most generous partner around. More accurately, a competition arises to appear to be the most generous partner around, since the favor-giver can’t literally read minds or see into the future. A reputation for fairness and generosity becomes an asset.
Now this just sets up a competition for potential beneficiaries to inflate their reputations without making the sacrifices to back them up. But it also pressures the favor-giver to develop ever-more-sensitive radar to distinguish the genuinely generous partners from the hypocrites. This arms race will eventually reach a logical conclusion. The most effective way to seem generous and fair, under harsh scrutiny, is to be generous and fair. In the long run, then, reputation can be secured only by commitment. At least some agents evolve to be genuinely high-minded and self-sacrificing ”” they are moral not because of what it brings them but because that’s the kind of people they are.
This is all quite straightforward: it can be adaptive to be cooperative. Clearly the boundaries between genes and culture are going to be difficult to trace, but it is clear that an inborn talent for being acculturated in this way is a universal human characteristic.
But so far we have not been shown why altruism, which we have seen can serve our broader self-interests, is morally good in any objective sense — or, for that matter, how anything can be objectively good, any more than something can be objectively tasty, or objectively funny. Pinker continues:
The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
This is what we’ve been waiting for. Well, how about letting God decide? Pinker plays the Euthyphro card (and why not?):
Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not ”” if his dictates are divine whims ”” why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others ”” if a command to torture a child was never an option ”” then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
So much for that. But is there then no solid ground upon which morality can stand?
This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.
Moral realism, as this idea is called, is too rich for many philosophers’ blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea ”” if not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few If-Thens ”” is not crazy.
Here comes the move. Watch carefully.
Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.
One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.
In other words, cooperation and altruism are ways of optimizing our rewards when we live in groups. We accrue more benefits by playing fair.
Pinker continues:
The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me ”” to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car ”” then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.
Not coincidentally, the core of this idea ”” the interchangeability of perspectives ”” keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle ”” the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.
Pinker is establishing a symmetry argument here, similar to the symmetry paradigms that have been central to so many of the physical sciences. In science a symmetry refers to something that is invariant after a transformation of some sort. For example, the Galilean Principle of Relativity describes a symmetry in which the laws of physics appear the same to observers in different inertial reference frames. That those laws also appear the same to observers at different locations is an example of a translational symmetry. So-called gauge symmetries lie at the heart of quantum field theory. And the great mathematician Emmy Noether showed that symmetries are deeply related to conservation laws. I think, in fact, that this is the most interesting part of Pinker’s article.
But let’s see where we’ve got to. Pinker has made a solid pragmatic argument for why we have the moral intuitions we do: namely that animals that live in groups benefit from behaving cooperatively toward other members of the group. The perspective-symmetry idea plays an important explanatory role as well, from a “selfish-gene” viewpoint: while it may benefit me as an individual to cheat and be greedy, things fall apart if everyone cheats and is greedy, and any genes that predispose humans to behave this way are not going to prosper when everyone has a copy of them.
If humans live in genetically related groups, and altruism/selfishness is to any extent influenced by our genes, a negative-feedback process will be at work that adversely affects the fitness of genes that make us less cooperative as those genes spread throughout the population. If we imagine a gene that makes a person succceed brilliantly as a truly selfish bastard, but at a high cost to the rest of the group, we can see that as the gene succeeds — making more and more copies of itself in more and more bodies — the group itself will fail. So what do we end up with? If humans live and die in groups, in circumstances where the failure of the group means the death or reproductive failure of the individual, we can indeed expect selection to find stategic optimizations of the sort described by game theory. And we do. We even have a name for these optimizations; we call them “moral truths”.
Pinker’s case for a new sort of objective morality, then, boils down to this: our innate moral sense is not just an arbitrary fluke of brain wiring, but represents objective natural facts about the best way for humans to get along with each other. But it seems to me this is a bit of a bait-and-switch: we were led to imagine that we would be given some basis to see our notions of goodness to be based somehow on what is good, not just what is pragmatically optimal for evolutionary fitness. Imagine that a game-theoretical optimization of the behavior of individuals in groups called for murdering everyone over age thirty, or eating deformed children, or raping all the women. The guiding hand of natural and cultural selection would almost certainly incline us to see these practices as “good” — and according to Pinker’s analysis, they would be. This is, of course, the naturalistic fallacy, plain and simple. Pinker is trying to concoct a very large “ought” from an evolutionary “is”.
Furthermore, Pinker ignores that the same influences that lead us to behave altruistically to others within our group impel us often to behave quite differently to members of competing groups. Thoughout history men have seen it as a moral imperative to torment and slaughter those outside the circle in the most brutal ways imaginable, but this too, arises from the same fitness-optimization processes that Pinker praises as the wellspring of in-group goodness. Yes, the whole family of Man may one day end up inside Peter Singer’s charmed circle, but we certainly don’t seem to be in any hurry to get there.
But then we are right back where we started, staring down a buttered slide to moral nihilism. But as I said at the beginning, I think that we needn’t worry about that — not because we do in fact have an ultimate, universal standard to which we can refer, but rather because I think that our fear of lacking such a foundation is itself based on a deep philosophical confusion.
Pinker’s article is excellent; I admire his work very much, and it’s clear to me that he is on the right track about the origins of our moral sensibilities. But he goes too far in his attempt to restore objectivity to morality: it’s a good try, but he fails, if you will, to deliver the goods.
22 Comments
Splendid! If I may be so bold as to give my humble opinion, I think you hit the illicit move squarely on the head, a move that depends upon an equivocation between two meanings of the word “good”: a meaning in the utilitarian-pragmatic sense and a meaning in the objective moral sense, whereby we have gained only a sophisticated confusion (which can admittedly have the merit, if we succumb to it, of dispelling nihilism in us). The question of whether the threat of nihilism can be dispelled in a non-equivocal way and without confusion, however, is another matter.
“I think that our fear of lacking such a foundation [to morality] is itself based on a deep philosophical confusion.”
Ah, now that’s the difficult bit! I look forward to your words on the matter.
Hi D., and thanks.
Yes, that is the tricky bit, and I know I have a marker outstanding to you in that matter.
Sufficiently tricky it is, and wary enough am I of going off half-cocked, that this is a bun that is still in the oven.
But I do think the fault lies not in the world, but in our naivetÁ©.
Malcolm – I agree with you that Pinker doesn’t manage to put morality on objective foundations. I’m not sure, though, that that’s what he was trying to do. Instead, I think he was just arguing that an evolutionary, or more generally, a naturalistic account of the raw materials of morality (i.e., a handful of behavioral dispositions and some ability for rational reflection) doesn’t preclude such an objective basis for morality. And I think he’s looking in the right directions for hints about how to characterize the objectivity of ethics — namely, noting that rationality is implicated in ethics. Ethics is about the reasons we have for doing things.
BTW, I think you might be conflating the issues of perspectival independence (symmetry) and scope of application (as in universal generalizations).
Hi Bob, and thanks as always for visiting.
It’s Pinker who explicitly raises the question of objective morality here – if he were simply making the case that there are naturalistic explanations for our moral sensibilities, and for why they are what they are, he could easily have stuck to that.
I agree with you that he is looking in the right direction for objective sources for our built-in ethical intuitions. But he quite clearly is also trying, in this article, to throw a bone to those who see a need for objective “goodness”, over and above practical accounts of the origins of our subjective valuations. I don’t think he needed to bother with that part at all, and I don’t think he’s going to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. The facts simply are what they are, and if some folks will never be satisfied without truly absolute moral standards, that’s just too bad.
I’m afraid I don’t follow your remark about symmetry. It seems quite clear to me that Pinker is arguing that an effective ethical system should be invariant over translations from person to person.
Malcolm – Pinker doesn’t pretend to establish the objectivity of ethics. Instead, he seeks to undermine the claim that treating ethics as a natural phenomenon implies that ethical claims could not be objective.
Universality, objectivity, symmetry… these are tricky concepts. What I’m trying to highlight is the difference between the “universality” of ethical rules such as “all lies are wrong” and the different sort of “universality” implied by a claim such as “if it’s wrong for smith to lie about x, then it would also be wrong for any similarly situated moral agent to lie about x.” The latter reflects what I sometimes call the “impersonal” character of objective reasons. That’s the sort of objectivity that I think is relevant to the question of whether ethics is objective.
Hi Bob,
I’m not sure I agree with you about that — on my reading he is indeed trying to put morality on a new kind of objective footing — but perhaps you are right about his motivation. In either case, however, I think he needn’t have bothered. He overreaches, and fails. It’s a pity, because the article is excellent otherwise. All of these writers — Pinker, Dennett, Dawkins — seem to be unnerved by the prospect of a radical unmooring of morality, which I think is a perfectly obvious consequence of naturalism, and not to be feared any more than a de-objectivization of the sweetness of sugar.
Your second characterization of symmetry — “if it’s wrong for smith to lie about x, then it would also be wrong for any similarly situated moral agent to lie about x” — is what I had in mind in this post, and what I think Pinker was referring to as well.
Hi again, Malcolm – I understand that you are willing to accept moral nihilism, and so see Pinker’s gestures toward objectivism as unnecessary. But some of us, apparently including Pinker, think naturalism and objectivism, properly understood (maybe we’re not there yet…), might be compatible, and that self-respecting naturalists might not need to embrace nihilisim after all. Babies and bathwater come to mind. I don’t think it’s helpful to see this as a “loss of nerve” on the part of naturalists who think morality might be objective. Who’s got more nerve, the guy who says “It’s all just subjective tastes, so don’t be bothered,” or the guy who says “Let’s mount another attack on a problem that has stumped the best minds in history”?
So, I don’t think it’s at all obvious that nihilism is a consequence of naturalism. To pursue the arithmetic analogy from Pinker, if somebody fashioned a persuasive naturalistic account of why we do arithmetic, would you start to doubt that 2+2=4 is an objective truth?
Hi Bob,
Well, I’m no Platonist when it comes to math, either…! I’d say that the truth of mathematical propositions is inextricably dependent upon our mind-made concept of number.
I must emphazise again the distinction between understanding how natural processes can give rise to specific moral intuitions and any assertion that such valuations are objectively correct. While it may be that certain optimizations for living together in groups will arise again and again, rubber-stamping them retroactively as being “objectively moral” simply because they are a kind of forced move is nothing more than a way to comfort ourselves by redefining our terms. As I wrote above, what if our evolutionary circumstances had made eating our young adaptive? I have no doubt that it would be seen as moral.
Naturalistic science is indeed mounting some very promising assaults on some ancient problems, and our growing understanding of the roots of our moral sensibilities is among the spoils. But as has happened again and again throughout the history of science, a broader and deeper view often means we must let go of some cherished conceit about our specialness. We’ve managed to come to terms with not being at the physical center of the Universe (or even the solar system), and with our vaunted race having descended from other, humbler creatures. I think that this is another one of those cases.
We have the moral architecture we do for comprehensible reasons, and it serves us well, most of the time. The better we understand it, the better we’ll be able to resolve its contradictions and inconsistencies, and to make clearer and more informed decisions about what we really want and why, and about how to move forward together in light of those choices. Can’t we just leave it at that?
Hello again Malcolm,
Given what I know about your anti-realist views on mathematics I’m rather surprised to see you taking what looks like a realist line on ethics. If I’ve got him right, Moore thought that ‘the good’ is absolutely undefinable. Hence any attempt to define the good, in particular in terms of natural phenomena, has to be fallacious. But is this right? What better foundation for ethics than ‘objective natural facts about the best way for humans to get along with each other’? Of course, one could argue that evolution hasn’t found the very best solution to the problem, so in principle we could have had an even better ethics, as it were, but these are the ethics we’ve got and the the evolutionary account of how we came by them through the genetics of reciprocal altruism is highly persuasive. Where are you standing that you can judge that they do not necessarily represent ‘the good’?
Malcolm – If I’m becoming tedious, I apologize. But…. If the only sort of objectivism that you can imagine requires embracing Platonism, well, then I think you need to stretch your imagination a bit.
Hi David,
Forgive me, but I think you have misunderstood me quite completely. I am most certainly not saying that our evolved ethical intutions misrepresent “the good”; this would imply that I thought there was some objective “fact of the matter” to which I was comparing our own morality. But this is exactly what I am arguing against; I don’t think any such standard exists. I’m with Moore.
And Bob, I’ll address your last comment here as well. I am defending naturalism against a commonly made assertion: that by removing the objective foundation of morality, it undermines the most important pillar of human civilization. What most people have in mind when they speak of such a foundation is that moral truth must either be rooted in God, or, failing that, that moral truths are at the very least “out there” in the same way that mathematical truths are often imagined to be. Without a theistic or Platonic grounding of this sort, it seems to a great many people that we are standing on moral quicksand. You both appear to disagree with that, and so do I.
So, what is left? David, you ask: what better foundation for an objectivist view of ethics than ‘objective natural facts about the best way for humans to get along with each other’? Well, I haven’t a better one to offer — and anyway, pace Bob, my imagination is every bit as elastic as the next guy’s — so let’s agree for the sake of this discussion that the moral intuitions we have arrived at as a result of our evolutionary history truly represent “the good”. But then we must keep in mind what is implicit in such an endorsement. If, as Darwinian naturalists like us must argue, natural selection has indeed converged on this optimal set of behavioral dispositions, it is because it has optimized… just what, exactly?
The answer is that, as always, the summum bonum as far as selection is concerned is the differential maximization of the number of offspring into which your genes are copied. That’s it. Whatever makes that happen, wins. If it were raping as many females as possible, or slaughtering your neighbor’s kids — both of which are well-represented strategies in the animal world — that’s what what our moral intuitions would endorse. And as it is, the moral obligations humans have exhibited throughout history regarding between-group interactions have shown impressive range. Examples of the “good” as regards competing human groups have typically included mass slaughter, systematic rape, enslavement, human sacrifice, and enforced starvation — all of which is highly adaptive, of course. It’s made us the success we are today.
So yes: if we must have our objectivism (and for for the life of me I can’t see why on Earth it matters so much), and theism and Platonism are off the table, I guess we we can simply define “the good” as “whatever strategy natural selection converges upon”. But looking around, it isn’t all that pretty, and it’s going to have rather a hollow ring to it, I think.
How about this instead: let’s get over this obsessive craving to rubber-stamp our contingent, adaptive moral dispositions with the seal of “objectivity”, and simply get on with the hard work of coming to understand ourselves, and of making the most of what we are.
Hi Malcolm,
Apologies if I have misunderstood you. I couldn’t believe you were Platonistic towards ‘the good’! But in saying Pinker commits the naturalistic fallacy aren’t you being inconsistent? The NF implies that there is something we call ‘the good’, but this, being essentially simple, cannot be captured in terms of other phenomena, in particular, natural phenomena. I seized upon your remark
This suggests that actually you do have some, seemingly ungrounded, notion of ‘the good’ that is open to all the usual anti-Platonist objections.
On a related point, I don’t think Pinker is saying that any naturally occurring behaviour must be good. Rather, the genetics of reciprocal altruism explains why our lives have a ‘moral dimension’, why we have the moral sentiments of gratitude and guilt, etc. Our nervous systems really are detecting an objective aspect of the world, that you have done me a favour perhaps, just as our eyes detect wavelength. We then identify the altruistic end of this dimension with (some of) the good, and the selfish end with the bad, and this gives us an objective foundation for some of our notion of ‘the good’. This line of thought runs so counter to Moore that it’s fatuous to dismiss it as an instance of the naturalistic fallacy.
Hi Malcolm –
I thought you were contesting Pinker’s view that the naturalistic, scientific investigation of the bases of morality doesn’t need to lead to moral nihilism. If your target was theistic or platonistic accounts of “the good,” OK, but again, Pinker doesn’t seem to be suggesting that morality is objective in that way.
Also, Pinker is quite clear that he thinks morality involves more than social dispositions (moral sentiments) — to get to morality one also needs to add at least a pinch of rationality to social dispositions. And he seems to suggest that it’s the element of rationality, not the moral sentiments, that provides an entry for objectivity about morality. This, incidentally, seem to echo Kant, who thought to base morality on the constraints implicit in rational agency.
David and Bob,
A busy day at work today, so no time for a lengthy response at the moment. And I want to thank you both, by the way, for this engaging conversation.
David, I think I am well within the customary understanding of the term “naturalistic fallacy” here. If we, having been sculpted by natural selection to be disposed to treat our fellow creatures empathetically (and, as I pointed out above, this has applied, throughout most of our history, only to very a small subset of our fellow men, and often not to women at all), we are, of course welcome then to ratify this disposition as an instance of “the good” if we like; indeed it seems obvious that all of our valuations must have some basis in something. But this is then merely a convention of definition, and we descend into the tautological. I think Moore’s great insight was the ineffability of our sense of the good, which is perfectly understandable if it is just put there, built right in a a level far below conscious volition, by natural and cultural evolution.
This is all fine with me, of course, if we simply must wallow in this morass; I don’t think we can do any better than this in attempting to find an objective grounding for “the good”. So perhaps we are actually in much closer agreement than you seem to think. I think also, however, that most of those who rail against the “corrosive” effect of naturalism on moral philosophy yearn for something rather less contingent! Again, I think the prospect that based on this view we might, had our evolutionary circumstances been a little different, justifiedly morally endorse eating our young, will sit poorly with many.
Bob,
Indeed we do mix rationality in with our inborn moral intuitions, and we should all be glad of that. But you can’t bootstrap an ethical system into being purely based on reason; indeed any rational argument depends at its root upon axioms that are chosen simply because they seem intuitively true. In the case of ethics, those axioms take the form of intuitive “oughts” that are themselves, under a naturalistic view, the result of our contingent evolutionary history. It is the ascription of objective “correctness” to those intuitions that I question, and that I think Pinker is attempting to establish. I think this is entirely incidental to his infinitely more productive main purpose, which is to understand why those intuitions are what they are, and is a bit of a sop to naturalism’s social critics. I’m quite a fan of Pinker’s, and I am only trying, in this post, to encourage him to keep his eye on the ball.
Well, that was something of a lengthy response after all!
Malcolm – I appreciate the demands of a busy workday, so I won’t expect a response.
I agree that you can’t bootstrap an ethical system purely from reason. But maybe the “ought of morality” is an instance of the “ought of reason” when reason is ranging over the moral sentiments. If that’s so, then perhaps bootstrapping is not out of the question after all. Now we must grant that reason, too, is not free floating, but depends on certain cognitive dispositions which are themselves the products of our evolutionary heritage. But does that undermine the objective truth of so-called “truths of reason” (i.e., the oughts of reason)? I think the burden of argument falls pretty squarely on those who think it does (and how would they shoulder that burden without depending on the very thing they seek to undermine?). And, just to be clear, I don’t think that any of this depends on there being some transcendent realm populated by Platonic ideas.
Hi Bob,
Yes, I simply can’t spend more time here just now, as much as I’d like to, and we begin to range farther afield.
C.S. Lewis, of course, did insist that naturalism undermined the objective truths of reason; he called this “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism”. I’ve even posted a little item on the topic myself.
My overarching theme here is that all of this controversy arises from our wish for certainty, to have the assurance that our reason and morality are somehow ratified by being rooted in, and congruent with, eternal truths. In fact I think they are simply “good enough”, and I think we should just be satisfied with that, and see where it can take us.
I’ve arrived late to the discussion, which has stimulated interesting questions and thoughts among my neural circuits, and I thank you for that. But one comment you made almost in passing is sticking in my craw a bit:
“this has applied, throughout most of our history, only to very a small subset of our fellow men, and often not to women at all”
It’s the “not to women at all” bit that bugs me. It seems to imply that women have not been involved in the evolution of morality at all, that it’s a guy thing. Surely that can’t be so–50% of the genes of the human species (more or less) are housed in female bodies, and female reproductive success has to be just a important to genetic transmission as male. I know that including female perspectives in these questions might complicate them a bit; on the other hand, it might actually lead to new ways of understanding the issues involved. . .
That’s a good comment, Addofio, and indeed my remark about women was made not “almost” in passing, but actually in passing, and I didn’t pause to dwell on the intriguing point you raise. You are quite right that females have been as involved in our evolutionary and cultural development as males, and that they are repositories for half of the copies of the human genome.
It is also true, though, that people see their circle of moral obligation extending only to those within their group; and these groups are not monolithic, but often take the form of what might be seen as a complex Venn diagram. David Sloan Wilson identifies a concept he call “trait groups”, which I think is a productive notion — namely that groups coalesce and interpenetrate according to specific unifying features: we might feel one allegiance as Americans, another as Christians, another as Yankee fans, etc.
The male-female division is an important one when seen in this light, as is acknowledged in the common notion of “the battle of the sexes” — and it is certainly the case that women, taken as a proper subset of certain human groups, are sometimes treated little better than farm animals, though the groups themselves exhibit considerable fitness as regards their competitive dealings with outer groups.
So I suppose the response to your objection is that various within-group strategies may be adaptive at the level of between-group competition; the success of the group as a whole, in turn, lifts the reproductive fitness of the individuals in the group more than enough to compensate for the within-group sacrifice the individuals make.
In this sense, then, males can regard females as being outside the innermost circle of empathetic moral obligation, but still as members of the group relative to genuine outsiders.
But there is a lot to think about here, and I have a long way to go with it all myself. I also realize that multi-level selection is still a bit of a heresy in mainstream evolutionary theory.
I strongly recommend Wilson’s book Darwin’s Cathedral for a good discussion of these issues.
I get the ingroup–outgroup thing, and of course it applies to both genders. My intention was to point out that there are gender-related differences in perspective, and that these should not be ignored in any discussion, pro or con, of the objectivity of morality, or of the biological, evolutionary basis of morality or our moral sense, either one. Empirically, there are differences, statistically speaking, in how (American, at least) females and males think about moral questions. I think those differences may be germane to the questions you were exploring; not only their mere existence must be accommodated into one’s theory of the origins of morality, but also some of the speciifc ways in which they differ may be relevant.
Good points all, Addofio. There is a great deal of complexity here, and gender roles vary a great deal from culture to culture. Really my point in making the remark you quoted was that our sense of moral obligation is limited by the inclusiveness of groups; by also bringing in the complexities and shadings of intra-group moral dynamics affecting such things as class and gender (certainly it is hard to see how honor killings, sexual slavery, genital mutilation, bride burning, etc. are adaptive for females) I am almost certainly biting off more than I can chew.
This is all very much a work in progress even for the professionals (among whom there is brisk and occasionally vitriolic debate), and obviously much more so for me. My goal here is just to stimulate discussion (which seems to be working!), and to articulate as clearly as I can what seem to me to be, for the moment at least, the most sensible positions.
Hi Malcolm,
I’d like to comment on your remarks
and
I think we have to accept that different species will have different systems of ethics and that we can’t judge one species from the ethical viewpoint of another. A bonobo, if he could speak, would express astonishment at the constraints we impose on our sexual behaviour. Orangutans, being solitary, have little need of ethics, would not experience moral sentiments like guilt and gratitude, and would not understand our talk of these things. This last example helps explain why Pinker escapes the naturalistic fallacy. The reciprocal altruism theory doesn’t just make claims as to what the good is, something Moore deems impossible. It goes much further: it offers an explanation for why, for us, good and evil (or at least some aspects thereof) exist in the first place. We can start to see that our sense of the good is not ineffable.
Hi David,
I must insert a placeholder here, as it is early Monday morning and I am confronted with clamant problems at work.
I think you have your finger on the nub of the issue, however: the question, really, is not whether our moral truths are rooted in a priori facts of God or some Platonic realm, as our sense of good and evil is a contingent arising in us. We should explore, rather, why we feel any need for ethics at all, and what, given the intuitions we inherit as human beings, we think should inform our choices as to what our ethics shall consist of. Because ultimately it’s up to us.
I’ll have to pick this up later.