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 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.

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.

and

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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. . .

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 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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

BTW, I think you might be conflating the issues of perspectival independence (symmetry) and scope of application (as in universal generalizations).