Evolution and ethics

Evolution and ethicsThe fact that human beings are a product of biological evolution has been thought to impinge on the study of ethics in two quite different ways. First, evolutionary ideas may help account for why people have the ethical thoughts and feelings they do. Second, evolutionary ideas may help illuminate which normative ethical claims, if any, are true or right or correct. These twin tasks –explanation and justification – may each be subdivided. Evolutionary considerations may be relevant to explaining elements of morality that are culturally universal; they also may help explain why individuals or societiesdiffer in the ethics they espouse. With respect to the question of justification, evolutionary considerations have sometimes been cited to show that ethics isan elaborate illusion – that is, to defend versions of ethical subjectivism and emotivism. However, evolutionary considerations also have been invoked to justify ethical norms. Although there is no conflict between using evolutionboth to explain traits that are universal and to explain traits that vary, it is not consistent to claim both that evolution unmasks ethics and justifies particular ethical norms.1 Explanation2 Genetic arguments3 The is/ought distinctionCopyright © 2000 Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis group. All rights reserved.1 ExplanationBefore we can assess whether evolution helps explain why we have the ethicalbeliefs we possess, we need to be clear on what the phenotype in question is. What part of human culture is delimited by the term ‘ethics’?Some of the evaluations an organism may place on an action or a person or a motive may count as ethical in character. What makes an evaluation ethical? The question here is not the normative question, ‘What standards should an individual use?’ Rather, it is descriptive; its answer helps define a line of inquiry in the social and natural sciences. If we visited an alien society – either that of human beings or ofsome other species – how would we tell whether that society has an ethics?Even if the individuals concerned have altruistic motives, this does not show that they possess an ethics. Parents may care for the welfare of their children, but feeling love and concern are not the same as possesing a morality. Closer to the mark is the idea that an ethics is a set of principles that possesses a certain sort of generality (see Morality and ethics).In his Methods of Ethics (1874), Sidgwick suggested that it is a self-evident truth of common-sense morality that if one person has a right to do something, then so does anyone else who is similarly situated. This normative claim has a descriptive analogue: an organism has a morality only if it possesses a set of principles that dictate what anyone fitting a certain qualitative description is entitled or required to do. These principles need not provide an algorithm for deciding which actions are morally right; they simply may specify a set of ethically relevant considerations. Nor does this idea require that a morality treat all human beings as having equal ethical standing. Tribal moralities, no less than universal moralities, state what individuals must be like to be entitled to perform various actions. Nor does the Kantian pedigree of the idea mean that ethics focuses exclusively on disinterested reason and has nothing to do with engaged emotion (see Kant, I. §§9–10); an ethics of caring about personal relations may still find expression in a set of general principles.Although generality is arguably a necessary feature of a morality, it is not sufficient. The hypothetical imperatives that specify rules for different aspects of cultural practice – of etiquette, of sports, and so on – may also be general. Ethics may be special because it dictates what individuals ought to care about, no matter what else they happen to want.Even after we single out the aspect of a culture that falls under the rubric of ‘ethics’, we must tak e care to describe this phenotype accurately. A person’s or a society’s ethics may fail to coincide with the slogans that figure in public discourse. Aliens visiting Earth from another galaxy would make an enormous mistake if they thought that the people who pay homage to the Ten Commandments believe that the acts listed are always prohibited or always required. An ethics may be compared to a grammar; just as people speak a language without being able to articulate the grammatical principles their language obeys, so their ethical intuitions correspond to a set of principles that they often are unable to articulate. Descriptive ethics poses problems that are no less subtle than those addressed in theoretical linguistics.Regardless of how exactly a morality is defined, the fact that moralities are so common in human societies raises a fundamental evolutionary puzzle. An individual may possess a mixture of selfish and altruistic motives without having a morality. Why, then, do moralities exist? It is worth considering the possibility that moralities began life and continue to exist because they perform a certain social function. The idea that there are obligations, prohibitions and entitlements that people must respect regardless of whatever else they happen to want obviously contributes to a well-functioning society. Perhaps everyone benefits from a society in which a morality is present; alternatively, it may be that some benefit at the expense of others. Each of these patterns can be accommodated in an evolutionary explanation of why morality emerged as a social form in ancestral populations.In addition to asking why moralities exist, evolutionary theory can be asked to explain why moralities have the features they do. But here we must be careful. To askwheth er evolution can explain ‘our ethics’ is to begin with a poorly formulated problem. There are many features of the ethical norms endorsed by a person or a society. Some of these may have important connections with evolutionary considerations; others may not.In virtually every human society, killing a member of one’s own society is viewed as a morally more weighty act than killing a chicken. It is hard to believe that evolution is irrelevant to why this is so. On the other hand, the fact that many societies have changed their views about capital punishment in the last century may be explicableby cultural, rather than evolutionary, factors.This is not to deny that having views about capital punishment requires an organismto have a big brain, and that having a big brain is a product of evolution. The point remains, a big brain is something that people of today share with their ancestors of a hundred years ago; thus it does not explain why our views on capital punishmentdiffer from those held a few generations ago.The present example about the ethics of killing should not be taken to imply that evolution can help explain only those features of ethics that are culturally universal. Evolution has endowed human beings with enormous behavioural plasticity; however, sometimes the details of an organism’s plasticity are themselves dictated by evolution. For example, polar bears grow thick fur when it is cold and thinner furwhen it is warm; natural selection has made the organism’s phenotype respond to environmental changes in ways that maximize fitness. So the mere fact that human beings espouse different ethical systems in different cultures does not imply that evolution is irrelevant to understanding that variation. The question is whether the pattern of variation can be understood as a phenotypically plastic adaptation.Copyright © 2000 Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis group. All rights reserved.2 Genetic argumentsIf morality emerged and persisted because it conferred some evolutionary benefit,then we may speculate that morality would have had this utility even if there reallywere no such things as the obligations and rights that people objectively possess. Itis worth remembering that ethics and religion were closely connected in the historiesof many societies. Although Western philosophy since the Greeks prominentlyfeatured the idea that ethical principles have a status independent of divine decree,this declaration of independence is hardly a cultural universal. If theism emerged and persisted for reasons having nothing to do with its objective correctness, one mayask whether the same is true of moral convictions.Here we find the beginning of a genetic argument for ethical subjectivism. The idea is that the causes of a conviction – the factors that generated it – provide evidenceabout whether the conviction is true. Arguments to this effect are called genetic because they refer to an idea’s genesis; they need have nothing to do with chromosomes. The question we need to consider is whether the fact that ethicalbeliefs can be explained – either by evolution or by details concerning human culture– show that these beliefs are never true or right or correct.We must be careful not to dismiss this suggestion simply by invoking the so-called‘genetic fallacy’. To be sure, one cannot deduce that a proposition is false just from information concerning why someone came to believe it. Even if Kekulé first thoughtof the benzene ring while he was hallucinating, this does not prove that benzene isnot a ring.Even so, facts about the genesis of a belief can provide non-deductive evidenceabout whether the proposition believed is true. If you form your belief concerning how many planets there are by drawing a number at random from an urn, then your beliefis probably mistaken. The process of belief formation provides an indication ofwhether its product is likely to be correct.If evolution produced some of the ethical convictions we have, what does that show about whether those convictions are likely to be true? Is this fact about their genesis evidence that the beliefs are false? It is easy to see how a genetic argument could show that a specific ethical belief is probably mistaken. If your belief about thenumber of planets can be cast in doubt by a genetic argument, there is no reasonwhy your ethics should be immune from this challenge.What is more puzzling is how the whole status of ethics as a subject can be undermined by genetic considerations. In the case of your belief about the number of planets, we assume that there is a fact of the matter concerning how many planets there are. We further assume that the process of drawing a number at random froman urn is not connected in the right way to that fact. This set of background assumptions explains why we are entitled to be confident that your belief about the number of planets is probably untrue.For a genetic argument to support ethical subjectivism, it would have to be shownthat the process of evolution is completely unrelated to the factors that make anethical proposition true or false. But even if this could be demonstrated, it would not follow that no normative statements are true, only that the ones we happen toespouse are probably mistaken. How could a genetic argument support theconclusion that ethics, in its entirety, not just in the details we happen to believe now,is an illusion? Subjectivism and emotivism, if they are to be defended, must be defended by some other route (see Moral Scepticism).Copyright © 2000 Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis group. All rights reserved.3 The is/ought distinctionHume (§4) famously observed that a normative conclusion cannot be deduced validly from purely descriptive premises. One cannot derive an ought from an is. This claim is not undermined by the fact that terms in natural languages sometimes combine normative and descriptive elements. To say that someone is cruel is both to describe and criticize the person in question. However, that does not affect the Humean thesis.It follows from this Humean doctrine that descriptive facts about evolution cannot be sufficient to deduce normative conclusions. The fact that human beings in ancestral populations were omnivores does not provide an ethical justification for eating meat. It is ‘natural’ for human beings to eat meat, in the sense that this is a trait that is found in nature. Nothing normative follows from this point.The Humean thesis concerns deduction. Even if an ought-statement cannot be deduced from purely is-premises, the question remains of whether descriptive premises provide non-deductive support for normative conclusions. Here the Humean thesis should be extended to the domain of non-deductive inference; purely is-premises do not, by themselves, provide evidence for an ought-conclusion.It does not follow that evolutionary information is always irrelevant to ethical problems. Evolutionary facts may be relevant, even if they do not provide the whole story. Whether this is so depends on the specific ethical system one considers and on the details of the ethical problem at hand. In just the same way, human psychology is relevant to ethics only in so far as some ethical theory makes this so. For example, hedonistic utilitarianism says that an action’s moral standing is determined by its propensity to cause pleasure and pain. If psychology tells us about the pains and pleasures that an action is apt to cause, this information is ethically relevant because utilitarianism (or some other ethical theory of interest) says that it is.One ethical idea that has been thought to establish the relevance of evolution to ethics is the ‘ought-implies-can’ principle. This principle says that obligations encompass only what is possible; we are not obliged to perform actions that are impossible for us to perform. If evolutionary considerations establish that certain types of behaviour are outside the human repertoire, then the idea of requiring them would not only be hopelessly utopian – such reforms also would fail to be ethically imperative.This concept sometimes surfaces in discussion of the idea that natural selection will lead females to evolve the inclination to be more choosy about their sexual partners than males; females may have more to lose in fitness terms by making a poor choice. If evolution has hard-wired a sexual double standard into our ethical intuitions, then it will be false that we ought to change the way we think. However, a moment’sreflection shows that a double standard does not strike all people everywhere as obviously correct. For many species, natural selection has forged the details of behaviour; but for human beings, it has caused a big brain to evolve. This big brain allows us to reflect on what would be for many other species an automatic reflex. Paradoxically enough, natural selection has caused a trait to evolve in human beings that limits the hegemony of natural selection in determining human behaviour. The human brain is a monkey wrench of the first order; apparently, it frequently preventsthe ought-implies-can principle from demonstrating that evolutionary theory has agreat deal to say about what our obligations are.Still, ethics since Aristotle has repeatedly found attractive the thought that reflectionon the biological nature of human beings must yield important information concerning what human flourishing amounts to, and a conception of human flourishing must bean important tool in forging theories of the right and the good. The more appealingsuch theories become, the more relevant to ethics will evolutionary ideas appear.There is no way to settle, once and for all, what evolution can teach us about ethics.As ethical theory evolves, the relevance of evolution will also experience a continuing metamorphosis.ELLIOTT SOBERCopyright © 2000 Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis group. All rights reserved.。