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Just another WordPress.com weblogThe Moral Argument»
The Moral Poverty of Evolutionary Naturalism
By adventuresinelfland
Darwin’s account of the origins of human morality is at once elegant, ingenious, and, I shall argue, woefully inadequate. Inparticular, that account, on its standard interpretation, does not
explain
morality, but, rather, explains it
away
. We learnfrom Darwin not how there could
be
objective moral facts, but how we could have come to
believe
—perhapserroneously—that there are.Further, the naturalist, who does not believe that there is such a personal being as God, is in principle committed toDarwinism, including a Darwinian account of the basic contours of human moral psychology. I’ll use the term
evolutionarynaturalism
to refer to this combination of naturalism and Darwinism. And so the naturalist is saddled with a view thatexplains morality away. Whatever reason we have for believing in moral facts is also a reason for thinking naturalism isfalse. I conclude the essay with a brief account of a theistic conception of morality, and argue that the theist is in a betterposition to affirm the objectivity of morality.
A Darwinian Genealogy of Morals
 According to the Darwinian account, given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape—i.e., the circumstances of survival—certain behaviors are adaptive. And so, any 
 propensity
for such behaviors will also be adaptive. Such explains theflight instinct in the pronghorn, the spawning instinct in the cutthroat salmon and my instinctual aversion to insultingHarley riders in biker bars. Insofar as such propensities are genetic (at least the first two examples would seem to qualify here), they are heritable and thus likely to be passed down to offspring.Imagine, for example, a time in the early history of hominids when the circumstances of survival prompted an early patriot(and kite-flying inventor, perhaps) to advise, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all be torn apart by ravenous wolves.” Insofar as such cooperation depends upon heritable dispositions of group members, those dispositions will conferfitness.Darwin speaks of “social instincts” that are at the root of our moral behavior. These include a desire for the approbation of our fellow humans and a fear of censure. They also include a general sympathy for others. He explains,In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aidand defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities whichincluded the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest numberof offspring.[1] A favored “complex manner” of the origin of such feelings involves an appeal to two varieties of altruism:
kin altruism
isdirected at family members—chiefly one’s offspring—and
reciprocal altruism
is directed at non-family members and evento strangers. The former is an other-regarding attitude and behavior—particularly concerning one’s own children, butextending in descending degrees to other family members—that does not seek any returns. The advantage, of course, is inthe reproductive success. The sense of parental duty that is possessed by, say, a female sea turtle ensures only that she lay her eggs somewhere above the high tide mark. From there, her relatively self-sufficient offspring are quite on their ownagainst daunting odds—something like a one in ten thousand chance of reaching maturity. Those odds are offset by thesheer numbers of hatchlings so that a fraction manage to survive the elements and elude myriads of predators.
The Moral Poverty of Evolutionary Naturalism « Adventuresinelfland’s Blogfile:///C:/Users/Daniel/Documents/Nat%20Theo/Moral/The%20Moral%...1 of 97/6/2009 9:49 PM
 
Such a numbers strategy would hardly work for the human species, given the utter helplessness of the human infant. Babiestend to suffer an inelegant fate if left untended. The probability that a human infant will die if left to its own resources at,say, just above the high tide mark, is a perfect 1. And those same odds would prevail for each of ten thousand similarly abandoned babies. (Word would spread quickly in the wild: “
 Hey, free babies!”
) Human parents possessed of no moreparental instinct than sea turtles would find that their line came to an abrupt end. Thus, a strong sense of love and concernis adaptive and heritable, and has the same function—a means to reproductive success—among humans that hatchlingself-sufficiency and sheer numbers have among turtles.Reciprocal altruism, on the other hand, is rooted in a tit-for-tat arrangement that ultimately confers greater reproductivefitness on all parties involved. Consider, for instance, the symbiotic relationship that exists between grouper and cleanershrimp. Though the shrimp would certainly make a nice snack for a hungry grouper and is busily flossing the fish’s teeth
 from the inside
, the benefit of long-term hygiene (
Whiter teeth! Fresher breath!
) outweighs that of short-termnourishment, and so the fish is programmed to pass on the prawn. The shrimp, of course, benefits from a delectable meal of the gunk otherwise responsible for halitosis in grouper.Similarly, there is benefit to be gained from cooperative and altruistic behavior among humans. For example, Darwinobserves, A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience,courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.[2] And membership in such a victorious tribe has its advantages. To attempt a metaphor, when a baseball team functions likea well-oiled machine, say, with a Tinker, Evers and Chance infield, the likelihood that
all
of the members will sport WorldSeries rings is increased.Thus, the human moral sense—conscience—is rooted in a set of social instincts that were adaptive given the contingenciesof the evolutionary landscape. Of course, there is more to the moral sense than the instincts that Darwin had in mind. Allsocial animals are possessed of such instincts, but not all are plausibly thought of as moral agents.[3]According to Darwin,
conscience
emerges out of a sort of “recipe.” It is the result of the social instincts being overlain with a certain degree of rationality. He writes,The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moralsense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.[4] Wolves in a pack know their place in the social hierarchy. A lower ranked wolf feels compelled to give way to the alpha male. Were he endowed with the intellectual powers that Darwin had in mind, then, presumably his “moral sense” would tell himthat obeisance is his
moral duty
. He would regard it as a moral fact that, like it or not, alpha interests trump beta or omegainterests. And our grouper, if graced with rational and moral autonomy, might reason, “It would be
wicked 
of me to bitedown on my little buddy here after all he has done for me!”Of course, such a “recipe” is precisely what we find in the human species, according to Darwin. We experience a strongpre-reflective pull in the direction of certain behaviors, such as the care for our children or the returning of kindness forkindness, and, on reflection, we conclude that these are our moral duties.
Evolutionary Naturalism and Moral Knowledge
It is not clear that the resulting account of the origin and nature of human morality does full justice to its subject. For onething, it is hard to see why anyone who accepts it is warranted in accepting
moral realism
—the view that there are objective,mind-independent moral facts that we sometimes get right in our moral beliefs. For it would appear that the human moralsense and the moral beliefs that arise from it are ultimately the result of natural selection, and their value is thus found inthe
adaptive behavior 
that they encourage. But then it seems that the processes responsible for our having the moral beliefs that we do are ultimately 
 fitness-aimed 
rather than
truth-aimed 
. This is to say that, in such a case,
the best explanation for our having the moral beliefs that we do makes no essential reference to their being true.
If we have the moral beliefs we do because of the fitness conferred by the resulting behavior, then it appears that we wouldhave had those beliefs whether or not they were true. Some writers have taken this to imply that ethics is “an illusionfobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate.”[5]This is to suggest that there are no objective moral facts,though we have been programmed to believe in them. A more modest conclusion might be that we are not in a position to
know
whether there are such facts because our moral beliefs are undercut by the Darwinian story of their genesis. This is
The Moral Poverty of Evolutionary Naturalism « Adventuresinelfland’s Blogfile:///C:/Users/Daniel/Documents/Nat%20Theo/Moral/The%20Moral%...2 of 97/6/2009 9:49 PM
 
 because that story makes no essential reference to any such alleged facts. Thus, our moral beliefs are without warrant. Butif our moral beliefs are unwarranted, then there can be no such thing as moral knowledge. And this amounts to moralskepticism.If the argument developed here succeeds, its significance is in its implications for the naturalist, who maintains that reality is exhausted by the kinds of things that may, in principle, be the study of the empirical sciences. For the naturalist’s wagonis hitched to the Darwinian star. Richard Dawkins was recently seen sporting a T-shirt that read, “
 Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth, The Only Game in Town.
” Perhaps Dawkins’ shirt reflects his more careful comment elsewhere that,“Although atheism might have been
logically
tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilledatheist.”[6]Before Darwin, the inference to Paley’s Watchmaker seemed natural, if not inevitable, given a world filled withthings “that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”[7]Naturalism without Darwinism is a worldview ata loss for explanation. Further, to appeal to natural selection to explain libidos and incisors, but to withhold such anexplanation for human moral psychology is an untenable position. Moral behavior is not the sort of thing likely to beoverlooked by natural selection because of the important role that it plays in survival and reproductive success.[8]But if naturalism is committed to Darwinism, and Darwinism implies moral skepticism, then naturalism is committed to moralskepticism.
Darwinism and Normativity
In
The
 
 Descent of Man
, Darwin asks, “Why should a man feel that he ought to obey one instinctive desire rather thananother?”[9]His subsequent answer is that the stronger of two conflicting impulses wins out. Thus, the otherwise timidmother will, without hesitation, run the greatest risks to save her child from danger because the maternal instinct trumpsthe instinct for self-preservation. And the timid man, who stands on the shore wringing his hands while allowing even hisown child to drown out of fear for his own life, heeds the instinct for self-preservation.[10] What Darwin never asks—and thus never answers—is why a man
ought 
, in fact, to obey the one rather than theother. The best that he offers here is the observation that
if 
instinct A is stronger than B, then one
will
obey A. What hedoes not and, I suggest,
cannot 
say is that one
ought 
to obey A, or that one
ought 
to feel the force of A over B. That is, whereas Darwin may be able to answer the
 factual
question that he
does
ask—why people believe and behave as they do—this does nothing to answer the
normative
question of how one
ought 
to behave or of what sets of instincts andfeelings one
ought 
to cultivate in order to be virtuous. It is, of course, one thing to explain why people believe and behave asthey do; it is quite another to say whether their beliefs are true (or at least warranted) and their behaviors right. As itstands, it appears that Darwin has precious little of moral import to say to the timid man.One could, I suppose, reply on Darwinian grounds that the father who lacks a strong paternal instinct is
abnormal
,lacking traits that are almost universally distributed throughout the species and are, perhaps, even kind-defining.[11]Darwin refers to the man who is utterly bereft of the social instincts as an “unnatural monster.” Doesn’t this observationlend itself to a normative evaluation of behaviors? Who wants to be a
monster 
, after all? But it is not at all clear that this cangive us what is needed. After all, departure from a statistical average is not necessarily a bad thing. If the average adult’s IQis around 100, Stephen Hawking is something of a freak. And, presumably, the first hominids to use tools (Hawking’s directancestors, perhaps?) or to express themselves in propositions were unique in their day.[12]Indeed, the Gandhis andMother Theresas of the world are certainly abnormal—enough that one evolutionary naturalist refers to them as“variations”—yet we tend to like having them around.I suppose that the evolutionary naturalist could go on to observe that, not only do we notice that the timid father is
different 
in that his parental instinct was not sufficient to prompt him to rescue his child, but it is a difference that naturally elicits negative
moral emotions
. We disapprove of him and think him blameworthy. Indeed, perhaps the man laterexperiences some negative moral emotions himself, such as “remorse, repentance, regret, or shame.”[13]According toDarwin, the sense of guilt is the natural experience of anyone who spurns the prompting of any of the more enduring socialinstincts, and it bears some similarity to the physical or mental suffering that results from the frustration of any instinct of any creature. Darwin considers the suffering of the caged migratory bird that will bloody itself against the wires of the cage when the migratory instinct is at its height. Indeed, he considers that conflict between the migratory and maternal instinctsin the swallow, which gives in to the former and abandons her young in the nest. He speculates, When arrived at the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct has ceased to act, what an agony of remorsethe bird would feel, if, from being endowed with great mental activity, she could not prevent the image constantly passing through her mind, of her young ones perishing in the bleak north from cold and hunger.[14]Like the moral sense in general, guilt is the yield of a sort of recipe: one part spurned instinct to one part “great mentalactivity” that permits remembrance and remorse. And so, when our timid man’s own personal danger and fear is past sothat the strength of his selfish instinct has receded, the scorned paternal instinct will have its revenge. Also, because we are
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