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Toward Good and Evil Evolutionary Approaches to Aspects of Human Morality

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Toward Good and Evil Evolutionary Approaches to Aspects of Human Morality Leonard D. Katz Toward Good and Evil Evolutionary Approaches to Aspects of Human Morality Moral Origins and Adaptation People are curious about how things began and especially about the origins of things they deem important. Besides satisfying such curiosity, accounts of origin may acquire broader theoretical or practical interest when they go beyond narrating historical accident to impart insight into more enduring forces, tendencies or sources from which the phenomena of interest more generally proceed. Accounts of evolutionary adaptation do this when they explain how and why a complex adaptation first arose over time or how and why it has been conserved since then, in terms of selection on heritable variation. Thus the eye was shaped and conserved over evolutionary time on account of its usefulness for sight and if we want to explain why its lens is transparent but its pupil black we shall tell how transmitting light to the retina but preventing scatter behind it both help us see. In such cases evolutionary accounts of origin may provide much of what early Greek thinkers sought in an arche, or origin — a unified understanding of something’s original formation, source of continuing existence, and underlying principle (Huffman, 1993, pp. 78–92; McKirahan, 1998). We should not expect to find so single and unified an account of human morality as of the eye or visual system because both the goals concerned and the means to these are likely much more varied. Our eye contributes to our survival and fitness mainly through the single function of sight; a long history of adaptation under uniform constraints of optics and physiological possibility have led to a fairly uniform result. To the extent that human morality is the result of specific adaptations for human social life, which has long varied between groups, times and environments, we may expect their contributions to our capacity for this social life to be more various and facultatively variable. We may wonder with Darwin how exactly to divide the credit for morality between natural selection, culture and learning, but suspect like him that, especially at the later stages of the evolution of morality, culture and learning, both individual and social, had the larger roles (1871, pp. 80–81, 166, 394, 404). Still, as Noam Chomsky says, ‘it certainly seems reasonable to speculate that the moral and ethical system acquired by the child owes much to some innate human faculty’ and is ‘rooted in our nature’ (Chomsky, 1988, p. 153). Minimally, morality has roots in our mammalian social nature, which goes back to the mother–child bond (Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, sects. 62–3, reporting Stoic views; Darwin, 1871, pp. 80–1; Midgley, 1991, p. 8) and this may be as deeply rooted on both sides as anything in our evolved psychology is. It is, however, much less likely that morality is the product of only one or very few informationally encapsulated specialist mental modules than that language is. Moral considerations are typically accessible to consciousness and deliberation, as the intermediate products of syntactic and phonological processing are not. And moral competence involves the appropriate use of diverse kinds of information to govern the deployment, restraint and balancing of different motives and emotions, such as compassion and indignation, in situationally sensitive and open­ended ways. Even where the perception of moral demands of diverse kinds may be psychologically mandatory and clear, their weighting against each other and against other reasons may be painfully problematic rather than automatic. Consonantly, whereas language seems to depend on discrete brain systems vulnerable to local lesions that may leave other functions largely unimpaired, the brain damage that most specifically impairs moral competence and development seems to impair cognitive–affective connections — minimally, the cognitive conditioning of fear and anxiety and the situation­sensitive generalization of behavioural restraint built on these — more generally (cf. Damasio et al., 1990; Damasio, 1994; Anderson et al., 1999). And studies of amoral criminally­ inclined ‘psychopaths’ or ‘sociopaths’ (who may sometimes be so disposed more by psychological adaptation to opportunity­ poor or socialization­poor environments than by originally abnormal temperament based in physiology) seem compatible with this view (see Wilson, 1993, pp. 105–8; Lykken, 1995; Mealy, 1995; Black, 1999, Ch. 6). These considerations suggest that morality may be the outcome of interactions between various systems that support and regulate social and affective learning and responding more generally and others that do much else besides, rather than of any single or of very few dedicated strictly modular faculties (cf. Darwin, 1871; Midgley, 1991; Flack and de Waal, Principal Paper and Response, and Railton, below). Morality, however, may be a product of natural selection without having been itself selected as a functional adaptation (Flack and de Waal, Response, p. 74), by being an outcome of tendencies and capacities that were. Individual learning may organize moral competence from these, by adaptation to a human environment shaped by social learning and cultural evolution — as these ‘adaptive processes, operating at different levels and timescales’ (Brian Skyrms, Response, p. 335), interact. The integration of inherited quasi­modular capacities with human ‘representational, inferential, epistemic, and communicative capacities’ (Peter Railton, below, p. 58) may be largely self­ organizing, as elsewhere in cognitive development it seems to be (Carey, forthcoming). But moral development may also adaptively respond to the demands of life stages, from early obedience, through dealings with peers, to nurturing, as Dennis Krebs suggests (below, p. 320). The four principal papers presented here, with interdisciplinary commentary discussion and their authors’ responses, represent contemporary approaches to an evolutionary understanding of morality — of the origins from which, and the paths by which, aspects or components of human morality evolved and converged. Their authors come out of no single discipline or school, but represent rather a convergence of largely independent work in primate ethology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and dynamic systems modelling on related problems, conjectures and tentative conclusions. In inviting contributions I deliberately made no attempt to define morality more sharply than common language and understanding have left it, including our ordinary responses to right and wrong, but not all of the very diverse thinking about this and other practical concerns — and about what we should make of all these — that ethics encompasses. This was not because of any lack of past definitions of morality, but because the history of controversy over these makes it advisable not to prejudge the question pending our inquiry’s results. From these we may see some outlines of plausible answers begin to emerge, only a brief sketch of some of which I can attempt here, sampling the hypotheses, scientific support, critical discussion of this, and refinement of positions in authors’ responses. Toward a Natural Prehistory of Morality and Politics In our first principal paper, Jessica Flack and Frans de Waal describe aspects of the social behaviour and inferred psychology of monkeys and apes, the living animals most closely related to us, in which they find ‘building blocks’ for the later evolution of human morality. Following Darwin, they, like Christopher Boehm in his following contributions, seek psychological traits we share with our closest relatives and presumably also with our common ancestor, from which, given the course of human cognitive evolution, and the need to adjust individual and shared interests in a social life, morality would naturally emerge. They find in the simple rules, expectations, order, and sense of social regularity implicit in the social interactions of group­living primates ‘elements of rudimentary moral systems’ arising out of the interaction of sympathetic, cooperative and competitive sentiments and the interpenetration of cognitive judgement and emotion, in ways that prefigure human morality and that can be used as clues to its evolution and dynamics. But as they make clear in responding to Kummer, Railton and others (p. 68, below), it is in the sentiments and capacities underlying the social behaviours they discuss, rather than in the behaviours themselves, that they find the raw material for the evolution of human morality. The following commentary and controversy lines up partly along generational lines, in keeping with the generation­long progressive relaxation of norms against ascribing cognitive and conscious states to nonhuman animals in behavioural science. Human developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan, the firmest sceptic, asserts that ‘animals have no conscious intentions’ and feel no guilt for past failures to live up to internalized standards, which they lack. Two veteran primatologists voice lesser degrees of scepticism about the cognitive and moral capacities of apes. Irwin Bernstein doubts that questions about animal intention and awareness of norms are experimentally tractable and apparently believes that less cognitive explanations of behaviour should therefore be preferred. Flack and de Waal in their Response oppose to such ‘cognitive parsimony’ a ‘principle of evolutionary parsimony’, a heuristic assumption of similarity between closely related species (such as humans
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