Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys?

[groovedaddy]

After being shown proudly around the campus of a prestigious American university built in gothic style, Bertrand Russell is said to have exclaimed, “Remarkable. As near Oxford as monkeys can make.” Much earlier, Immanuel Kant had expressed a less ironic amazement, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe … the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” Today many who look at morality through a Darwinian lens can’t help but find a charming naïveté in Kant’s thought. “Yes, remarkable. As near morality as monkeys can make.”

So the question is, just how near is that? Optimistic Darwinians believe, near enough to be morality. But skeptical Darwinians won’t buy it. The great show we humans make of respect for moral principle they see as a civilized camouflage for an underlying, evolved psychology of a quite different kind.

This skepticism is not, however, your great-grandfather’s Social Darwinism, which saw all creatures great and small as pitted against one another in a life or death struggle to survive and reproduce — “survival of the fittest.” We now know that such a picture seriously misrepresents both Darwin and the actual process of natural selection. Individuals come and go, but genes can persist for 1000 generations or more. Individual plants and animals are the perishable vehicles that genetic material uses to make its way into the next generation (“A chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg”). From this perspective, relatives, who share genes, are to that extent not really in evolutionary competition; no matter which one survives, the shared genes triumph. Such “inclusive fitness” predicts the survival, not of selfish individuals, but of “selfish” genes, which tend in the normal range of environments to give rise to individuals whose behavior tends to propel those genes into future.

A place is thus made within Darwinian thought for such familiar phenomena as family members sacrificing for one another — helping when there is no prospect of payback, or being willing to risk life and limb to protect one’s people or avenge harms done to them.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/moral-camouflage-or-moral-monkeys/?th&emc=th

[Jim__]

1. There is an interesting discussion attached to that article.

here. I haven't had a chance to listen to the entire discussion yet, but the beginning sounds promising.

His view seems topical. For instance:

We can see a similar cultural evolution in human law and morality — a centuries-long process of overcoming arbitrary distinctions, developing wider communities, and seeking more inclusive shared standards, such as the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Humans Rights. Empathy might induce sympathy more readily when it is directed toward kith and kin, but we rely upon it to understand the thoughts and feelings of enemies and outsiders as well. And the human capacity for learning and following rules might have evolved to enable us to speak a native language or find our place in the social hierarchy, but it can be put into service understanding different languages and cultures, and developing more cosmopolitan or egalitarian norms that can be shared across our differences.

Marilynne Robinson has a book out, Absence of Mind, in which she discusses modern thought (from Comte onward) as being largely behavioristic, minus the label, in that it dismisses any role that the human mind might play with respect to our actions.

[struggle4progress]

2. It's always worthwhile to consider in what ways our evolutionary history might determine

who and what we are

Of course, in the case of humans, evolution has produced mechanisms that allow a great deal of cultural influence on survival: the very large heads, which complicate birth substantially but accommodate large brains capable of learning and imaginative reasoning ; an extraordinarily protracted childhood, which extends parental responsibility long beyond that common for most animals but accommodates a long cultural transfer period, including learning of language and other significant interpersonal skills ...

It is certainly interesting to ask, what portions of our morality originate from biological evolution? but of course one can also ask what portions originate from cultural evolution?

The overall contributions from biological and cultural evolution must be difficult to sort out properly. It seems quite possible to me that culture provides herd advantages that reduce certain biological pressures: the nearsighted, the asthmatic, the lame, typically survive because human cultural settings are more tolerant than the world without culture. So some of our less acculturated distant ancestors could well have been more intelligent than we today are in some ways, because their survival might have required forms of intelligence that we no longer need as desperately, since we can lean extensively on our cultural inheritance. I doubt whether five thousand years of civilization is adequate to produce much biological evolutionary change -- but it is clear that the advances of the last few centuries have the capacity to accelerate some kinds of selection in ways that we may not be able to anticipate easily: for example, the widespread availability of birth control quite obviously can influence which children are conceived and at what stage of their parents lives children appear