Before embarking on an answer to that puzzle, a word is needed on the status and character of good and evil.
Sofia 99 March/April 2011 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden … the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (Gen 2:8–9) It is easy to dismiss the Eden story as mere myth. It is less easy to dismiss the central question it poses: from where do we get our knowledge of good and evil? And it is much less easy again to answer that question.
The biblical narrative portrays the awakening of human moral consciousness as a fall from an initial state of grace. The tale of restoration that ensues is the subject of the second article in this twopart project. In this first part we follow an alternative but no less puzzling story that is based broadly on the principles of Darwinian evolution. The puzzle can be distilled into a single question: how has the mechanism of natural selection, associated with slogans such as ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘the selfish gene’, given rise to a moral sensibility that highly rates qualities like self-sacrifice, generosity, and care for the helpless?
The SOF movement is committed to exploring and promoting r religion as a human creation. Does this also require us to treat m morality as a human creation? Is the distinction between good and evil something already existing ‘out there’, for humankind to discover, or is it something we have created for ourselves? And when we designate a particular act or event or situation as either good or bad, are we acknowledging the inherent character of the thing, or do we ourselves make it good or bad by declaring it to be so? From my own study of the origin and exercise of moral consciousness, I conclude that good and evil are neither inherent characteristics nor arbitrary designations, but rational assessments that are objectively grounded while depending upon the context of the moral judgement being made.
The Unselfish Gene?
To return to Darwinian evolution. Consider a situation where there is a shortage of food and some animals in a given population are bound to die of starvation.
Those individuals with a trait that favours slightly more efficient eating (bigger mouths, say) are more likely to survive and have children. That trait will be passed on to their offspring, who will form the majority of the next generation, meaning that bigger mouths will be found in a higher proportion of the second generation than the first. After a time the smaller mouthed branch of the family will die out: big mouths will have been ‘naturally selected’. Now imagine another group in a similar situation, where part of the population is characterised by a tendency to hold back and let others feed first. By analogy with the first case, we can assume that on average these altruistic individuals will be more likely to starve, less likely to have children, and therefore the proportion of animals bearing this trait will be smaller in next generation than in the previous one. Eventually the increasingly smaller proportion will die out altogether and the altruistic tendency will have been naturally deselected.
That is Darwinism in action. So how have moral traits such as self-sacrifice and putting others first not only survived but come to be valued?
A number of theories have been put forward.
Suppose, for instance, that in the second case just considered, the altruistic individuals do not hold back for just any member of their group, but only for their own children. This changes the calculations. Previously we assumed that lessening the chances of survival for An Eden Project 1 The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil Starting from the story of the ‘fatal tree’, Anthony Freeman discusses the origin of moral consciousness.
Sofia 99 March/April 2011 6 the individual would lead to fewer of their genes surviving into the next generation; but holding back in favour of their own offspring will have the opposite effect: the altruistic parents are now increasing the chances of survival for their own children. If this pattern is repeated in succeeding generations, we shall have a situation where the proportion of altruistic parents in the population will increase and the ‘unselfish gene’ will have been naturally selected. There is evidence that this kind of behaviour does in fact take place. It has been observed among both humans and some non-human animals that individuals are more likely to sacrifice themselves for their children or other close relatives than for the population in general.
So here is a way, despite the apparent selfishness built into evolution, that a kin-related altruism could be the result of the ‘blind’ mechanism of natural selection.
The idea that self-denial by an individual, although negative for that individual, can have a positive outcome for the group, is not new. It is known as the principle of ‘group selection’, and as a possible evolutionary explanation for altruism it goes back to Darwin himself. He gave the example of a stinger bee, who inevitably dies in the act of stinging an intruder to the hive, but whose self-sacrifice saves the life of the queen and whole community. In its original form this theory assumed that individuals spread the benefits of their selfless behaviour randomly, and researchers showed that on this basis natural selection would not work to increase the tendency to unselfish behaviour.
But as we have seen, when selective altruism is exercised in favour of one’s offspring or other close kin, the situation changes, and the evolution of such a trait does fit in with Darwinian principles.
To recap, individual self-denial can, in some circumstances at least, be wholly explained as adaptive behaviour in the Darwinian sense. That is to say, having first arisen as a chance characteristic of one or more individual animals, it has become a dominant trait, established by the blind mechanism of natural selection alone, without anyone intending it or planning it. This is an important conclusion, because it shows that evolution can be mechanistic and deterministic and at the same time result in something unexpected. Of course, what we call an altruistic act, even when repeated across a population, does not of itself constitute moral awareness. However, the natural emergence of such a seemingly unlikely characteristic makes it possible – and even likely – that the knowledge of good and evil also has a natural explanation.
From Altruism to Morality Another approach to the origin of self-denying behaviour in evolutionary terms, which also turns on the relationship between the individual and the group, looks at patterns of behaviour among social animals.
Research on apes, for example, has found that sharing resources and resolving conflict appear to result from individuals exercising empathy and sympathy for each other. Moreover, these one-to-one relations can sometimes spread into community-wide concern. Such behaviour patterns may not make non-human primates into moral beings, but they do exhibit a sense of social regularity that is mutually beneficial. This could well be a biologically-grounded stepping stone to the moral norms developed among humans.
These ideas are scorned by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, who warned in The Selfish Gene that, ‘if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature’. Yet primatologist Frans de Waal and others have offered detailed evidence for biologically grounded ‘protomoral’ behaviour in nonhuman species. And philosopher Mary Midgley, writing about the origin of ethics, sees the universality of ethics across all human cultures as evidence for its biological origin. In her opinion, even though they are not moral in our sense, these animals do demonstrate ‘a willingness and a capacity to look for shared solutions’ that provide the building blocks of human morality.
SOF members are familiar with the emphasis laid by Don Cupitt upon the role of language in the human creation of religion, and cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm is among many who see language as a key also in the transition from the protomoral behaviours of non-human primates to full blown moral communities of humans. This trail was signposted by Darwin himself, who supposed that at the later stages of the evolution of morality, culture and learning (which must include language) takes over the major role from biological natural selection. But what triggered the crucial step to conscious moral awareness among early humans?
Boehm’s study of both non-human and human hunter-gatherer communities has led him to speculate that the ‘evolutionary Original Sin’, as he calls it, was bullying. Once this had been identified as deviant behaviour, ethics developed in tandem with politics to cope with it.
The argument runs as follows. Hunter-gatherer societies are known to be egalitarian, and this makes sense because large beasts require co-operation in the hunt and a willingness to share equably the resultant meat. But individual primates (both human and ape) exhibit a desire to dominate, so an egalitarian society could only develop if the majority acted in concert to stamp out the despotic behaviour of the inevitable Sofia 99 March/April 2011 bullies who would emerge and otherwise dominate them – the so-called alpha-males. Such co-operation was driven by the dislike of being dominated, which in all primates matches their desire to dominate others.
This co-operation was able, in the case of early humans, to develop into a moral and political system, because of the biological development of the large brain that had already taken place and made possible the beginnings of language.
This sketch of the evolutionary origins of morality – of the knowledge of good and evil – has brought us to a concept of morality as a means of social control, closely linked with politics. The individual’s inherent selfishness and desire to dominate is tempered by the realisation that the good of one member is tied up with the good of the whole community, including oneself. But within this continuing focus on self-interest, the shift from individual selfishness to ‘group selfishness’ does open up a new perspective on other individuals in the group. ‘the evolutionary Original Sin was bullying’ First comes the move from seeing others only as my competitors to seeing them as agents whose welfare is bound up with mine. In this situation, working for another’s good is encompassed within working for my own good, especially when the ‘other’ is my child or other close kin. But once the idea of working for another’s good gets a foothold, the possibility arises of treating it as an end in itself, and not merely a means to serve my own selfish ends. This development has been explored by philosopher Elliott Sober and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, who were also the ones who rehabilitated the theory of group selection, when they argued that putting the good of one’s offspring before one’s own could be adaptive behaviour resulting from biological natural selection.
That first stage, which developed in pre-human animals, they called ‘evolutionary altruism’. Their extension of the principle to conscious human behaviour they term ‘psychological altruism’, the existence of which is also supported by an evolutionary argument that focuses on parents and their offspring. The upshot is that neither of these forms of altruism is itself the same as morality, because they lack the crucial move of translating a concern for the welfare of specific others into generally applicable ethical principles. Sober and Wilson conclude that behaviour driven solely by selfish motives and the desire for one’s own pleasure (as proposed by the more widely held theory of psychological egoism) has given way, in the process of evolution, to a naturally selected plurality of human motivations that balances one’s own good with that of others as ultimate ends in themselves. Thus the stage is set for full-blown morality.
The Knowledge of Good and Evil Whatever the mechanisms – biological, cultural or spiritual – by which moral awareness first developed in humans, its application depends upon our discernment of good and evil in particular cases. The evolutionary path discussed so far suggests that at least some choices that we regard as ethically positive (such as the selfless nurturing of our children) are biologically based, and therefore the classifying of them as ‘good’ is not an arbitrary designation. It is founded on the way things actually are, in the natural world as studied by science. But accepting that the designation is not arbitrary does not commit us to the opposite extreme of asserting that goodness is an absolute quality, inherently and permanently belonging to the action in question.
Here is the reason. In Darwinian evolution a key concept is ‘fit’ or ‘fitness’. This is a family of words that needs always to be used in relation to two or more things. It makes no sense to say that something is ‘fit’ without also saying what it is fit for, or what it fits with. A particular key fits a particular lock; in relation to any other lock it does not fit. Even physical fitness, often (wrongly) used as an absolute term, requires a context: the kind of fitness required for my desk job and that needed by a professional sportsman are two very different things (luckily for me!). So when we say that something is ‘good’ in the context of evolution, we mean that it fits the survival requirements of the organism in question. This is certainly not an arbitrary claim, but neither is it absolute. Species become extinct precisely when their environment changes and they fail to change with it, because an adaptive characteristic that in one context was good (fitted), proves to be bad (unfitting) in a new one.
I have long believed, on the basis of simple observation, that all moral judgments are contextdependent, and that moral absolutists are mistaken when they oppose ‘relativism’ in this sense; but in most cases what they are actually condemning is arbitrariness in ethics (which they wrongly regard as the only alternative to absolutism). An evolutionary approach to morality, such as I have indicated here, offers a way clear of the sterile debate between relativists and absolutists. Because it is grounded in biology, it is genuinely objective; and because it concerns always a specific context, its judgements may change in changed situations. This would seem to safeguard the key insights, and meet the chief anxieties, of both sides.
Anthony Freeman is managing editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.