Darwin's Dangerous Idea (89 page)

pereptory policies, the extremist policies. In chapter 18, we will consider

[First Essay, sec. 3, p. 27.]

how we might wisely patrol the memosphere, and what we might do to protect ourselves from the truly dangerous ideas, but we should keep the The amazing and ingenious tale Nietzsche told about how the transvaluation of values happened defies fair summary, and is often outrageously bad example of eugenics firmly in mind when we do so.) misrepresented. I will not attempt to do justice to it here, but will just draw Nietzsche's most important contribution to sociobiology, I think, is his attention to its central dieme (widiout judging its truth): the "aristocrats" who steadfast application of one of Darwin's own fundamental insights to the ruled by might over the weak were cunningly tricked ( by the "priests" ) into realm of cultural evolution. This is the insight most notoriously overlooked adopting the inverted values, and this "slave revolt in morality" turned the by the Social Darwinists and by some contemporary sociobiologists. Their cruelty of the strong against itself, so that the strong were manipulated into error is sometimes called the "genetic fallacy" (e.g., Hoy 1986): the mistake subduing and civilizing themselves.

of inferring current function or meaning from ancestral function or meaning.

As Darwin (1862, p. 284 ) put it, "Thus throughout nature almost every part For with the priests
everything
becomes more dangerous, not only cures of each living thing has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for and remedies, but also arrogance, revenge, acuteness, profligacy, love, lust diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery of many ancient and to rule, virtue, disease—but it is only fair to add that it was on the soil of distinct specific forms." And as Nietzsche put it: diis
essentially dangerous
form of human existence, the priesdy form, that man first became
an interesting animal,
that only here did the human soul

... the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual in a higher sense acquire
depth
and become
evil
—and these are die two employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever basic respects in which man has hitherto been superior to other beasts!

exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted

[First Essay, sec. 6, p. 33.]

to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a
becoming
Nietzsche's Just So Stories are terrific (old-style and new-style). They are
master,
and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpre-a mixture of brilliant and crazy, sublime and ignoble, devastatingly acute tation, an adaptation through which any previous "meaning" and "pur-history and untrammeled fantasy. If Darwin's imagination was to some de-pose" are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. [Second Essay, sec. 12, gree handicapped by his English mercantile heritage, Nietzsche's was even P. 77.]

more handicapped by his German intellectual heritage, but those biographical facts (whatever they are) have no bearing on the current value of the Aside from Nietzsche's characteristic huffing and puffing about some power memes whose birth each attended so brilliantly. Both came up with dan-subduing and becoming master, this is pure Darwin. Or, as Gould might put gerous ideas—if I am right, diis is no coincidence—but, whereas Darwin it, all adaptations are exaptations, in cultural evolution as well as in biolog-was ultra-cautious in his expression, Nietzsche indulged in prose so over-ical evolution. Nietzsche went on to emphasize another classical Darwinian heated that it no doubt serves him right that his legion of devotees has theme:

included a disreputable gaggle of unspeakable and uncomprehending Nazis and other such fans whose perversions of his memes make Spencer's per-The "evolution" of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus by no means its versions of Darwin's seem almost innocent. In both cases, we must work to
progressus
toward a goal, even less a logical
progressus
by the shortest repair the damage such descendants have inflicted on our meme filters, route and witii die smallest expenditure of force—but a succession of which tend to dismiss memes on the basis of guilt by association. Neither more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of Darwin nor Nietzsche was politically correct, fortunately for us.

subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transforma-466 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

Sotne Varieties of Greedy Ethical Reductionism 467

tion for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful argued that sociobiology, no matter how sophisticated it became, no matter counteractions. [Second Essay, sec. 12, pp. 77-78.
f
how many cranes it employed, could never bridge the gap between the "is"

of empirical scientific fact and the "ought" of ethics! (They say this with Considering that Nietzsche may never have read Darwin's own work, his impressive passion.) That is the conviction we must examine next.

appreciation of its major directions is remarkable, but he rather spoiled his record as a sound Darwinian by lapsing, on the same page, into skyhook hunger, announcing his "fundamental opposition to the now prevalent instinct and taste which would rather be reconciled even to the absolute 3. SOME VARIETIES OF GREEDY ETHICAL REDUCTIONISM

fortuitousness, even the mechanistic senselessness of all events than to the theory that in all events a
will to power
is operating." Nietzsche's idea of a One of the shibboleths of contemporary philosophy is that you can't derive will to power is one of the stranger incarnations of skyhook hunger, and,

"ought" from "is." Attempting to do this is often called the
naturalistic
fortunately, few find it attractive today. But, if we set that aside, the upshot
fallacy,
taking the term from G. E. Moore's classic,
Principia Ethica
( 1903 ).

of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals is that we must be extremely careful not As the philosopher Bernard Williams points out (1983, p. 556 ), there really to read into the history we extrapolate from nature any simplistic conclusions are several issues here. Naturalism "consists in the attempt to lay down about value:

certain fundamental aspects of the good life for man on the basis of considerations of human nature." Naturalism wouldn't be refuted by the rather The question: what is the
value
of this or that table of values and "morals"?

obvious fact that you can't derive any
simple
"ought" statement from any should be viewed from the most divers perspectives; for the problem
simple
"is" statement. Consider: does it follow logically that I
ought
to give

"value for
what?"
cannot be examined too subtly. Something, for example, you five dollars from the fact ( and suppose it is a fact) that I said I would that possessed obvious value in relation to the longest possible survival of give you five dollars? Obviously not; any number of intervening excusing a race (or to the enhancement of its power of adaptation to a particular conditions might be cited to block this inference. Even if we were to char-climate or to the preservation of the greatest number) would by no means acterize my saying as
promising
—an ethically loaded description—no
sim-possess the same value if it were a question, for instance, of producing a
ple
"ought" statement follows directly.

stronger type. The well-being of the majority and the well-being of the few But reflections like this make scarcely a dent on naturalism as a theoretical are opposite viewpoints of value: to consider the former
a priori
of higher goal. Philosophers distinguish between finding the
necessary
and
sufficient
value may be left to the naivete of English biologists. [Nietzsche 1887, First conditions for various things, and the application of the distinction in this Essay, sec. 17.]

case actually helps clarify the situation. It is one thing to deny that collections of facts about the natural world are
necessary
to ground an It is Spencer, clearly, not Darwin, whom Nietzsche is accusing of naivete ethical conclusion, and quite another to deny that any collection of such facts about value. Both Spencer and Ree thought they could see a straight, simple is
sufficient.
According to standard doctrine, if we stay firmly planted in the path to altruism (Hoy 1986, p. 29). We can see Nietzsche's criticism of this realm of facts about the world as it
is,
we will never find any collection of Panglossianism as a clear forerunner of George Williams' criticism of the them, taken as axioms, from which any particular ethical conclusion
can be
Panglossianism of naive group selectionism (see chapter 11). Spencer, in our
conclusively proven.
You can't get there from here, any more than you can terms, was an egregiously greedy reductionist, trying to derive "ought" from get from any consistent set of axioms about arithmetic to all the true

"is" in a single step. But doesn't this reveal the deeper problem with all statements of arithmetic.

sociobiology? Haven't the philosophers shown us that you can
never
derive Well, so what? We may bring out the force of this rhetorical question with

"ought" from "is," no matter how many steps you take? Some have another one, rather more pointed: If "ought" cannot be derived from "is,"

just what
can
"ought" be derived from? Is ethics an
entirely
"autonomous"

field of inquiry? Does it float, untethered to facts from any other discipline or tradition? Do our moral intuitions arise from some inexplicable ethics 4. It is interesting to note that Nietzsche also had a thoroughly sound and modern idea module implanted in our brains (or our "hearts," to speak with tradition)?

about the relationship between complexity and any notion of global progress: "The that would be a dubious skyhook on which to hang our deepest convictions richest and most complex forms—for the expression 'higher type' means no more than about what is right and wrong. Colin McGinn notes:

this—perish more easily: only the lowest preserve an apparent indestructibility"

(Nietzsche 1901, p. 684).

A

468 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

S
ome Varieties of Greedy Ethical Reductionism
469

... according to Chomsky, it is plausible to see our ethical faculty as anal-effect of heroin, Skinner assures us when he notices the problem (p. 110), is ogous to our language faculty; we acquire ethical knowledge with very anomalous." Hardly a convincing defense against the charge of greedy little explicit instruction, without great intellectual labour, and the end reductionism. He goes on and on in the book about how scientific his result is remarkably uniform given the variety of ethical input we receive.

"design for a culture" is, and how optimally suited it is for... for what? What The environment serves merely to trigger and specialise an innate sche-is his characterization of the
summum bonum?.

matism.... On the Chomskyan model, both science and ethics are natural products of contingent human psychology, constrained by its specific con-Our culture has produced the science and technology it needs to save stitutive principles; but ethics looks to have a securer basis in our cognitive itself- It has the wealth needed for effective action. It has, to a considerable architecture. There is an element of luck to our possession of scientific extent, a concern for its own future. But if it continues to take freedom and knowledge that is absent in the case of our ethical knowledge. [McGinn dignity, rather than its own survival, as its principal value, then it is pos-1993, p. 30.]

sible that some other culture will make a greater contribution in the future. [Skinner 1971, p. 181]

By contrasting our presumed innate sense of ethical knowledge with our merely "lucky" capacity to engage in science, McGinn and Chomsky suggest I hope you want to join me in retorting: So what? Even if Skinner were right that there are
reasons
to be discovered for our possession of the former. If (and surely he isn't) that a behaviorist regime is our best chance of preserving there were a morality module, we would certainly want to know what it was, our culture into the future, I hope it is clear to you that Skinner may well how it evolved—and, most important of all, why. But, once again, if we try to have been mistaken when he deemed "survival of the culture" to be the peer inside, McGinn tries to close the door on our fingers, decrying as highest goal any of us could ever imagine wanting to further. In chapter 11,

"scientism" the attempt to provide answers to our scientific questions about we briefly considered how mad it would be to put survival of one's own the source of this marvelous perspective we and no other creatures have.

genes ahead of everything else. Is survival of one's own culture a clearly From what can "ought" be derived? The most compelling answer is this: saner item to put on the pedestal above everything else? Would it justify ethics must be
somehow
based on an appreciation of human nature—on a mass murder, for instance, or betraying all your friends? We meme-users can sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being see other possibilities—beyond our genes, and beyond even the welfare of might want to have or want to be. If
that
is naturalism, then naturalism is no the groups (and cultures) to which we currently belong. Unlike our somatic-fallacy. No one could seriously deny that ethics is responsive to such facts line cells, we can conceive of more complicated
raisons d'etre.

about human nature. We may just disagree about where to look for the most What is wrong with Skinner is not that he tried to base ethics on scientific telling facts about human nature—in novels, in religious texts, in psycho-facts about human nature, but that his attempt was so simplistic! I suppose logical experiments, in biological or anthropological investigations. The pigeons might indeed fare as well as they ever could want in a Skinnerian fallacy is not naturalism but, rather, any simple-minded attempt to rush from Utopia, but we are really much more complicated than pigeons. The same facts to values. In other words, the fallacy is
greedy
reductionism of values defect can be seen in the attempt at ethics by another Harvard professor, E.