An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (30 page)

One might offer, on Prinz's behalf, the following solution. An act is wrong just in case it is disposed to cause
X
disapprobation assuming
X
has qualities
ABC
and is under circumstances
DEF
. That is, we stipulate in advance all the “correct” conditions. But this solution raises a new problem:
the problem of practical relevance
. In short, why should it matter
to X
that under these highly specified conditions
someone under the “correct” conditions
would feel disapprobation? Recall from §3.1 that one of the essential ingredients of moral judgments is their practical oomph: they
move us
(however slightly) to act in accordance with our judgments. Someone who claims that abortion is immoral but is not moved in the slightest to avoid having one (or to condemn those who have) raises obvious doubts about her claim. Now if moral wrongness amounted to an act's disposition to cause
someone
with qualities
ABC
, under conditions
DEF
, to feel disapprobation, this seems to short-circuit the practical oomph that moral judgments were supposed to have. After all, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly odd about my judging, on the one hand, that
someone
(under all the “right” conditions) might feel disapprobation toward some act and, on the other hand, that I'm not motivated at all to refrain from performing that act. Why? Because I feel no disapprobation toward that act!

Joyce summarizes his concern this way: “the kind of dispositional natural properties that [Prinz is offering] as the ontological constituents of the moral realm
don't come close
to satisfying the pretheoretical desiderata of what moral properties should look like” (2008a, 2008b: 253). In other words, if rightness and wrongness are supposed to look anything like the characterization offered at §3.1, then Prinz's view fails, for it offers a picture that does nothing to support that characterization.

Similar remarks are supposed to cover moral constructivism. Recall that moral constructivism construes wrong acts as acts that someone,
who was concerned about finding general rules to govern behavior
, could reasonably object to. But, Joyce asks, why should
I
care about what such a person could reasonably object to? Why should that fact give
me
a reason to resist performing that act? The practical relevance problem, in other words, is a problem for moral constructivism, too. A successful theory of morality should make it clear how the wrongness feature should be practically relevant to
me
– why it should move me. And, according to Joyce, moral constructivism does not make this clear.

In the same vein, moral constructivism confronts the incompleteness problem. Can we say with confidence that there
is
a determinate set of acts that
everyone
– even those concerned with general rules – could reasonably reject? Won't there be tremendous variation? (Joyce asks us to consider what “drunken Vikings,” “medieval samurais,” and “Soviet communists” might reasonably object to.) Joyce suspects that a similar kind of “radical and rampant” relativism to the one that plagued Prinz's view plagues moral constructivism.

But the problems (allegedly) don't stop there. The content problem is of a piece with the problems above. This problem concerns the question of whether the acts that response dependency and/or moral constructivism identify as wrong will line up with the acts that moral common sense identifies as wrong. Joyce foresees that both views will render acceptable some acts that are “intuitively immoral.” “How do we know,” Joyce wonders, “that even
being rational
(say) will exclude a preference for ethnic cleansing?” (2008: 257). Of course, one might attempt to avoid this absurd result by requiring that the agents deliberating over what could be reasonably rejected are
virtuous
, that is, have an intrinsic interest in rejecting immoral acts. Unfortunately, this move gets us nowhere. For wasn't immorality supposed to be understood in terms of what agents could reasonably reject? If so, then this won't remove the content problem. After all, what good does it do to add that the agents deliberating over what could be reasonably rejected have an intrinsic interest in deliberating over what could be reasonably rejected? On the other hand, if we characterized virtue (say) in terms of
fairness
, this might indeed get us somewhere. The cost of making this move, however, would be steep: moral constructivism is no longer doing any interesting philosophical work. It's a fifth wheel. If fairness (for example) is driving the decision-making
because fairness is objectively right
, then it's not the decision-making process that determines rightness – but fairness itself. Thus moral constructivism is not where all the moral action is.

As you no doubt suspect, defenders of response-dependency-style views are not rolling over dead. They are actively formulating responses. In the interest of keeping the focus, I will allow Joyce to get the last word here – not because (I believe) his objections are fatal, but because these metaethical debates are the subject of an entirely different book. At any rate, the suggested readings at the end of this chapter will provide the hungry reader with more meaty bits to chew on.

Let me close by discussing Joyce's reaction to naturalized virtue ethics. Recall that this moral realist option attempts to identify moral facts with functional facts, where functional facts are uncovered by modern biology. What it is to be a good human (or to live a flourishing human life) is to perform our human function(s)
well
. And what the human function(s) are is identified by the same method that identifies what the heart's function is and what the eye's function is and so on. Thus, just as we can say that the heart
should
pump blood at a given rate (and that a heart that fails to do so is a
bad
heart), we can say that someone
should
promote social harmony (say) or
should
be honest. And someone who doesn't is a
bad
person.

Joyce concedes that there is some sense in talking about what hearts and eyes
ought
to do. But, he argues, how “we get from ‘Joe's heart ought to pump blood’ to ‘Joe ought to keep his promise’ remains problematic” (2006: 170). What's problematic is the distinctive
normativity
(or reason-giving nature) of morality: the fact that moral claims have a special authority, that they are inescapable (again, see §3.1). Consider: it's one thing to say that the heart ought to pump blood. It's quite a different thing to say that the heart is
required
or
obligated
to pump blood – or that the heart
has a reason
to pump blood, in the sense of a practical demand. But this latter way of talking is precisely what characterizes
moral
oughts: you are required to keep your promises, you have a reason not to harm people unnecessarily. Apparently, biology doesn't seem able to provide the kind of normative force that the moral realm exhibits.

Think of things this way: What are we saying when we judge that a heart
ought
to pump blood? Isn't it something like: statistically speaking, most hearts tend to pump blood and so we predict that this one will, too? Now contrast this with judging that you ought to help someone who has helped you. Is this judgment
merely
(or at all) like saying: statistically speaking, most people tend to help those who have helped them, so we predict that you will, too? Surely there's more to the judgment than this. When I judge that you ought to help those who have helped you, I'm not pointing out what most people tend to do. I'm pointing out a
demand
on you, a demand that holds independently of what anyone else happens to do. Morality requires this. Moreover, if you refuse to help someone who has helped you, then you are (at least in principle)
deserving
of punishment. Why? Because you have transgressed a moral law. By contrast, it would be silly to suppose that a heart that fails to pump blood deserves punishment (if anything, it deserves a transplant!). So the biological ought seems too “wimpy” to account for the moral ought: “the normativity that may be squeezed from evolutionary biology comes nowhere near to accommodating this desideratum” (Joyce 2006: 174). The updated Aristotelian can either abandon the idea that morality has this normative force or promise to show that biology can supply it. The first choice looks drastic. The second choice is but an unfulfilled promise. At best, a naturalized virtue ethic is a work in progress.

12.6 Conclusion The moral realist retains some interesting options. We have discussed four: rejecting moral nativism, response dependency, naturalized virtue ethics, and moral constructivism. The latter three options involve some fairly sophisticated metaethical moves. Response-dependency views like Prinz's identify moral facts with response-dependent facts, in particular facts about the emotional responses certain acts tend to produce in observers. For Prinz, morality is ultimately (only)
felt
. A related response-dependency view is moral constructivism, according to which moral facts are identified with facts about the rules people would freely accept (if they were seeking a set of rules to live by). Naturalized virtue ethics redirects the focus on
agents
, rather than acts. Here the aim is to develop and maintain traits of character, and which traits of character we ought to develop depends on careful Darwinian study of our function(s).

Given the resurgent interest in evolutionary ethics, no doubt more realist options – and more anti-realist responses – are forthcoming. Central to these coming debates is the empirical debate over the innateness of morality. This was our focus in part I. We asked: To what extent (if any) are our moral minds the result of evolution by natural selection? Because that issue has yet to be resolved, the metaethical story must be qualified in the following way. Claims about the nature of morality itself will need to be understood as conditionals:
if
natural selection is largely responsible for our moral minds, then the truth about morality is thus-and-so. If it's not, all bets are off. It's back to the drawing board.

At the same time, part of the debate will focus on
how real
moral facts must be in order to deserve the name moral realism. As we saw in chapter 11, Joyce and Street argue that we have no reason to believe that there is anything in the world that comes close to grounding moral facts. Real moral properties are an illusion. Contemporary realists, on the other hand, argue that there are indeed naturalistic properties that ground moral facts. This debate continues to rage in corners of moral philosophy quite apart from evolutionary considerations.

What we can all agree on, however, is this. If moral
realism
is to have a chance, then there needs to be a way of understanding, on the one hand, how natural selection played a critical role in shaping our moral minds and, on the other, how this can be reconciled with an account of moral facts that can sufficiently underwrite the distinctive character of moral judgment. Moral realists contend that such a view is available. Evolutionary anti-realists (like Joyce and Street) deny this.

For good or ill, the process of “biologicizing” ethics is under way. But this pursuit can take different shapes. It might take the shape of trying to understand how (if at all) our disposition to make moral judgments could have been the result of Darwinian pressures – the very same pressures that resulted in the tiger's stripes and the oak's leaves. We explored this pursuit in part I. On the other hand, it might take the shape of trying to understand how Darwinian principles can, directly or indirectly, reveal moral principles. Maybe what we ought to do, morally, follows directly from what our evolutionary past has disposed us to do (whatever that might be). This was our focus in part II. And finally, the pursuit of “biologicizing” ethics might take the shape of trying to understand the nature of moral properties
under the assumption
that we evolved to think morally. Evolutionary anti-realists claim that the evolutionary story
undermines
belief in an objectively
real
moral order. Realists counter this claim. We have waded through these debates in the last three chapters. Our understanding of these different pursuits will grow as our understanding of our evolutionary past grows. And it will grow as our understanding of morality itself grows.

Further Reading Casebeer, W. (2003)
Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition
(MIT).

James, S. (2008) The Caveman's Conscience: Evolution and Moral Realism.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
,
87/2
: 1–19.

James, S. and P. Carruthers (2008) Human Evolution and the Possibility of Moral Realism.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
,
77/1
: 237–44.

Joyce, Richard (2006)
The Evolution of Morality
(MIT Press).

Joyce, Richard (2008) Replies.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
,
77/1
: 245–67.

Kitcher, Philip (2005) Biology and Ethics. In D. Copp (ed.),
The Oxford Handbook of Ethics
(Oxford University Press).

Prinz, Jesse J. (2007)
The Emotional Construction of Morals
(Oxford University Press).

Prinz, Jesse J. (2008a) Acquired Moral Truths.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
,
77/1
: 219–27.

Scanlon, T.M. (1998)
What We Owe to Each Other
(Harvard University Press).

Notes

1.
Unless of course you have had, say, significant damage to your ventro-medial prefrontal cortex, in which case you likely lack executive control over your behavior.

2.
As those who are familiar with the conflagration following the release of E.O. Wilson's
Sociobiology
can attest.

3.
Interested readers are encouraged to see Kitcher (1985) and Pinker (2002).

Chapter 1 Natural Selection and Human Nature

1.
A powerful subsidiary force –
sexual selection
– operates according to the pressures associated with mating. There is, on the one hand, intrasexual competition whereby members of one sex compete for mating access to members of the opposite sex; this competition will tend to yield adaptations among intrasexual rivals (e.g. body mass among male primates). On the other hand, there is intersexual competition, whereby the preferences of one sex will tend to determine which qualities come to dominate among members of the opposite sex (e.g. the bright plumage of the male peacock).

2.
During a critical period of early development, ducklings will come to associate the movements of a larger, independent object with their mother, and so follow that object wherever it leads. In most environments, such an organism
is
their mother, but in experimental settings ducklings can “imprint” on inanimate objects – or the legs of a scientist.

3.
Just to be clear: there is no in-principle reason to think that, all things being equal, Mother Nature would not have selected for the oxygen-carrying substance had it appeared green to creatures like us.

4.
I'm sweeping under the rug very large and very controversial questions. For example, what (if anything) is/was the purpose of moral sense? In later chapters we'll do a thorough housecleaning job, addressing this question in its proper place.

5.
A note of caution: while the enthusiasm for a specialized moral sense is highest among evolutionary psychologists, they are not the only researchers involved in the debate. Some researchers are pursuing the more general question of whether or not the mind contains any specialized faculties, independently of their evolutionary origin. The emphasis on evolutionary psychology in what follows is only meant to highlight one area of vigorous research. Important alternative models are suggested at the end of chapter 4.

6.
Mixing our metaphors further, consider your house key. That key is useless in almost every other lock, but it's a cheap and very reliable key in the lock that counts: the one to your house.

7.
For present purposes, I won't assume anything about the relationship between the mind and the brain; I will note, however, that it is a working assumption among psychologists that the mind is in some sense realized by the operations of the brain. But these are deep waters we need not enter.

8.
Of course, how these rules are “encoded” in the brain is an entirely different matter, one that would take us across several different disciplines. My aim here is simply to offer a rough sketch of the evolutionary psychologist's program as a way of laying the foundation for our main discussion. For a more in-depth look at this field, see the Further Reading at the end of this chapter.

Chapter 2 The (Earliest) Roots of Right

1.
One of the more striking cases came in 1996 when Binti Jua, a female western lowland gorilla at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, carefully cradled a 3-year-old boy who had fallen into the gorilla exhibit before delivering the boy to her trainers.

2.
Sounds good on paper, but what do field tests show? More specifically, do the field tests show that alarm-calling in ground squirrels follows this inclusive fitness constraint? They do. In fact, not only are ground squirrels quite selective in their alarm-calling (almost only in the presence of kin), they're also selective in their assistance, rushing to help kin injured in conflict, but ignoring non-kin. See Sherman 2009.

3.
According to a Spanish proverb, an ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship,

4.
Explaining
why
of course is notoriously difficult. For example, if someone demanded from you a justification for saving your brother first, what would you say beyond “He's my brother?” Most of us are inclined to think that that is justification enough. But surely something more can be said to defend the notion. What should we say?

5.
A corresponding point can be made about selfishness: an organism is selfish on some occasion if and only if its motives on that occasion are self-interested. If it happens to help others on some occasion, we don't call it altruistic if its motives are self-interested.