An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (14 page)

The obvious advantage of Sripada and Stich's account – relative to the evolutionary account – is that it will readily explain the world's moral diversity. The moral beliefs that you come to have will be a direct function of the rules you are exposed to in your local community. This will be true of the learning account as well. If my caregivers routinely reward one kind of behavior and punish another, then it's no surprise that as an adult I'm likely to think and behave in ways that reflect those moral attitudes, rather than the moral attitudes of geographically remote communities. A second advantage of these alternatives to the evolutionary account is simplicity: these accounts are simpler than the evolutionary account. As we've seen in various places, natural selection is a highly conservative process. Evolutionary biology reveals time and again that natural selection will “favor” simpler, cheaper solutions to adaptive problems even if they're less effective than more sophisticated alternatives we could dream up.

To be sure, evolution has a role to play in these other accounts; it's just that its role is significantly diminished. Evolution might explain the selection of general reasoning and learning mechanisms or, as in the S&S model, sophisticated norm-acquisition systems. It might also explain general motivational dispositions – for example, caring about the suffering of others. But this picture of morality relies less critically on evolution (after all, on this picture, aliens could be just as successful at developing into moral creatures). On this picture, the principal reason humans are
moral
creatures is that humans are
reasoning
creatures.

In the next chapter we'll explore these accounts in a bit more detail as we turn to the empirical side of the story. What I've tried to do in this chapter is to sketch the processes that may (I stress,
may
) have led to our moral sense. I've said very little, however, about the
structure
of our moral minds. This is what we'll pursue in the next chapter. We'll consider research from across the scientific spectrum, research that helps sharpen our understanding of the structure of the moral mind. For example, we'll look carefully at primatological data suggesting moral-like behavior in primates; we'll investigate the behavior of infants and toddlers for clues on how children develop morally; and, finally, we'll look to neuroscientific data revealing how the brain represents and processes morality, and how it initiates moral responses. I'll also argue that, despite all the information flooding in, we're not in a position yet to articulate the structure of the moral mind. At best, we'll put ourselves in a position to craft the outlines of a plausible theory.

4.8 Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to offer a popular historical account of why humans developed the disposition to think and behave morally, a disposition that needs to be sharply distinguished from other sorts of thinking and behaving. That account relies essentially on the biological advantages of cooperation in social interactions.

If we can suppose that moral thinking (or some early prototype) managed to get a foothold in a population of early humans, as some philosophers and psychologists believe, then we can trace out a story explaining why it spread to the population as a whole. For when we contrast a group of individuals that regards certain actions as
morally wrong
– thus making their performance quite rare – with a group of individuals that does not regard those actions as wrong, but perhaps only unattractive, we see that members of the former group, unlike members of the latter group, enjoy biological benefits that favor their selection. As a model of such interactions, Prisoner's Dilemma-style games bear this out – but only if we allow participants the ability to choose whom they interact with and the tendency to punish defectors. How this is achieved may depend on certain emotional dispositions (something we'll explore in the next chapter). What makes this account attractive to its proponents is its ability to capture the distinctive characteristics of morality: for example, the sense that immoral acts are acts that are
prohibited
(and not merely unattractive), do not depend on the interests or desires of any particular person, should elicit guilt in those who commit them, and prompt others to feel justified in punishing wrongdoers.

Critics of the evolutionary account emphasize the diversity in moral attitudes across the globe. If the evolutionary account is correct, they ask, shouldn't we observe more consistency than we do? As an alternative, they suggest that the mind is innately equipped with more general learning mechanisms, and it's these mechanisms that enable humans to develop into moral creatures. Debates over
how
we came to have the moral minds we have will not be settled until we begin to understand
what
the moral mind looks like – that is, its structure. To this we now turn.

Further Reading Frank, Robert (1988)
Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions
(Norton).

Iredale, W., M. Vugt, and R. Dunbar (2008) Showing Off in Humans: Male Generosity as Mating Signal.
Evolutionary Psychology
,
6/3
: 386–92.

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

Levy, N. (2004)
What Makes Us Moral? Crossing the Boundaries of Biology
(Oneworld).

Nowak, M.A. (2008) Generosity: A Winner's Advice.
Nature
, 456: 579.

Rottschaefer, William A. and David Martinsen (1995) Really Taking Darwin Seriously: An Alternative to Michael Ruse's Darwinian Metaethics. In P. Thomson (ed.),
Issues in Evolutionary Ethics
(SUNY Press).

Ruse, Michael (1995) Evolutionary Ethics: A Phoenix Arisen. In P. Thomson (ed.),
Issues in Evolutionary Ethics
(SUNY Press).

Stich, S. (2008) Some Questions about The Evolution of Morality.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
, 77 (1): 228–36.

Wilson, E.O. (1978)
On Human Nature
(Harvard University Press).

Wright, Robert (1995)
The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are. The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
(Vintage).

The Science of Virtue and Vice
To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.

(Horace Mann, Lectures on Education)
Why does everyone take for granted that we don't learn to grow arms, but rather, are designed to grow arms? Similarly, we should conclude that in the case of the development of moral systems, there's a biological endowment which in effect requires us to develop a system of moral judgment and a theory of justice, if you like, that in fact has detailed applicability over an enormous range.

(Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics) Children can be cruel. Insects do not stand a chance around a group of boys with access to fire. Little girls can steal with impunity. Children do nothing to hide their displeasure at having to kiss old Aunt Bettie or getting socks for Christmas. They tease, bully, and harass. They're the inspiration for characters like Dennis the Menace, Bart Simpson, and Lucy from
Peanuts
. So it might come as a surprise to learn that children are a favorite source of evidence about the historical roots of our moral minds. Why? Because their grasp of morality is – in all honesty – impressive. Whether or not they regularly
do
the right thing, they invariably
know
what the right thing is. And this has led psychologists to speculate that maybe morality is not taught. Maybe morality is innate.

Here's the thinking. Suppose children can demonstrate a certain sort of competence from a very young age. And suppose that it is unlikely that they could have learned all the skills associated with that competence from their surroundings. Well, if that competence didn't come from the
outside
, then it must have from the
inside
. That is, the competence must be innate. It must be part of a child's “design specification.” But this raises a new question: how did this competence come to be innate? Someone or something must have “put” it there. Defenders of the evolutionary approach argue that natural selection put it there – in the form of genes that shape the how the mind works.

Notwithstanding the anecdotal evidence cited by parents and schoolteachers, careful studies indicate that children follow a morally rich developmental path beginning from a very early age. Dennis the Menace knows much more about morality than you might think. Now this doesn't mean that children won't be cruel, any more than it means that adults – who are indisputably moral creatures – won't be cruel. What it means is that, absent other powerful outside influences, most children will develop the range of moral capacities typical of adults
whether or not their caregivers provided them with so-called “moral training
.” They may sometimes act like moral monsters, but on closer inspection they're far more attuned to their moral environment than we give them credit for. By studying the moral minds of children we get some insight into our evolutionary inheritance.

But if we're trying to understand where our morality came from we should not stop at young children. We should go even further back. According to the preeminent primatologist Frans de Waal, “the building blocks of morality clearly predate humanity” (2005: 225). De Waal has spent a lifetime observing and writing about his experiences with primates: apes, capuchins, bonobos, and chimps. These observations are significant because primates are our cousins; we share a common ancestor. Hence, what we observe in them provides indirect evidence of what this distant ancestor was like. Characteristics humans have in common with primates tell us something about our distant past and the kinds of adaptations that directed the path of evolution.

Moreover, we can corroborate this story by investigating the structure of the organ responsible for behavior, i.e., the brain. So a third line of investigation concerns how the brain operates when trying to navigate the moral world. It's pretty much agreed that there is no dedicated moral organ or system in the brain in the way that there is a dedicated visual or auditory system in the brain. Instead, it appears as if multiple systems contribute to our moral minds, and through the work of neurologists and neuroscientists we're beginning to understand how these systems contribute to the whole. For when a particular system fails to function properly or is absent entirely, distinct moral deficits result. And this gives us some insight into the function of that particular system. From here, we can perform comparative studies with primates to determine, for example, how old certain systems are and what kinds of adaptive pressures may have contributed to their selection.

So the aim of this chapter is to review some of the fascinating new research on the biology and psychology of morality, from the perspective of developmental psychologists, primatologists, and neuroscientists. With this picture in hand, we can return to the speculative story sketched in the previous chapter to see how well the two cohere.

5.1 Distress Test The path to the moral mind begins, we might say, with distress. Infants appear to experience a range of emotions even within the first few hours of life, but one emotion in particular stands out: distress. Infants exhibit signs of distress not only in response to their own discomfort but in response to the discomfort of others. Infants appear to be wired to mirror the distress of those around them: cry and the whole world (of neonates nearby) cries with you. The psychologist Nancy Eisenberg interprets this sensitivity to a “rudimentary form of empathy” (Eisenberg and Mussen 1989: 789). When you and I empathize with others, we do not merely come to have beliefs about their states of distress (what we might call sympathy), we actually experience “faint copies” of those states. We
feel
the pain of others. Infants, while they probably do not have any beliefs about their neighbors' emotions, appear to
resonate
to what others are feeling. This distress test is what gets the moral ball rolling. For feeling the pain of others very soon prompts us to act: we want the distress to stop. (It's perhaps too soon to call this a moral emotion since one could have selfish reasons for wanting the distress to stop.) In a fascinating set of studies, the psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler (Zahn-Waxler
et al.
1991) demonstrated that this response begins at a remarkably early age. What Zahn-Waxler
et al.
found was that 14-month-olds not only experience distress in response to the distress of another person, they move – without prompting – to comfort the distressed person. Zahn-Waxler had family members of the child pretend to cry or to wince in pain. In response the child, as by some instinct, patted the family member or rubbed her injury. Such findings would be less striking if they could be explained by the fact that a child had been
told
how to respond or had observed others responding in the appropriate ways. But the fact is, 14-month-olds are far from mastering a language. And children whose primary caregivers have never displayed signs of distress nonetheless respond empathically.

In fact, children appear to be sensitive to more than just distress. They seem to be natural helpers. Drop a clothespin, say, in the vicinity of a child as young as 14 months and you may be surprised by his reaction. According to Felix Warneken, a Harvard psychologist, he “will toddle over, pick it up and return it to you” even in the “total absence of encouragement or praise” (Warneken and Tomasello 2009: 397). If, instead of dropping the clothespin, the experimenter throws it down, infants do not regularly make an effort to retrieve it. In another set of experiments, Warneken and his colleagues (Warneken and Tomasello 2007) tested what infants would do when an object was placed out of reach of an experimenter, but within reach of the child. When experimenters attempted (but failed) to reach the object, infants routinely helped the experimenter by retrieving the object. Interestingly, the help infants provided was not influenced by a reward. Instead, their tendency to help depended only on whether or not the experimenter made an attempt to reach for the object: when the experimenter did not reach for the object, infants did not help. This suggests, at a minimum, that infants were able to recognize not only that others had goals, but that they needed help in achieving those goals.

All this raises a question. If children display rudimentary forms of empathy and if these forms of empathy do not require language, then perhaps we should look for empathy outside the human species. Perhaps distress-sensitivity is an ancient system. Several lines of evidence support this idea.

The primatologist Frans de Waal contends that responses to distress are commonplace among apes. Like toddlers learning to walk, young apes learning to climb trees occasionally fall. When this happens, according to de Waal, the wailing youngster “will immediately be surrounded by others who hold and cradle it. … If an adult loses a fight with a rival and sits screaming in a tree, others will climb toward him to touch and calm him” (2005: 183). And this response is not limited to family members. This response to others can be taken to remarkable extremes. Monkeys and rats will literally starve themselves instead of causing others distress. In one set of experiments (Masserman
et al.
1964; Wechkin
et al.
1964), the only way for a monkey to receive food was by pressing a bar that would – at the very same time – deliver an electric shock to another monkey in an adjoining cage. (Monkeys quickly grasped the association.) The acting monkey was thus forced to make a difficult decision: starve or cause distress in a neighbor. Monkeys would routinely go
five days
without eating. One monkey went
twelve days
without eating.

Now to explain what's going on here, we don't have to attribute empathy to these monkeys. The simpler, more direct explanation is that monkeys don't like distress, whether in themselves or in others. In short, distress begets distress. This is of course distinct from being directly concerned about the welfare of others.
¹
Still, the findings are provocative because they indicate that
social emotions
(as we might call them) are produced by very ancient systems, systems that proved and continue to prove their biological value. De Waal speculates that such emotions serve to alert us to distress-causing elements in our environment: “if others show fear and distress, there may be good reasons for you to be worried, too. If one bird in a flock on the ground suddenly takes off, all other birds will take off as well … the one who stays behind may be prey” (2005: 187).

In general, the idea that the capacity for empathy is part of our inherited biology is consistent with the evolutionary sketch offered in the previous chapter, according to which morality serves to promote and protect cooperative arrangements among individuals. If humans are naturally disposed to be distressed at the distress of others, then they will, as far as possible, take steps to avoid actions that cause distress in others. This will require, among other things, a bit of cultural training. Infants have not been around long enough to learn which acts cause others distress. (As we'll see shortly, it may require, for example, the ability to take on the perspective of others.) But once this ability is in place, and once others begin to put their trust in a person, she will be
emotionally
disposed (according to this account) to avoid acts of “defection,” since such acts are expected to cause others distress. None of these associations needs to be conscious. This is, if you will, the emotional precursor to the sophisticated moral sense adults possess.

Further support for the idea that humans are wired to mirror the distress of others comes from the work of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. What, they ask, is the
brain's
role in empathy? What brain system or systems are involved in taking in the relevant information from the environment, processing that information, and initiating a response? Arriving at this understanding is, to say the least, formidable. Almost nothing in the universe (natural or unnatural) rivals the complexity of the human brain, with its 100 trillion to 1,000 trillion connections (or neural synapses) between more than a trillion nerve cells. All packed into something smaller than a bowling ball. Despite this complexity, researchers looking for the neural bases of morality have managed to produce some intriguing results – largely by way of an unorthodox source: psychopaths. One of the more effective means of learning about the brain is to compare individuals with a very specific cognitive or behavioral deficit, one that does not affect other mental capacities, with individuals
without
that deficit. How, if at all, are their brains different? And what do these differences tell us about the function of different brain systems? In some cases, there are no remarkable differences. In other cases, however, the differences are unmistakable.

Take face-blindness (or
prosopagnosia
), a neurological condition marked by an inability to recognize faces. Prosopagnosiacs have no difficulty passing a wide array of vision tests, and their memories are not noticeably impaired. But faces are entirely forgettable; they do not recognize friends, relatives, even themselves.
²
They can perfectly well describe the person they're seeing. It's just that they don't know
who
that person is. When neuroscientists began subjecting prosopagnosiacs to brain scans, it became apparent that something was indeed amiss with their brains. Specifically, what neuroscientists did
not
see in prosopagnosiacs that regularly appeared in non-prosopagnosiacs was activity in the
occipital
and
temporal lobes
of the cerebral cortex (a portion of the brain involved in memory, attention, and perceptual awareness) along with processing in the
fusiform gyrus
. (Don't worry, this won't be on the test.) The point is that, on the basis of these experiments, it is now believed that these different areas of the brain are critically important in the recognition of faces. Similar results have now been shown in chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. So what do psychopaths teach us about the brain's role in our moral lives?