An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (20 page)

If you will, think of the environment as a great sieve, through which only those individuals who happen to have useful traits pass. These traits come to be thought of as adaptations. But, at the outset, which traits ultimately become adaptations is quite unpredictable – for at least two reasons. First, the variations in form that may make a difference to an organism are the result of
random genetic mutation
, in combination with environmental input.
¹
Second, variations that improve an organism's fitness in one environment may be disastrous in another (for example, an individual's thicker fur that might be helpful in colder climates might be harmful in warmer climates). The upshot is that mindlessness undermines any hope of anticipating how the course of evolution may play out. More to the point, the evolution of creatures that look like us – let alone think and feel and desire like us – could not have been anticipated. Humans are no more biologically inevitable than three-toed sloths, or cacti. “We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity,” wrote the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1996: 216).

Gould famously invited us to imagine “rewinding the tape of life” back some 530 million years, well before most familiar organisms had evolved. If we were to let the tape play out again, what are the chances, Gould asked, of
homo sapiens
once again appearing on the scene? Vanishingly small. The cast of characters populating the world, according to Gould, would have been wildly different. And we would have been nowhere to be seen. Think of matters this way. If you were to get into your car in New York City and drive for a month, taking random lefts and rights, random on-ramps and off-ramps, what are the chances that you would end up in, say, Dallas, Texas? Probably about as good as ending up in
any city whatsoever
. Of course, in our case, we did end up in Dallas (so to speak). But start all over, and where would you end up? It's anyone's guess. That's Gould's point.

But what does this point have to do with Spencer? Well, it appears that Spencer thought that humans were in fact the necessary endpoint of Darwinian natural selection. On Spencer's understanding of evolution, rewinding the tape of life and letting it play out again would eventually bring us back to the human race, in all its distinguished glory. After all, for Spencer, evolution
progresses
– from simpler to more complex forms. And we are the most complex. The truth of course is that evolution doesn't progress. Says Gould: The fact of evolutionary change through time doesn't represent progress as we know it. Progress is not inevitable. Much of evolution is downward in terms of morphological complexity, rather than upward. We're not marching toward some greater thing. The actual history of life is awfully damn curious in the light of our usual expectation that there's some predictable drive toward a generally increasing complexity in time. If that's so, life certainly took its time about it: five-sixths of the history of life is the story of single-celled creatures only. (1996: 52) So much for the inevitable drive to complexity. We cannot look to evolution as a process whose very point is the development of complex organisms like us. To describe a trait as “more evolved,” as Spencer does, implies
next to nothing
about its structure, its complexity, or whatever. From a biological standpoint, it's not even clear what that expression means. Are bacteria more evolved than humans? After all, some bacteria have been evolving for 4
billion
years – 10,000 times longer than the period of modern human evolution! Is it the
rate
of evolution that makes a creature “more evolved”? If so, then viruses stand miles ahead of us. The proteins of the influenza virus, for example, evolve about a
million
times faster than human proteins. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins' observation that forms the epigraph to this chapter, humans (to take our favorite example) are not the
point
of evolution; we are merely its product. There is no point to evolution.

If we have to attach a special metaphor to the process of evolution, it shouldn't be “upward.” It should probably be “outward” – as in the way a bush grows. Or, better yet, as a wheel. Biologists David M. Hillis, Derrick Zwickl, and Robin Gutell, of the University of Texas, developed a tree of life based on a small subunit of rRNA sequence taken from about 3,000 species throughout the tree of life (which, as it turns out, amounts to only about 0.18 percent of all known species).
Figure 6.3
is a simplified version of the Hillis
et al.
illustration. According to this depiction of life, mammals, our favorite biological class of organisms, figure as just another class on the wheel – no “higher” or “lower” than ferns or flatworms. We just occupy a different spoke (or twig of the evolutionary bush). We have no
biological
reason to regard our species as anything particularly special. We're good at some things, to be sure. But we're also terrible at other things. And of course there's no guarantee that our rather pretentious presence on the planet will last. We showed up late to the party (billions of years after it started) and it's very likely we'll leave early (mess with the global thermostat too much in one direction and we're goners).

Figure 6.3
Simple Tree of Life
From D. Sadava, H.C. Heller, G.H. Orians, W.K. Purves, and D.M. Hillis,
Life: The Science of Biology,
8th edn. Sinauer Associates and W.H. Freeman, 2008.

At any rate, all this spells trouble for Spencer. So long as Spencer's argument depends on the assumption that the human species represents a pinnacle in evolutionary design, it fails. We simply cannot assert that humans occupy a place higher up on the evolutionary scale for the simple reason that there is no such scale. In the biological realm, no such value orderings are possible. In our little niche we've done pretty well. But it would take an entire library to list all of the organisms that have done just as well or better than us in their little niches. What this means, then, is that although the kind of conduct that improved and extended our lives (kindness, charity, tolerance, fairness) may have worked for
us
in
this
niche, that's only a historical accident. In other niches, such conduct may not have improved and extended our lives. And in many other possible worlds, we do not even exist – and in many of those worlds, neither does such conduct.

But this is only the beginning of the problems with Spencer and what has come to be called Social Darwinism. For
even if
it turned out (miraculously) that biologists are wrong about the structure of Darwinian evolution,
even if
evolution did tend to progress in complexity and design, Spencer would be no better off. As we'll see in the next chapter, the move from biology to values is fraught with obstacles. More specifically, any attempt to justify how things
ought to be
on the basis of how things
are
is, according to philosophers, doomed.

Further Reading Brockman, John (1995)
The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution
(Touchstone).

Dennett, Daniel C. (1995)
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
(Simon & Schuster).

Gould, Stephen J. (1992)
The Panda's Thumb
(Norton).

Rachels, James (1990)
Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism
(Oxford University Press).

Ruse, Michael (1986)
Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy
(Oxford University Press).

Sadava, D., H.C. Heller, G.H. Orians, W.K. Purves, and D.M. Hillis (2008)
Life: The Science of Biology
, 8th edn. (Sinauer Associates and W.H. Freeman).

Spencer, Herbert (2004/1879)
The Principles of Ethics
(University Press of the Pacific).

Thomson, Paul (ed.) (1995) Issues in Evolutionary Ethics (SUNY Press).

I have received, in a Manchester newspaper, a rather good squib, showing that I have proved “might is right.”

(Charles Darwin, Life and Letters)
But as Authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the Readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality.

(David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature) What if Spencer had been correct about Darwinian evolution? What if human beings really did represent the pinnacle of evolution by natural selection? What if evolution, truly possessed of a “far-seeing benevolence,” did in fact weed out of the population those that failed to embody industriousness, prudence, temperance, kindness, generosity, and the rest? In this imaginary world, could we then say with confidence that morality had found its natural foundation? That we
ought
to strive to embody those traits? Or that our fundamental moral obligation is to promote social harmony since this is the direction in which evolution naturally leads? Could we at least say that we ought, generally speaking, to follow nature's lead?

The answer, in short, is
No
. Spencer's case is not improved by ignoring the fact that evolution does not tend toward morally “higher” beings. Those who want to use evolution (or, for that matter, any “natural” process) for the purposes of showing that, for example, “might is right” face a steep philosophical climb. For, to put it cryptically, you can't get from the
is
of biology to the
ought
of morality. There are two (related) reasons why. Both have to do with our concepts.

One reason goes back to the Scottish philosopher David Hume. According to Hume, no claim(s) about how things
are
logically entail how things
ought
to be. A conceptual gap divides these two realms. Our aim in this chapter is to get clear on what Hume meant. The other reason derives from the work of G.E. Moore. According to Moore, talk of what is good (or right or wrong, etc.) cannot be reduced to talk of the natural world. For slightly different reasons, Moore, too, thought that a conceptual gap divides these two realms.

Together Hume and Moore are the Godzilla to Spencer's King Kong (or, maybe, the Alien to Spencer's Predator). To many contemporary philosophers, evolutionary ethics represents just this battle between Social Darwinists like Spencer and critics like Moore. The history of this debate suggests that when philosophers took a hard look at the hypotheses of the Social Darwinists, it is assumed that they put those hypotheses to bed, once and for all. Moore and Hume crushed the Social Darwinists. The truth of course is messier than that, as it always is. But there can be no doubt that the march toward a “biological ethics” hit sizable walls in Hume and Moore. In this chapter we'll begin with Hume and what some call – rather grandly – Hume's Law. In the next chapter we'll turn our attention to Moore.

7.1 Deductively Valid Arguments Let's begin with a little refresher lesson in logic. Suppose it is true (as I think it is) that all humans are mortal. Suppose it is also true that Beatrice is human. On the basis of these two truths can we infer anything else about Beatrice? Of course. Beatrice is
mortal
. If all humans are mortal and Beatrice is human,
then it must be the case
that Beatrice is mortal. How could it not? (I defy you to imagine a world where all humans are mortal, Beatrice is human,
but
Beatrice is not mortal. You can't do it – at least without doing damage to yourself. So long as you are not changing the meaning of the words, Beatrice's morality is guaranteed. It's logically necessary.) We can represent the argument I just offered this way:

1.
All humans are mortal.

2.
Beatrice is human.

3.
Therefore, Beatrice is mortal.