An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (27 page)

It sounds plausible, but plausibility comes cheap, argues Street. The question is whether there is another, more persuasive, account that has all the virtues of the tracking account, but lacks its vices. Is there, in other words, a leaner, more scientifically respectable, account? Street believes there is. In direct competition with other scientific theories of our moral tendencies, the tracking account loses out to what she calls the
adaptive link
account. On the adaptive link account, our moral minds evolved to link certain circumstances with biologically beneficial behavior – and that's it. According to Street, moral judgments evolved not because “they constituted perceptions of independent evaluative truths, but rather because they forged adaptive links between our ancestors' circumstances and their responses to those circumstances” (2006: 127). She likens this tendency to a “reflex mechanism.” The mechanism is not in the business of detecting wrongness or rightness, goodness or badness, in the world. Instead, the mechanism merely reinforces a link between situations of a certain kind with responses of a certain kind. An example will help.

Suppose that you recognize that Gertrude has helped you. Let's say that Gertrude shared some of her food with you. This recognition in turn triggers a judgment that you ought to return the favor – that is, you ought to share some of your food with Gertrude when the opportunity arises. And this judgment in turn motivates you to do just that. When the opportunity arises, you
do
share some of your food with her. The crucial question here is this: What is the
function
of the judgment that you ought to return the favor? Is it, as the tracking account maintains, to detect that special moral property (namely, duty) that somehow “gloms onto” the situation? This seems biologically superfluous – not to mention mysterious. Shouldn't we say that the function of the judgment that you ought to return the favor is simply to get you to return the favor? Street thinks so. On the adaptive link account, the point is to move you to act. It's not necessary that you detect the (alleged) moral obligation of returning a favor. It's only necessary that you
act
in a specific way.
⁴

There are of course differences between reflex mechanisms and moral judgments, as Street notes. For one thing, moral judgments are presented to you as reasons. For example, that an action is wrong is a reason not to do it. And we have the power to deliberate over these reasons. We can accept them or reject them. But this fact doesn't derail the adaptive link account. After all, the
point
of having these reasons presented to you is that they get you to respond in ways that are biologically adaptive. We're more sophisticated than Venus fly-traps, to be sure, but we're subject to the same evolutionary forces.

The philosophically significant point here is this: the adaptive link account provides all the explanatory power of the tracking account but with fewer components. Better still, the components the adaptive link account dispose of are admittedly
peculiar
: namely, objective rightness and wrongness. The adaptive link account can happily ignore the thorny issue of the truth of moral judgments. Is lying on this occasion
really and truly
immoral? Is killing one person to save three others
really and truly
morally permitted? As far the adaptive link account is concerned, questions like these are, at best, irrelevant. According to Street, the adaptive link account can explain all that we might want to explain about the presence of moral systems in the world, but “without any need to posit a role for evaluative truth” (2006: 129). At worst, such questions are uniformly false. Nothing in the world is immoral or amoral.

The Darwinian Dilemma thus confronting the realist looks insurmountable. Street thinks that the moral realist has “no escape.” If the moral realist chooses to deny that there is any relationship between evolution's influence on our moral minds and the independent moral truths, then he has to accept the untenable view that evolution “either pushed us
away from
or pushed us in ways that
bear no relation
to these evaluative truths” (2006: 135). On the other hand, the only available alternative is a tracking account of some kind. But, according to Street, an adaptive link account will always be (empirically and philosophically) preferable to any tracking account.

11.3 Conclusion The philosopher Philip Kitcher is probably right when he says that “philosophers most interested in the biological basis of morality struggle with issues about objectivity” (2005: 177). What the Darwinian revolution brought to the moral philosophers' table, it now appears, was a story about why we have the moral beliefs we do, and this story dispenses with
objective
morality. In chapter 10 I offered an analogy based on the neuroscientific discoveries of Michael Persinger: insofar as your justification for God's existence rests solely on your religious experiences, your justification founders in the face of the neuropsychological causes of such experiences. Richard Joyce offers the Napoleon pill analogy: insofar as your justification for believing that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo is based merely on having the belief, then your justification founders in the face of the discovery that you were given a pill that caused such a belief. According to Street, someone who defends the reality of moral properties must somehow reconcile that belief with the (alleged) fact that evolution exerted a tremendous influence on our disposition to adopt moral beliefs.

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

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

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

Street, S. (2006) A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.
Philosophical Studies
, 127: 109–66.

It's no accident, I think, that philosophers most interested in the biological basis of morality struggle with issues about objectivity.

(Philip Kitcher, “Biology and Ethics”) The evolutionary realist must be, at this point, feeling backed into a corner. The previous two chapters have painted a fairly grim picture for anyone sympathetic to the idea that morality is
real
, that actions can in fact be
objectively
wrong, good, or bad. So what sorts of options are available to someone committed to the idea of moral realism? In this chapter we'll explore four different sorts of options. The first option involves a fairly blunt instrument: denying that evolution played any role in the development of our moral sense. I describe this as “blunt instrument” because it refuses to accommodate the central claim of the evolutionary anti-realist. Instead, it attempts to clear everything off the table and begin anew.

The three other options we'll explore attempt to work within the developmental framework emphasized by the evolutionary anti-realist. They concede, to varying extents, the idea that evolution played
some
role in developing our moral minds. Does this commit the realist to a kind of tracking account, as suggested by Street in the previous chapter? Not exactly. In fact, I think it's fair to say that at least two of these positions – response dependency and virtue ethics – represent the possibility of a
kind of
moral realism that does not require, for its defense, a tracking account. The philosopher Jesse Prinz is prepared to defend
response dependency
as a species of moral realism. On this view, the property
moral wrongness
is like the property
funny
or
disgusting
, in this sense: they dispose subjects to respond in stereotypical ways under normal conditions. Prinz is dubious that evolution played the defining role that the anti-realists we've discussed think it did in shaping our moral minds. Instead, Prinz argues that evolution is responsible for selecting a core set of emotions that are then shaped in important ways by the environment. Nevertheless, Prinz does assign some role to evolution in the shaping of our moral minds, so his view is not the blunt instrument I described above.

The philosophers William Casebeer and – somewhat tentatively – Philip Kitcher, take a different tack in response to the evolutionary anti-realist. They defend a version of
virtue ethics
in the context of evolution. This means that the focus of moral evaluation is not primarily on action, but on a person's character. The virtue ethicist seeks to answer the question,
What sort of person should I be?
and not (or not in the first instance),
What's my moral duty?
And to answer the question about what sort of person I should be, the contemporary virtue ethicist looks to Darwinian selection. We'll leave the details for later.

Finally, building on the work of others, I have offered a moral constructivist position, according to which moral rightness and wrongness consist in what agents (from a particular standpoint) would accept as rules to govern behavior. Unlike the other options outlined in this chapter, my position is an explicit attempt at a tracking account. I'm prepared to say that the reason we evolved to make moral judgments has precisely to do with the fact that a preponderance of these judgments were
true
. I'll save the details for later.

Before getting started, I should try to say something about the vexed notion of
moral realism
. Like so many other technical terms, moral realism does not have a received meaning among philosophers.
¹
Even seeking a minimum conception is difficult. But let me offer this: moral realism is true just in case (1) moral properties (like rightness or wrongness) exist and (2) their existence does not depend on anyone thinking (or desiring or caring) they exist. This is simply an extension of the general definition for realism. Some philosophers insist on something more robust; others are content to accept less. It won't advance our discussion much by cataloguing all these differences – partly because the dispute over moral realism sometimes amounts to little more than a
terminological
dispute. Philosophers say: I understand all the components of your view, but does it deserve the title “realism”? Well, that of course depends on your definition of realism. But one would hope that we are interested in matters more substantial than definitions. For this reason, I propose that we spend our time discussing the details of the views themselves. Whether the view
really
deserves to be called realist we can regard as a secondary concern.

12.1 Option 1: Learning Right from Wrong Recall that the evolutionary
anti-realist
motivates her case by arguing that our disposition to make moral judgments is
not
, in an important sense, learned. Rather, our moral sense is an evolutionary inheritance. The crux of the anti-realist's metaethical case is that when we examine this evolutionary inheritance, we see that there is no need to appeal to an independent realm of moral facts to explain our moral sense. All we need is the evolutionary story.

One option for the evolutionary
realist
is to deny that our moral sense is an evolutionary inheritance. Barring the possibility that we inherited it from aliens or God, such a denial would imply that we
learned
right from wrong. And if the evolutionary realist can make this case, then she has thereby made room for the possibility that learning right from wrong is in part a matter of learning what the moral facts are. In other words, perhaps the best explanation for why it is that humans come to develop a moral sense must make mention of the moral properties that somehow exist independently of humans. Otherwise, our explanation is incomplete. The evolutionary anti-realist thinks her case is complete because she maintains the evolutionary story explains all that we want explaining. But if the evolutionary story is irrelevant – or, at best, incomplete – then she's mistaken. And the evolutionary realist can then take advantage of the opening by giving an account of moral development that relies on human “interaction” with moral properties.

Two caveats about this option. First, taking this option requires (among other things) a thorough repudiation of the
empirical
case made by the evolutionary anti-realist. Recall the lines of evidence introduced by the anti-realist in chapters 5 and 6. While philosophical speculation no doubt plays a role here, the anti-realist at least attempts to hitch those speculations to a train of research, research that extends from neuroscience to primatology. It is not enough to accuse the anti-realist of making a conceptual error. There is a body of evidence that needs to be dealt with, case by curious case. I do not mean to suggest that such an undertaking is out of the question. In fact, we've already considered just such an undertaking in chapters 5 and 6. My point here is that the option we're discussing requires some very heavy empirical lifting. And no matter how comfortable our philosophical armchairs may be, we cannot expect to this option to pay off unless we get out of our armchair and confront the data.

A second caveat echoes the tone of the first. In my original sketch of the realist's option, I was careful to say that showing that the evolutionary case for moral development is mistaken only “makes room for the possibility of” moral facts. In saying this I meant to imply that the realist's work has only just begun. Making room for the
possibility
that your view is true is a far cry from showing that your view true. To demonstrate the latter requires engaging in a careful examination of how moral judgments (as described at §3.1) are made true by facts about the world that we can all accept. Moral realism gets no special pass when it comes to defending itself.

So in effect option 1 amounts to
stage
1 of a multi-stage program. Stage 1 is largely an empirical matter, involving as it does a critique of the evolutionary anti-realist's case for the evolution of our moral mind. Stage 2 and beyond is a philosophical matter. It involves linking our conception of moral judgment with facts about the world. In one loose sense, I've just described the work of the philosopher Jesse Prinz. Part of the reason I've decided to treat his work differently, however, will be explained in the next section.

12.2 Option 2: Response Dependency Jesse Prinz is not convinced that morality is innate. We reviewed his concerns at §5.6. Prinz's leading concern seems to be (as he put it recently) the “absolutely dizzying” variation in moral codes around the world (2008a: 221). He also suggests that the data that Joyce and others point to in defending moral nativism can just as easily be accounted for by a
non
-nativist explanation. In other words, we don't need to posit some special moral “faculty” of the mind in order to explain (for example) cross-cultural similarities or the apparent moral knowledge of children. Still, Prinz is not about to dismiss the role of evolution when it comes to our moral minds.

Prinz believes that we
do
come into the world equipped with a set of capacities that underwrite a moral sense, namely, the capacity to
feel
. For Prinz, emotions are central to morality (he makes his case in
The Emotional Construction of Morals
). And Prinz believes that evolution may play a critical role in explaining why we have the emotions that we do. The so-called moral emotions are constructed out of more basic emotions. So, for example, moral anger is anger that is directed at those who violate rights or commit an injustice. Guilt is sadness directed at
oneself
when one has violated rights or committed an injustice (Prinz 2008b: 69ff.). And insofar as Darwinian pressures are responsible for these affective systems in humans, then evolution and morality are not, on Prinz's view, unrelated.

This, however, might strike you as odd. You might be tempted, for example, to suspect that Prinz's moral psychological view leads seamlessly to evolutionary
anti
-realism. After all, you might argue that if human morality can be explained merely by pointing to the emotional dispositions of creatures like us, then there's no need to appeal to moral facts. Morality is nothing more than the pushes and pulls of our own emotional states. Morality – it would appear – is all in our heads. Prinz thinks the matter is more complicated than this. Indeed, his reasoning leads him to assert that “moral facts are both real and motivating” (2008a: 223). Moral realism has a voice after all.

Now before proponents of moral realism take their victory lap, it's important to understand exactly what this view entails – and what it does
not
entail. For it is especially what the view does not entail that may disappoint some moral realists. First and foremost (in case anyone actually imagined otherwise), moral facts will look nothing like, say, physical facts. They aren't concrete entities that you could put in your pocket or observe under a microscope. No great loss here, since few probably expected moral facts to have
that
kind of status. But, going further, moral facts, on Prinz's view, will also look nothing like numerical facts. Philosophers standardly treat numbers as
abstract
objects, objects that are real, though they do not have a location in space or time. Some moral philosophers like this idea and have sought to model moral facts after numerical facts. But Prinz will not be much comfort here either. His view does not make moral facts out to be anything like numbers. So what, then, is Prinz offering?

Prinz, following the work of other response-dependency theorists, argues that the property
being wrong
is like the property
being funny
in this way: to have this property is just to have the tendency to cause certain responses in observers. We don't want to say, for example, that things are funny because they have some special comedy dust sprinkled on them. Or, in a more academic spirit, that they are instances of an “incongruous relationship” between human intelligence and human habit (as suggested by the philosopher Henri Bergson). Rather, what makes funny things funny is just that they tend to amuse people. That's it. If we go searching for something that
unifies
all these things, at a level
beneath
these typical responses, we'll come up empty-handed, according to response-dependency theorists. Being funny is an example of a
response-dependent
property because what makes it true that a given object (a joke, a person, etc.) is funny depends essentially on the typical
responses
of observers. If most people do not tend to find a particular joke funny, then on this view it's not funny. Other response-dependent properties might include
being delicious
,
being loathsome
,
being disgusting
.

Prinz is attracted to this view in part because it squares with the intuition that you can actually be
mistaken
about what's funny or what's delicious. Exotic cases aside, funerals are not funny and rotting meat is not delicious. If you were to judge otherwise, you would be mistaken. However, your mistake would lie
not
in a failure to grasp some deep (comedic or funereal) property, but simply in a failure to assess what tends to make people laugh or what tends to give people gustatory delight.

So what does it mean then to say that
being wrong
is a response-dependent property? Roughly, an action is wrong just in case it is disposed to cause disapprobation (or disapproval) in observers. Just as in the case of humor, if we go searching for something that unifies all immoral acts, at a level beneath typical responses, we'll come up empty-handed. We cannot pick out what is immoral without appealing to how such acts tend to strike observers. In this way, moral judgments can be treated as
truth-apt
, that is, as capable of being true or false. Furthermore, it should be obvious that some moral judgments will indeed be true. For example, the judgment that it is wrong to kill your child for fun is true. So is the judgment that you ought to help others if they have helped you in the past. What makes them true has to do with the kind of responses such acts tend to produce in observers. In this way, Prinz (and other response-dependency theorists) can promote their view as a kind of moral realism. There is, after all, a fact of the matter as to whether stealing your neighbor's car for fun is wrong. And that fact lies outside what you happen to think or desire or whatever.