An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (28 page)

Admittedly, this brand of realism may not satisfy everyone. Keen readers will be quick to point out that on this view moral facts are suspiciously
contingent
– that is, they could just as easily have been different. Not only that, but Prinz's view looks positively
relativistic
. For relative to a culture where emotional responses tend to be
different
, acts that we regard as impermissible may turn out to be permissible. In modern Western cultures, for example, killing members of another group to promote one's status is greeted with disapprobation. But in some primitive cultures, that very same practice is greeted with approval. If Prinz's view is correct, then that practice is wrong in our culture but not wrong in another culture. After all, nothing in Prinz's view requires that everyone everywhere tends to have the
same
kind of emotional response to the same kind of behavior. Of course, where this is true, there will be moral uniformity. But where it isn't, there will be moral plurality.

Troubling as these implications may be, they do not amount to a criticism of Prinz's view. The thing to keep in mind here is that while Prinz may have promised moral
realism
, he did not promise moral
objectivity
. The former notion implies, very roughly, that there are facts of the matter regarding what you should or should not do, morally speaking. The latter notion implies, very roughly, that those moral facts are not subject to the various attitudes people might take to them. Evidently, on Prinz's view, moral realism does not entail moral objectivity. At any rate, Prinz is driven to this view because it succeeds in accommodating two important observations: first, that emotions are central to moral judgment and, second, that moral views vary across cultures. If this is not what readers had hoped for in a moral realist position, Prinz would surely say that this reflects a problem – not in the view – but in the viewer. Prinz positively embraces relativism (he calls it subjectivism) with the same confidence that he rejects anti-realism.

The responses to Prinz's views are, as of this writing, only beginning to trickle in. We cannot say now how his view will generally be received. Still, we know how at least one evolutionary
anti
-realist – Richard Joyce – feels. But rather than discuss Joyce's replies to Prinz here, I'm going to hold off until the end of the chapter. For Joyce thinks that his replies to Prinz apply, with
equal force
, to the kind of constructivist position I have offered. So for the purposes of continuity, I'd like to first sketch the other two options available to the moral realist before returning to Joyce and his criticisms.

12.3 Option 3: Virtue Ethics Naturalized The history of moral philosophy – to paint with a
very
broad brush – did not begin with discussions of right and wrong, moral duty, or rights. The search for an analysis of what makes an action immoral would have struck ancient philosophers as odd, if not misguided. From the vantage point of one the most influential ancient philosophers, Aristotle, the fundamental philosophical question was, in one sense, much broader than this. We should be asking:
How should I live? What kind of thing(s) should I pursue?
While such questions will no doubt make contact with moral judgments as we've described them, they also reach beyond or beneath them. For Aristotle and latter-day Aristotelians, such questions push us in the direction of asking:
What kind of person should I be? Which traits are good for me to have?
The Greek word for these traits is
arēte
, often translated as “virtue.” Thus,
virtue
ethics. By cataloguing the various virtues, we can then say which sorts of traits we ought to develop in ourselves. Virtue ethicists (following Aristotle) often point to traits like honesty, kindness, courage, and temperance. Having these traits, according to Aristotle, is constitutive of the best life. It's good to have them.

But why
these
traits? After all, it's logically possible that the virtues are radically different than we suppose. Perhaps the good life consists of deception, meanness, and greed. (Didn't Gordon Gecko, the fictional hero of the 1987 film
Wall Street
, famously proclaim, “Greed is … good?”) Here is where the work of the virtue ethicist begins. For we need a compelling reason to think that the better life consists of traits like honesty and generosity and not traits like meanness and greed. What is it about us that makes such traits virtues? How do we know what's good for creatures like us?

Aristotle's answer was refreshingly direct:
function.
Consider: What makes a good hammer
good
? What makes a good pianist
good
? What makes a good computer
good
? No one would attempt to answer these questions by launching an investigation into the microphysical properties of these items, as if each thing had some “goodness” atom in common with the rest. The answer is much closer to the surface. What makes a good hammer good is its ability to pound nails in well, to extract nails easily, and so on. What makes a good pianist good is her ability to play well. What makes a good computer good is its ability to process information quickly and accurately, its ability to store a lot of information, and so on. What can we generalize from these examples? That is, how would you complete the following definition?

For anything
x
,
x
is good if and only if
x
___.

Well, in each of the above cases, what made a particular item good was its ability
to perform its function well
. A good hammer is made good precisely because it performs its designated function well. A good pianist is good precisely because she performs her designated function well. And so on and so forth.

With this little formula in hand, we can turn to our favorite subject:
us.
What makes a good person
good
? What makes a good (human) life
good
? To answer these questions requires, as per our formula, understanding of our function. Aristotle poses the questions this way: Have the carpenter, then, and the tanner certain functions or activities, and has man none? Is he born without a function? Or as eye, hand, foot, and in general each of the parts evidently has a function, may one lay it down that man similarly has a function apart from all these? What then can this be? (1988/350 BCE: Book I, §7) This is the linchpin of the virtue ethicist's story. If she can put this piece of the puzzle in place, then we can trace a direct line from natural facts to facts about how we ought to live our lives. The method Aristotle uses to identify our function involves searching for that capacity that distinguishes us from other creatures. And according to Aristotle, it is the “life of the rational element” that distinguishes us from other creatures. In other words, our ability to reason and to follow reason. Unlike other creatures, we do not (always) eat the moment we are hungry or fight the moment we are confronted. Instead, we are unique in our ability to
deliberate
, to weigh considerations both for and against a course of action. Perhaps eating (or fighting) now conflicts with other goals. At any rate, what distinguishes us is this capacity to deliberate, to reason. If this is right, then our function is to live a life according to reason. And if this is right, then it follows (according to Aristotle) that what makes a human life good is a life lived according to reason. Now Aristotle unpacks this idea of a life lived according to reason by suggesting that we adopt certain intellectual and social (or moral) virtues, but we can hold off on delving any deeper. We've already hit a few snags.

One concern modern readers have with this line of reasoning has to do with our distinguishing trait. Is it so obvious, they ask, that humans are in fact the
only
organism with the sort of deliberative powers Aristotle cites? It does not appear that higher primates are the thoughtless brutes we may have once thought. But this is not the only problem. Suppose it's true that humans are unique in their ability to reason. What licenses the move from this claim to the claim that reasoning is our
function
? After all, there are surely other characteristics that are unique to humans: for example, walking upright, recursive grammar, hat-wearing. Is anyone seriously supposing that since we are alone in our ability to speak a language (let's say) that our
function
is to talk? That we ought to talk
more
? If the move from what distinguishes humans to the human function is indeed illicit, then more needs to be done to convince us that the best life for us is the life of reason.

Perhaps of even greater concern to the modern thinker is Aristotle's conception of the natural world, in particular his view that natural kinds (animals, plants, even rocks) all have a purpose, or
telos
. On Aristotle's view, just as we can say that the purpose or function of hammers is to pound nails, we can say that the purpose of birds is to fly, the purpose of fish is to swim, and so on. But modern science (as we noted at §6.2) appears to have undercut this picture. We no longer conceive of the world as home to objects, each of which “strives” toward a perfected state, a state correlated with its essence. Sure, birds fly. But it's an entirely different kind of logical statement to say they
ought
to fly, that flying is their essence. At a deeper level, scientists are uncomfortable with the idea that in addition to all of the physical properties that constitute a particular organism (e.g., the atoms that comprise a snake), there is some non-physical property that somehow attaches itself to the snake: namely, its function, what it's
supposed
to do. But where exactly is this mysterious property? Inside its cells?

These criticisms did not, however, sink Aristotelians. For friends of function did not abandon their cause. Beginning in the 1970s, philosophers of biology attempted to resurrect (and make respectable) talk of functions. Driving the resurrection was Darwinian natural selection. The philosopher of biology Larry Wright (1973) proposed that we understand function-talk in terms of
selection
-talk. Take an easy case: the human heart. Modern biology provides a compelling case for the claim that the human heart pumps blood because it was selected for over evolutionary history. Perhaps, then, this is how we should understand the intuitively compelling idea that the human heart has a function: it was selected to pump blood and its selection explains its modern presence. Functions, then, can just be “read off” the record of evolutionary selection.

Some neo-Aristotelians have decided to run with this effort to legitimize function-talk. For example, the philosopher William Casebeer employs this modern conception of function as a way of (as he puts it) “bringing Aristotle up to date” (2003: 49). The trick is to swap out Aristotle's implausible conception of nature with a scientifically respectable one. As far as functions are concerned, Casebeer adopts an analysis introduced by the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith: “functions are dispositions to and powers which explain the recent maintenance of a trait in a selective context” (1994: 344). In other words, functions are those dispositions acted on by “recent” selective pressures. Casebeer believes that this “thoroughgoing naturalized conception of function” (2003: 53) is precisely what's needed to put Aristotle back on a firm footing. For with a scientifically respectable notion of function in hand, we can thus show that, as Casebeer puts it, “moral facts are functional facts” (2003: 53).
²
On this updated version of Aristotle, what we ought morally to do follows from the kinds of traits we ought to develop. And the kinds of traits we ought to develop follow from the kind of creatures we're meant to be. And (finally) the kind of creatures we're meant to be follows from our biologically given functions.

So what does all this mean in practice? The answer is less straightforward than one might hope. For teasing out our function(s) requires sustained empirical work. It's not merely (or hardly at all) a matter of just thinking really hard about our evolutionary past from the philosophical armchair. What's required is biological study. As a general matter, however, our functions will “nest” or “smoothly stack,” according to Casebeer. Lower-level functions will, in general, subserve higher functions. For example, Casebeer stresses the social nature of our species, something we noted throughout part I. Thus, being a “good human” entails developing traits that subserve this higher-level function. There is, as Casebeer admits, a “rich complex” here, and sorting out this complex requires a degree of biological understanding that we do not, as yet, possess. At any rate, what Casebeer appears to have provided is a principled way of reconciling moral facts with an evolutionary account of moral development. It would be misleading to portray this account as a tracking account, whereby we evolved to “track” moral facts that somehow exist independently of us. On Casebeer's view, moral facts are no more mysterious than functional facts. And functional facts (at least as Casebeer understands them) are biologically respectable facts, facts that are indeed objective even if they are “not to be found in the environment
per se
, but rather within the organism” (2003: 48).

The philosopher Philip Kitcher offers a slightly different sketch of a naturalized virtue ethics. Since Kitcher only summarizes a position, a position he may or may not choose to develop further, I'm going to quote his idea in full: The more immediate function of normative guidance (and the rules of proto-morality) was to reinforce the psychological capacities that made sociality possible for us in the first place. Those psychological capacities involved an ability to empathize with the needs and interests of
some
others and to
some
extent, and they were reinforced by directives to take greater account of other people's plans and projects, even where there is, at least initially, no empathetic response. We can say, then, that the primary function of morality is to extend and amplify those primitive altruistic dispositions through which we became social animals in the first place, and that this has the secondary effect of promoting social cohesion. On the account of functions I prefer, the function can be ascribed to the impact on our altruism, even though the process of selection (natural and cultural) may attend to differences in social harmony. We might say that the function of morality is the enhancement of social cohesion
via
the amplification of our psychological altruistic dispositions. (2005: 178) As I understand Kitcher, evolution put in place some rudimentary capacities, capacities not entirely unlike the capacities Prinz suggested: namely to
feel
. In particular, the capacity to empathize with others, to feel their pain, to identify with their desires,
etc.
But these capacities are notoriously limited. Your friend's pain means more to you than a stranger's. Yet as we saw in part I, extending one's empathy to include those beyond your immediate circle yields real biological dividends. On Kitcher's view, that's morality's role: extending one's empathy to others. This implies that, as moral creatures,
our function
is to extend our empathic responses, to widen our altruistic tendencies. Virtue, then, is a matter of developing those traits that, as Kitcher puts it, amplify our biologically given disposition to altruism. Like Casebeer, Kitcher proposes a way of accepting the evolutionary account of our moral minds without giving up the idea that there are objectively better and worse ways of living. Just as you can be mistaken about the function of the human heart (e.g., to keep the beat), you can be mistaken about
your
function
as a human being
.