The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (54 page)

The basic paradox here — the intellectual groundlessness of blame, and the practical need for it — is something few people seem eager to aknowledge. One anthropologist has made the following two statements about divorce: (a) "I do not want to encourage someone saying, 'Well, it's programmed in and I can't help it.' We can help it. While these behaviors may be powerful, many people in fact resist them quite successfully"; and (b) "[T]here are men and women walking the streets today saying to themselves, 'I'm a failure! I've had two marriages, and neither of them has worked.' Well, that's probably a natural human behavior pattern, and they feel a little better when they hear what I have to say. I don't think people need to feel failure following a divorce."
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Each of these statements is defensible, but you can't have it both ways. It's accurate, on the one hand, to say that any given divorce was inevitable, driven by a long chain of genetic and environmental forces, all mediated biochemically. Still, to stress this inevitability is
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to affect public discourse, and thus to affect future environmental forces and future neurochemistry, rendering inevitable future divorces that otherwise wouldn't have been. To call things in the past inexorable makes more things in the future inexorable. To tell people they're not to blame for past mistakes is to make future mistakes more likely. The truth is hardly guaranteed to set us free.

Or, to put the point another, perhaps more upbeat, way: the truth depends on what we say the truth is. If men are told that the impulse to philander is deeply "natural," essentially irrepressible, then the impulse — for those men, at least — may indeed be so. In Darwin's day, though, men were told something else: that animal impulses are formidable foes but can, with constant and arduous effort, be defeated. This then became, for many men, the truth. Free will was, in an important sense, created by their belief in it.

In the same sense, one might argue, their "successful" belief in free will justifies our own belief in it. But not belief in the metaphysical doctrine of free will. There is nothing in the behavior of self-disciplined Victorians that upsets the doctrine of determinism; they were just products of their environment, of a time and place where belief in the possibility of self-control was in the air — as were (therefore) stiff moral sanctions against those who failed at the task. Still, these men represent, in a sense, an argument for putting the same influences in our air. At least, these men are evidence that the influ ences can work; they are cause to consider the doctrine of free will "true" in a sheerly pragmatic sense of the word.
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But whether such pragmatism can outweigh real truth — whether a self-fulfilling "belief" in free will can survive the ever-more-manifest dubiousness of free will as a metaphysical doctrine — is another question altogether.

And, anyway, even if this artifice succeeds, and the idea of "blame" remains conveniently robust, we are back to the challenge of confining it to useful proportions: blaming people only when blame serves the greater good, not letting self-righteousness get carried away (as it naturally tends to do). And, meanwhile, we will still face the deeper challenge of reconciling necessary moral sanction with the limitless compassion that is always, in fact, appropriate.
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Launching a war against divorce, complete with harsher sanctions against philanderers, and zero tolerance for their claims that philandering is "natural," may or may not be worth the miscellaneous costs. This is a question about which reasonable people may disagree. But creeping determinism is, in any case, a problem, because moral codes of some sort are surely desirable. Morality, after all, is the only way to harvest various fruits of non-zero-sumness — notably those fruits that aren't harvested by kin-selected altruism or reciprocal altruism. Morality makes us mindful of the welfare of people other than family and friends, raising society's overall welfare. You don't have to be a utilitarian to think that's a good thing.

Actually, morality isn't the only way to harvest these particular fruits. But it's the cheapest way, and the least creepy. If no one drinks before driving, society is better off. And most of us would rather see compliance enforced by an internalized moral code than by a ubiquitous police force. This is the rigorous answer to people who ask why terms like morality and values should be taken seriously. Not because tradition is a good thing in itself. But because of what a strong moral code is uniquely able to offer: the more elusive benefits of non-zero-sumness, without lots of police.

John Stuart Mill felt that moral codes could be as stifling and eerie as ubiquitous police. He complained, in
On Liberty
, of living "under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship."
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So it may seem ironic, at the very least, to pen this ode to moral toughness right after penning an ode to Mill's ethical philosophy, utilitarianism.

But Mill's real complaint wasn't about strong moral codes; it was about strong and mindless moral codes. Specifically: codes banning behaviors that wouldn't have harmed anyone — codes, in other words, that weren't sound from a utilitarian standpoint. In those days, various statistically aberrant lifestyles, such as homosexuality, were considered grave crimes against humanity, even though it was hard to find a human they hurt. And divorce was fairly scandalous even if both husband and wife wanted it and were childless.

But not all rules looked so absurd to Mill. In fact, he pointedly did not embrace a general right to leave a marriage.
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Couching his
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views on marital responsibility in almost unrecognizably abstract terms, he wrote: "When a person, either by express promise or by conduct, has encouraged another to rely upon his continuing to act in a certain way — to build expectations and calculations, and stake any part of his plan of life upon that supposition — a new series of moral obligations arises on his part towards that person, which may possibly be overruled, but cannot be ignored." And as for leaving a marriage after having children: "[I]f the relation between two con tracting parties ... as in the case of marriage, has even called third parties into existence, obligations arise on the part of both the con tracting parties toward those third persons, the fulfillment of which, or at all events the mode of fulfillment, must be greatly affected by the continuance or disruption of the relation between the original parties to the contract."
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In other words: it's bad to walk out on your family.

Mill's gripe in
On Liberty
is with Victorian moral gravity, not with moral gravity itself. There had been a time in the distant past, he wrote, when "the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess, and the social principle had a hard struggle with it... ." Back then, the difficulty was "to induce men of strong bodies of minds to pay obedience to any rules which required them to control their impulses." But, "society has now fairly got the better of indi viduality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences." It isn't clear that if Mill were around today he would make the same judgment.

Certainly Mill would attack residues of mindless Victorianism, such as homophobia. But he might well not favor the sort of hedonism that, in the late 1960s, was identified with the left (hallucinogenic drugs and sex) nor the sort that, in the 1980s, was identified with the right (nonhallucinogenic drugs and BMWs).

In fact, Mill considered hedonism fair game for moral judgment even when it hurt no one except the hedonist. We shouldn't punish people for ceding their long-term welfare to the animal within, Mill wrote; still, they can only expect that, since they are hazardous models for emulation, we may choose not to associate with them, and indeed may warn our friends against doing so. "A person who
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shows rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit — who cannot live within moderate means — who cannot restrain himself from hurtful indulgences — who pursues animal pleasures at the expense of those of feeling and intellect — must expect to be lowered in the opinion of others, and to have a less share of their favourable sentiments... ."
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Here John Stuart Mill, libertarian, meets Samuel Smiles, puritan. Though Mill ridiculed the idea of a "radically corrupt" human nature that must be suffocated in the name of spiritual progress, he also doubted that the higher sentiments, which yield morality, would flower without cultivation. "The truth is," he wrote, "that there is hardly a single point of excellence belonging to human character, which is not decidedly repugnant to the untutored feelings of human nature."
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Smiles himself couldn't have said it better; a not altogether rosy view of human nature underlay his emphasis in
Self-Help
on strenuous self-restraint. Indeed, notwithstanding the seemingly opposite drifts of Smiles's and Mill's 1859 books, the two men saw eye-to-eye quite broadly. Both (along with Darwin) embraced the left-of-center political reforms of the day, as well as their philosophical framework; Smiles was a big fan of utilitarianism, which was known in those days as "philosophical radicalism."

Mill's position on human nature accords well enough with modern Darwinism. Surely it would be an exaggeration to say that we are innately evil — that, as Mill's caricature of Calvinism would have it, we cannot be good without ceasing to be human. Indeed, the ingredients of morality, from empathy to guilt, have a deep basis in human nature. At the same time, these ingredients don't spontaneously coalesce into a mind that is truly benevolent; they were not designed for the greater good. Nor do these ingredients reliably promote our own happiness. Our happiness was never high among natural selection's priorities, and even if it had been, happiness wouldn't naturally arise in an environment so different from the context of our evolution.

There is thus a sense in which the new paradigm lends itself to morally conservative use. By showing that the "moral sentiments" aren't
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naturally deployed morally, it suggests that a strong moral code may be needed if people are to respect the greater good. Marvelous though it is how often the mutual pursuit of self-interest leads two or more human beings to find common benefit, much common benefit will go unfound unless we take morality seriously.

Does this sort of moral conservatism have a deep connection with political conservatism? Not really. True, political conservatives spend more time than their opposites championing moral austerity. But they also tend to think that the strong moral code we should all obey is the one they espouse ex cathedra — or, at least, the one that has the blessing of "tradition." A Darwinian, by contrast, looks at time-honored moral codes with deep ambivalence.

On the one hand, codes that have long endured must have a kind of compatibility with human nature, and probably do serve the interests of at least someone. But of whom? The molding of a moral code is a power struggle, and power in human societies is usually distributed complexly and unequally. Figuring out which agendas are served can be tricky.

The dissection of moral codes — determining who pays for them and who benefits, and the costs and benefits of alternative codes — is best done with the tools of the new paradigm. And it is best done with care. We should, in the end, dispense with those norms that don't make practical sense, but in the meanwhile we should recognize that norms often do make practical sense; they have grown out of an informal give and take that, though never purely democratic, is sometimes roughly pluralistic. What's more, this implicit negotiation probably took into account some (perhaps harsh) truths about human nature that may not at first be apparent. We should look at moral axioms the way a prospector looks at shiny rocks — with great respect and great suspicion, a healthy ambivalence pending further, and urgent, inspection.

The result of such appraisal will be too diverse to characterize with a simple label. It may be called conservative, so long as that refers to a tentative respect for tradition and not an undying love for it. Then again, the result of the analysis may be called liberal, so long as liberalism isn't equated with hedonism or with moral laissez-faire. If liberalism's moral philosophy is what the (in his day) "radical"
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John Stuart Mill laid out in
On Liberty
, then it includes a healthy appreciation of the dark side of human nature and the need for self-restraint, even for moral censure.

As for the effects of creeping biological determinism — which is to say, creeping determinism — they also defy ideological pigeonholing. On the one hand, by stressing that incarceration is always a moral tragedy, if a practical necessity, determinism accents the urgency of erasing the social conditions, such as poverty, that lead to punishable behavior. Darwin saw this. In his notes, after professing his determinism and recognizing the philosophical vacuousness of retribution, he wrote: "Believer in these views will pay great attention to Education." Animals, he noted, "do attack the weak & sickly as we do the wicked. — we ought to pity & assist & educate by putting contingencies in the way to aid motive power."
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Yet, Darwin wrote, if a wicked man is "incorrigably bad nothing will cure him. "Indeed. Though the new paradigm stresses the mental plasticity that liberals have long stressed, it also suggests — as does casual observation — that this plasticity is not infinite, and certainly not eternal; many mechanisms of mental development seem to have their essential effects during the first two or three decades of life. It's not yet clear how concrete various aspects of the character then become. (Can a man become a nearly incorrigible rapist, or at least incorrigible until his testosterone level drops, near middle age?) But the answers may at times be favored on the political right, by those who argue for locking 'em up and throwing away the key.