The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (23 page)

The closest thing to a generic Darwinian view of how moral codes arise is this: people tend to pass the sorts of moral judgments that help move their genes into the next generation (or, at least, the kinds of judgments that would have furthered that cause in the environment of our evolution). Thus a moral code is an informal compromise among competing spheres of genetic self-interest, each acting to mold the code to its own ends, using any levers at its disposal.
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Consider the sexual double standard. The most obvious Darwinian explanation is that men were designed, on the one hand, to be sexually loose themselves yet, on the other, to relegate sexually loose women ("whores") to low moral status — even, remarkably, as those same men encourage those same women to be sexually loose. Thus, to the extent that men shape the moral code, it may include a double standard. Yet on closer inspection, this quintessentially male judgment is seen to draw natural support from other circles: the parents of young, pretty girls, who encourage their daughters to save their favors for Mr. Right (that is, to remain attractive targets for male parental investment), and who tell their daughters it's "wrong" to do otherwise; the daughters themselves, who, while saving their virtue for a high bidder, self-servingly and moralistically disparage the competing, low-rent alternatives; happily married women who consider an atmosphere of promiscuity a clear and present danger to their marriage (that is, to continued high investment in their offspring). There is a virtual genetic conspiracy to depict sexually loose women as evil. Meanwhile, there is relative tolerance for male philandering, and not only because some males (especially attractive or rich ones) may themselves like the idea. Wives, too, by finding a husband's
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desertion more shattering than his mere infidelity, reinforce the double standard.

If you buy this way of looking at moral codes, you won't expect them to serve the interests of society at large. They emerge from an informal political process that presumably gives extra weight to powerful people; they are quite unlikely to represent everyone's interests equally (though more likely to do so, perhaps, in a society with free speech and economic equality). And there's definitely no reason to assume that existing moral codes reflect some higher truth apprehended via divine inspiration or detached philosophical inquiry.

Indeed, Darwinism can help highlight the contrast between the moral codes we have and the sort that a detached philosopher might arrive at. For example: though the double standard's harsh treatment of female promiscuity may be a natural by-product of human nature, an ethical philosopher might well argue that sexual license is more often morally dubious in the case of the man. Consider an unmarried man and an unmarried woman on their first date. The man is more likely than the woman to exaggerate emotional commitment (consciously or unconsciously) and obtain sex under these false pretenses. And, if he does so, his warmth is then more likely than hers to fade. This is far, far from a hard and fast rule; human behavior is very complex, situations and individuals vary greatly, and members of both sexes get emotionally chewed up in all kinds of ways. Still, as a gross generalization, it is probably fair to say that single men cause more pain to partners of short duration through dishonesty than single women do. So long as women don't sleep with already mated men, their sexual looseness typically harms others obliquely and diffusely, if at all. Thus, if you believe, as most people seem to, that it is immoral to cause others pain by implicitly or explicitly misleading them, you might be more inclined to condemn the sexual looseness of men than of women.

That, at any rate, would be my inclination. If in this chapter I seemed to suggest that women practice sexual restraint, the advice wasn't meant to carry any overtone of obligation. It was self-help, not moral philosophy.

This may sound paradoxical: one can, from a Darwinian vantage
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point, advise sexual restraint for women, roughly echoing traditional moral exhortation, while at the same time decrying the moral censure of women who don't take the advice. But you might as well get used to the paradox, for it's part of a more general Darwinian slant on morality.

On the one hand, a Darwinian may treat existing morality with suspicion. On the other hand, traditional morality often embodies a certain utilitarian wisdom. After all, the pursuit of genetic interest sometimes, though not always, coincides with the pursuit of happiness. Those mothers who urge their daughters to "save themselves" may at one level be counseling ruthless genetic self-interest, but they are, on another level, concerned for the long-term happiness of their daughters. So too for the daughters who follow mother's advice, believing it will help them become lastingly married and have children: yes, the reason they want childen is because their genes "want" them to want children; nonetheless, the fact remains that they do want children, and may well, in fact, have more fulfilling lives if they get them. Though there's nothing inherently good about genetic self-interest, there's nothing inherently wrong with it either. When it does conduce to happiness (which it won't always), and doesn't gravely hurt anyone else, why fight it?

For the Darwinian inclined toward moral philosophy, then, the object of the game is to examine traditional morality under the assumption that it is laden with practical, life-enhancing wisdom, yet is also laced with self-serving and philosophically indefensible pronouncements about the absolute "immorality" of this or that. Mothers may be wise to counsel restraint in their daughters — and, for that matter, wise to condemn competing girls who aren't so restrained. But the claim that these condemnations have moral force may be just a bit of genetically orchestrated sophistry.

Extricating the wisdom from the sophistry will be the great and hard task of moral philosophers in the decades to come, assuming that more than a few of them ever get around to appreciating the new paradigm. It is a task, in any event, to which we'll return toward the end of this book, after the origins of the most fundamental moral impulses have become apparent.
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One common reaction to discussions of morality in light of the new Darwinism is: Aren't we getting a little ahead of the game here? Evolutionary psychology is just getting started. It has produced some theories with powerful support (an innate difference in male and female jealousy); some with fair-to-middling support (the Madonna-whore dichotomy); and many more that are sheer, if plausible, speculation (the "mate ejection" module). Is this body of theories really capable of supporting sweeping pronouncements about Victorian, or any other, morality?

Philip Kitcher, a philosopher who in the 1980s established himself as sociobiology's preeminent critic, has carried this doubt a step further. He believes Darwinians should tread carefully not just in making moral or political extensions from their inchoate science (extensions most of them avoid anyway, thanks to the scorching a few received in the 1970s), but in making the science in the first place. After all, even if they don't cross the line between science and values, someone else will; theories about human nature will inevitably be used to support this or that doctrine of morality or social policy. And if the theories turn out to be wrong, they may have done a lot of damage in the meanwhile. Social science, Kitcher notes, is different from physics or chemistry. If we embrace "an incorrect view of the origins of a distant galaxy," then "the mistake will not prove tragic. By contrast, if we are wrong about the bases of human social behavior, if we abandon the goal of a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of society because we accept faulty hypotheses about ourselves and our evolutionary history, then the consequences of a scientific mistake may be grave indeed." Thus, "When scientific claims bear on matters of social policy, the standards of evidence and of self-criticism must be extremely high."
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There are two problems here. First, "self-criticism" per se is not an essential part of science. Criticism from colleagues — a kind of collective self-criticism — is. It is what keeps the "standards of evidence" high. And this collective self-criticism can't even begin until a hypothesis is put forward. Presumably Kitcher isn't suggesting that we short-circuit this algorithm of scientific progress by refraining
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from the proposal of weak hypotheses; the way weak hypotheses get strong is by being proposed and then mercilessly scrutinized. And if Kitcher is suggesting only that we label speculative hypotheses as such, no one has any objection to that. Indeed, thanks to people like Kitcher (and this isn't meant sarcastically), many Darwinians are now masters of careful qualification.

Which brings us to the second problem with Kitcher's argument: the suggestion that Darwinian social scientists, but not social scientists generally, should proceed with great caution. The unspoken assumption is that incorrect Darwinian theories about behavior will tend to be more pernicious than incorrect non-Darwinian theories about behavior. But why should that be so? One long-standard and utterly non-Darwinian doctrine of psychology — that there are no important innate mental differences between men and women bearing on courtship and sex — seems to have caused a fair amount of suffering over the past few decades. And it depended on the lowest imaginable "standards of evidence" — no real evidence whatsoever, not to mention the blatant and arrogant disregard of folk wisdom in every culture on the planet. For some reason, though, Kitcher isn't upset about this; he seems to think that theories involving genes can have bad effects but theories not involving genes can't.

A more reliable generalization would seem to be that incorrect theories are more likely than correct theories to have bad effects. And if, as is often the case, we don't know for sure which theories are right and which are wrong, our best bet is to go with the ones that seem most likely to be right. The premise of this book is that evolutionary psychology, in spite of its youth, is now far and away the most likely source of theories about the human mind that will turn out to be right — and that, indeed, many of its specific theories already have fairly firm grounding.

Not all threats to the honest exploration of human nature come from the enemies of Darwinism. Within the new paradigm, truth sometimes gets sugarcoated. It is often tempting, for example, to downplay differences between men and women. Regarding the more polygamous nature of men, politically sensitive Darwinian social scientists may say things like: "Remember, these are only statistical generalizations, and any one person may diverge greatly from the
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norm for his or her sex." Well, yes, but few of those divergences are very close to the other sex's norm (and half of the divergences, remember, are farther than average from the other sex's norm). Or: "Remember, behavior is influenced by the local environment and conscious choice. Men don't have to philander." True — and crucially important. But many of our impulses are, by design, very strong, so any force that is to stifle them may have to be pretty harsh. It is grossly misleading to talk as if self-restraint is as easy as punching a channel on the remote control.

It's dangerous too. George Williams, perhaps the closest thing there is to a single founding father of the new paradigm, may be going too far when he says that natural selection is "evil." After all, it created everything benign in human nature as well as everything destructive. But surely it's true that the roots of all evil can be seen in natural selection, and are expressed (along with much that is good) in human nature. The enemy of justice and decency does indeed lie in our genes. If in this book I seem to depart from the public-relations strategy practiced by some Darwinians, and stress the bad in human nature more than the good, it is because I think we are more in danger of underestimating the enemy than overestimating it.
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We all like to think of ourselves as selfless. And on occasion we are. But we are pigs compared to the social insects. Bees die for their fellow bees, disemboweling themselves upon stinging an intruder. Some ants, also in defense of the colony, detonate themselves. Other ants spend their lives as doors, keeping out insects that lack security clearance, or as food sacks, hanging bloated from the ceiling in case of scarcity.
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These pieces of furniture have no offspring.

Darwin spent more than a decade wondering how natural selection could have produced whole castes of ants that create no descendants. Meanwhile, he was creating plenty of descendants himself. The problem of insect sterility had gotten his attention by the time his
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fourth child, Henrietta, was born in late 1843, and he still had not solved it by the birth of his tenth and last child, Charles, in 1856. For all those years, he kept the theory of natural selection secret, and one reason may be the seemingly blatant contradiction of it by ants. The paradox seemed "insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory."
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Darwin probably didn't suspect, as he pondered the insect puzzle, that the solution to it could explain, as well, the texture of his growing family's everyday life: why his children showed affection for one another, why they sometimes fought; why he felt compelled to teach them the virtues of kindness, why they sometimes resisted; even why he and Emma grieved more deeply the loss of one of their children than another. Understanding self-sacrifice among insects would unlock the dynamics of family life among mammals, including people.