The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (50 page)

Mill wrote "Nature" before the
Origin
came out (though he published it after), and didn't consider the possibility that suffering in a price paid for organic creation. Still, the question, even then, would remain: If God were benevolent and truly omnipotent, why couldn't he invent a painless creative process? Darwin himself, at any rate, saw the voluminous pain in the world as working against common religious beliefs. In 1860, the year after the
Origin
appeared and long before Mill's "Nature" did, he wrote in a letter to Asa Gray: "I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to
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me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."

Darwin and Mill not only saw the problem in much the same terms; they also aw the solution in much the same terms. Both believed that, in a universe which for all we know is godless, one reasonable place to find moral guidance is utilitarianism. Mill, of course, did more than subscribe to utilitarianism. He was its premier publicist. In 1861, two years after
On Liberty
and the
Origin
appeared, he published a series of articles in Fraser's magazine that are now known by the single title Utilitarianism and have become the doctrine's classic defense.

The idea of utilitarianism is simple: the fundamental guidelines for moral discourse are pleasure and pain. Things can be called good to the extent that they raise the amount of happiness in the world and bad to the extent that they raise the amount of suffering. The purpose of a moral code is to maximize the world's total happiness. Darwin quibbled with this formulation. He distinguished between "the general good or welfare of the community," and "the general happiness," and embraced the former, but then conceded that since "happiness is an essential part of the general good, the greatest-happiness principle indirectly serves as a nearly safe standard of right and wrong."
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He was, for practical purposes, a utilitarian.
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And he was a great admirer of Mill, both for his moral philosophy and for his political liberalism.

One virtue of Mill's utilitarianism in a post-Darwinian world is its minimalism. If it is harder now to find a grounding for assertions about basic moral values, then, presumably, the fewer and the simpler the foundational assertions, the better. Utilitarianism's foundation consists largely of the simple assertion that happiness, all other things being equal, is better than unhappiness. Who could argue with that?

You'd be surprised. Some people believe that even this seemingly
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modest moral claim is an unwarranted inference of "ought" from "is" — that is, from the real-world fact that people do like happiness. G. E. Moore himself argued as much (though later philosophers have traced Moore's complaint to a misunderstanding of Mill).

It's true that Mill sometimes worded his argument in a way that invited such criticism.
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But he never professed to have quite "proven" the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain; he believed "first principles" beyond proof. His argument followed more modest and pragmatic lines. One of them consisted of saying, basically: Let's face it, we all subscribe at least partly to utilitarianism; some of us just don't use the term.

First of all, we all conduct our own lives as if happiness were the object of the game. (Even people who practice severe self-denial typically do so in the name of future happiness, either here or in the hereafter.) And once each of us admits that, yes, we find our own happiness in some basic sense good, something that is not rightly trampled upon without reason, it becomes hard to deny everyone else's identical claim without sounding a bit presumptuous. Indeed, the point is widely conceded: everyone — except sociopaths, whom the rest of us consider poor moral beacons — agrees that the question of how their acts affect the happiness of others is an important part of moral evaluation. You may believe in any number of absolute rights (freedom, say) or obligations (never cheat). You may consider these things divinely ordained, or unerringly intuited. You may believe that they always override — "trump," as some philosophers say — solely utilitarian arguments. But you don't believe the utilitarian arguments are irrelevant; you implicitly agree that, in the absence of your trump card, they would win.

What's more, when pressed, you probably have a tendency to justify your trump cards in utilitarian terms. You might argue, for example, that even if the occasional isolated act of cheating somehow inrcased overall welfare in the short run, cheating on a regular basis would erode integrity, so that moral chaos would eventually ensue, to everyone's detriment. Or, similarly, once freedom is denied even to a small group of people, no one will feel secure. This sort of underlying logic — closet utilitarianism — often emerges when the logic behind basic "rights" is teased out. "The greatest-happiness
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principle," Mill wrote, "has had a large share in forming the moral doctrines even of those who most scornfully reject its authority. Nor is there any school of thought which refuses to admit that the influence of actions on happiness is a most material and even predominant consideration in many of the details of morals, however unwilling to acknowledge it as the fundamental principle of morality, and the source of moral obligation."
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The above arguments for "trump cards" illustrate a scantly appreciated fact: utilitarianism can be the basis for absolute rights and obligations. A utilitarian can fiercely defend "inviolable" values, so long as their violation would plausibly lead to big problems in the long run. Such a utilitarian is a "rule" utilitarian, as Mill seems to have been, rather than an "act" utilitarian.
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Such a person doesn't ask: What is the effect on overall human happiness of my doing such and such today? Instead the question is: What would be the effect if people always did such and such in comparable circumstances, as a rule?

Belief in the goodness of happiness and the badness of suffering isn't just a basic part of moral discourse that we all share. Increasingly it seems to be the only basic part that we all share. Thereafter, fragmentation ensues, as different people pursue different divinely imparted or seemingly self-evident truths. So if a moral code is indeed a code for the entire community, then the utilitarian mandate — happiness is good, suffering bad — seems to be the most practical, if not the only practical, basis for moral discourse. It is the common denominator for discussion, the only premise everyone stands on. It's just about all we have left.

Of course, you could dig up a few people who wouldn't go even that far; perhaps citing the naturalistic fallacy, they would insist that there's nothing good about happiness. (My own view is that the goodness of happiness is, in fact, a moral value that remains unscathed by the naturalistic fallacy. Conveniently, space doesn't permit the dissertation-length defense that this claim requires.) Some other people might say that although happiness is a fine thing, they don't think there should be any such thing as a consensually accepted moral code. That's their prerogative. They are free to opt out of moral discourse, and out of any obligations, and benefits, that the resulting code might
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bring. But if you believe that the idea of a public moral code makes sense, and you want it to be broadly accepted, then the utilitarian premise would seem to be a logical starting point.

Still, the question is a good one: Why should we have a moral code? Even accepting the basis of utilitarianism — the goodness of happiness — you might ask: Why should any of us worry about the happiness of others? Why not let everyone worry about their own happiness — which seems, anyway, to be the one thing they can be more or less counted on to do?

Perhaps the best answer to this question is a sheerly practical one: thanks to our old friend non-zero-sumness, everyone's happiness can, in principle, go up if everyone treats everyone else nicely. You refrain from cheating or mistreating me, I refrain from cheating or mistreating you; we're both better off than we would be in a world without morality. For in such a world the mutual mistreatment would roughly cancel itself out anyway (assuming neither of us is a vastly more proficient villain than the other). And, meanwhile, we would each incur the added cost of fear and vigilance.

To put the point another way: life is full of cases where a slight expenditure on one person's part can yield a larger saving on another person's part. For example: holding open a door for the person walking behind you. A society in which everyone holds the door open for people behind them is a society in which everyone is better off (assuming none of us has an odd tendency to walk through doors in front of people). If you can create this sort of system of mutual consideration — a moral system — it's worth the trouble from everyone's point of view.

In this light, the argument for a utilitarian morality can be put concisely: widely practiced utilitarianism promises to make everyone better off; and so far as we can tell, that's what everyone wants.

Mill followed the logic of non-zero-sumness (without using the term, or even being very explicit about the idea) to its logical conclusion. He wanted to maximize overall happiness; and the way to maximize it is for everyone to be thoroughly self-sacrificing. You shouldn't hold doors open for people only if you can do so quite easily and thereby save them lots of trouble. You should hold doors open whenever the amount of trouble you save them is even
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infinitesimally greater than the trouble you take. You should, in short, go through life considering the welfare of everyone else exactly as important as your own welfare.

This is a radical doctrine. People who preach it have been known to get crucified. Mill wrote: "In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality."
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It is surprising to see such a warm, mushy idea — brotherly love — grow out of a word as cold and clinical as "utilitarianism." But it shouldn't be. Brotherly love is implicit in the standard formulations of utilitarianism — maximum total happiness, the greatest good for the greatest number. In other words: everyone's happiness counts equally; you are not privileged, and you shouldn't act as if you are. This is the second, less conspicuous foundational assumption of Mill's argument. From the beginning he is asserting not only that happiness is good, but that no one person's happiness is special.

It is hard to imagine an assertion that more directly assaults the values implicit in nature. If there's one thing natural selection "wants" us to believe, it's that our individual happiness is special. This is the basic gyroscope it has built into us; by pursuing goals that promise to make us happy, we will maximize the proliferation of our genes (or, at least, would have stood a good chance of doing that in the ancestral environment). Leave aside for the moment that pursuing goals which promise to make us happy, in the long run, often doesn't; leave aside that natural selection doesn't really "care" about our happiness in the end and will readily countenance our suffering if that will get our genes into the next generation. For now the point is that the basic mechanism by which our genes control us is the deep, often unspoken (even unthought), conviction that our happiness is special. We are designed not to worry about anyone else's happiness, except in the sort of cases where such worrying has, during evolution, benefited our genes.

And it isn't just us. Self-absorption is the hallmark of life on this planet. Organisms are things that act as if their welfare were more
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important than the welfare of all other organisms (except, again, when other organisms can help spread their genes). It may sound innocuous for Mill to say that your happiness is a legitimate goal only so long as it doesn't interfere with the happiness of others, but this is an evolutionary heresy. Your happiness is designed to interfere with the happiness of others; the very reason it exists is to inspire selfish preoccupation with it.

Long before Darwin knew about natural selection, long before he could have thought about its "values," his own contrary values were well formed. The ethics embraced by Mill were a Darwin family tradition. Grandfather Erasmus had written about the "greatest happiness principle." And on both sides of the family universal compassion had long been an ideal. In 1788 Darwin's maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, made hundreds of antislavery medallions showing a black man in chains under the words "AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?" Darwin sustained the tradition, feeling deeply the anguish of black men who, he observed bitterly, "are ranked by the polished savages in England as hardly their breth-ren, even in God's eyes."

This sort of simple and deep compassion is what Darwin's utilitarianism ultimately rested on. To be sure, he did, like Mill, pen a rationale for his ethics (a rationale that, oddly, flirts more openly than Mill's with the naturalistic fallacy).
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But in the end, Darwin was simply a man who empathized boundlessly; and in the end, boundless empathy is what utilitarianism is.

Once Darwin fathomed natural selection, he surely saw how deeply his ethics were at odds with the values it implies. The insidious lethality of a parasitic wasp, the cruelty of a cat playing with a mouse — these are, after all, just the tip of the iceberg. To ponder natural selection is to be staggered by the amount of suffering and death that can be the price for a single, slight advance in organic design. And it is to realize, moreover, that the purpose of this "advance" — longer, sharper canine teeth in male chimpanzees, say — is often to make other animals suffer or die more surely. Organic design thrives on pain, and pain thrives on organic design.