The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (51 page)

Darwin doesn't seem to have spent much time agonizing over this conflict between natural selection's "morality" and his own. If
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a parasitic wasp or a cat playing with mice embodies nature's values — well, so much the worse for nature's values. It is remarkable that a creative process devoted to selfishness could produce organisms which, having finally discerned this creator, reflect on this central value and reject it. More remarkable still, this happened in record time; the very first organism ever to see its creator did precisely that. Darwin's moral sentiments, designed ultimately to serve selfishness, renounced this criterion of design as soon as it became explicit.
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It's conceivable that Darwin's values, ironically, drew a certain strength from his pondering of natural selection. Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another: "My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death." And you are one of these organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity. It's enough to make you feel a little alienated — if not, indeed, out and out rebellious.

There is another sense in which Darwinian reflection works against selfishness, a sense Darwin himself could not fully appreciate; there is a sense in which the new Darwinian paradigm can lead one appreciably in the direction of Mill's and Darwin's and Jesus' values.

This is meant informally. I'm not claiming that any moral absolutes follow from Darwinism. Indeed, as we've seen, the very idea of moral absolutes has suffered a certain amount of damage at Darwin's hands. But I do believe that most people who clearly understand the new Darwinian paradigm and earnestly ponder it will be led toward greater compassion and concern for their fellow human beings. Or, at least toward the admission, in moments of detachment, that greater compassion and concern would seem to be in order.

The new paradigm strips self-absorption of its noble raiment. Selfishness, remember, seldom presents itself to us in naked form. Belonging as we do to a species (the species) whose members justify their actions morally, we are designed to think of ourselves as good and our behavior as defensible, even when these propositions are
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objectively dubious. The new paradigm, by exposing the biological machinery behind this illusion, makes the illusion harder to buy.

For example, nearly all of us say, and believe, that we don't dislike people without reason. If someone is an object of our wrath, or even of our callous indifference — if we can enjoy his suffering, or easily countenance it — it is because of something he did, we say; he deserves to be treated coldly.

Now, for the first time, we understand clearly how humans came to have this feeling that the deserts they dish out are just. And its origins don't inspire great moral confidence.

At the root of this feeling is the retributive impulse, one of the basic governors of reciprocal altruism. It evolved not for the good of the species, or the good of the nation, or even for the good of the tribe, but for the good of the individual. And, really, even this is misleading; the impulse's ultimate function is to get the individual's genetic information copied.

This doesn't necessarily mean the impulse of retribution is bad. But it does mean that some of the reasons we've been thinking of it as good are now open to question. In particular, the aura of reverence surrounding the impulse — the ethereal sense that retribution embodies some higher ethical truth — is harder to credit once the aura is seen to be a self-serving message from our genes, not a beneficent message from the heavens. Its origin is no more heavenly than that of hunger, hatred, lust, or any of the other things that exist by virtue of their past success in shoving genes through generations.

There is, actually, a defense of retribution that can be cast in moral terms — in utilitarian terms, or in terms of any other morality whose aim is to get people to behave considerately toward one another. Retribution helps solve the "cheater" problem that any moral system faces; people who are seen to take more than they give are thereafter punished, discouraged from always being a door holdee and never a door holder. Even though the retributive impulse wasn't designed for the good of the group, as Mill's moral system is, it can, and often does, raise the sum of social welfare. It keeps people mindful of the interests of others. However lowly its origins, it has come to serve a lofty purpose. This is something to be thankful for.

And it might be enough to exonerate the retributive impulse
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except for one fact: the grievances redressed by retribution aren't tallied with the sort of divine objectivity that Mill would prescribe. We don't try to punish only people who truly have cheated or mis treated us. Our moral accounting system is wantonly subjective, in formed by a deep bias toward the self.

And this general bias in calculating what we're owed is only one of several departures from clarity of moral judgment. We tend to find our rivals morally deficient, to find our allies worthy of compassion, to gear that compassion to their social status, to ignore the socially marginal altogether. Who could look at all this and then claim with a straight face that our various departures from brotherly love possess the sort of integrity we ascribe to them?

We are right to say that we never dislike people without a reason. But the reason, often, is that it is not in our interests to like them; liking them won't elevate our social status, aid our acquisition of material or sexual resources, help our kin, or do any of the other things that during evolution have made genes prolific. The feeling of "rightness" accompanying our dislike is just window dressing. Once you've seen that, the feeling's power may diminish.
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But wait a minute. Couldn't we similarly discount the sense of rightness accompanying compassion, sympathy, and love? After all, love, like hate, exists only by virtue of its past contribution to genetic proliferation. At the level of the gene, it is as crassly self-serving to love a sibling, an offspring, or a spouse as it is to hate an enemy. If
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the base origins of retribution are grounds for doubting it, why shouldn't love be doubted too?

The answer is that love should be doubted, but that it survives the doubt in pretty good shape. At least, it survives in good shape by the lights of a utilitarian, or indeed of anyone who considers happiness a moral good. Love, after all, makes us want to further the happiness of others; it makes us give up a little so that others (the loved ones) may have a lot. More than that: love actually makes this sacrifice feel good, thus magnifying total happiness all the more. Of course, sometimes love is hurtful. Witness the woman in Texas who plotted the murder of the mother of her daughter's rival for a cheer-leading slot. Her maternal love, though undeniably intense, doesn't go down the positive side of the moral ledger. And so too whenever love ends up doing more harm than good. But either way — whether the new result is good or bad — the moral evaluation of love is the same as the evaluation of retribution: we must first clear away the window dressing, the intuitive feeling of "rightness," and then soberly assess the effect on overall happiness.

Thus the service performed by the new paradigm isn't, strictly speaking, to reveal the baseness of our moral sentiments; that baseness, per se, counts neither for nor against them; the ultimate genetic selfishness underlying an impulse is morally neutral — grounds neither for embracing the impulse nor for condemning it. Rather, the paradigm is useful because it helps us see that the aura of rightness surrounding so many of our actions may be delusional; even when they feel right, they may do harm. And surely hatred, more often than love, does harm while feeling right. That is why I contend that the new paradigm will tend to lead the thinking person toward love and away from hate. It helps us judge each feeling on its merits; and on grounds of merit, love usually wins.

Of course, if you're not a utilitarian, sorting these issues out may be more complex. And although utilitarianism was Darwin's and Mill's solution to the moral challenge of modern science, it isn't everyone's. Nor is this chapter intended to make it everyone's (although, I admit, it's mine). The point, rather, is to show that a Darwinian world needn't be an amoral world. If you accept even the
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simple assertion that happiness is better than unhappiness (all other things being equal), you can go on to construct a full-fledged mo rality, with absolute laws and rights and all the rest. You can keep finding laudable some of the things we've always found laudable love, sacrifice, honesty. Only the most die-hard nihilist, who insists that there's nothing good about the happiness of human beings, could find the word moral meaningless in a post-Darwinian world.

Darwin was not the only Victorian evolutionist who took a dim view of evolution's "values." Another was his friend and advocate Thomas Huxley. In a lecture titled "Evolution and Ethics," which he delivered at Oxford University in 1893, Huxley took aim at the whole premise of social Darwinism, the idea of deriving values from evolution. Echoing the logic of Mill's essay "Nature," he said that "cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before." Indeed, a close look at evolution, with its massive toll in death and suffering, suggested to Huxley that it is rather at odds with what we call good. Let us understand, he said, "once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it." Peter Singer, one of the first philosophers to take the new Dar winism seriously, has noted, in this context, that "the more you know about your opponent, the better your chances of winning." And George Williams, who did so much to define the new paradigm, has embraced both Huxley's and Singer's points, and stressed how strongly the new paradigm underscores them. His revulsion at natural selection's values, he writes, is even greater than Huxley's, "based both on the more extreme contemporary view of natural selection as a process for maximizing selfishness, and on the longer list of vices now assignable to the enemy." And if the enemy is indeed "worse than Huxley thought, there is a more urgent need for biological understanding."
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Biological understanding to date suggests some basic rules for engaging the enemy. (My enumeration of them isn't meant to imply
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that I'm notably successful in following them.) A good starting point would be to generally discount moral indignation by 50 percent or so, mindful of its built-in bias, and to be similarly suspicious of moral indifference to suffering. We should be especially vigilant in certain situations. We seem, for example, prone to grow indignant about the behavior of distinct groups of people (nations, say) whose interests conflict with a distinct group to which we belong. We also tend to be inconsiderate of low-status people and exceedingly tolerant of high-status people; making life somewhat easier on the former at the expense of the latter is probably warranted, at least by utilitarian V lights (and the lights of other egalitarian moralities).

This isn't to say that utilitarianism is mindlessly egalitarian. A powerful person who uses his or her station humanely is a valuable social asset, and thus may merit special treatment, so long as the treatment facilitates such conduct. A famous example in the annals of utilitarian writing is the question of whether you would first save an archbishop or a chambermaid if the two were trapped in a burning building. The standard answer is that you should save the archbishop — even if the chambermaid is your mother — since he will do more good in the future.

Well, maybe so, if the high-status person is an archbishop (and even then, perhaps, it depends on the archbishop). But most high-status people aren't. And there is little evidence that high-status people have any particular proclivity toward conscience or sacrifice. Indeed, the new paradigm stresses that they have attained their status not for "the good of the group" but for themselves; they can be expected to use it accordingly, just as they can be expected to pretend otherwise. Status merits much less indulgence than it generally gets. It is only human nature to extend deference to Mother Teresa and Donald Trump; in the second case, this part of human nature is perhaps unfortunate.

Of course, these prescriptions assume a utilitarian premise — that the happiness of other people is the object of a moral system. What about the nihilists? What about people who insist that not even happiness is a good thing, or that only their happiness is a good thing, or that for some other reason the welfare of others shouldn't concern them? Well, for one thing, they probably go around acting as if it
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did. For the pretense of selflessness is about as much a part of human nature as is its frequent absence. We dress ourselves up in tony moral language, denying base motives and stressing our at least minimal consideration for the greater good; and we fiercely and self-righteously decry selfishness in others. It seems fair to ask that even people who don't buy the stuff about utilitarianism and brotherly love at least make one minor adjustment in light of the new Darwinism: be consistent; either start subjecting all that moral posturing to skeptical scrutiny or quit the posturing.

For people who choose the former, the simplest single source of guidance is to bear in mind that the feeling of moral "rightness" is something natural selection created so that people would employ it selfishly. Morality, you could almost say, was designed to be misused by its own definition. We've seen what may be the rudiments of self-serving moralizing in our close relatives the chimpanzees as they pursue their agendas with righteous indignation. Unlike them, we can distance ourselves from the tendency long enough to see it — long enough, indeed, to construct a whole moral philosophy that consists essentially of attacking it.