The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (52 page)

Darwin, on grounds such as this, believed that the human species is a moral one — that, in fact, we are the only moral animal. "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them," he wrote, "We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity."
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In this sense, yes, we are moral; we have, at least, the technical capacity for leading a truly examined life; we have self-awareness, memory, foresight, and judgment. But the last several decades of evolutionary thought lead one to emphasize the word technical. Chronically subjecting ourselves to a true and bracing moral scrutiny, and adjusting our behavior accordingly, is not something we are designed for. We are potentially moral animals — which is more than any other animal can say — but we aren't naturally moral animals. To be moral animals, we must realize how thoroughly we aren't.
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We acquire many notions unconsciously, without abstracting them & reasoning on them (as justice ...)

In the mid-1970s, the book
Sociobiology
gave the new Darwinian paradigm its first burst of publicity. It also gave its author, E. O. Wilson, his first burst of public abuse. He was called a racist, a sexist, a capitilist imperialist. His book was characterized as a right-wing plot, a blueprint for the continued oppression of the oppressed.

It may seem odd that such fears would persist many decades after the unmasking of the "naturalistic fallacy" and the crumbling of social Darwmism's intellectual foundation. But the word natural has more than one application to moral questions. If a man cheating on his wife, or exploiting the weak, excuses himself by saying it's "only natural," he doesn't necessarily mean it's divinely ordained. He may just mean that the impulse runs so deep as to be practically irresistible; what he's doing may not be good, but he can't much help it.

For years, the "sociobiology debate" subsisted largely on this one issue. Darwinians were accused of "genetic determinism" or
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"biological determinism" — which, it was said, left no room for "free will." They then accused their accusers of confusion; Darwinism, rightly understood, posed no threat to lofty political and moral ideals.

It is true that the accusations were often confused (and that the charges directed specifically against Wilson were gratuitous). But it's also true that some fears on the left have a firm grounding even after the confusion is dispelled. The question of moral responsibility in the view of evolutionary psychology is a large one, and dicey. In fact, it is large enough, properly understood, to alarm the right as well as the left. There are deep and momentous issues lying out there, going largely unaddressed.
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As it happens, Charles Darwin addressed the deepest of them more than a century ago in thoroughly acute and humane fashion. But he didn't tell the world. As aware as any modern Darwinian ol how explosive a truly honest analysis of moral responsibility might be, he never published his thoughts. They have remained in obscurity, in the darkest recesses of his private writings — a grab bag of papers that he labeled, with typically emphatic modesty, "Old & USELESS notes about the moral sense & some metaphysical points." Now, with the biological basis of behavior coming rapidly to light, is .1 good time to excavate Darwin's treasure.

The occasion for Darwin's analysis is a conflict between ideal and real. Brotherly love is great in theory. In practice, however, problems arise. Even if you could somehow convince lots of people to pursue brotherly love — reality problem number one — you would run into reality problem number two: brotherly love tends to make society fall apart.

After all, true brotherly love is unconditional compassion; it har bors utter doubt about the validity of harming anyone, however repugnant their behavior. And in a society where no one gets punished for anything, repugnant behavior will grow.

This paradox lurks in the background of utilitarianism, especially John Stuart Mill's rendering of it. Mill may say that a good utilitar ian is someone who loves unconditionally, but until the day when
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everyone does love unconditionally, the realization of utilitarianism's goal — maximum overall happiness — will entail highly conditional love. Those who haven't seen the light must be encouraged to act nice. Murder must be punished, altruism praised, and so on. People must be held accountable.
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Remarkably, Mill didn't confront this tension anywhere in his basic text on the subject, Utilitarianism. A few dozen pages after embracing the universal love taught by Jesus, he endorsed the principle "of giving to each what they deserve, that is, good for good as well as evil for evil."
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This is an irreconcilable difference — between saying "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" and saying, "Do unto others as they have done to you"; between saying "Love your enemies" or "Turn the other cheek" and saying "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
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Maybe Mill can be excused for taking a charitable view of the sense of justice, the governor of reciprocal altruism.
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As we've noted, the machinery of reciprocal altruism is, for a utilitarian, a real evolutionary godsend; by dishing out a steady stream of tits for tats, it provides the sticks and carrots that keep people in touch with the needs of others. Given that human nature didn't evolve to elevate the community's welfare, it does a none too shabby job of it. Lots of non-zero-sum fruits get reaped.

Still, thanking the retributive impulse for services rendered isn't the same as thanking it for light shed. Whatever its practical value, there is no reason to believe that the inherent sense of justice — the sense that people deserve punishment, that their suffering is a good thing in and of itself — reflects a higher truth. The new Darwinian paradigm, indeed, reveals the sense of rightness surrounding retribution to be mere genetic expediency, and to be warped accordingly. This unmasking was part of the basis for my suggestion in the previous chapter that the new paradigm will tend to steer people toward compassion.

There is a second powerful reason that the idea of retributive punishment looks dubious from the standpoint of modern Darwinisn. Evolutionary psychology professes to be the surest path to a complete explanation of human behavior, good and bad, and of the
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underlying psychological states: love, hate, greed, and so on. And to know all is to forgive all. Once you see the forces that govern behavior, it's harder to blame the behaver.

This has nothing to do with a supposedly right-wing doctrine of "genetic determinism." To begin with, the question of moral responsibility has no exclusive ideological character. Though some on the far right might be thrilled to hear that businessmen can't help but exploit laborers, they would be less happy to hear that criminals can't help but commit crimes. And neither Bible-thumpers in the "moral majority" nor feminists especially want to hear male philanderers say they're slaves to their hormones.

More to the point: the phrase "genetic determinism" exudes ignorance as to what the new Darwinism is about. As we've seen, everyone (including Darwin) is a victim not of genes, but of genes and environment together: knobs and tunings.

Then again, a victim is a victim. A stereo has no more control over its tunings than over the knobs it was born with; whatever importance you attach to the two factors, there's no sense in which the stereo is to blame for its music. In other words: though the fears of "genetic determinism" that were current in the 1970s were unfounded, the fears of "determinism" weren't. Yet that's also the good news — more reason to doubt impulses of blame and censure and extend our compassion beyond its natural confines of family and friends. Then again, that's also the bad news: this philosophically valid endeavor has some pernicious real-world effects. The situation, in short, is a mess.

Of course, you can argue with the proposition that all we arc is knobs and tunings, genes and environment. You can insist that there's something ... something more. But if you try to visualize the form this something would take, or articulate it clearly, you'll find the task impossible, for any force that is not in the genes or the environment is outside of physical reality as we perceive it. It's beyond scientific discourse.

This doesn't mean it doesn't exist, of course. Science may not tell the whole story. But just about everyone on both sides of the sociobiology debate in the 1970s professed to be scientifically minded. That's what was so ironic about all the anthropologists and
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psychologists who complained of sociobiology's "genetic determinism." The then-reigning philosophy of the social sciences was "cultural determinism" (as anthropologists put it) or "environmental determinism" (as psychologists put it). And when it comes to free will, and thus to blame and credit, determinism is determinism is determinism. As Richard Dawkins has noted, "Whatever view one takes on the question of determinism, the insertion of the word 'genetic' is not going to make any difference."
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Darwin saw all of this. He didn't know about genes, but he certainly knew about the concept of heredity, and he was a scientific materialist; he didn't think any nonphysical forces were needed to explain human behavior or anything else in the natural world.
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He saw that all behavior must therefore boil down to heredity and environment. "[O]ne doubts existence of free will," he wrote in his notebooks, because "every action determined by heredetary [sic] constitution, example of others or teaching of others."
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What's more, Darwin saw how these forces have their combined effect: by determining a person's physical "organization," which in turn determines thought and feeling and behavior. "My wish to improve my temper, what does it arise from but organization," he asked in his notebook. "That organization may have been affected by circumstances & education, & by choice which at that time organization gave me to will."

Here Darwin is making a point that even today often goes ungrasped: all influences on human behavior, environmental as well as hereditary, are mediated biologically. Whatever combination of things has given your brain the exact physical organization it has at this moment (including your genes, your early environment, and your assimilation of the first half of this sentence), that physical organization is what determines how you will respond to the second half of this sentence. So, even though the term genetic determinism is confused, the term biological determinism isn't — or, at least, it wouldn't be if people would realize that it's not a mere synonym for genetic determinism. Then again, if they realized that, they'd realize they could drop the word "biological" without losing anything. The
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sense in which E. O. Wilson is a "biological determinist" is the sense in which B. F. Skinner was a "biological determinist" — which is to say, he was a determinist.
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The sense in which evolutionary psychology is "biologically determinist" is the sense in which all psychology is "biologically determinist."

As for why, if all behavior is determined, we "feel" as if we're making free choices, Darwin had a strikingly twentieth-century explanation: our conscious mind isn't privy to all the motivating forces. "The general delusion about free will obvious. — because man has power of action, & he can seldom analyse his motives (originally mostly INSTINCTIVE, & therefore now great effort of reason to discover them: this is important explanation) he thinks they have none.'

Darwin doesn't seem to have suspected what the new Darwinism suggests: that some of our motives are hidden from us not incidentally but by design, so that we can credibly act as if they aren't what they are; that, more generally, the "delusion about free will" may be an adaptation. Still, he got the basic idea: free will is an illusion, brought to us by evolution. All the things we are commonly blamed or praised for — ranging from murder to theft to Darwin's eminently Victorian politeness — are the result not of choices made by some immaterial "I" but of physical necessity. "This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything," Darwin wrote in his notes. "[N]or ought one to blame others."
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Here Darwin has unearthed the most humane scientific insight of all — and, at the same time, one of the most dangerous.

Darwin saw the danger in the forgiveness brought by understand ing; he saw that determinism, by eroding blame, threatens society's moral fiber. But he wasn't too worried about this doctrine spreading. However compelling the logic seemed to a thoughtful scientific ma terialist, most people aren't thoughtful scientific materialists. "This view will not do harm, because no one can be really fully convinced of its truth, except man who has thought very much, & he will know his happiness lays in doing good & being perfect, & therefore will not be tempted, from knowing every thing he does is independent of himself to do harm."
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In other words: So long as this knowledge
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is confined to a few English gentlemen, and doesn't infect the masses, everything will be all right.

The masses are now getting infected. What Darwin didn't realize is that the technology of science would eventually make the case for determinism vivid. He saw that "thought, however unintelligible it may be, seems as much function of organ, as bile of liver," but he probably didn't dream that we would start pinpointing specific connections between the organ and the thoughts.
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