I The context for this talk
1. A naturalistic account of human nature, i.e. human beings, with all their mental, social and moral characteristics, are material beings, products of 'blind,' chance-infected Darwinian selection mechanisms, and subject to scientific explanation in essentially the same ways as the rest of nature, is antecedently probable from the perspective of Christian faith, i.e. Christian theists should expect the empirical evidence to point toward naturalism. Finding consonance between faith and science depends on this judgment about prior probabilities, not, as is widely supposed, on separating the genuine results of science form allegedly illegitimate naturalistic interpretations of them.
2 . A naturalistic account of human nature: human beings, with all their mental, moral and social capacities, are material beings and that they are subject to scientific explanation in essentially the same way as everything else in nature, thus the social, or human, sciences are not essentially different in their objects and methods from the natural sciences.
3 . The focus of this talk: one part of the project of giving the naturalistic account is the attempt to give a natural scientific explanation of human moral capacities. (This is probably most difficult and least plausible.)
Why this is significant: science unveils the moral machinery of the soul, showing our moral capacities to be an entirely natural feature of the human species. This appears remove one of the last sources of human uniqueness and dignity.
The plan for this talk: briefly review some of the science that offers to give the naturalistic explanation of morality and then to consider what it might imply for human freedom, the authority of morality, and Christian faith.
II Evolutionary moral psychology (EMP): the explanation of human moral capacities by means of evolutionary biology
1 . The difficulty faced by a Darwinian account of altruism:
The naturalist assumption: the likely place to look for the origin of morality is in altruistic feelings (Hume's sympathy).
In contrast to traditional, non-naturalistic views:
* morality derived from pure reason (Kant),
* making cognitive contact with a transcendent realm of values (Plato),
* responsiveness to divine commands (some Christian traditions).
Definition of altruism: the disposition to forego benefits or take risks for the benefit of someone else (irrespective of motive)
Why altruism is so important: acting morally is essentially a matter of forgoing benefits to oneself in order to avoid harm to others (if we explain that, we explain morality: if there's anything that approximates a supreme principle of morality it's a principle of reciprocity: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") Note that this is not to say that being moral in the normative sense, e.g. doing the right thing, can be defined as doing the altruistic thing, as though we had only to ascertain the altruistic action in order to know what's right in any given situation. The point is explanatory, not normative: moral characteristics of actions, persons and situations can matter only to those who are capable of at least minimally altruistic behavior.
If there is to be a natural scientific explanation of a general human capacity it will presumably be Darwinian.
However: altruism seems made to order for resisting explanation in terms of natural selection. Nevin Sesardic: "inveterately altruistic creatures have a pathetic tendency to die before reproducing their kind." (e.g. an individual attracts the attention of others to the food it finds, thus gets less food than non-altruistic conspecifics, lowers its chances of differential success in reproduction, so it's unlikely to send gene for that behavior into the next generation)
So it was long assumed that morality would never be captured in the Darwinian net.
Moving toward a solution: the discovery of kin-selection (1960's) it was recognized that there's an exception. Organisms bearing genes for altruism of a restricted sort, toward close relatives, are likely to propagate. J.B.S.Haldane: 'Would you give up your life for your brother? After a quick calculation on a napkin: No, but for two brothers or eight cousins.' (Turns out to be capable of explaining hitherto anomalous phenomena, e.g. social insects.)
Yet, there's no obvious route from kin-selection to altruism toward strangers, trans-kin altruism and thus no obvious route to morality.
This is highlighted by the incapacity of group selection to explain it. A group of altruists would be at a competitive advantage, but how can it get a foothold?
It would be good, from the standpoint of the group or species, if individuals became altruistic, but there's no point of view of the group or species, just the blind Darwinian mechanisms, lacking foresight and purpose.
Philip Hefner (The Human Factor) as an example of drawing the line here: trans-kin altruism not biologically explained but due to an experience of the sacred articulated in myth (culture).
2 . But the naturalists don't give up that easily. The situations analyzed by the mathematical theory of games are relevant to evolutionary theory. The classic prisoners' dilemma scenario: if Richard rats on Peter and Peter keeps quiet Richard goes free and Peter gets 10 years; if Peter rats on Richard and Peter keeps quiet Peter goes free and Richard gets 10 years; if both stay mum they both get one year; if they both rat, they both get five years.
Both know that it would be rational for them to agree not to confess. But neither can reasonably trust the other not to do what's best for himself individually, which is to confess. And each knows that the other cannot trust him not to confess. Here the individual pursuit of rational self-interest is paradoxically irrational. Because Peter and Richard each do the reasonable thing they both go to jail for 5 years. There's no rational route to cooperation.
Compare an arms race during the cold war: US & USSR both better off if both disarm but crazy for either to do it unilaterally.
The crucial point: - PD's like the situation of a non-altruistic species: it would be better for everyone if everyone became altruistic, but the individual who makes the first move in an altruistic direction is wiped out.
However, there's a less dismal report on iterated games: in Robert Axelrod's (1979) tournament of computer simulated strategies a simple tit-for-tat strategy won: begin by cooperating and on later rounds do whatever the other player did on the previous round. I.e. 'do something for the other guy unless you have reason to think he won't do something for you in return' Transposing to the context of evolutionary biology: genes that dispose the creatures that bear them to adopt this strategy are winners: copies of them appear in later generations and eventually dominate. Reciprocal altruism can evolve.
Once a population has some reciprocal altruists the way is clear to move on: from direct altruism, where individuals do good things for those they expect to do good things for them in return, to indirect altruism, where individuals do good to individuals not because they expect them to do good in return, but because others will see them do it and regard them as the sort of cooperative, helpful individual for whom they want to do good things. Individuals come to recognize the value of a good reputation, and devise subtle strategies to enhance it. A propensity toward indiscriminate altruism comes to dominate in the population. Individuals internalize first implicit, later explicit, social rules that regulate social interaction (specifications of what actions warrant what payback.) A moral social contract comes into existence. (see e.g. attempts to work out the intricacies in Richard Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems and Brian Skyrms, The Evolution of Cooperation)
There's an important objection to all this: isn't there all the difference in the world between the reciprocal altruism that evolutionary moral psychology purports to explain and the genuine altruism involved in human morality? Isn't so-called reciprocal altruism not really altruism but simply prudence, not disinterested morality but rational self-interest? Selfishness, in one sense of the term. But in reality human beings typically do all kinds of nice things for one another without any thought of possible payoffs and we refrain from doing all kinds of bad things we know we could get away with. At the limit, we might ask: did Mother Teresa go through life playing tit-for-tat, doing good things for others with cunning calculation of the payoff? Was she a reciprocal altruist?
Response: The point of EMP explanation is close to being the opposite: human beings are capable of reciprocal altruism, and thus living in the terms of the social contract, because they have a natural tendency to want to cooperate with and help others. We have evolved so that certain situations trigger certain emotional and cognitive responses, irrespective of what we believe about our self-interest, irrespective of what we believe about our chances of reproductive success. Once we have those feelings and dispositions we sometimes act on them - that's no surprise.
The moral social contract doesn't come about principally by way of the rational, conscious choice of individuals. The focus of explanation is the genotype, not the individual organism, not the species. Natural selection shapes the genotype over generations in ways that lead to a population of individuals having the perceptions and emotional responses that dispose them to act this way. This neo-Darwinian account explains why we have innate emotional and cognitive responses to the fortunes and misfortunes of others, a natural disposition to act for the benefit of the other (at least) until she demonstrates a lack of such a disposition, an expectation that others act likewise and a strong negative response to cheaters, and in general why we're inveterate and skilled makers and enforcers of the social contract.
Evolutionary moral psychology employs explanations of the sort that Richard Dawkins made famous with his phrase 'the selfish gene:' genes, acting with no regard for anything (as befits mindless molecules) have, courtesy of natural selection, acted in ways that bring about the existence of copies of themselves in later generations, and in so doing have brought forth persons who are capable of acting altruistically, sometimes without regard to rewards or punishments. Nothing in this is selfish in any pejorative sense. As Steven Pinker cautions, we should not 'confuse the real motives of the person with the metaphorical motives of the genes.'
3 . Collateral supporting research
* At the interface of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of the mind: Tooby and Cosmides' experiments with the Wason selection task (understanding the logic of the material conditional) indicate that we have dedicated mental modules for the detection of cheaters in social contract situations. "If Harry does this, then he gets that:" payoffs in rule-governed social interaction, invariant across complex, unfamiliar and unrealistic scenarios.
* Primate studies reveal that our cousins have a kind of reciprocal altruism: they express empathy, internalize social rules, cooperate to form coalitions, reward cooperators and punish cheaters, forego benefits for the sake of allies and even the group as a whole, etc. Such a proto-morality possibly in our non-human ancestors who putatively resemble these contemporary creatures. (E.g., literally "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine" in grooming behavior.)
III Does EMP's explanation of our moral capacities threaten our status as free moral agents?
Any scientific theory that purports to explain human behavior via evolutionary biology raises the specter of a genetic determinism that threatens our conception of ourselves as free moral agents. Moral action is the central arena of human freedom, and the theory says that our being moral actors is a natural biological function, like acquiring a language or learning to walk or growing teeth. Does this mean that our conception of ourselves as free moral agents is an illusion?
1 . EMP purports to have found, in our evolutionary history, the causes of our capacity for having moral sentiments (emotions, desires) and the causes of our capacity for making moral judgments (perceptions, beliefs)
* this no obvious threat to freedom because:
* on the one hand, we already know that we do what we do in light of what we believe and what we want (Why did Sally put out the cat? belief-desire psychology; the lack of relevant belief and desire means insanity not freedom) We explain actions by appeal to beliefs and desires (= reasons for action).
and on the other hand, we already know that we are caused to believe what we believe and want what we want: e.g. CTNS offers you $100 to believe there's a rhinoceros here. It's obvious - I think it is! - that you can't do it (vs. choosing to pretend, to act a certain way: 'Lo! a rhinoceros' while looking sincerely surprised.) The same goes for desires, emotional responses: avocado, accordion, brother-in-law
This is not to deny:
* current beliefs and desires have past choices among their causes
* nor choosing now might cause future beliefs (call rent-a-rhino) or desires (focus on brother-in-law's good points, spend less time with him)
* still the will is impotent so far as the direct control of belief and desire goes
Maybe some of us still find the idea of science coming up with the causes of our beliefs and desires unsettling. But this really wouldn't be a concern with freedom. It would belie a concern for a notion of radical autonomy, the idea that human beings are somehow self-constituting, not just choosing what to do, but their reasons for doing what they do.
* Common sense, as much as science, rejects this idea
* also rejected by Christianity and the other theistic religions: we are made, but not ultimately self-made, things. We're God's creatures. * However there is room for a less radical idea of autonomy, one that says a person is autonomous to the extent that more, rather than fewer, of her current beliefs and desires have her reflective, rational choices in their causal histories. That's an ideal we can endorse. And it's consistent with our beliefs and desires having causes.
So, why would this talk of science finding the causes of our moral beliefs and desires be a problem for freedom? The crucial question for freedom: not whether our beliefs and desires are caused. They are and that's no problem for freedom. The crucial question for freedom is whether our beliefs and desires cause us to act as we do. Does Sally believing and desiring as she does cause her to put out the cat? Given those beliefs and desires, did she have to put out the cat? Do our actions finally fit into the cause and effect framework of nature?
Most people seem to assume that if our beliefs and desires cause us to act as we do, then we do not act freely. Those who make this assumption would be right to see in EMP a threat to freedom if it said that our actions are caused and also endorsed the assumption that actions that are the effects of causes cannot be free actions ('incompatibilism.') But it seems that EMP has nothing to say directly relevant to either issue. Thus EMP poses no direct challenge to freedom.
However: to leave it at this would be misleading. Whether our actions are caused by what we believe and want (or anything else) is the central methodological question of the social or human sciences. If they are, then human action can be shown to be part and parcel of the causal order of nature, and it follows that the human sciences are continuous with the natural sciences. If our actions are not caused, then citing the reasons for which someone did something is not giving a casual explanation; the human sciences would be a fundamentally different enterprise than the natural sciences (interpretation vs causal explanation?) On this issue EMP is clearly in the naturalist camp; it's a component of the overall program of naturalizing the human sciences. In a general way it presupposes that human action is part of the causal structure of nature. If we are to accept it, we must explain how our actions can be free even though they are the effects of causes. (I have my go at this elsewhere in The Material Image, where I describe human actors as good material simulations of agent causes, but that's another story.) Those convinced this cannot be done have reason to reject the whole naturalizing program of which EMP is one part.
IV Does EMP's account of our moral capacities undermine the authority of our moral sentiments and judgments?
1. The more serious challenge is in the power of EMP to undermine the authority of our moral sentiments and judgments
by 'the authority of morality' I have two things in mind:
(i) moral realism, the idea that there really are moral facts, that our moral judgments are true or false in virtue of what's 'really there.' Thus when we say things like 'Capital punishment is unjust' or 'What Harry did to Sally was cruel' they're true or false because of real moral facts; they're not just fancy ways of expressing our feelings about certain actions or describing our societal conventions.
(ii) normativity, the idea that moral facts are normative: they have the power in themselves rationally to motivate us to act.
EMP says that at some general level we are genetically programmed to have the moral emotions and beliefs we have: creatures with a significantly different evolutionary history would not emote and believe that way; the moral facts would be invisible to them. Does this undermine our belief that there's a moral reality really there that gives us good reasons to act in certain ways and to avoid acting in other ways?
Once we see the moral machinery will morality lose its hold on us? From a scientifically-informed point of view, from which we see its humble, even ignoble origins, does morality no longer matter the way we think it should? (Dorothy in Oz pulls back the curtain and sees the inner workings...?)
3. The difficulty with realism lies in EMP's implicit and scientific naturalism's explicit physicalist presuppositions:
By physicalism I mean all this world's facts are one way or another physical facts, facts of the sort accessible to physics. The naturalist supposes that the map of this world made by physics doesn't leave out any territory that's really out there. (Here "physical" means "having to do with physics")
If there really are moral matters of fact, where are they? Surely they're not physical facts. (we won't detect Harry's cruelty in a cloud chamber or weigh the wickedness of capital punishment in the laboratory)
Nor are they reducible to physical facts: Moral judgments like "Genocide is evil" or "Harry is toying with Sally's affections" can't be translated into the physical vocabulary that lets us speak of particles, fields and forces. (If we've learned anything in philosophy in the 20th century it's that reductions in this sense just aren't in the cards, that we can't give strict definitions of most interesting things in any vocabulary, let alone in the austere and remote language of physics.)
What to do about the irreducibility of moral facts? We might say that this shows there really are no such facts, that when we make moral judgments we're really just expressing our attitudes toward things, that moral evaluation is not an enterprise that has a cognitive dimension...
But the other option is to say that the moral facts supervene on the physical world, that our moral emotions respond to, and our moral judgments are about, supervenient qualities.
Supervenience is hard to define simply but it's easy to give examples of it: Colors are good examples of supervenient qualities: from the 17th-century people knew that our color sensations are caused by the light-reflecting properties of the invisible microstructure of the surfaces of objects, and for a long time people thought this meant that we could reduce colors to the physical facts. But we can't translate an idea like 'This avocado is green' into something like 'This object's surface reflects light in the vicinity of 4860 A.' But it turns out that things can be green without reflecting light that way and that things can reflect light that way without being green. There's no plausible physical definition of green. (note: 'green' denotes a category of physical objects, those that cause us to have green sensations under paradigmatic viewing conditions; it doesn't denote green sensations: they can't be green!)
That is to say our color concepts cannot be smoothly mapped onto the physical world. Do They cut nature at its joints? Not much more than categories or concepts like 'Things that go bump in the night' or 'Things Bob Russell thinks about on Tuesdays.' Colors, like almost everything else interesting and important to us, are 'ontologically shallow.' To describe the world in terms of its colors is to speak from a human perspective, the perspective of a creature whose evolutionary history has given it the capacity to organize the world it experiences into eminently useful categories that are, from the point of view of physical reality as such, grab-bags. To speak of them is not to try to assume what Thomas Nagel calls 'the view from nowhere,' the hypothetical absolute perspective on the world, the one that describes it in the neutral language of physics. From that point of view, colors, like almost everything else we know and love, disappear.
We are not entitled to call colors real without qualification. What's true is what we might call a quasi-realist theory of colors. Their being there has something to do with us, nonetheless, they're real, but real in the way supervenient things are. We perceive what's green and identify misperceptions and distinguish between really being green and just appearing to be green. We make publicly true or false judgments about colors, and we sometimes reasonably argue about them. In the special sciences and in everyday life we invoke them in causal explanations. (e.g. the bees are avoiding those mutant flowers because they're the wrong color) Our perceptions of them guide our actions, and reasonably so, as we stop at stop signs, select bananas and avoid yellow snow.
They're real in the ways that matter to human thought, feeling and action. If their supervenient status tempts you to think otherwise, go paint your friend's BMW orange and try assuaging his anger by informing him that orange is not a real feature of the world.
If EMP is right, there's an analogous story about moral reality. The moral qualities supervene on the physical world. To describe the world in terms of its moral properties is to speak from a human perspective, the perspective of a creature whose evolutionary history has given it the capacity to organize the world it experiences into eminently useful categories that are, from the point of view of physical reality as such, grab-bags. All that's good or bad, right or wrong, kind or cruel, fair or unfair disappears when we imagine ourselves viewing the world from a neutral, non-human point of view. But no more than with colors should this lead us into thinking there is no moral reality. Moral reality is as real as chromatic reality.
Some dispute this, saying that morality is parochialin ways the other supervenient things are not (e.g. Bernard Williams). They say that while our color categories are rooted firmly in our biological nature moral categories serve the interests of a particular community, interests that may conflict with those of other communities. If this were true, a relativising effect would be inescapable: How seriously can we take our moral emotions and our moral beliefs once we realize that they are different for others, and that ours would have been different if we had been born at some other place or time? One's moral sense would be demoted; it would be like one's fashion sense: it's no big deal if you don't have one and, even if you do, you might have no particularly good reason to heed its promptings. Being a slave to morality might seem as out of proportion as being a slave to fashion. If morality is parochial in this way then we're forced into what Richard Rorty would call a kind of 'ironic distancing' of ourselves form our moral emotions and moral beliefs that results from too vivid an apprehension of the contingency of our moral vocabulary. At least it seems too vivid to me in virtue of putting at risk the pressing concerns of peace and justice, undermining the motivation to act with a view to the well-being of persons remote and different from ourselves.
In the face of this criticism we need to keep in mind that the tendency of EMP is strongly against seeing morality as parochial. Its evolutionary explanation supposes that our basic moral capacities were in place prior to the development of most human culture. It offers universal explanations and promotes belief in a common human moral nature. In contrast to earlier attempts to bring Darwinism to bear on moral matters, like Social Darwinism and sociobiology, the message of EMP is clearly universalizing and egalitarian. It points toward a human core of moral perceptions, emotions and judgments that precedes and underlies cultural differentiation.
Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss this kind of objection altogether. To whatever extent our moral concepts cannot be tied to that biologically grounded common human core, then ironic distancing is perhaps just what is appropriate. Values that are not, however indirectly, a manifestation of our evolved moral capacities ought not to be taken with full seriousness. With respect to them it would be good to follow the lead of postmodernist critics like John Caputo (e.g. in Against Ethics) who advocate suspicion toward the theoretical ethical metanarratives that can blind us to the moral qualities that are really there, like human suffering. In this light, the results of EMP appear not as tending to undermine the real authority of morality, but as giving us a principled way to distinguish what is truly authoritative from what is properly subject to skeptical, delegitimizing critique.
In general, I think, EMP can deal with the concern that it implies that there are after all no real moral facts. It can also deal with the concern that it undermines morality's normativity.
4. EMP raises doubts about the normativity of moral judgment
Recall that normativity refers to the fact that when we believe that something has a moral property we are thereby rationally motivated to act in a certain way (if we're normal, not sociopaths). Sally believes that it would be unfair to take Harry's pizza. Her making this moral judgment about the situation is in itself a reason for her not to take his pizza. She doesn't need another reason, like a desire to be nice to Harry or to avoid his retaliation, in order to have a reason not to take it. (This doesn't mean she might not have other reasons, like being really hungry, that trump this reason.)
Critics of the idea that there are real moral facts think this is just weird: why should a matter of "objective fact," a fact about how things are in the world beyond Sally's mind, have this "inner connection" to her will? They think it's more reasonable that our moral judgments have this built-in power to motivate us because moral judgments are really nothing but expressions of our attitudes, not cognitive reports on what's in the world. If Sally's judging that something is unfair is simply an expression of her negative emotional response to it then it's no surprise that she is motivated to act to avoid it.
But EMP removes the mystery without resorting to a non-cognitive account of moral response: it implies that from the (metaphorical) 'design perspective' of natural selection the supervenient moral qualities have a purpose. This (non-metaphorical, see Ruth Garrett Millikan's Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories) 'natural function' is precisely to move human beings to want to act in a certain way. The moral qualities came into existence along with human emotional responses, just as colors came into existence along with human perceptual mechanisms. Colors exist for us to see them; moral qualities exist to elicit emotion and appropriate action. (if this sounds preposterous see Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained.)
The traditional naturalistic outlook on ethics did, I think, push us in directions that weaken the authority of morality, but I think the explanations of our moral capacities provided by contemporary science push us in the opposite direction. The idea that there are real moral qualities which we perceive, respond to emotionally, and which motivate us to rational action, is entirely at home with EMP.
V Theological considerations
1. And yet: all this may seem hopelessly secular, making no reference to morality's intimate connection to the religious dimension of human life.
From the religious point of view EMP seems deflationary: religion traditionally portrays human moral agency as response to experience of a sacred, transcendent reality. EMP describes it as a Darwinian adaptation to social life, with no grounding beyond the historical contingencies and purposeless mechanisms of human evolution. Our moral perceptions do not open a window onto the 'moral nature of the universe' It leaves morality an ultimately human thing. Is it too shallow a basis for genuine moral agency as viewed form a religious point of view?
2. I suggest that a Christian confession sensitive to the particularities of the Judeo-Christian historical narrative about the character, intentions and actions of God reverses this negative evaluation, one that delivers us from the motivation to try to make human morality bear more than it can, and from the tendency to reduce the Christian faith to a program for the moral improvement of humanity:
* God created this universe with the intention of it bringing forth a community of personal creatures capable of living in relation with a God they know, love and trust
* it is likely that God, carrying out this intention, would create a universe strikingly similar to the one described by contemporary scientific naturalism: one without divine control over or foreknowledge of the precise nature of the material personal creatures that come to exist
* our capacity for moral response has an evolutionary history but once we have our moral concepts, we can apply them in new ways, e.g. to a God revealed in the historical and experiential witness of Israel and the Christian Church. E.g. in the Hebrew scriptures God calls Himself good, appealing to the historical fact of the Exodus. This God enters into that human scheme of concepts, in part endorsing it but also challenging its claim to ultimacy: it, like everything else, has whatever value it has relative to God's purposes, to the economy of God's relation to human creatures.
* EMP's robustly naturalistic account of our moral capacities is antecedently probable from the perspective of Christian faith. It's the sort of thing we're entitled to expect is true.