A number of the comments stand on their own as contribution—sometimes complementary, sometimes contrastive—to the continuing debate over the bearing of evolution on morality. Several also point to what my own brief piece left out, or passed over too quickly. While I cannot respond at length, I hope that a few comments on my part might help the discussion along.

First of all, Frans de Waal is certainly right in observing how very distant Huxley’s perspective was from Darwin’s. And we agree that the idea that morality is a mere veneer laid over a selfish core finds no real support in Darwinian theory. I thought it might nonetheless be worthwhile discussing the “Veneer Theory”—what I called “moral camouflage”—in my New York Times on-line piece because this idea continues to exercise a strange appeal for many who take themselves to be thinking in Darwinian terms. Perhaps more understandably, the Veneer Theory is also widespread among those who reject Darwinian thinking—‘understandably’ because, if this were the Darwinian view, then they would have good reason to reject it. The comments that piece generated, as well as a few suggestions found in “On the Human”, attest to the continuing vitality of this mistaken idea. A myth, it nonetheless appears to die hard.

Like de Waal, I believe that empathy has good evolutionary credentials and that our capacity for empathy plays a central role in making morality possible. Mitchell Aboulafia notes, however, that it is a great deal easier to identify capacities that help make morality possible than it is to give a bona fide explanation of the emergence of morality among us naked apes. For that, much greater attention to cultural processes is required—not simply in the abstract, or at such a high level of generality that real history is left behind. Philosophers of biology used to contrast “how possibly” explanations with “actual process” explanations in evolutionary theory, and in truth it is very difficult in the case of cultural evolution to give the kind of process-rich genealogical reconstruction possible in physical evolution. So we should not kid ourselves about this, or think that we are being more scientific than we are. Concepts do not leave good fossils and archaeological evidence from early human evolution is scanty and highly inferential. Looking at living hunter-gatherer communities can be very instructive, as can models of cultural evolution, as Bill Benzon observes, or mathematical models, as Bruce Morlan adds. But at some point we have to recognize that the genealogical question will always rest to some degree indeterminate, and that giving it a determinate answer is not essential to answering the question, “What should we make of actual human moral practices?”

Moreover, in answering this question, as Sally Haslanger points out, it is important to avoid a normative double standard with respect to realms of human inquiry and activity. If creatures of natural selection have found ways to think and regulate their conduct that can promote greater objectivity and rational justification in the sciences, then we should ask with equal seriousness whether we can see such processes at work in moral thought and practice. She is quite right that I had hoped shift some of the burden of proof onto the skeptics.

She also warns that relativism is too easily invoked at this point in the discussion. (Here, too, as I suspect she’d agree, we often find a double standard: those who invoke the historical and social variation in moral codes against moral objectivity often contrast morality with “hard science”, but seldom note the equally large historical and social variation in views of the cosmos or how to gain evidence.) Ted Strom argues that, even if we think of human societies and moral practices as part of the way in which our species has solved the problem of survival, this still will result in different norms prevailing at different times and in different environments. He believes we can study this diversity objectively, but also that this diversity calls into question whether any one set of morals has “greater absolute validity”.

This he finds a troubling implication, as would I. But I do not think the implication holds. For example, as Marc Hersch explains, different norms of mutual aid and property tend to prevail in nomadic vs. settled populations. But if we think of moral requirements as embodying a kind of generalized respect for others and concern for their well-being, then we can see both normative systems as having—in some measure—a recognizably moral character, whether this plays out through more communal or individualistic social relations. Hersch himself contrasts the “empathic altruism” of nomads with the “relations of property, wealth, and individual self-interest” of settled populations, but is also notable that settled human societies have given us ideals of impartial (rather than familial or “tribal”) justice, charity toward strangers, and human equality “before God”. Indeed, the role of religion in the cultural evolution of morality deserves, I think, much greater attention than I gave it in my original piece.

Bob Fancher notes another problem with overly-simple evolutionary accounts. After all, “natural selection did not select for the values of the urbane, educated, twenty-first century cognoscenti”, who remain “a small subset of humans” in any event. It is obviously true, as he points out, that natural selection left humans with capacities “general enough” to make the adoption of such values possible—after all, we do find such people, and what is actual is surely possible! But this seems to make appeals to evolution rather uninformative if we want to think carefully about what to make of morality. Hersch, likewise, thinks I have things “upside-down” in terms of trying to understand the sources of morality—my speculations about (what is sometimes called) “evolutionary psychology” are too “reductionist”, as he puts it, to capture the social-historical processes that are at the heart of the explanation. And Bruce Morlan’s interesting suggestion is, if I understand him, that we should look to art as the truest form of unself-interested moral endeavor—and in such creativity, certainly, we are “rising above the mathematics of the algorithms that drive our existence”.

My own sense is that evolution is important in trying to understand how our brain and body are built, and that humans managed to reach morality not by “rising above” our organic nature, but by realizing various potentials within it. These include our capacities for cultural innovation, normative self-governance, reciprocal altruism, and generalized empathy. The prevalence and influence of the Veneer Theory—among friends and foes of Darwinian science, and its tendency to resurface even in very erudite discussions—is enough, I think, to show that there is still a purpose to be served by asking which “proximate psychological mechanisms” might have emerged under selection pressure, and how they might give us insight into the workings of human morality.

In talking of charity I wasn’t so much interested in charity as such, but as an illustration of a technique of abstract definition whereby new concepts can be introduced into the nervous system that are outside the repertoire of our direct biological endowment. I’ve used that technique, for example, to examine the overall semantic structure of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 and to ground the concept of lying in a pattern of sensorimotor activity.

And it’s not clear to me what art gets you. Yes, you’ve defined it in such a way that it is outside “the mathematics of the algorithms that drive our existence.” That leaves an empirical question: does such an activity exist at all? Last year in this venue, for example, Joseph Carroll argued that art is biologically adaptive. Over the last year or two I’ve been developing a line of thought that builds on Steven Pinker’s game theoretic analysis of indirect speech in the final chapter of The Stuff of Thought (Viking 2007). My suggestion is that canonical works of art (literature, music, painting, dance, whatever) play the role of the “focal point” in population-wide coordination games about norms and values. When asked to give an interpretation of these works, people may very well disagree, but that’s not the point. The point is that they’re disagreeing about a canonical work, which implies that they’re agreeing that those are the important issues, and that that embodiment of them is a good one. Michael Chwe has taken a similar line in Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (Princeton 2001).

The question, it seems to me, is not whether or not we have “risen above” the algorithms, but rather whether or not we realize versions of those algorithms that are beyond our “raw” biological capacity. If so, how?

As a mathematician I have also seen the game theory solutions of the prisoner’s dilemma and have seen the absolute dominance of the tit-for-tat, eye for an eye strategy in maximizing long run outcomes. The selfish gene presents a behind the scenes explanation for what we might otherwise have liked to have claimed as a sign of our humanity, the altruistic impulse, effectively removing the claim of altruism as a marker of our humanity.

As a decision scientist I have learned that rationality is behavior that is consistent with our personal utility functions. While others may not share the same values as we, when we are allowed to make decisions freely, then it is tautological that we will do so in a utility maximizing manner because our actions define the utility function that we maximize.

Finally, as an atheist, I cannot turn to a higher power to claim any sort of special place for my own species.

In spite of all this reducto ad nihilism I still find that we may be most human when we step outside the mathematics of these forcing algorithms to do what is suboptimal as measured by those algorithms. While charity does represent one possible such behavior, it suffers from the intrusion of the economic man concept, which is that all behavior is mathematically rational under the right utility function. Charity provides a sense of self-worth that has value in a way that is distinguished from simple selfish behavior only by the measurement metric used to measure that benefit.

So, I would suggest that art might be the uniquely moral human activity. To make this claim requires that we define true art as that activity upon which we expend energy without the expectation of gain (in the genetic, game theoretic or utility argument sense). Filtering out art done for reproductive success (say, decorating one’s home), art done for competitive advantage (social camouflage) and art done for self-gratification (economic man) could leave us with the best indicator of whether we have risen above the mathematics of our material existence. But then we have to ask why such a rising is laudable, desirable or even necessary. Acting so as to please one or more gods provides only the briefest of escapes from the bonds of rationality and it does so at the price of that very rationality. Perhaps it is such “rising above the mathematics of the algorithms that drive our existence” that is a possible indicator of our humanity.

Veneer Theory reflects a confusion between the process of evolution (which is harsh and merciless) and its possible outcomes, which can be quite social, even prosocial. Empathy definitely falls under its many products given that we now even have evidence for this capacity in rodents.

This is what Ernst Mayr (1997: 250) had to say about the unfortunate Huxleyan legacy: “Huxley, who believed in final causes, rejected natural selection and did not represent genuine Darwinian thought in any way … It is unfortunate, considering how confused Huxley was, that his essay [on ethics] is often referred to even today as if it were authoritative.”

It should be pointed out, though, that in Huxley’s time there was already fierce opposition to his ideas, some of which came from Russian biologists, such as Petr Kropotkin. Given the harsh climate of Siberia, Russian scientists traditionally were far more impressed by the battle of animals against the elements than against each other, resulting in an emphasis on cooperation and solidarity that contrasted with Huxley’s dog-eat-dog perspective. Kropotkin’s (1902) “Mutual Aid” was an elaborate attack on Huxley, but written with great deference for Darwin.

At any rate, I just wanted to clarify that Darwinian thought is quite different from the card-board version advocated by some popularizers, and that has reached many nonbiologists as the Darwinian view. Darwin himself had no trouble placing morality in an evolutionary context. Since primate behavior contains many elements that we, humans, have built into our moral systems, it is hard to disagree with the idea of a fundamental continuity between primate sociality and human morality, even though differences remain.

Readings:
Desmond, A. 1994. Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest. New York: Perseus.
de Waal, F. B. M. 2006. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Point: The “selfish-gene” proposition misleads. Selfishness is an property of intention but the crux of the Darwinian model is that what comes to be expressed as the physical and behavioral characteristics of an organism does so solely because it works in here and now conditions of a given time, place, and circumstance.

Point: Genetic evolution, occurs intergenerationally, through a process of random genetic variation in which some few accidents work better in some time and place, but in any given time and place the whole creature, as a behaving entity is not determined genetically but is rather, behaviorally bounded, more or less, by its genetic characteristics. Within these bounds, behavior varies infinitely.

Point: The evolutionary emergence of what we call human beings occurred over a period of 50,000 to 100,000 years. The principal characteristic selected for among these creatures was the capacity for predictive-collaborative action through symbolic behavior. This behavioral constellation is predicated on empathy and entails the emergence and thereafter, cultural development of theoretic intention.

Point: Conditions favored the emergence of the empathic-predictive naked ape because the overall conditions favored a nomadic-tribal creature in which the social group operated as an altruistic whole. The nomadic condition was favored because the oppositional characteristic of symbolic behavior (we-they) had a limited carrying capacity. For this reason, the success of the human species was marked less by an increase in numbers and more by an increase in range. Once the carrying capacity of a tribal unit (we) approached the breaking point, a new tribe was spun off and moved into another range. See patterns and rapidity of pre-historic human migrations.

Point: In relatively small nomadic tribes, theoretic intentionality was bound up in a mythic “we”. The “we” was not, on the whole, involved in mortal combat with other tribal “we’s” because others moved into new ranges. Mortal combat between one “we” and other “we’s” would have caused the human evolutionary experiment to collapse had it not been for this nomadic disposition that eschewed the permanence of property and location in favor of evermore tribal ranges.

Point: Only 5000 years ago, give or take, the products of the theoretic-intentional mind enabled technological innovations that permitted some tribes to stop wandering through agricultural practices. This recent development was within the bounds of the human genome, but produced a behavioral-cultural shift from relations of empathic altruism to relations of property, wealth, and individual self-interest.

Point: From a genetic standpoint, the propensity of human beings for theoretic-intentionality is very well suited to the tribal-nomadic relations that gave rise to the faculties of human consciousness. From a genetic standpoint, the relatively recent development of non-nomadic, property-centered culture has produced a new self-created situation in which the workability of the evolved genetic faculties of the theoretic-intentional creature are being tested by a new here and now post-tribal technological and economic circumstance.

Point: Endemic and deadly intra-species conflict among members of the human species is a product, not of evolution, but of cultural changes wrought by the “successes” of human technological innovation in which the nomadic lifestyle came to be supplanted by a sedentary property-centered existence.

What “worked” during the bulk of the period during which consciousness evolved, may not be “working” now. Ask any dinosaur. Five thousand years is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to tests of what works.

In commenting on this impasse at my blog, New Savanna, I suggested a different metaphor, that of a game, such as chess. In this metaphor biology provides the game board, the pieces, and the basic moves. But culture provides the tactics and strategy that govern long-term game play. This metaphor gives considerably more scope to culture while at the same time recognizing an irreducible primacy to biology: you can’t play the game without the board and the pieces. I suggest that this metaphor can accommodate a real human morality that is, nonetheless, grounded in biologically given behavioral equipment.

The trick, of course, is to move from metaphor to model. Some years ago John Bowlby (1969) reconstructed psychoanalytic object relations theory using primate ethology and some simple systems concepts. The result was the now familiar account of infant attachment. In 1982 Peter Marris published an essay, “Attachment and Society,” in which he discussed utopian religious communities and suggested (p. 199):

So those who try to live without exclusive ties of relationship, like the people of Oneida or the members of a monastic order, have to create a surrogate that will fulfill for them the same structural need for some ordering of priorities of concern. Characteristically, they find it in a symbolic relationship with the same emotional connotations as a personal pond; they are brides of Christ, children of a supernatural father.

That is to say, the attachment system is being “repurposed” by having attachment focus on symbolic beings rather than real ones. Much of ritual and story-telling, I submit, seems to serve such a purpose.

In 1973 the late David Hays, a computational linguist, proposed that abstract concepts are grounded in concrete realities through stories. He chose ‘charity’ as his prime example: ‘Charity is when someone does something nice for someone else without thought of reward.’ The definiens is a general pattern of relationships that defines charity, making charity an abstract pattern. Any particular story that has that pattern would be an instance of charity. Some years later Hays (1981) went on to ground his cognitive system in sensorimotor schemas, thus bringing it in range of neurobiological reality.

I suggest, then, that human morality consists in abstract patterns over behavioral sequences executed by our innate biological endowment. The mechanisms of abstraction are fragile and so abstract patterns subject to degradation and collapse. They are nonetheless real, and not to be discounted. They are what allow us to, among other things, conduct such discussions, but which I mean to indicate not simply the abstruse subject matter under consideration, but the ethical behavior that sustains the intellectual community though veridical reporting of observations and results and proper citation of precedent and sources.

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1: Attachment. New York, Basic Books.

Hays, D. G. (1973). “The Meaning of a Term is a Function of the Theory in Which It Occurs.” SIGLASH Newsletter 6: 8-11.

Hays, D. G. (1981). Cognitive Structures. New Haven, HRAF Press.

Marris, P. (1982). Attachment and Society. The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior. C. M. Parkes and J. Stevenson-Hinde. New York, Basic Books: 185-201.