Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Getting Over the Either Or



Several years ago in my Human Nature & Human Values course, a student indignantly objected to the whole idea I was presenting.  He told that he and several of his friends once jumped into a lake to save a poor fellow from drowning.  We didn’t do it, he insisted, because we were trying to survive or make babies!  We didn’t even think about what we were doing.  We did it because we cared about the poor bastard in the water. 
This turned out to be one of those great teachable moments.  I drew a chart on the board that started like this:
phenomenon
Dropping a hot object
Proximate cause
Pain
Function
Avoiding physical injury
Secondary Evolutionary Explanation
Personal Survival
Primary Evolutionary Explanation
Personal Reproductive Fitness

Dropping a hot object is something we do without thinking about it.  It is a reflexive reaction to pain.  Now suppose that someone said that physical injury had nothing to do with it.  I didn’t drop it because it might have injured me; I dropped it because it hurt.  That would surely be a mistake, not because the latter part is wrong but because both explanations are correct.  Yes, pain is a motive.  However, it is also obviously functional.  It encourages us to avoid things that might result in physical injury. 
One might then wonder how we came to be such creatures as are hurt by things that injure us.  The secondary evolutionary explanation explains how the functional device is maintained by its direct functional advantage, and the primary evolutionary explanation is the ultimate explanation of the action.  The same thing is true of my student’s wonderful story. 
phenomenon
Dropping a hot object
Saving a stranger from drowning
Proximate cause
Pain
Concern for another’s welfare
Function
Avoiding physical injury
Reciprocity
Secondary Evolutionary Explanation
Personal Survival
Forming cooperative networks for the sake of mutual survival
Ultimate Evolutionary Explanation
Reproductive Fitness
Reproductive Fitness

The concern for a stranger’s welfare was the genuine reason that my friend jumped into the water.  Like pain, this concern is obviously functional.  All of us are better off if each of us is prepared to jump to another’s aid.  It’s a case of both, not either or.  My secondary evolutional explanation here points to something like group selection, but I will ignore that for the moment.  Suffice it to say that the evolutionary explanations do not in any way contradict the common sense explanations that my student preferred. 
Yesterday, as I was laying out Lee Dugatkin’s four routes to cooperation, another student suggested that human beings, unlike animals, think about what they are doing.  Surely we cooperate because we can see that it makes sense, and not (or not solely) because of evolved instincts.  I emphatically agreed that deliberation is an important factor in human cooperation; however, I insisted, our deliberation is guided by social emotions.  We would reach different conclusions as a result of deliberation if we had a different set of emotions.  Here is another chart:
phenomenon
Ostracizing a cheater from the group
Proximate cause
Righteous Indignation
Function
Encouraging honest cooperation within the group
Secondary Evolutionary Explanation
Maintaining cooperative networks for the sake of mutual survival
Primary Evolutionary Explanation
Reproductive Fitness

When confronted with a cheater, a group of homo sapiens may think long and hard about what do.  If they decide to kick the dead weight out of the group that may be because they have calculated that he isn’t worth his weight.  Or they may simply be so mad that they don’t care about shrinking the group.  Either way, their indignation is a powerful motive and the human capacity for that emotion is clearly functional. 
The hardest part of teaching evolutionary social theory to undergraduates is getting them to see that common sense interpretations of social phenomena are not opposed to, let alone exclusive of, functional and evolutionary explanations. 

5 comments:

  1. I think part of the reason that this idea is hard for some of us to accept is that it often goes hand in hand with the idea that everything we do, we do for selfish motives. Those who want to be virtuous don't want to be told that the real reason they have given a homeless man food is that doing so makes them feel good. They want to believe in selflessness.

    It's not that students (or former students in my case) are resistant to common sense interpretations. It's that we're resistant to views that make human actions look uglier and less noble than we'd like to think we are.

    Perhaps part of the problem is that when science-minded people present this idea, they often include one side, but not the other. When you're presented only with the selfish side, instead of being told right off the bat that both reasons can be true, it sort of sets up the either/or argument. It also reeks of reductionism.

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  2. Who said anything about selfishness? In chart 2 above, the motive for saving a stranger from drowning is explicitly the concern for the stranger's welfare, not one's own. Nor is it true, I think, to say that we act in a certain way because doing so makes us feel good. That would require calculation where often we active instinctively.

    In the case of my student's example he acted out of genuine concern. It may well have made him feel good about himself later, but that is quite proper. A virtuous person feels good when she does virtuous things. A person who does them grudgingly and regretfully is not a person of virtue. I see nothing ugly in any of this.

    I certainly agree with the last paragraph. If someone argues that the evolutionary function is the only genuine level of interpretation, that is a greedy and altogether implausible example of reductionism. But the reverse is just as often true: any attempt to present both sides is perceived as a denial of the genuineness of the virtues.

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  3. I see now that you are making a slightly different argument than I am used to running into. The first time I ran into a similar argument, it came from Randians who believed to some degree in psychological egoism. They argued that every action was motivated by selfish concerns and ultimately the desire to reproduce. Your argument is slightly different, s inceyou draw a distinction between conscious choices and instinctive reactions and allow for both motivations. It still isn't as pretty as thinking that someone might act purely out of a desire to be kind, without any reproductive motivation, but I suppose that the fact that I don't think it's as pretty doesn't make it untrue.

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  4. Miranda: what is ugly about "reproductive motivations"? Aristotle describe the human desire to reproduce as the pursuit of a kind of immortality by leaving behind another such as oneself. Is a concern for future generations less beautiful than compassion for the people we see before us? Someone who is consciously concerned both for the present generations and for future generations strikes me as a more morally complete person than someone who is purely acting out of the former.

    We need to be careful, however, to distinguish our motivations from their biological functions. A man's love for his children (to speak of what I know) is somewhere between 99 and 100% pure in its focus on these particular offspring. He need not have any notion of reproductive biology and, if he does have some notion of that, it is likely to be abstract. Does it really detract from the beauty of that to recognize that the love has a biological function, that without it there might be no future generations? I hold the opposite to be true. At any rate, understanding the biological function of a passion no more discredits the passion than understanding the science of optics discredits a great painting.

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  5. ps. The doctrines of egoism and hedonism are adolescent. The idea that all human actions are aimed at selfish pleasure has everything but reality to recommend it. If I gain some satisfaction from the sacrifices I make for my loved ones or my principles, that is because I care about someone or something other than myself. Egoism and hedonism get it ass backwards.

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