The Evolution of Virtue 1

 What follows is the beginning of a paper that I will present at the end of the month at the meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association in New Orleans. 

Morality is inescapable.  The existential space that defines the human being extends along a number of dimensions.  Easiest to describe are the three dimensions of space.  Every human being exists at some point in space and can move to another point only by moving through all the points in between.  Time is often described as a fourth dimension, though it is radically different from the spatial dimensions.  We move through time in one direction, leaving behind a past we more or less remember and moving into a future that is more or less predictable but nonetheless invisible.  These dimensions fix us in the world of physical objects. 

We are fixed in the world of organic objects by a number of dimensions including flourishing and decay (the end point of the latter being death), pain and pleasure, wretchedness and happiness.  Along with the physical dimensions described above, the organic dimensions comprise the map wherewith we act.  The moral dimension, extending between what is right and what is wrong, is another fundamental extension of that map.  To be sure, someone can act with disregard for morality just as he can act with a disregard for the future.  To do either, however, amounts to a self-imposed blindness.  Ignoring morality doesn’t make for escape from the moral dimension any more than ignoring the future makes for an escape from time. 

It might be tempting to suppose that these existential dimensions are merely elements of human psychology and not descriptive of the larger Kosmos in which human beings exist.  They are, however, our only access to any truth about that larger Kosmos.  All science and philosophy presuppose that the microcosm is a more or less accurate reflection of the macrocosm.  The world is intelligible precisely to the degree that the reflection is more rather than less. 

Human beings are moral animals.  We readily pass judgment on others as they deal with us and on ourselves as we deal with others.  These judgments are enabled by a wide pallet of moral emotions: anger, gratitude, guilt, and shame, among others.  This capacity for judgment is not merely self-interested.  Our moral emotions interest us in dramas that we have no part in, as is evident from our inexhaustible taste for storytelling.  When we come to understand how our moral sense is rooted in our biological history, we come to understand ourselves.  Likewise, as we come to understand ourselves, we better understand organic world out of which we emerged. 

This essay will attempt to build a dialogue between evolutionary accounts of moral emotions and the theory of virtue presented by Plato and Aristotle.  I will show that the two are not only compatible but that each sheds light upon and deepens the other. 

Nagel's Neoaristotelian Teleology

In Chapter 4, Section 6 of Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel adds a fourth kind of explanation for the existence of organisms, consciousness, reason, and value.  The first three I have considered in previous posts: chance, non-intentional biasing, and intentional biasing. 

Nagel considers all three to be inadequate.  He accepts the apparent consensus that the appearance of the original, proto-biological self-replicators cannot be explained by random processes.  He accepts Robert White’s argument that non-intentional biasing is not indicated because, while it can explain non-random patterns, it cannot explain a bias “towards the marvelous.”  This is to say that non-intentional biasing is no more likely to produce creatures or traits of creatures that look designed than mere chance.  Finally, he rejects intentional biasing in large part because he is an atheist. 

So what is left?  Nagel proposes a naturalistic teleology

that is distinct from all three of the other candidate explanations: chance, creationism, and directionless physical law. 

What does a “naturalistic teleology” mean?  When we try to understand any natural event, we look for ways in which the initial state of the system limits subsequent states.  A beaker of water can be frozen or heated to a boil, but not transformed into gold.  Lava under the earth can produce a volcano, but not Godzilla. 

Given any initial state of a system, some subsequent states are more likely than others.  It is rare, but not unprecedented, for mammalian evolution to move toward the development of wings and flight.  Some mammals returned to the sea and began to look a lot like fish; however, they did not develop gills.  This is what Daniel Dennett meant when he talked about “design space”.  At any point in the history of life on earth, a range of future organisms is possible.  As environments change, evolution will explore the possibilities in design space.  A population of lizards may change color to blend in better with new local vegetation, but the lizards will not acquire the power of genuine invisibility. 

Nagel proposes that the laws of physics underlying the appearance of life are biased towards “the formation of more complex systems”. 

Teleological laws would assign higher probability to steps on paths in state space that have a higher velocity toward certain outcomes. 

In other words, there is something in inorganic matter that is biased toward the development of something like human beings.  It smoothed the path toward the appearance of the Ur-replicators, and then toward the development of genuine organisms.  It has operated in evolution up to the appearance of philosophers. 

All I would add at this point is that Nagel has become an Aristotelian, if not a Platonist.  The Socratics clearly believed in an embedded teleology.  It is not, or not so much, that some God intervenes to govern the course of organic development.  It is that mind is already present in the forces that mold living things. 

That is a shockingly bold proposal.  How it can be maintained and/or squared with a scientific scheme seems to me to be a challenging question.  I don’t know if we can make sense of such an embedded teleology without a divine intention biasing the cosmos; however, if we forget about that question for a moment, this is a plausible picture of the history of life on earth.