The Evolution of Virtue 6

Former student and friend Miranda has been putting me to the task in a long running exchange appended to this post.  I will address two general questions she poses at various points in this and a subsequent post. 

First, if virtuous behavior is selected for, then why does vicious behavior persist?  Why are some of us still tempted to do immoral things and why are some persons so inclined toward immorality that they become tyrants? 

I reply that selection works by favoring traits that are reproductively fit within a distinct environmental context.  The usual term for this is a niche.  Several distinct sets of organisms may be found at different altitudes on a mountain because temperature, moisture, etc., form distinct niches.  Niches may be geographically separated or they may overlap and more than one may be found inside another.  An environmental niche will usually include other organisms in such roles as predators and prey, mates and partners.  Thus, in adapting to a niche one species will often create a niche for another, as a large animal, in making a home in the forest, makes a home for his load of parasites.  Finally, different individuals within the same species will sometimes occupy slightly different niches.  The reproductive interests of male and female are rarely identical. 

The simplest model for understanding how distinct niches can favor both morality and immorality is the infamous prisoner’s dilemma.  This is a simple game in which two players have each the choice to cooperate or defect.  Here is the payoff matrix:

The game produces a paradox.  In a single round, each player does better by defecting regardless of what the other player does.  In an extended series of rounds, both players do better by cooperating.  That is the logic of justice. 

In a famous tournament involving computer programs that consisted of strategies for playing the game, the most successful strategy was called Tit For Tat.  This program always begins by cooperating and then on each subsequent move it mimics what the other player did on the last move.  TFT wins by forming cooperative partnerships with any player inclined to cooperate and by punishing defectors (as well as limiting they damage they can inflict).  TFT is the simple logic of righteousness in exchanges.  The unrighteous, always-defect hawks fare poorly against a population of honest cooperators. 

TFT also creates a niche for the saintly, always-cooperate program, which prospers when it is playing with TFT.  However, this in turn creates a niche for the occasional hawk who makes out like a bandit when he encounters a saint. 

Replace points with offspring and this provides a model for the evolution of virtue.  Honest cooperators are stronger, collectively, that dishonest defectors.  However, the more successful that an honest community becomes, the more it leaves a niche for the conman who can effectively exploit the trust that the cooperators have achieved.  That is why most people are not very good at cheating and why no human community is free from cheats. 

Christopher Boehm argues in the second chapter of Moral Origins that, while our moral emotions keep us in check most of the time, the temptation to cheat when we think we can get away with it is also selected for.  This seems to me to be right. 

Genuine Morality & Natural Selection

I have been reading Steven Forde’s conference paper “Darwin and Political Theory”.  It includes a very strong survey of social and political thought.  I expect I will comment more fully when I have digested the whole piece.  For now, I consider a question that seems to linger always in the background but is crucial to the argument. 

There are reasons for remaining skeptical of Darwinian approaches, as I will explain momentarily. In the case of political theory, there is reason to dread its impact, inasmuch as Darwinism makes evolved, inherited emotional responses the ground of human morality, and such a foundation seems to make morality amoral. If we’re altruistic because we’ve been programmed to be altruistic, is it a matter anymore for moral judgment, for praise?

This raises the question: what is the difference between moral and amoral morality?  What makes an action or sentiment authentically moral and what makes the same inauthentically moral? 

I suggest that there is a common sense distinction that is implicated here: between acts and sentiments that are genuinely moral and those that are fraudulently moral.  Consider the following two scenarios:

1.  I help an elderly woman down some icy steps because her distress arouses genuine compassion in me and, perhaps secondarily, because I really believe that one should come to the aid of another in such a situation. 

2.  I help an elderly woman down some icy steps because I know her to be wealthy and I hope that my apparently moral act will encourage her to donate to some cause that I am invested in. 

I think that almost anyone would agree that the first case presents a genuinely moral action and the second a fraudulently moral action.  In the first case I do what I do because I judge that it is the right thing to do.  This judgment might arise solely out of my emotions and it might arise my conscious commitment to abstract moral principles.  Probably it is the first or both rather than just the second.  Either way, the action is moral because it is motivated by moral concerns. 

In the second case the motivation is amoral.  I act as I do solely out of interest and if I pretend to be acting morally, I am attempting to deceive the beneficiary of my action.  It is the proximate motive for the action that makes it moral or not. 

What does not make the action authentically or inauthentically moral is the evolutionary origin of my moral passions.  Human beings are endowed by our creator with a pallet of such emotions.  We are capable of compassion and contempt; guilt, shame, and pride, a sense of obligation and righteous indignation.  If evolutionary theory is correct, then all of these emotive capacities are available to us because they have been selected for.  That means that our ancestors were successful at reproduction because they had this pallet of emotions.  However, the selection pressure that works on a trait does not define the trait. 

A camouflaged insect does not blend into its environment because it is selected for; it is selected for because it blends into its environment.  Compassion, obligation, and indignation are not moral because they were selected for.  That gets it ass backward.  They were selected for because they are genuinely moral.  Human beings who were both capable and inclined to do the right thing for the right reason, who were genuinely motivated by moral concerns and capable of articulating moral norms based on those concerns, have been generally more successful at forming cooperative communities and for that reason leaving behind more offspring than those who are not. 

Natural selection can explain why we have moral emotions.  The fact that these emotions were selected for is not what makes them moral. 

Arnhart & Forbes on Disappointed Platonism

Larry Arnhart engages Steven Forbes on the questions of “Darwinism vs. (Disappointed) Platonism” on his blog.  The two presented papers on a panel at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago.  I plan to explore this topic more fully after I have digested the two papers, but I have a few comments to offer now. 

Here are two paragraphs of Larry’s blog post:

Most Platonists today are disappointed Platonists--people with Platonic expectations that are unfulfilled, because they accept Darwinian evolution as true, and therefore since all living forms have evolved, they cannot be eternal as conforming to Plato's intelligible realm of eternal Ideas.  Moreover, if everything has evolved, this must include moral and political order, and thus there is no eternally unchanging Idea of the Good by which we can see absolute standards of right and wrong.  Consequently, there are no moral absolutes, and we must accept moral relativism or nihilism.  Darwinism is "true but deadly" (as Nietzsche said).  And thus these disappointed Platonists become nihilists.

But if you do not have Platonic expectations, you will not be disappointed by the Darwinian conclusion that everything has evolved, and therefore human beings have evolved.  Without the Platonic assumption that morality must be grounded in a moral cosmology, you will be satisfied with a Darwinian explanation of morality as grounded in a moral anthropology.  Even if morality has no eternal grounding in a cosmic God, a cosmic Nature, or a cosmic Reason, human morality can still have an evolutionary grounding in human nature, human culture, and human judgment.  And thus in contrast to the disappointed Platonists, the satisfied Darwinians are not nihilists.

I weigh in as a satisfied Platonist.  Plato’s Socrates advanced a very bold interpretation of the world as it appears to common sense.  To mention only two general ideas, we can know a tree is because, just as there is one tree behind the various images of any tree that we encounter (an oak looks small at a distance but big up close), so there must be an idea tree behind all the various trees that we encounter.  Likewise, we can know the general rules of geometry without having been taught them because we were born knowing them.  Socrates advances these arguments as tentative, however.  He only claims that it is something like this. 

I hold that modern science presents us with a Kosmos that is intelligible because it is ordered by a number of eternal ideas.  What is the periodic table of elements if not statement of basic Platonic forms?  Plato’s Socrates was right, I suggest, in holding that we are born knowing the basic principles of geometry.  Darwinism confirms this, if it presents a rather different interpretation of reincarnation that is suggested in Plato’s Meno. 

It may be true that the laws of cosmology writ large do not include moral principles.  Perhaps the sun doesn’t warm the earth because it is good that it does so.  However, moral principles may well arise from laws governing organic nature generally and human nature specifically.  Human beings are part of the cosmos and so human nature is part of a complete account of cosmology.  If it turns out that the idea of the good plays a much more restricted role in cosmology than Plato’s Socrates supposed, that does not mean that it plays no role. 

Arnhart has this on his blog post:

Socrates teaches us that to know what is truly good, we must transcend the visible realm of Becoming in ascending to the invisible realm of Being, and finally ascending to the Idea of the Good.  But it's not clear that this answer is fully convincing or satisfying.  Socrates concludes the Republic with the myth of Er--a mythic story about eternal rewards and punishment in the afterlife.  The problem with this myth is that it's only a myth, and so it's not clear why we should believe it.  But the earlier answer--the Idea of the Good--is so incomprehensible that it's not clear why we should believe it either.

I agree that the myth of Er is just a myth‑a noble lie suggested for folks who are not philosophically inclined.  I do not agree that the Platonic idea of the good is incomprehensible.   

Socrates became Socrates (as opposed to one more philosophical conventionalist) when he realized that the cosmos can be comprehensible if and only if the principles that characterize it are, at least roughly, commensurate with the principles of our own common sense understanding of things.  That is why Socrates returned to the city and (initially at least) abandoned direct investigations into natural phenomena.  The keys to understanding nature lie in the opinions and especially in the contradictions between the opinions of ordinary people. 

The idea of the good is central to ordinary human understanding of such things as justice, beauty, and truth.  Socrates supposed that the good has to be part of our understanding of the larger cosmos or else that cosmos is beyond our understanding altogether.  That looks like a mistake, although it is too soon to rule it out.  Some of the scholarship on the origin of life has dealt with the immense improbability of that emergence by chance alone by supposing some kind of “unintentional forcing” operating in the physics of the earth just before life emerged.  If that turns out to be a viable hypothesis, Plato’s idea of the good may have a new cosmological purchase. 

There are two ways in which morality may be said to have natural foundations.  One is that human beings are by nature moral creatures, endowed by their evolutionary origins with a pallet of moral passions.  Forde apparently acknowledges that this is true, but somehow supposes that this but somehow seems to think that it cannot be the basis of genuine morality.  Is it because we get no moral credit for our instincts but only for free choices we make?  The second way in which morality can be natural is that moral behavior makes for the natural human good.  Human beings who choose to do what is right live better lives and help their family and fellows to live better lives.  There is plenty of room for choice here and every reason to suppose that Darwinian biology allows for it.  The idea of the good is necessarily part of any account of human morality.  

This Platonist is not yet disappointed.