I, Niall Francis Lambkin, hereby assert and give notice of my right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this essay.
There was a point at which this universe burst into existence in a paroxysm of energy and over a period of billions of years cooled and condensed into its present form. In its present form it contains, in this region of space/time at least, a planet upon which lives and breathes at least one species of creature that conducts its activities in complex cultural dances and does so in a manner that is not easily described by the science it has developed to explain its physical existence and surroundings. The cultural dance it finds most problematic to explain is that of moral behaviour, for it is in part this moral behaviour that sets the species apart from the rest of the biosphere. The species, our own of course, spends much of its time thinking about its actions and deliberating as to the rightness or otherwise of its performances. It has built for itself an advanced (relatively) technological and scientific civilisation and has stouthearted confidence in its ability to reach a unified understanding of all that there is. Its scientific community aspires to develop a Theory of Everything that will bring together a coherent interlocking system of equations capable of describing all that can be known of the physical universe.
Now, it is upon this term ‘physical’ that much rests. Its use implies its opposite and immediately sets in mind the notion of dual existence and of a world that is in part physical and in part non-physical. Within this dualistic universe the problem of man’s ethical behaviour becomes an issue of whether it is founded in the physical or the non-physical and whether ethical authority is mundane or extra-mundane. Much rests upon the answer we give to these questions.
It is supposed that there is a single gene pool out of which I (and all other human individuals) have been drawn and into which, in the fullness of time, I (and all others) will finally be returned in a well-understood and entirely physical manner. The question is: might this singular fact tell me something interesting and important about my moral being? At once it tells me that I am intimately linked to the genetic inheritance of the species in particular and to the rest of the biosphere in general, and sets me wondering whether this common heritage in some way directs the universal forms of human moral action as evidenced in the rich variety of human modi vivendi throughout history and throughout the world. Anthropological studies document common (if basic) moral codes even amongst the most diverse human communities, separated in time and space.
Given the possibility of a physical/non-physical divide there are two possible attitudes I can take regarding the possible importance to morality of genetic inheritance and indeed of biological evolution in general. I can take a transcendentalist view that moral behaviour is at a deep level not of this world viz., the foundation of ethics and its authority comes from outside of the human mind, or I can take the view that the foundation of ethics and its authority is grounded firmly in the physical world and is largely a contrivance of minds engaged on living efficiently and co-operatively together. This latter attitude might be called the empirical stance. The transcendentalist view will be that genetic inheritance is largely irrelevant because even if it could be shown that genetics ground ethics, the force of moral behaviour nevertheless comes from outside the physical system. The empiricist view will be that if it can be shown genetics in some way ground ethics then to talk of anything outside of the physical system is irrelevant and indeed probably meaningless. If it is possible to demonstrate the genetic matrix out of which sophisticated moral behaviour emerges then there is no need to posit some further matrix (call it matrix 2) in which matrix 1 must be embedded. Do we then posit matrix 3 for matrix 2 to be embedded in, and so on?
Let me put this another way: does my moral behaviour spring from the moral ordinances of a creator god that caused the genetic pool, or does it spring merely from the causal properties of the pool itself? Is my moral behaviour, in other words, transcendent in nature or merely empirical and therefore contingent?
Whatever answer is given to this question of the origin of ethics there remains the question of authority: to what extent are we bound by the apparent authority of moral imperatives to dictate our behaviour?
Men have always pondered their behaviour. We seem to know, somehow without thinking at a base level, what actions are acceptable and which not (in straightforward situations). We have always sought to provide an explanation for this division of action and once again have noticed that this thinking about human action is compelling – noticed that we simply can’t help it – that we are being driven to seek and achieve satisfactory answers to our incessant questions.
The question this paper will deal with is: what causes us to be so morally driven? In order to answer this I shall look at three closely connected issues concerning moral behaviour and attempt to draw a conclusion that will point to the plausibility of a theory of everything and to the dissolution of the dualistic divide.
I shall deal firstly with what constitutes ethical discourse, secondly with explanations for the origin of ethical behaviour, and finally with the consequences of accepting the most plausible explanation.
ETHICAL DISCOURSE
Ethical discourse is about human behaviour and specifically that behaviour judged by the acting individual and by others to be either good or bad, worthy or unworthy, noble or ignoble, virtuous or vicious in the context of human interaction. How we relate to each other is directed by codes of conduct that bind us into a co-operative society of individuals, each individual monitoring his own and others’ behaviour in terms of these codes, each praising and admonishing, approving and condemning as and when appropriate. Ethical discourse is therefore talk about such behaviour that impacts upon human lives (and indeed upon non-human lives and the environment as a result of human action) in positive and negative ways. Nothing else has a moral dimension. All non-human objects and events beyond the control of man are in themselves non-moral. It is only when man takes up a certain attitude towards such objects that they become ethically important. For example, a wilderness is simply an area of land that has not been changed by the activity of man and may be viewed by man as an area of outstanding natural beauty that ought to be contemplated aesthetically in the interests of ‘spiritual’ enrichment. Being viewed in this way makes it an object of moral concern but it is not in itself an object of moral concern. Should that wilderness come under threat from property developers there would be an outcry from some quarters claiming that to spoil an area of such beauty would be morally indefensible. The ensuing debate would be ethical discourse. If the wilderness were destroyed by a meteorite impact we might be saddened by the destruction but the destruction would not be a moral issue. It is only man’s attitude and activity that provides the ethical dimension.
So, we might ask what lends human beings this special quality that may in turn renew faith in ourselves when good is done and dismay us utterly when bad is perpetrated? Part of the answer lies in the fact that human beings are creatures of reason as well as unreason. We live our lives, on the surface at least, in reasonable ways, all the time thinking and planning and devising. What is bubbling below the surface we prefer not to think about too much lest it upset us and topple us from the pedestal we like to occupy, proudly declaring our superiority over the biosphere and beyond. Unreason, irrationality, directs our moods and prejudices, but even this places us at a distance from other animals. It was Aristotle who first made clear that the essential difference between man and the rest of the biosphere was man’s possession of rationality. All living things had souls or forms of life; plant soul had vegetative life, simple and limited; brute creation had this life as well, but in addition possessed sensitive and perceiving life. Beyond brute creation came man and he possessed, in addition to all the other forms of life, rationality, a dominant form of life that was superimposed upon the others and absorbed by it. And this is what sets man apart from the rest of nature. Man is capable of reasoning in the pure sense of thinking about abstract objects of interest, the immutable features of the world like mathematics and logic. He is capable also of practical reason, thinking about all the mutable features of existence, specifically human affairs. Practical reason is therefore about goal-directed activity. And it is in the choice of goals that a moral dimension emerges for when it comes to goals we know the difference between what is worthy and unworthy. And what any individual man chose as his goal was for Aristotle a matter primarily of his character which was something he was not simply born with but something which it was possible to develop over time by conscious direction. A man could become good (or at least better) by practising good acts. He could, for example, whilst a child, be forced by his betters to practise what were considered good acts, and then as a young adult freely choose to continue to so practise, perhaps inspired by the good actions of someone he admired and wished to emulate. In the end acting well would become part of his character, an integral part of him; he would become a good man, motivated by the good itself, so if ever he fell short of achieving the good then he would feel shame and deficient.
An interesting question to raise here is that concerning the origin of the concepts of good and bad, of virtue and vice. Aristotle considered that these concepts were readymade in the human psyche. It was in a sense self-evident what was good and what bad, what a virtue and what a vice; one did not have to think much about it, but practical reason enabled one to steer a course through life by exercising sound judgment and thereby ensuring that a good life could be lead. For Aristotle the virtue of a man was his specific excellence and this was his specific and unique ability to deliberately direct his life in a manner consistent with the virtues of character, ethical behaviour. In Aristotelian terms ethics has its origin in human nature, for if you study human nature with sufficient attention you can derive from it the notions of right and wrong, good and bad, noble and ignoble. A man who studies himself and his fellows simply sees this to be the case. Ethical behaviour is therefore a natural phenomenon, empirical through and through, and furthermore is behaviour that man wishes to develop because it is an integral part of his nature and gives him pleasure when it is improving.
There is, of course, much one can say in criticism of Aristotle’s virtue ethics (for example, it does not follow that because a man possesses an abundance of virtues, such as courage, loyalty, prudence and temperance, that he is a good man; without understanding and compassion he could, as pointed out by Aldous Huxley , be as nearly virtuous as Satan) but his early reflections on the origin of ethics and ethical discourse have a ring of authenticity about them and are not far removed from the position I shall take up at the end of this paper. But his thoughts were seriously challenged and muddied by the rise of Christianity that placed upon man even greater distinction than had Aristotle when explaining what it is about humans that makes them uniquely the source of ethical discourse.
Christianity placed in man an immortal soul over and above his reason, and this soul was part of the godhead that the species somehow knew and could eventually be absorbed into. The idea of God was in man’s mind readymade, put there by his Creator. And God historically became man, and suffered as a man, and as Christ provided for the species the template of the good man. Man owed obedience to God and being good consisted of following God’s will. In this sense moral behaviour was not natural for the source of morality was extra-mundane, supernatural. Reason, however, continued to play an immensely important role. After all, reason could be considered to be God’s greatest gift to man and man could use this faculty to probe the will of his Creator and see, intellectually, that it was good and compelling. As a result philosophers of a religious persuasion could still focus on reason as the feature of human beings that set them aside from brute creation and made morality possible. Aquinas and Kant are prime examples of such philosophers.
ORIGINS AND COMPULSION
We want to discover the origin of our moral impulses not through idle intellectual curiosity but because we want to work out answers to two related questions: first of all, how should we act when circumstances generate conflict between the ethical rules we operate with, and second, why should we obey these rules in the first place? If we have an understanding of the origin of the codes of conduct (that is to say, the foundation upon which they are based or from which they are derived) then we should be in a better position to understand how to resolve moral conflicts and decide how authoritative the codes in fact are.
I shall deal here with three very different explanations concerning origin, the first two rather briefly even though they constitute the most widely accepted explanations. The third explanation I shall concentrate on in more detail because it seems to me to offer the most coherent explanation available to us and has considerable consequences for future ethical behaviour.
Egoism, the social contract and Christianity.
According to Hobbes’ origin myth morality has not always been an operating force in the lives of men. We behave the way we do towards one another for reasons of egoistic prudence and we do so because personal survival in society suggests that not to treat our fellows in certain respects would not be in our best interests. In a state of solitude the individual does not require any kind of moral code to direct his life precisely because his state is one of solitude. As soon as individuals come together the matter changes radically for what we now have is a confluence of egos each bent on satisfying its desires and needs and each generating conflict with every other. In order to minimise such conflict and in order to maximise security and prosperity for each member of the new society, in order that is, to prevent “a war of every man against every man” as Hobbes put it (Leviathan Part One, Ch. 13), a social contract is drawn up to protect the interests of all men. Before the contract was made man’s state was pre-ethical; it only became ethical with the drawing up of the contract. This origin myth is not, we might suppose, to be taken literally, but as symbolic it demonstrates vividly how moral behaviour might be construed as wholly a man made phenomenon, existing only in the minds of men and in his society. There is nothing transcendent about this explanation.
The second explanation is archetypically transcendent. Christianity explains morality as a striving by imperfect man to achieve his lost perfection through living his life in accordance with the will of God. It was not the case that man was always imperfect; his fall from grace is vividly described symbolically in the Book of Genesis and like Hobbes’ origin myth man’s state before the Fall was a pre-ethical one in which there was no conflict between the desires of men and God. It is only in post-Fall conflict that ethics becomes necessary as man attempts to recover his pre-Fall state.
Whilst it is easy to see how the social contract explains why the individual should obey the moral law if he wishes to continue to live in a society of his fellows, it is not so clear how the Christian explanation shows why men should obey God. It does not follow, for example, that because an all powerful, all knowing God created us that we are bound to obey Him. I would not think it my duty to obey such a being if that being dictated that I do things I took to be morally objectionable. It would not follow even if that being were wholly benevolent. I might still want to know why I should obey His dictates. I might wonder whether His dictates were good because He dictated them or whether He dictated them because they were good. I might obey because I feared the consequences of not obeying, but then my obedience would not be strictly moral in nature because not freely chosen in the absence of coercion. If a Christian objected that God is simply the repository of all ideals and virtues in their perfect forms, and that man recognises these ideals and virtues for what they are and should therefore live his life in accordance with them, my response might be that this way of looking at the situation is all back to front, that these ideals and virtues are on the contrary wholly human and have been deified and projected egotistically upon the character of God made in our own image. In Christian terms, therefore, the problem of moral authority remains problematic.
Social contract theory is not, of course, without its difficulties (though we may concede that the actual moral codes we operate in society are contracts of sorts; more accurately we would describe them as sets of rules that people agree to live by but for reasons other than mere prudence). To begin with it is far too simple to account for the immense complexities of moral behaviour. It assumes that a significant proportion of the species is intelligent enough and patient enough and imaginative enough to calculate the positive consequences of its egoistic prudence and understands the folly of not doing so. It takes for granted that the ordinary man in the street who does not have the necessary intellectual and imaginative power to carry out his own calculations will step in line with the demands of the institutions set up by those who do in fact understand the need for the contract and have the intelligence and imagination to draw it up in reasonable measure; the contract could not survive without this bovine acquiescence. But real life shows us that ordinary people, the ordinary man in the street, is perfectly capable of making moral decisions and calculating the possible and probable consequences of his actions, and does so for reasons that do not necessarily imply egoistic prudence. In addition, we frequently behave (and deliberately so) in manifestly imprudent ways that serve us negatively as individuals and thereby damage the integrity of the society that feeds us! People are also moved to act well for a whole variety of reasons none of which necessarily relate to prudence exercised by selfish egoists. People may act from a sense of justice, from friendship, from loyalty and generosity, and most importantly from sympathy and consequent compassion. On the cultural level these last two are fundamental to the development of sophisticated moral behaviour. It is these last two that bring tears to eyes and allow the individual to reach out beyond his immediate kin to contemplate the condition of those more remote in biology and space.
If we reject these origin myths about human morality - that is, if we reject the notion of Hobbesian communities of prudent egoists co-operating in order to keep at arms length an original war of all against all, and reject also the Christian notion of God implanting souls, what are we left with? Two fundamental assumptions about the way the biosphere is constituted were separately made by the egoists and the transcendentalists and both these assumptions can now be shown to be unacceptable. Firstly, it was assumed by the egoists that not just humans but additionally all non-human creatures were essentially egotistical, out to get what they could when they could. However, even a brief study of animal behaviour demonstrates that in crude and primitive forms many non-human creatures co-operate with each other in rich and complex social communities and display certain virtues common to human society: care for the young, mutual protection, mutual grooming, co-operation in hunting, sharing the spoils etc. It is not to be supposed that such non-human animals calculate some form of social contract to bring into effect their communities. Secondly, the transcendentalists assumed that there was a difference in kind between humans and non-humans that could be explained only in terms of radical differences in constitution. The human soul and the human faculty of reason provided the required difference and set humans in an entirely different category of being. It could not be countenanced that humans were really just clever animals with a talent for society. Humans were rather the creatures of God, made in His image and non-humans were merely members of His brute creation. It was true that certain human vices could be recognised in certain creatures (cruelty and predation in the wolf, dirtiness, gluttony and overindulgence in the pig) but any kind of suggestion that human beings resembled animals significantly would be outrageous, a degradation of human dignity, a suggestion that all that was excellent in humans was mere animality refined. Human spirituality could not merely be refined animality; the human soul was not of this mundane plane – it was a transcendental implant that allowed men a vision of the godhead and prompted him to seek through his thoughts and actions community with his Creator. A closer and impartial study of animal behaviour, however, suggests that the difference between human beings and non-human creatures is a difference in degree rather than of kind and allows us to better understand how it is that humans developed out of non-human animals. The new suggestion is, therefore, that there is a connection between the natural dispositions of social animals and human moral behaviour which may turn out to be fundamentally important.
Sociobiology and the origin of ethics.
The empiricist thesis is essentially this: ethics is a social construct of favoured behaviour of a certain kind that is expressed in a code of principles, essentially a set of rules of conduct. This conduct is driven and given general direction by hereditary predispositions in mental development so that all human societies have in common certain general moral features. It is these basic predispositions upon which specific and detailed moral codes, drafted by history and circumstance, are founded. The empiricist argument, therefore, is that by studying the biological roots of moral behaviour, and by researching into how the brain and mind develop and work, we shall be in a position to better define our moral codes and deal with increasing complexity of moral conflict. The advantage of this approach is that there is heavy emphasis on objective knowledge and metaphysical assumptions are kept to an absolute and reasonable minimum. It is in principle much easier and more fruitful to learn the details of something firmly grounded in the physical world than it is to attempt to read the mind of God which is, ex hypothesi, outside space/time.
To see the force of the empiricist argument it is necessary to point out the basic deficiency in secular transcendental accounts of moral conduct. The deficiency is essentially one of plausibility and, for the most part, arises because the accounts pay little or no attention to the natural and social sciences which all the time are providing us with insights and new knowledge about the world in terms of how it is constituted and works, and about how we as beings in that world actually operate and behave. If we ignore such knowledge we run the risk of designing accounts and explanations of ethics far removed from how things are. We might usefully, therefore, look briefly first at Kant’s attempt to explain the certainties we have about specific duties and obligations we feel compelled to accept (judging that his conclusions take him well beyond what both logic and what we now know about biology and psychology allow), and then at G.E. Moore’s attempt.
As mentioned previously Kant, in his moral philosophy, used reason to argue his way towards a position that was consistent with what he already assumed to be the case, namely that behind all that we perceive is God. He reasoned that moral being ultimately resides in the realm that lies behind that of appearances (the natural world), resides, that is, in the realm of the numinous, which is the realm of reality, of things-in-themselves. Through the exercise of free will Kant believed a glimpse of that reality could be had because moral conduct allowed man to transcend the natural world and enter a realm of freedom. The realm of appearances is a realm of cause and effect, an empirical world, but moral choice, which involves the exercise of free will, is not subject to cause and effect, hence man’s ability to rise above mere instinct. Humans, in other words, are independent moral beings capable of adhering to or breaking the moral law to which they are subject and which in relatively crude terms consists of a categorical imperative that states: Act only on that maxim through which you wish also it becomes a universal law.
Ethics, therefore, is not to be found in the natural world of appearances and cause and effect, which is where we live and breathe, but in the exercise of our free will and adherence to a code of conduct. Although Kant was himself a man with a deeply ingrained Protestant conscience, his moral philosophy is an example of secular transcendentalism because he used reason to determine the explanation for the certainty we have concerning our duties and obligations. But in the end he argues for far more than he has a logical right to do. We are also left with the feeling that whilst we might agree that his categorical imperative has plausible potency (few would disagree with it), his metaphysics is out of kilter with what we know about brains and human psychology. There is no reason to suppose that any aspect of brain activity or function (like making decisions or making choices) is exempt from laws of cause and effect. Talk of free will is fraught with difficulty and it is difficult to see how the concept of free will can be given the meaning intended by Kant and indeed others who lay claim to a transcendental explanation for moral conduct.
More recently G. E. Moore suggested that an ought cannot be derived from an is for to do so is to commit what he called the naturalistic fallacy. His view was that there were no grounds at all for moral judgements or for moral decisions; one simply saw what was good and acted accordingly. What was good was self-evident and that the good should be pursued was also self-evident. “Good is good and that is the end of the matter” he said, meaning that fundamental moral concepts could not be defined or derived from something else. To attempt such a derivation or definition was to commit the naturalistic fallacy and especially so if an attempt were made to derive a moral principle from a natural state of things in the world.
Now it is difficult to make sense of Moore’s position here because it sounds as though his moral qualities are supernatural, emanating from God. But Moore denied that such qualities were supernatural, claiming instead that they were non-natural. But I am not clear about what this term ’non-natural’ means or could possibly mean if not ‘supernatural’. As a result Moore’s attempt to secure a secularist foundation for ethics founders on rocks of obscurity and one is tempted to suggest that his secularist credentials are suspect and that at core he was an old fashioned transcendentalist. Once again, looking closely at the real world as it is studied by the natural sciences would have shown Moore that there is opposition only between the mundane and extra-mundane: if a transcendental origin of ethics is unacceptable then we must accept an empirical origin.
What appears to be a better and more fruitful approach to designing explanations of the origin of ethics is to first look at what we know about the world and see what this might tell or suggest to us about our moral behaviour and codes. This is a sensible thing to do because it is more likely that moral codes grow out of biology and culture than it is that they are presented ready made to man by God, or that moral precepts exist in some realm outside of the human mind and must be discovered through either revelation or reasoned argument.
The causal chain for transcendentalists is top-down. It begins with the precept or principle which is outside of man and is there to be discovered or revealed and for man to live his life by. Moral life for man becomes a way of finding strategies for living consistently with the principle. For the empiricist the causal chain goes in the opposite direction and more plausibly so: man, as a species, is understood to have biological predispositions to behave in certain ways through making certain types of choices. The rich complexities and social pressures of cultural evolution mean that some, if not all, of these choices are formalised as guides for social behaviour and then formalised further, as they bed down, into laws of behaviour. It might then come about that these laws or rules of conduct are so compelling that they become the commands of whichever god serves the interest of the community. Linking ethics to religion in this manner is understandable. But the causal direction is what counts because it makes possible the objective study of ethical origins. As Wilson puts it: “The general empiricist principle takes this form: Strong innate feeling and historical experience cause certain actions to be preferred; we have experienced them, and weighed their consequences, and agree to conform with codes that express them. Let us take an oath upon the codes, invest our personal honour in them, and suffer punishment for their violation.”
Important to note here is the process of drawing up the code based upon intelligent prediction of consequences. The human group begins by noticing predispositions that produce certain types of behaviour and notices also that some are preferable to others. The preferable behaviour is then codified and accepted by public will, and it is because of this public will that one person might advise another that they ought to do this or that, or ought not to this or that. It follows that moral codes are designed to conform to some natural drives (which are positive) and suppress others (which are negative). It follows also that as circumstances change and knowledge increases these codes can and should be reviewed in order to make them wiser and more stable by minimising conflict and producing strategies for dealing with novel situations. We see the urgent need for this now in our increasingly complex civilisation where scientific and technological advances far out run our moral ability to deal with ethical ambiguities and special cases. This approach to ethics points to the dynamic status of moral codes or sets of rules; whilst the moral sentiments that underpin the codes may remain stable because rooted in our biology, the codes themselves are designed to guide man through his detailed day to day living in society which is ever mutating as it increases its scientific and philosophical understanding of the world. This means that old, familiar and comfortable rules may have to be discarded as our knowledge improves and new and at first uncomfortable rules put in their place to deal with the new circumstances. A society that fails to respond in a morally dynamic way to new circumstances will destroy itself through intolerance and internecine conflict.
What might the biological mechanism for all this be? Whilst the quest for an objective grasp of the origin of ethics is still in process it is possible to sketch a fairly rough and ready, but importantly, coherent and plausible, picture of what such an objective understanding would consist of. The idea is that the moral sentiments, or moral instincts, are derived from epigenetic rules that allow hereditary biases to form during mental development. These biases would be conditioned most likely by emotion and influence in obvious and subtle ways the concepts and decisions made from them. The matrix within which the mental development occurs is the tension that arises as soon as individuals come into contact with one another. The dynamic generated is always one of tension caused by the choice either to co-operate with others or defect, and it is this dynamic relation between co-operation and defection that constitutes the primary origin of the moral instincts. The secret ingredients necessary for the moral cake to rise successfully are, however, intelligence and imagination; without these ingredients human society would be primitive and not wholly moral. For morality to emerge from the basic tensions and conflicts of interest that naturally arise when social creatures live in close proximity, it is necessary for intelligence to judge and manipulate the tension of that social dynamic. With high intelligence and imagination it is possible to build from the dynamic complex mental scenarios and project these into future times. In other words, the possession of high intelligence and imagination means that once a certain dynamic has been experienced and dealt with it can be absorbed into the developing mind and referred back to the next time a similar dynamic arises. Rules and codes can subsequently be devised to guide the individual, and more importantly the group, through present and future tensions. When this happens the group becomes a moral community. Wilson paints a simple co-operation verses defection picture to illustrate the point:
Imagine a Paleolithic hunter band, say composed of five men.
One hunter considers breaking away from the others to look
for an antelope of his own. If successful he will gain a large
quantity of meat and hide, five times greater than if he stays
with the band and they are successful. But he knows from
experience that his chances of success alone are very low,
much less than the chances of a band of five working together.
In addition, whether successful alone or not he will suffer
animosity from the others for lessening their own prospects.
By custom the band members remain together and share the
animals they kill equitably. So the hunter stays. He also
observes good manners while doing so, especially if he is
the one who makes the kill. Boastful pride is condemned
because it rips the delicate web of reciprocity.
Here there is a social dynamic caused by the tension of the group. Each member will have a propensity to co-operate or defect, and intelligence, imagination and experience informs the group that it had better operate as a tightly knit team if it is to be successful at hunting; it requires of each member that he is a good team player. But now suppose that the propensities for co-operation or defection are heritable traits (and there is good reason to suppose that they are ). If this is the case we would expect over a period of many thousands of generations, the propensity to co-operate rather than defect to dominate the population, simply because co-operation better serves the individual and group interests in terms of survival; if I co-operate I am more likely to live a relatively healthy and long life, and if I am innately disposed to co-operate then I have a better opportunity to pass on my genes than if were disposed to be an individualist and defector. Co-operation, therefore, has survival value and fits in well with what we already know about how genetic evolution works.
The practice of co-operation between group members in primitive human communities over long periods of time, stretching over thousands of generations, would lead (given intelligence and imagination) inevitably to the moral instincts, and eventually, as culture took grip, to sets of rules and moral codes. This is what Darwin speculated and is now looking likely. Each of us in modern society can give expression to our moral instincts by experiencing conscience, shame when we act imprudently, self-respect (which is tied into shame) empathy and remorse, and perhaps even altruism. These are at least some of the base instincts or moral sentiments that underpin our moral codes and explain the universal elements within them. They do not of themselves constitute morality; what they do is make morality possible.
Darwin had interesting things to say on the subject. Having rejected a transcendental origin of ethics he sought to ground them in natural social dispositions. This background of social motives would naturally incline humans to form rules of conduct that would allow them to cope efficiently with the increasingly complex social tensions that inevitably develop as communities culturally progress. The rules become necessary in order to negotiate conflicts between opposing natural dispositions and this in turn produces more social coherence (individual group members know where they stand and how to act in given situations) and continuity of the group. Priorities are therefore set between different aims that individuals or the group might have, and this entails the acceptance of principles and rules for guiding conduct. Darwin suggested that any appropriately intelligent beings with social dispositions would form rules of conduct designed to protect the priority of the instincts that promoted social cohesion. In terms of probability he suggested: “any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.” Study of cetaceans demonstrates that certain cetacean species possess highly evolved central nervous systems and enjoy complex social lives; it is interesting, therefore, to speculate about their higher order moral status as creatures that so clearly express what I have called moral sentiments or moral instincts. A conversation between a human and a dolphin or orca might well throw up common moral attitudes. They might well agree with Darwin that “the social instincts – the prime principle of man’s (and cetacean’s) moral constitution – with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the Golden Rule, ‘As ye would that men (cetaceans) should do to you, do ye to them likewise;’ and this lies at the foundation of morality.” In the end we need the priority-rules to allow society to run smoothly and to protect it against sliding into complete and utter confusion, characterised by conflict and all the vices of defection.
One might note with interest here that Darwin’s Golden Rule is derived from speculation about natural social motives to morality, whilst Kant derived his categorical imperative from reasoning about certainties of duty and obligation.
CONSEQUENCES
If Darwin is right then it is fair to say that the objective study of the origin
of ethics will be an important contributory factor in the death of God. God
is already staggering from the assault of Enlightenment philosophy and modern
physics, but it is with the epistemological action of biology that an intellectual
deathblow shall be finally dealt.
There are two separate but related issues here: first is the notion that biology
will exorcise the world of its demons (supernatural beliefs) and secondly that
should this happen man shall be plunged into a state of complete moral confusion
and misery. Both these issues can be fairly easily dealt with.
First of all, it may be true that biology (along with the other sciences) will come to show the concept of God as nothing more than an idea in the mind of man and that all other supernatural notions are likewise contained therein. But this ‘death of God’ would not constitute a proof for the non-existence of God but only a demonstration that if God does exist He is unlikely to be immanent and interested in the affairs of man. The death of God, that is to say, takes away from the Godhead His centrality in the affairs of men; takes away His moral authority; sidelines Him and makes Him an almost impossible Being in whom man can show an interest.
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor speaks plainly and urgently when he says that if the ruling hand of God is removed then all things become permissible and freedom turns to misery. It is oft held that a humanist ethic is not possible or that when moral humanists are unearthed they are moral only insofar as they have accepted the ethics of religion and disposed of the belief in God. It becomes immediately clear, however, if the empiricist picture is correct, that this objection to the death of God is wholly misplaced for it demonstrates that we are moral before we are religious; demonstrates that moral sentiments or instincts are to be found in the biology of the beast, and subsequent moral codes and religious beliefs are driven by them in the general directions and with the characteristics we presently observe. Our biological inheritance means very clearly that contrary to all things being permissible, there are possible actions of both the individual and group that are not permissible at all. We behave the way we do in general terms because we are bound so to do; we cannot help, that is to say, loving our children (under normal conditions), or feeling the pain of another empathically. These are qualities that serve the unity of the tribe and it is within this matrix of dispositions and subsequent rules of conduct that we find meaning for the ought in ethics.
We are still morally juvenile, we realise, if we look honestly at how we generally behave both as individuals and as groups or tribes and must conclude that even in our most advanced societies we remain fundamentally tribal in our affections and outlook. Given that familiarity and common interests are essential to social transactions, it is not surprising that our moral sentiments became selective and favoured the group rather than the species. It is relatively easy to relate to one’s group and all its constituent members, but much more difficult to relate in similar fashion to other tribes – and the more remote the other tribes in space or in cultural character the more difficult (to the point of impossibility) it is to accept their humanity, for what is remote from experience and strange in character is threatening and invariably viewed with suspicion; it is simply not understood and best left either alone or destroyed. Tribalism is therefore part of our innate moral disposition. This is not, of course, to excuse our negative tribal behaviour; there is every reason to suppose that intelligence and compassion can transcend basic moral propensities and favour instead something like universal sympathy that may develop into something like universal love.
Transcendentalist views of ethical origins, because they are top-down, tend to be deontological and conservative. This makes it very difficult for the transcendentalist to react appropriately to novel circumstances. We see this now in medical ethics when we struggle to deal with very difficult cases involving palliative medicine: do we allow this person in agonising pain, with no prospects of recovery, to die or not? And if either ‘yes’ or ‘no’, why? The moral codes operating in Western society tend to be transcendentalist for historical reasons, but we can in part explain our inability to solve novel ethical problems with confidence in the light of the transcendentalist nature of our codes.
A shift away from transcendentalist ethics to an objective empiricist ethics (on the back of detailed research into the origins of ethics and the development of priority-rules and codes) would allow a more intelligent, wiser approach to resolutions of moral problems. Because objective such a science of moral behaviour would have predictive power and present us with possibilities of designing more coherent moral procedures that more readily anticipate and address problems than those presently available. Wilson suggests that to establish an objective basis for moral discourse something like the following four-part research programme should proceed. I quote in full:
The suggestion is that if such a programme were successful it would issue in an objective understanding of the origin of ethics and produce an unambiguous description of ethical behaviour in humans. Moral codes have always sought to set priority rules in order to cope with conflict of instinctive impulses, but because our moral competence is presently founded on a mix of cultural pressures, religious presuppositions, prejudice and gut reactions, our codes are too inert and too arbitrary to meet every circumstance in a cultural environment that is throwing up novel contingencies with increasing rapidity and all of which demand a coherent moral response. Consequently we are often left feeling utterly perplexed when dealing with extraordinary conditions. A science of ethics is likely to produce objective moral codes with clearly defined priority rules, ones that will allow a more measured and assured response to the ethical challenges generated by rapidly developing technological civilisations.
So, the empiricist thesis, if correct, places a heavy burden of responsibility on man’s shoulders. The fact his primitive moral sentiments give general direction to his moral codes, does not mean that he is bound to behave in precise manners according to mathematical rules of cause and effect. The success of any moral code depends upon how wisely the moral sentiments are interpreted, so those who devise the codes and review them should know how the brain works and the mind develops to ensure that the codes do not contradict the science. But the success of the codes also depends upon the accurate prediction of consequences of particular actions as opposed to others – especially in cases of moral ambiguity. To make wise moral decisions depends, therefore, upon deep knowledge of the natural and social sciences and an appreciation of the connectivity of all things. The effects of any decision will ripple out to affect everything else in matters of degree; it surely follows that the more we understand the wiser will our decisions be. Hence, a developing science of ethics holds out the prospect, if not the promise, of a significantly more stable future for the species and biosphere.
CONCLUSION
Plausibility and coherence.
None of what I have said about the empiricist stance and explanation of the origin of ethics entails that it is true. It would need a research programme of the sort described by Wilson to validate it. Presently it remains no more than a theory competing with other theories that have a transcendental flavour. When choosing between competing theories the criteria of plausibility and unity should have the final say; for each theory we should ask – how plausible is it in the light of what we already know about the world, and how well does the theory fit into the already accepted and well understood general picture we have of the world’s constitution?
It is clear that the empiricist/sociobiological explanation of the origin of ethics is consistent with everything else we know of the empirical world, and if further research strongly suggests that the explanation is correct, its plausibility will be further enhanced. Of course, there remains the possibility that it is false and that the moral world is, as Kant suggested, a world removed from that of cause and effect, a transcendental world lying outside the sphere of empirical knowledge. If this is the case then the life of man cannot be wholly explained in empirical terms and any expectancy of achieving a unity of knowledge, expressed in a Theory of Everything, will be hopelessly futile. But the mounting evidence is pointing the way fairly clearly and encouragingly towards unity of knowledge and away from transcendentalism. Transcendentalism of the kind I have been talking about appears more and more to be the refuge of minds that refuse to seriously engage with empiricism. Transcendental notions cannot in principle be verified and in the context of the origin of ethics such explanations have only emotional force and advance our understanding of moral being not very much at all. Although it is still possible for the transcendentalist to argue that verification is irrelevant because the sphere of God is metaphysical, it is an increasingly implausible stance to take when it can be plausibly argued that religious behaviour may have arisen from evolution by natural selection. Religious behaviour usually involves a belief in a deity or deities and all religious practices employ propitiation and sacrifice (either actual or symbolic). These specific features are essentially acts of submission to a superior being and exactly mirror the submissions and submissive rituals associated with hierarchy in organised mammalian societies. There is a clear semiotic resemblance and parallel between animal submissive behaviour and human obeisance to either religious or civil authority. Close attention paid to human behaviour in groups strongly suggests that we as a species have only just diverged from our non-human primate ancestors.
And if it should be asked how man first came to have the concept of a god and afterlife, then this too is not beyond the competence of sociobiology to plausibly explain. The survival instinct is the instinct that all others must serve and so fear of extinction, whether personal or group, is a primal emotion in man. Lucretius talks of cropping “…that fear of Hell which blasts the life of man from its very foundations, sullying everything with the blackness of death and leaving no pleasure pure and unalloyed.” The desire, craving even, for permanent existence is felt by each individual (all things being equal) and since we see the dissolution of flesh all about us we seek our survival in whatever form best comes to hand. The swift passage of the mind through physical life cannot be all there is, we plead, like plaintiffs before creation. It is natural, therefore, to look to something higher and greater than the individual and the group to bring about satisfaction of desire for immortality. Fear and the automatic gesture of submission and the need to propitiate; this mingled with a compelling desire for life and more life, informed by intelligence and spiced with imagination – this concoction of emotion and reason created the gods out of natural need. And once born the gods became the natural source of moral authority, codifying and ritualising through their priests the moral instincts and developing moral codes in the interests of tribal stability. The birth of the gods and the association of the tribal moral codes with religious life make possible greater cohesion for the tribe; and there is hereditary selective advantage to be had in being a member of a powerful group united by devout beliefs and common purposes, because co-operative members enjoy the protection of the group and so have greater chances of survival than either defectors or members of a less powerful tribe.
I do not for a moment believe that should empiricist explanations turn out to be correct that religious belief with wither quickly on the vine. Ironically, if the empiricist explanations do turn out to be correct then they will have shown that religious belief has a foundation in the biology of the species and that the empiricist picture of the world (I hesitate to use the term mythos) will appeal wholeheartedly only to those who have weak propensities for metaphysics. And there will be nothing wrong in this or too disappointing. Cause for concern will only arise if the metaphysical urges continue to operate along tribal lines and the world remains essentially a place of tensions and conflicts.