Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys?
Lance
Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys?
By PETER RAILTON
After being shown proudly around the campus of a prestigious American
university built in gothic style, Bertrand Russell is said to have
exclaimed, “Remarkable. As near Oxford as monkeys can make.” Much
earlier, Immanuel Kant had expressed a less ironic amazement, “Two
things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe …
the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” Today many who
look at morality through a Darwinian lens can’t help but find a
charming naïveté in Kant’s thought. “Yes, remarkable. As near morality
as monkeys can make.”
So the question is, just how near is that? Optimistic Darwinians
believe, near enough to be morality. But skeptical Darwinians won’t
buy it. The great show we humans make of respect for moral principle
they see as a civilized camouflage for an underlying, evolved
psychology of a quite different kind.
This skepticism is not, however, your great-grandfather’s Social
Darwinism, which saw all creatures great and small as pitted against
one another in a life or death struggle to survive and reproduce —
“survival of the fittest.” We now know that such a picture seriously
misrepresents both Darwin and the actual process of natural selection.
Individuals come and go, but genes can persist for 1000 generations or
more. Individual plants and animals are the perishable vehicles that
genetic material uses to make its way into the next generation (“A
chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg”). From this
perspective, relatives, who share genes, are to that extent not really
in evolutionary competition; no matter which one survives, the shared
genes triumph. Such “inclusive fitness” predicts the survival, not of
selfish individuals, but of “selfish” genes, which tend in the normal
range of environments to give rise to individuals whose behavior tends
to propel those genes into future.
A place is thus made within Darwinian thought for such familiar
phenomena as family members sacrificing for one another — helping when
there is no prospect of payback, or being willing to risk life and
limb to protect one’s people or avenge harms done to them.
But what about unrelated individuals? “Sexual selection” occurs
whenever one must attract a mate in order to reproduce. Well, what
sorts of individuals are attractive partners? Henry Kissinger claimed
that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, but for animals who bear a
small number of young over a lifetime, each requiring a long gestation
and demanding a great deal of nurturance to thrive into maturity,
potential mates who behave selfishly, uncaringly, and unreliably can
lose their chance. And beyond mating, many social animals depend upon
the cooperation of others for protection, foraging and hunting, or
rearing the young. Here, too, power can attract partners, but so can a
demonstrable tendency behave cooperatively and share benefits and
burdens fairly, even when this involves some personal sacrifice — what
is sometimes called “reciprocal altruism.” Baboons are notoriously
hierarchical, but Joan Silk, a professor of anthropology at UCLA, and
her colleagues, recently reported a long-term study of baboons, in
which they found that, among females, maintaining strong, equal,
enduring social bonds — even when the individuals were not related —
can promote individual longevity more effectively than gaining
dominance rank, and can enhance the survival of progeny.
A picture thus emerges of selection for “proximal psychological
mechanisms”— for example, individual dispositions like parental
devotion, loyalty to family, trust and commitment among partners,
generosity and gratitude among friends, courage in the face of
enemies, intolerance of cheaters — that make individuals into good
vehicles, from the gene’s standpoint, for promoting the “distal goal”
of enhanced inclusive fitness.
Why would human evolution have selected for such messy, emotionally
entangling proximal psychological mechanisms, rather than produce yet
more ideally opportunistic vehicles for the transmission of genes —
individuals wearing a perfect camouflage of loyalty and reciprocity,
but fine-tuned underneath to turn self-sacrifice or cooperation on or
off exactly as needed? Because the same evolutionary processes would
also be selecting for improved capacities to detect, pre-empt and
defend against such opportunistic tendencies in other individuals —
just as evolution cannot produce a perfect immune system, since it is
equally busily at work improving the effectiveness of viral invaders.
Devotion, loyalty, honesty, empathy, gratitude, and a sense of
fairness are credible signs of value as a partner or friend precisely
because they are messy and emotionally entangling, and so cannot
simply be turned on and off by the individual to capture each marginal
advantage. And keep in mind the small scale of early human societies,
and Abraham Lincoln’s point about our power to deceive.
Why, then, aren’t we better — more honest, more committed, more loyal?
There will always be circumstances in which fooling some of the people
some of the time is enough; for example, when society is unstable or
individuals mobile. So we should expect a capacity for opportunism and
betrayal to remain an important part of the mix that makes humans into
monkeys worth writing novels about.
How close does all this take us to morality? Not all the way,
certainly. An individual psychology primarily disposed to consider the
interests of all equally, without fear or favor, even in the teeth of
social ostracism, might be morally admirable, but simply wouldn’t cut
it as a vehicle for reliable replication. Such pure altruism would not
be favored in natural selection over an impure altruism that conferred
benefits and took on burdens and risks more selectively — for “my
kind” or “our kind.” This puts us well beyond pure selfishness, but
only as far as an impure us-ishness. Worse, us-ish individuals can be
a greater threat than purely selfish ones, since they can gang up so
effectively against those outside their group. Certainly greater
atrocities have been committed in the name of “us vs. them” than “me
vs. the world.”
So, are the optimistic Darwinians wrong, and impartial morality beyond
the reach of those monkeys we call humans? Does thoroughly logical
evolutionary thinking force us to the conclusion that our love,
loyalty, commitment, empathy, and concern for justice and fairness are
always at bottom a mixture of selfish opportunism and us-ish
clannishness? Indeed, is it only a sign of the effectiveness of the
moral camouflage that we ourselves are so often taken in by it?
Speaking of what “thoroughly logical evolutionary thinking” might
“force” us to conclude provides a clue to the answer. Think for a
moment about science and logic themselves. Natural selection operates
on a need-to-know basis. Between two individuals — one disposed to use
scarce resources and finite capacities to seek out the most urgent and
useful information and the other, heedless of immediate and personal
concerns and disposed instead toward pure, disinterested inquiry,
following logic wherever it might lead — it is clear which natural
selection would tend to favor.
And yet, Darwinian skeptics about morality believe, humans somehow
have managed to redeploy and leverage their limited, partial, human-
scale psychologies to develop shared inquiry, experimental procedures,
technologies and norms of logic and evidence that have resulted in
genuine scientific knowledge and responsiveness to the force of logic.
This distinctively human “cultural evolution” was centuries in the
making, and overcoming partiality and bias remains a constant
struggle, but the point is that these possibilities were not
foreclosed by the imperfections and partiality of the faculties we
inherited. As Wittgenstein observed, crude tools can be used to make
refined tools. Monkeys, it turns out, can come surprisingly near to
objective science.
We can see a similar cultural evolution in human law and morality — a
centuries-long process of overcoming arbitrary distinctions,
developing wider communities, and seeking more inclusive shared
standards, such as the Geneva Conventions and the Universal
Declaration of Humans Rights. Empathy might induce sympathy more
readily when it is directed toward kith and kin, but we rely upon it
to understand the thoughts and feelings of enemies and outsiders as
well. And the human capacity for learning and following rules might
have evolved to enable us to speak a native language or find our place
in the social hierarchy, but it can be put into service understanding
different languages and cultures, and developing more cosmopolitan or
egalitarian norms that can be shared across our differences.
Within my own lifetime, I have seen dramatic changes in civil rights,
women’s rights and gay rights. That’s just one generation in
evolutionary terms. Or consider the way that empathy and the pressure
of consistency have led to widespread recognition that our fellow
animals should receive humane treatment. Human culture, not natural
selection, accomplished these changes, and yet it was natural
selection that gave us the capacities that helped make them possible.
We still must struggle continuously to see to it that our widened
empathy is not lost, our sympathies engaged, our understandings
enlarged, and our moral principles followed. But the point is that we
have done this with our imperfect, partial, us-ish native endowment.
Kant was right to be impressed. In our best moments, we can come
surprisingly close to being moral monkeys.
Source: New York Times
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/moral-camouflage-or-moral-monkeys/
Peter Brooks
>
>
> Within my own lifetime, I have seen dramatic changes in civil rights,
> women’s rights and gay rights. That’s just one generation in
> evolutionary terms. Or consider the way that empathy and the pressure
> of consistency have led to widespread recognition that our fellow
> animals should receive humane treatment.
>
in Iraq, from a US-style capitalist country - albeit one run by a US
supported dictator - into a god-ridden hell-hole moving to Sharia Law.
Meanwhile, the US leads the table of prison population per 100,000
people by a large margin:
People, by Country
Ranked by Highest to Lowest Incarceration Rate (per 100,000 people)
2007
Prison Prisoners Per
Rank Country/Region Population 100,000 People
------- ---------------------------- ---------------
---------------------
1 United States 2,186,230 738
2 Russia 869,814 611
3 St Kitts and Nevis 214 547
4 Turkmenistan 22,000 489
5 Cuba 55,000 487
6 Belize 1,359 487
7 Bahamas 1,500 462
8 Belarus 41,583 426
9 Dominica 289 419
10 Barbados 997 367
11 Panama 11,649 364
12 Ukraine 165,716 356
13 Suriname 1,600 356
14 Singapore 15,038 350
15 Botswana 6,259 348
16 Maldives 1,125 343
17 Kazakhstan 49,292 340
18 South Africa 157,402 335
19 Estonia 4,463 333
pg
news:a157c376-dc21-4ffe...@f6g2000yqa.googlegroups.com...
On Aug 22, 6:18 pm, Lance <lanceg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Within my own lifetime, I have seen dramatic changes in civil rights,
>>women’s rights and gay rights. That’s just one generation in
>>evolutionary terms. Or consider the way that empathy and the pressure
>>of consistency have led to widespread recognition that our fellow
>>animals should receive humane treatment.
>
>A very narrow an parochial view. The US has now engineered the change
>in Iraq, from a US-style capitalist country - albeit one run by a US
>supported dictator - into a god-ridden hell-hole moving to Sharia Law.
Still, the piece as a whole is a reasonable summary of basic principles of
evolutionary psychology and the development of moral principles devoid of
supernatural guidance, is it not?
pg
Dave Smith
> On Aug 22, 6:18 pm, Lance <lanceg...@gmail.com> wrote:>
>
> > Within my own lifetime, I have seen dramatic changes in civil rights,
> > women’s rights and gay rights. That’s just one generation in
> > evolutionary terms. Or consider the way that empathy and the pressure
> > of consistency have led to widespread recognition that our fellow
> > animals should receive humane treatment.
>
> A very narrow an parochial view. The US has now engineered the change
> in Iraq, from a US-style capitalist country - albeit one run by a US
> supported dictator - into a god-ridden hell-hole moving to Sharia Law.
However, such rapid change in moral values seems to be evidence for
cultural rather than biologiical evolution.
> Meanwhile, the US leads the table of prison population per 100,000
> people by a large margin:
Yes, the land of the free.
Dave Smith
Lance
> "Peter Brooks" <peter.h.m.bro...@gmail.com> wrote in message
Yeah - I thought it was quite a good summary too.
Lance
Lance
wrote:
I think "values" are not the same as morality, and I think what people
value does have a clear link to cultural conditions. For example
agricultural societies clearly have different values from hunter
gatherer societies - and these are clearly related to the need to
preserve an heritage (or wealth). I think industrial and post
industrial societies promote quite different values again - hence the
great stress that modernization brings to societies like Iraq.
Lance
Dave Smith
>
> - Show quoted text -
Isn't morality based on values?
Lance
>
> - Show quoted text -
Values don't have to be moral. Values are often studied quite
independently of morality (e.g., Rokeach's study of values). Morality
can be seen as arising from things that are not values (well I don't
think they are) such as sympathy.
Lance
Dave Smith
I think judgements of goodness and badness or of approval and
disapproval underlie all moral judgements. Feelings of sympathy might
not be associated with a moral judgement, as when one sympathises
with the bereaved, but equally they might be, as when one sympathises
with the wrongly imprisoned. A moral judgement can be made about
sympathy itself, as when one approves of kind behaviour.
I agree that we have values that don't give rise to moral judgements.
I think this is because morality primarily involves judgements
regarding human behaviour. We approve of the actions of machines, the
weather and even animals without holding them morally responsible.
Dave Smith
Lance
>
> - Show quoted text -
Hmm. I think judgements are actions (something that a person does) and
values are a kind of codified declaration that something is good or
bad. By codified I mean that they are part of the collective set of
statements that everyone in a culture knows. Some of these values will
exist in any particular individual in the form of beliefs. It is
always possible for person to know that some value exists (e.g.,
adultry is bad) without personally believing in it.
Judgements of good or bad in the first instance are nearly always
personal. "In the first instance" means - before we have had time to
reflect on them. So when a good person slips on a banana peel one's
first reaction may be pleasure because that person has been
irritating. Then we think about it, and decide that he really didn't
desrve to injure his backside in that way.
Even in the reflection phase it is quite possible to decide on the
goodness or badness of something in a way that conflicts with the
declared statements of value in our society. One may endorse the idea
that adulterers should be stoned to death, but when one gets there and
sees the person being stoned - one may decide differently.
It is quite possible to make judgements that involve the ideas of
favourable or unfavourable outcomes (good or bad?) that are not moral
and that nevertheless do pertain to people. Politeness is not the same
as morality - and we can decide that someone is rude without deciding
that he is evil. Demeanour is not morality - and we can decide that
someone who picks their nose is not worthy of our attention without
decising that he has committed a crime or done something immoral.
Sympathy is, I think, a spontaneous response on our part to the
suffering of someone else. We may have values about how people should
behave (for example that people who don't work for a living should be
left to starve) and yet still find ourselves feeling sympathy for a
starving layabout. It is a source of moral action and obviously it
also underlies many of the values we eventually come to endorse. But
it is not in itself a "value" - a declaration or statement of what we
consider to be good or bad. It is a response to what we experience.
That response may in turn give rise to moral judgements and perhaps
moral values.
Lance
Dave Smith
I'm suggesting that morality concerns how certain types of behaviour
are perceived and assessed -- it is in the eye of the beholder
rather than in the actions themselves. In itself, acting out of
sympathy isn't moral. though it may be asserted to to be moral by some
observer. It's possible to imagine some people claiming that acting
out of sympathy is stupid or weak. There can then be a debate, not
about what is actually done, but about the moral status of the
action.
We've been over this ground before, so I don't think we'll agree !
For me, morality is a social reality rather than a physical reality
-- it is subjective in an ontological rather than an epistemological
sense.
Dave Smith
Lance
Dave Smith wrote:
>
> I'm suggesting that morality concerns how certain types of behaviour
> are perceived and assessed -- it is in the eye of the beholder
> rather than in the actions themselves. In itself, acting out of
> sympathy isn't moral. though it may be asserted to to be moral by some
> observer. It's possible to imagine some people claiming that acting
> out of sympathy is stupid or weak. There can then be a debate, not
> about what is actually done, but about the moral status of the
> action.
>
> We've been over this ground before, so I don't think we'll agree !
> For me, morality is a social reality rather than a physical reality
> -- it is subjective in an ontological rather than an epistemological
> sense.
>
Hmm. Social realities like money (surely money is the best example of
an ontologically social reality, and I think Searle uses it as an
example) are not associated with much subjectivity. Ditto property.
Afterall property (the idea that something belongs to or is owned by a
person) has no physical basis -- it is a purely social thing. Yet it
is not associated with much subjectivity. Even those who steal (as
Searle points out) silently ascribe to the notion as is since the
point of stealing is to take someone else's property and make it
yours. It seems to me that those things that are clearly ontologically
social are not subjective in the sense that people have widely
differing views about their nature. So in that sense morality is very
different from money or property. I'll give it more thought but it
doesn't seem to me that an unequivocal case CAN be made that morality
is ontlogically social.
Lance
Peter Brooks
>
> > We've been over this ground before, so I don't think we'll agree !
> > For me, morality is a social reality rather than a physical reality
> > -- it is subjective in an ontological rather than an epistemological
> > sense.
>
> Hmm. Social realities like money (surely money is the best example of
> an ontologically social reality, and I think Searle uses it as an
> example) are not associated with much subjectivity.
>
money is highly subjective. It has been said, as just one example,
that the only figure that can be said to have anything approaching
truth in the Annual Report of a company is the amount of tax paid -
pretty much everything else is a matter of opinion.
Peter Brooks
been involved on either side of a landlord-tenant dispute (and I've
had the misfortune to have, at different times, been on both sides)
can tell you.
Lance
You don't dispute that a particular piece of paper is money, or that
some electronic transaction in your bank account is money do you? What
you dispute is what people do with money, not the fact of money.
But people do dispute the very fact of morality. Compare with money.
You may say a ten percent salary increase won't beat inflation next
year and have a dispute with management about this, but you don't
dispute the idea that money is a medium of exchange that exists in
various forms. Even if you don't think your increase is enough you
don't doubt that you are getting money. But if someone does X another
person may say it is moral and a third person may say it is evil and a
fourth person may say morality has nothing to do with it. Some people
have even denied the exitence of morality altogether. Money per se is
sort of invisible and if it does come into dispute (as when paper
money was introduced) it may simply stop functioning altogether. So
for money to work it has to be supported by a universal consensus that
it is a medium of exchange.
If this doesn't make sense try reading John Searle.
Lance
Lance
Again the disputes are about whether the property is yours or mine or
someone elses. But it is quite senseless to have such a dispute if you
deny the very notion of property. American indians disn't dispute
ownership of land with white settlers - they said the land could not
be anyone's for they had no notion of land being the sort of thing
that could be owned. But if you subscribe to the notion of property
only then can you disoute ownership. If the idea of property was
regularly disputed then most "subjective" fights about property would
be meaningless.
Lance
Peter Brooks
it.
I suppose that, though, for the Red Indians, the white occupiers
couldn't be invaders either because they'd have to have a notion of
there being something that could be invaded - and you can't invade
something that nobody owns.
Dave Smith
>
> Lance- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
I have found this article on the definition of morality helpful in
clearing up some of my confusion:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/
It claims that morality is a code of conduct. Ambiguity arises
because the term is applied both descriptively and normatively. The
last few paragraphs attempt to provide and explicate a normative
definition:
“Morality is an informal public system applying to all rational
persons, governing behavior that affects others, and has the lessening
of evil or harm as its goal.”
Dave Smith
Lance
cite have much to do with the usage of the term 'morality' by
psychologists or philosophers. For example, when a developmental
psychologist writes about moral development they almost certainly are
not referring to codified beliefs (such as 'Christian morality').
Lance
Dave Smith
> I'm not at all sure that the sort of definitions in the article you
> cite have much to do with the usage of the term 'morality' by
> psychologists or philosophers. For example, when a developmental
> psychologist writes about moral development they almost certainly are
> not referring to codified beliefs (such as 'Christian morality').
The article is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and is
concerned with the way philosophers use the concept of morality. I
think psychologists also are concerned with morality as a code of
conduct, though they might not see it quite that way -- for instance,
they investigate how cognitive, emotional and social development
results in a moral framework and viewpoint.
Dave Smith
Lance
more complicated the whole matter becomes. I am afraid I will have to
postpone replying until I am a little clearer in my own mind about the
matter.
Lance
Dave Smith
> I've been thinking about your observation, but the more I think the
> more complicated the whole matter becomes. I am afraid I will have to
> postpone replying until I am a little clearer in my own mind about the
> matter.
I think it helps to remember that the term 'morality' is used
descriptively and normatively. The descriptive usage is
straightforward -- it is a mattter of detailing the codes of conduct
people actually subscribe to. The normative usage is problematic in
that it isn't clear what sort of criteria (religious, scientific,
philosophical, the promptings of conscience, etc.) could or should
determine which moral code is the best. People tend to have their own
'sense of morality' which they consider others should also subscribe
to. Another person's morality in the descriptive sense, may be viewed
as immoral or amoral in the normative sense.
Dave Smith