Re: Re: POLITICS Mike/Biological Basis of Morality

[Guest guest]

The whole piece is too long to make it through so I am including the link,

from it you will have to access part II of the article. As I said, this man is

considered one of the top scientists in the world. He has written many books,

very strong advocate of conservation. Do note he references many works and

ideas, none however, from the field of psychology.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98apr/biomoral.htm

A P R I L 1 9 9 8

The Biological Basis of Morality

Do we invent our moral absolutes in order to make society workable? Or are these

enduring principles expressed to us by some transcendent or Godlike authority?

Efforts to resolve this conundrum have perplexed, sometimes inflamed, our best

minds for centuries, but the natural sciences are telling us more and more about

the choices we make and our reasons for making them

by O.

The online version of this article appears in two parts. Click here to go to

part two.

CENTURIES of debate on the origin of ethics come down to this: Either ethical

principles, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human

experience, or they are human inventions. The distinction is more than an

exercise for academic philosophers. The choice between these two understandings

makes all the difference in the way we view ourselves as a species. It measures

the authority of religion, and it determines the conduct of moral reasoning.

The two assumptions in competition are like islands in a sea of chaos, as

different as life and death, matter and the void. One cannot learn which is

correct by pure logic; the answer will eventually be reached through an

accumulation of objective evidence. Moral reasoning, I believe, is at every

level intrinsically consilient with -- compatible with, intertwined with -- the

natural sciences. (I use a form of the word " consilience " -- literally a

" jumping together " of knowledge as a result of the linking of facts and

fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of

explanation -- because its rarity has preserved its precision.)

Every thoughtful person has an opinion on which premise is correct. But the

split is not, as popularly supposed, between religious believers and

secularists. It is between transcendentalists, who think that moral guidelines

exist outside the human mind, and empiricists, who think them contrivances of

the mind. In simplest terms, the options are as follows: I believe in the

independence of moral values, whether from God or not, and I believe that moral

values come from human beings alone, whether or not God exists.

Theologians and philosophers have almost always focused on transcendentalism as

the means to validate ethics. They seek the grail of natural law, which

comprises freestanding principles of moral conduct immune to doubt and

compromise. Christian theologians, following Saint Aquinas's reasoning in

Summa Theologiae, by and large consider natural law to be an expression of God's

will. In this view, human beings have an obligation to discover the law by

diligent reasoning and to weave it into the routine of their daily lives.

Secular philosophers of a transcendental bent may seem to be radically different

from theologians, but they are actually quite similar, at least in moral

reasoning. They tend to view natural law as a set of principles so powerful,

whatever their origin, as to be self-evident to any rational person. In short,

transcendental views are fundamentally the same whether God is invoked or not.

For example, when Jefferson, following Locke, derived the doctrine

of natural rights from natural law, he was more concerned with the power of

transcendental statements than with their origin, divine or secular. In the

Declaration of Independence he blended secular and religious presumptions in one

transcendentalist sentence, thus deftly covering all bets: " We hold these Truths

to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by

their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,

Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. " That assertion became the cardinal

premise of America's civil religion, the righteous sword wielded by Abraham

Lincoln and Luther King Jr., and it endures as the central ethic binding

together the diverse peoples of the United States.

So compelling are such fruits of natural-law theory, especially when the Deity

is also invoked, that they may seem to place the transcendentalist assumption

beyond question. But to its noble successes must be added appalling failures. It

has been perverted many times in the past -- used, for example, to argue

passionately for colonial conquest, slavery, and genocide. Nor was any great war

ever fought without each side thinking its cause transcendentally sacred in some

manner or other.

So perhaps we need to take empiricism more seriously. In the empiricist view,

ethics is conduct favored consistently enough throughout a society to be

expressed as a code of principles. It reaches its precise form in each culture

according to historical circumstance. The codes, whether adjudged good or evil

by outsiders, play an important role in determining which cultures flourish and

which decline.

The crux of the empiricist view is its emphasis on objective knowledge. Because

the success of an ethical code depends on how wisely it interprets moral

sentiments, those who frame one should know how the brain works, and how the

mind develops. The success of ethics also depends on how accurately a society

can predict the consequences of particular actions as opposed to others,

especially in cases of moral ambiguity.

The empiricist argument holds that if we explore the biological roots of moral

behavior, and explain their material origins and biases, we should be able to

fashion a wise and enduring ethical consensus. The current expansion of

scientific inquiry into the deeper processes of human thought makes this venture

feasible.

The choice between transcendentalism and empiricism will be the coming century's

version of the struggle for men's souls. Moral reasoning will either remain

centered in idioms of theology and philosophy, where it is now, or shift toward

science-based material analysis. Where it settles will depend on which world

view is proved correct, or at least which is more widely perceived to be

correct.

Ethicists, scholars who specialize in moral reasoning, tend not to declare

themselves on the foundations of ethics, or to admit fallibility. Rarely do we

see an argument that opens with the simple statement This is my starting point,

and it could be wrong. Ethicists instead favor a fretful passage from the

particular to the ambiguous, or the reverse -- vagueness into hard cases. I

suspect that almost all are transcendentalists at heart, but they rarely say so

in simple declarative sentences. One cannot blame them very much; explaining the

ineffable is difficult.

I am an empiricist. On religion I lean toward deism, but consider its proof

largely a problem in astrophysics. The existence of a God who created the

universe (as envisioned by deism) is possible, and the question may eventually

be settled, perhaps by forms of material evidence not yet imagined. Or the

matter may be forever beyond human reach. In contrast, and of far greater

importance to humanity, the idea of a biological God, one who directs organic

evolution and intervenes in human affairs (as envisioned by theism), is

increasingly contravened by biology and the brain sciences.

The same evidence, I believe, favors a purely material origin of ethics, and it

meets the criterion of consilience: causal explanations of brain activity and

evolution, while imperfect, already cover most facts known about behavior we

term " moral. " Although this conception is relativistic (in other words,

dependent on personal viewpoint), it can, if evolved carefully, lead more

directly and safely to stable moral codes than can transcendentalism, which is

also, when one thinks about it, ultimately relativistic.

Of course, lest I forget, I may be wrong.

Transcendentalism Versus Empiricism

THE argument of the empiricist has roots that go back to Aristotle's Nicomachean

Ethics and, in the beginning of the modern era, to Hume's A Treatise of

Human Nature (1739-1740). The first clear evolutionary elaboration of it was by

Darwin, in The Descent of Man (1871).

Again, religious transcendentalism is bolstered by secular transcendentalism, to

which it is fundamentally similar. Immanuel Kant, judged by history the greatest

of secular philosophers, addressed moral reasoning very much as a theologian.

Human beings, he argued, are independent moral agents with a wholly free will,

capable of obeying or breaking moral law: " There is in man a power of

self-determination, independent of any coercion through sensuous impulses. " Our

minds are subject to a categorical imperative, Kant said, of what our actions

ought to be. The imperative is a good in itself alone, apart from all other

considerations, and it can be recognized by this rule: " Act only on that maxim

you wish will become a universal law. " Most important, and transcendental, ought

has no place in nature. Nature, Kant said, is a system of cause and effect,

whereas moral choice is a matter of free will, absent cause and effect. In

making moral choices, in rising above mere instinct, human beings transcend the

realm of nature and enter a realm of freedom that belongs exclusively to them as

rational creatures.

Now, this formulation has a comforting feel to it, but it makes no sense at all

in terms of either material or imaginable entities, which is why Kant, even

apart from his tortured prose, is so hard to understand. Sometimes a concept is

baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong. This idea does not

accord, we know now, with the evidence of how the brain works.

In Principia Ethica (1903), G. E. , the founder of modern ethical

philosophy, essentially agreed with Kant. In his view, moral reasoning cannot

dip into psychology and the social sciences in order to locate ethical

principles, because those disciplines yield only a causal picture and fail to

illuminate the basis of moral justification. So to reach the normative ought by

way of the factual is is to commit a basic error of logic, which called

the naturalistic fallacy. Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), once again

traveled the transcendental road. He offered the very plausible suggestion that

justice be defined as fairness, which is to be accepted as an intrinsic good. It

is the imperative we would follow if we had no starting information about our

own future status in life. But in making such a suggestion Rawls ventured no

thought on where the human brain comes from or how it works. He offered no

evidence that justice-as-fairness is consistent with human nature, hence

practicable as a blanket premise. Probably it is, but how can we know except by

blind trial and error?

Had Kant, , and Rawls known modern biology and experimental psychology,

they might well not have reasoned as they did. Yet as this century closes,

transcendentalism remains firm in the hearts not just of religious believers but

also of countless scholars in the social sciences and the humanities who, like

and Rawls, have chosen to insulate their thinking from the natural

sciences.

Many philosophers will respond by saying, Ethicists don't need that kind of

information. You really can't pass from is to ought. You can't describe a

genetic predisposition and suppose that because it is part of human nature, it

is somehow transformed into an ethical precept. We must put moral reasoning in a

special category, and use transcendental guidelines as required.

No, we do not have to put moral reasoning in a special category and use

transcendental premises, because the posing of the naturalistic fallacy is

itself a fallacy. For if ought is not is, what is? To translate is into ought

makes sense if we attend to the objective meaning of ethical precepts. They are

very unlikely to be ethereal messages awaiting revelation, or independent truths

vibrating in a nonmaterial dimension of the mind. They are more likely to be

products of the brain and the culture. From the consilient perspective of the

natural sciences, they are no more than principles of the social contract

hardened into rules and dictates -- the behavioral codes that members of a

society fervently wish others to follow and are themselves willing to accept for

the common good. Precepts are the extreme on a scale of agreements that range

from casual assent, to public sentiment, to law, to that part of the canon

considered sacred and unalterable. The scale applied to adultery might read as

follows:

Let's not go further; it doesn't feel right, and it may lead to trouble. (Maybe

we ought not.)

Adultery not only causes feelings of guilt but is generally disapproved of by

society. (We probably ought not.)

Adultery isn't just disapproved of; it's against the law. (We almost certainly

ought not.)

God commands that we avoid this mortal sin. (We absolutely ought not.)

In transcendental thinking, the chain of causation runs downward from the given

ought in religion or natural law through jurisprudence to education and finally

to individual choice. The argument from transcendentalism takes the following

general form: The order of nature contains supreme principles, either divine or

intrinsic, and we will be wise to learn about them and find the means to conform

to them. Thus Rawls opens A Theory of Justice with a proposition he regards

as irrevocable: " In a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken

as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political

bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. " As many critiques have made

clear, that premise can lead to unhappy consequences when applied to the real

world, including a tightening of social control and a decline in personal

initiative. A very different premise, therefore, is suggested by Nozick

in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974): " Individuals have rights, and there are

things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So

strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what,

if anything, the state and its officials may do. " Rawls would point us toward

egalitarianism regulated by the state, Nozick toward libertarianism in a

minimalist state.

The empiricist view, in contrast, searching for an origin of ethical reasoning

that can be objectively studied, reverses the chain of causation. The individual

is seen as predisposed biologically to make certain choices. Through cultural

evolution some of the choices are hardened into precepts, then into laws, and,

if the predisposition or coercion is strong enough, into a belief in the command

of God or the natural order of the universe. The general empiricist principle

takes this form: Strong innate feeling and historical experience cause certain

actions to be preferred; we have experienced them, and have weighed their

consequences, and agree to conform with codes that express them. Let us take an

oath upon the codes, invest our personal honor in them, and suffer punishment

for their violation. The empiricist view concedes that moral codes are devised

to conform to some drives of human nature and to suppress others. Ought is the

translation not of human nature but of the public will, which can be made

increasingly wise and stable through an understanding of the needs and pitfalls

of human nature. The empiricist view recognizes that the strength of commitment

can wane as a result of new knowledge and experience, with the result that

certain rules may be desacralized, old laws rescinded, and formerly prohibited

behavior set free. It also recognizes that for the same reason new moral codes

may need to be devised, with the potential of being made sacred in time.

The Origin of Moral Instincts

IF the empiricist world view is correct, ought is just shorthand for one kind of

factual statement, a word that denotes what society first chose (or was coerced)

to do, and then codified. The naturalistic fallacy is thereby reduced to the

naturalistic problem. The solution of the problem is not difficult: ought is the

product of a material process. The solution points the way to an objective grasp

of the origin of ethics.

A few investigators are now embarked on just such a foundational inquiry. Most

agree that ethical codes have arisen by evolution through the interplay of

biology and culture. In a sense these investigators are reviving the idea of

moral sentiments that was developed in the eighteenth century by the British

empiricists Francis Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam .

What have been thought of as moral sentiments are now taken to mean moral

instincts (as defined by the modern behavioral sciences), subject to judgment

according to their consequences. Such sentiments are thus derived from

epigenetic rules -- hereditary biases in mental development, usually conditioned

by emotion, that influence concepts and decisions made from them. The primary

origin of moral instincts is the dynamic relation between cooperation and

defection. The essential ingredient for the molding of the instincts during

genetic evolution in any species is intelligence high enough to judge and

manipulate the tension generated by the dynamism. That level of intelligence

allows the building of complex mental scenarios well into the future. It occurs,

so far as is known, only in human beings and perhaps their closest relatives

among the higher apes.

A way of envisioning the hypothetical earliest stages of moral evolution is

provided by game theory, particularly the solutions to the famous Prisoner's

Dilemma. Consider the following typical scenario of the dilemma. Two gang

members have been arrested for murder and are being questioned separately. The

evidence against them is strong but not irrefutable. The first gang member

believes that if he turns state's witness, he will be granted immunity and his

partner will be sentenced to life in prison. But he is also aware that his

partner has the same option, and that if both of them exercise it, neither will

be granted immunity. That is the dilemma. Will the two gang members

independently defect, so that both take the hard fall? They will not, because

they agreed in advance to remain silent if caught. By doing so, both hope to be

convicted on a lesser charge or escape punishment altogether. Criminal gangs

have turned this principle of calculation into an ethical precept: Never rat on

another member; always be a stand-up guy. Honor does exist among thieves. The

gang is a society of sorts; its code is the same as that of a captive soldier in

wartime, obliged to give only name, rank, and serial number.

In one form or another, comparable dilemmas that are solvable by cooperation

occur constantly and everywhere in daily life. The payoff is variously money,

status, power, sex, access, comfort, or health. Most of these proximate rewards

are converted into the universal bottom line of Darwinian genetic fitness:

greater longevity and a secure, growing family.

And so it has most likely always been. Imagine a Paleolithic band of five

hunters. One considers breaking away from the others to look for an antelope on

his own. If successful, he will gain a large quantity of meat and hide -- five

times as much as if he stays with the band and they are successful. But he knows

from experience that his chances of success are very low, much less than the

chances of the band of five working together. In addition, whether successful

alone or not, he will suffer animosity from the others for lessening their

prospects. By custom the band members remain together and share equitably the

animals they kill. So the hunter stays. He also observes good manners in doing

so, especially if he is the one who makes the kill. Boastful pride is condemned,

because it rips the delicate web of reciprocity.

Now suppose that human propensities to cooperate or defect are heritable: some

people are innately more cooperative, others less so. In this respect moral

aptitude would simply be like almost all other mental traits studied to date.

Among traits with documented heritability, those closest to moral aptitude are

empathy with the distress of others and certain processes of attachment between

infants and their caregivers. To the heritability of moral aptitude add the

abundant evidence of history that cooperative individuals generally survive

longer and leave more offspring. Following that reasoning, in the course of

evolutionary history genes predisposing people toward cooperative behavior would

have come to predominate in the human population as a whole.

Such a process repeated through thousands of generations inevitably gave rise to

moral sentiments. With the exception of psychopaths (if any truly exist), every

person vividly experiences these instincts variously as conscience,

self-respect, remorse, empathy, shame, humility, and moral outrage. They bias

cultural evolution toward the conventions that express the universal moral codes

of honor, patriotism, altruism, justice, compassion, mercy, and redemption.

The dark side of the inborn propensity to moral behavior is xenophobia. Because

personal familiarity and common interest are vital in social transactions, moral

sentiments evolved to be selective. People give trust to strangers with effort,

and true compassion is a commodity in chronically short supply. Tribes cooperate

only through carefully defined treaties and other conventions. They are quick to

imagine themselves the victims of conspiracies by competing groups, and they are

prone to dehumanize and murder their rivals during periods of severe conflict.

They cement their own group loyalties by means of sacred symbols and ceremonies.

Their mythologies are filled with epic victories over menacing enemies.

The complementary instincts of morality and tribalism are easily manipulated.

Civilization has made them more so. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, a tick in

geological time, when the agricultural revolution started in the Middle East, in

China, and in Mesoamerica, populations increased tenfold in density over those

of hunter-gatherer societies. Families settled on small plots of land, villages

proliferated, and labor was finely divided as a growing minority of the populace

specialized as craftsmen, traders, and soldiers. The rising agricultural

societies became increasingly hierarchical. As chiefdoms and then states thrived

on agricultural surpluses, hereditary rulers and priestly castes took power. The

old ethical codes were transformed into coercive regulations, always to the

advantage of the ruling classes. About this time the idea of law-giving gods

originated. Their commands lent the ethical codes overpowering authority -- once

again, no surprise, in the interests of the rulers.

Because of the technical difficulty of analyzing such phenomena in an objective

manner, and because people resist biological explanations of their higher

cortical functions in the first place, very little progress has been made in the

biological exploration of the moral sentiments. Even so, it is astonishing that

the study of ethics has advanced so little since the nineteenth century. The

most distinguishing and vital qualities of the human species remain a blank

space on the scientific map. I doubt that discussions of ethics should rest upon

the freestanding assumptions of contemporary philosophers who have evidently

never given thought to the evolutionary origin and material functioning of the

human brain. In no other domain of the humanities is a union with the natural

sciences more urgently needed.

When the ethical dimension of human nature is at last fully opened to such

exploration, the innate epigenetic rules of moral reasoning will probably not

prove to be aggregated into simple instincts such as bonding, cooperativeness,

and altruism. Instead the rules will most probably turn out to be an ensemble of

many algorithms, whose interlocking activities guide the mind across a landscape

of nuanced moods and choices.

Such a prestructured mental world may at first seem too complicated to have been

created by autonomous genetic evolution alone. But all the evidence of biology

suggests that just this process was enough to spawn the millions of species of

life surrounding us. Each kind of animal is furthermore guided through its life

cycle by unique and often elaborate sets of instinctual algorithms, many of

which are beginning to yield to genetic and neurobiological analyses. With all

these examples before us, we may reasonably conclude that human behavior

originated the same way.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The online version of this article appears in two parts. Click here to go to

part two.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

O. is the Pellegrino University Research Professor and Honorary

Curator in Entomology at Harvard University. His article in this issue is drawn

from his book Consilience, to be published this month by Knopf.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Illustrations by Goldstrom

Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

The Atlantic Monthly; April 1998; The Biological Basis of Morality; Volume 281,

No. 4; pages 53 - 70.

[Guest guest]

>

>

>The whole piece is too long to make it through so I am including the

link, from it you will have to access part II of the article. As I said, this

man is considered one of the top scientists in the world. He has written many

books, very strong advocate of conservation. Do note he references many works

and ideas, none however, from the field of psychology.

>

><http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98apr/biomoral.htm>http://www.theatlantic.co\

m/issues/98apr/biomoral.<http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98apr/biomoral.htm>ht\

m

This is a great article, but I can't see how it advances your view, ?

He seems to believe that morality is based on our biology, which

doesn't seem to fit what you have been saying? (It DOES fit what

I believe, which is that " morality " is a kind of shorthand for

" what works " ). Or am I misunderstanding something terribly?

-- Heidi

>A P R I L 1 9 9 8

>

>

>

>I am an empiricist. On religion I lean toward deism, but consider its proof

largely a problem in astrophysics. The existence of a God who created the

universe (as envisioned by deism) is possible, and the question may eventually

be settled, perhaps by forms of material evidence not yet imagined. Or the

matter may be forever beyond human reach. In contrast, and of far greater

importance to humanity, the idea of a biological God, one who directs organic

evolution and intervenes in human affairs (as envisioned by theism), is

increasingly contravened by biology and the brain sciences.

>

>The same evidence, I believe, favors a purely material origin of ethics, and it

meets the criterion of consilience: causal explanations of brain activity and

evolution, while imperfect, already cover most facts known about behavior we

term " moral. " Although this conception is relativistic (in other words,

dependent on personal viewpoint), it can, if evolved carefully, lead more

directly and safely to stable moral codes than can transcendentalism, which is

also, when one thinks about it, ultimately relativistic.

>

>Of course, lest I forget, I may be wrong.

>

>

>