Mar 2 JDN 2460737

In my previous post, I talked about some ways that evolutionary theory can be abused in ethics, leading to abhorrent conclusions. This is all too common; but it doesn’t mean that evolutionary theory has nothing useful to say about ethics.

There are other approaches to evolutionary ethics that do not lead to such horrific conclusions; one such approach is evolutionary anthropocentrism; it is a position held by respected thinkers such as Frans de Waal, but it is still flawed. The claim is that certain behaviors are moral because we have evolved to do them—that behaviors like friendship, marriage, and nationalism are good precisely because they are part of human nature. On this theory, we can discern what is right and wrong for human beings simply by empirically studying what behaviors are universal or adaptive among human beings.

While I applaud the attempt to understand morality scientifically, I must ultimately conclude that the peculiar history of human evolution is far too parochial a basis for any deep moral truths. Another species—from the millions of other life forms with which we share the Earth to the millions of extraterrestrial civilizations that must in all probability exist somewhere in the vastness of the universe—could have a completely different set of adaptations, and hence a completely incompatible moral system.

Is a trait good because it evolved, or did it evolve because it is good? If the former then “good” just means “fit” and human beings are no more moral than rats or cockroaches. Indeed, the most fit human being of all time was the Moroccan tyrant Mulai Ismail, who reputedly fathered 800 children; the least fit include Isaac Newton and Alan Turing, who had no children at all. To say that evolution gets it right—as, with qualifications, I will—is to say that there is a right, independent of what did or did not evolve; if evolution can get it right, then it could also, under other circumstances, get it wrong.

For illustration, imagine a truly alien form of life, one with which we share no common ancestor and only the most basic similarities. Such creatures likely exist in the vastness of the universe, though of course we’ve never encountered any. Perhaps somewhere in one of the nearby arms of our galaxy there is an unassuming planet inhabited by a race of ammonia-based organisms, let’s call them the Extrans, whose “eyes” see in the radio spectrum, whose “ears” are attuned to frequencies lower than we can hear, whose “nerves” transmit signals by fiber optics instead of electricity, whose “legs” are twenty frond-structured fins that propel them through the ammonia sea, whose “hands” are three long prehensile tentacles extending from their heads, whose “language” is a pattern of radio transmissions produced by their four dorsal antennae. Now, imagine that this alien species has managed to develop sufficient technology so that over millions of years they have colonized all the nearby planets with sufficient ammonia to support them. Yet, their population continues to grow—now in the hundreds of trillions—and they cannot find enough living space to support it. One of their scientists has discovered a way to “ammoniform” certain planets—planets with a great deal of water and nitrogen can be converted into ammonia-supporting planets. There’s only one problem: The nearest water-nitrogen planet is called Earth, and there are already seven billion humans (not to mention billions of other lifeforms) living on it who would surely die if the ammoniforming were performed. The ammoniformer ship has just entered our solar system; we have managed to establish radio contact and achieve some rudimentary level of translation between our radically different languages. What do we say to the Extrans?

If morality is to have a truly objective meaning, we ought to be able to explain in terms the Extrans could accept and understand why it would be wrong for them to ammoniform our planet while we are still living on it. We ought to be able to justify to these other intelligent beings, however different they are from us chemically, biologically, psychologically, and technologically, why we are creatures of dignity who deserve not to be killed. Otherwise, the species with superior weapons will win; and if they can get here, that will probably be them, not us.

Sam Harris has said several times, “morality could be like food”; by this he seems to mean that there is objective evaluation that can be made about the nutrition versus toxicity of a given food, even if there is no one best food, and similarly that objective evaluation can be made about the goodness or badness of a moral system even if there is no one best moral system. This makes a great deal of sense to me, but the analogy can also be turned against him, for if morality is just as contingent upon our biology as diet, then who are we to question these Extrans in their quest for more lebensraum?

Or, if you’d prefer to keep the matter closer to home: Who are we to question sharks or cougars, for whom we are food? In practice it’s difficult to negotiate with sharks and cougars, of course. But if even this is to have real moral significance, e.g. that creatures more capable of rational thought and mutual communication are morally better, we still need an objective inter-species account of morality. And suppose we found a particularly intelligent cougar, and managed some sort of communication; what would we be able to say? What reasons could we offer in defense of our claim that they ought not to eat us? Or is, ultimately, our moral authority in these conflicts no deeper than our superior weapons technology? If this is so, it’s hard to see why the superior weapons technology of the Nazi military wouldn’t justify their genocide of the Jews; and thus we run afoul of the Hitler Principle.

While specific moral precepts can and will depend upon the particular features of a given situation, and evolution surely affects and informs these circumstances, the fundamental principles of morality must be deeper than this—they must at least have the objectivity of scientific facts; in fact I think we can go further than this and say that the core principles of morality are in fact logical truths, the sort of undeniable facts that any intelligent being must accept on pain of contradiction or incoherence. Even if not trivially obvious (like “2+2=4” or “a triangle has three sides”), logical and mathematical truths are still logically undeniable (like “the Fourier transform of a Gaussian function is a Gaussian function” or “the Galois group of some fifth-order real polynomials has an acyclic simple normal subgroup” or “the existence of a strong Lyapunov function proves that a system of nonlinear differential equations has an asymptotically stable zero solution”. Don’t worry if you have no idea what those sentences mean; that’s kind of the point. They are tautologies, yes, but very sophisticated tautologies). The fundamental norms must be derivable by logic and the applications to the real world must depend only upon empirical facts.

The standard that moral principles should be scientific or logical truths is a high bar indeed; and one may think it is unreachable. But if this is so, then I do not see how we can coherently discuss ethics as something which makes true claims against us; I can see only prudence, instinct, survival or custom. If morality is an adaptation like any other, then the claim “genocide is wrong” has no more meaning than “five fingers are better than six”—each applies to our particular evolutionary niche, but no other. Certainly the Extrans will not be bound by such rules, and it is hard to see why cougars should be either. There may still be objectively valid claims that can be made against our behavior, but they will have no more force than “Don’t do that; it’s bad for your genes”. Indeed, I already know that plenty of things people do are (at least potentially) bad for their genes, and yet I think they have a right to do them; not only the usual suspects of contraception, masturbation and homosexuality, but indeed reading books, attending school, drinking alcohol, watching television, skiing, playing baseball, and all sorts of other things human beings do, are wastes of energy in purely Darwinian terms. Most of what makes life worth living has little, if any, effect at spreading our genes.