Evolved Morality: The Biology and Philosophy of Human Conscience

by Frans de Waal (Contributor)

Morality is often defined in opposition to the natural "instincts," or as a tool to keep those instincts in check. New findings in neuroscience, social psychology, animal behavior, and anthropology have brought us back to the original Darwinian position that moral behavior is continuous with the social behavior of animals, and most likely evolved to enhance the cooperativeness of society. In this view, morality is part of human nature rather than its opposite. This interdisciplinary volume debates the origin and working of human morality within the context of science as well as religion and philosophy. Experts from widely different backgrounds speculate how morality may have evolved, how it develops in the child, and what science can tell us about its working and origin. They also discuss how to deal with the age-old facts-versus-values debate, also known as the naturalistic fallacy. The implications of this exchange are enormous, as they may transform cherished views on if and why we are the only moral species.

These articles are also published in Behaviour , Volume 151, Nos. 2/3 (February 2014).

Suitable for course adoption!

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Psychology, Anthropology

270 pages, Hardcover

First published February 20, 2014

About the author

Frans de Waal has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. The author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, among many other works, he is the C. H. Candler Professor in Emory University’s Psychology Department and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Reviews

[Ben Mulvey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The academic world is witnessing the formation and rapidly evolving field of animal studies. I’m not referring to the narrower field of animal rights, begun more or less with the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975, which seems as vibrant a field as ever. Animal studies cuts across and embraces such disciplines as history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, religious studies, art history, sociology, biology, among others. The rapidity by which interesting insights have been formulated and shared in this vast field is staggering. This is also true of another cross-disciplinary field that might be called evolutionary studies. The last decade or so of research in these two broad areas area has helped to shape new understandings of both human and non-human animals. This volume offers representative examples of some of the best work going on at the convergence of these areas.

Evolved Morality is a 270-page book divided into four sections of two to four chapters each and includes a forward and an index. It consists of a collection of presentations to a workshop on the biological roots of morality and ethics that took place in 2012. These presentations were also already published in the journal Behavior in 2014. In the editors’ words, “… we brought together a collection of experts from disparate fields with the goal of exploring how and why morality may have evolved, how it develops in the human child, and how it is related to religious beliefs, and whether neuroscience and evolutionary theory can shed light on its functioning in our species” (3). By the end of the volume it’s clear that much light has been and can be so shed.

Section one, “Evolution,” starts with the controversy arising between Darwin, Huxley, and others about how and whether evolutionary theory can adequately account for the phenomenon of altruism. Are human beings basically “brutish” as Hobbes said? Are brutes “brutish” in the same way as humans? Is morality just a sham in the sense that it is a social convention that glosses over the otherwise basic ruthlessness of all animals including homo sapiens? In “A History of the Altruism-Morality Debate in Biology,” Owen Harmen, as the title of his contribution implies, provides a very accessible entrée into the whole collection and De Waal’s “Natural Normativity: the ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ of Animal Behavior” provides a sturdy and accessible bridge between the science and philosophy of morality.

The next section, “Metaethics,” continues the discussion of the metaethical issue of the “is/ought problem” with some of contemporary philosophy’s heavy hitters (e.g., Owen Flanagan, Simon Blackburn, Philip Kitcher). Their “research has explored new directions” (71) in the sense that the questions for them is not the standard “Do the biology and psychology of moral behavior bear upon ethical judgments,” but has become more like “How does the biology and psychology of moral behavior bear upon ethical judgments?” In fact, the assumption here more or less underlies the approach of all the contributors to this volume. The debates in this book are more like family squabbles than they are like divorce-inducing irreconcilable differences.

The third section, “Neuroscience and Development,” explores the relationship between the social inclinations and the basic genetic substructures that make them possible, thereby providing the biological “foundations” of morality. For a non-scientist, this may be the densest section of the book. But the contributors here are all fairly masterly writers so that some of the most intricate scientific details are quite comprehensible. Churchland’s “The Neurobiological Platform for Moral Values,” is representative. She makes the whole enterprise of the scientific study of morality possible by bringing morality back from the Platonic (or other) heaven and placing it firmly on familiar ground with this simple claim: “…moral values are not other-worldly; rather they are social worldly. They reflect facts about how we feel and think about certain kinds of social behavior” (147).

The fourth and final section, “religion,” offers a fascinating rehearsal of a number of research projects that explore “the connections in human evolution between supernatural beliefs, organized religion, and morality” (227). The two contributions to this section, Norenzayan’s “Does Religion Make People Moral?” and Girtotto et al’s “Supernatural Beliefs: Adaptations for Social Life or By-Products of Cognitive Adaptations?” lay to rest a number of silly assumptions about this issue and offer clear, level-headed summaries of some very interesting empirical research.

Evolved Morality is not meant for a general reading audience. Nonetheless, the various pieces making up this collection are for the most part accessible and well-written. I think intelligent readers with no specific background in the various disciplines covered here could find the book interesting and useful. It’s the sort of collection that one can dabble in, reading chapters in no particular order, ignoring some altogether for that matter. The great strength of this collection, for me, was that it offers some real answers to real questions about the evolutionary roots of morality without being polemical. Furthermore, it clarifies some of the debates and questions that have been quite muddled so that false questions can be dispensed with allowing for fruitful research projects to proceed. Because this collection represents some of the most cutting edge research questions being addressed in the field of animal studies right now, for anyone interested in the nature and development of morality in humans and animals and the relations between the two, this book is well worth considering.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a dream. INDEED!!! It was so well written and so well explained, it was so easy to read in comparison to The Primate Mind, which was such a challenge... And this book just changed my life, I am still amazed by what I have found.

SPOILERS

The reviewed evidence shows that infants have an early and strong tendency to attribute agency based on minimal cues. Indeed, all humans, including adults, seem to be highly sensitive to signs of agency, in particular, of human agency, so much so that they tend to attribute intentions where all that really exists is accident (Boyer, 2001). Likewise, humans are pattern seekers, so much so that they tend regard regularities, like a series of six boys born in sequence at a hospital, not as accident but as the product of mechanical causality or of someone’s intention (Kahneman, 2011).

“The tendency in savages to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by a little fact which I once noticed: my dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent, and that no stranger had a right to be on his territory.

The belief in spiritual agencies would easily pass into the belief in the existence of one or more gods. For savages would naturally attribute to spirits the same passions, the same love of vengeance or simplest form of justice, and the same affections which they themselves feel”(Darwin,1871, p. 67).

The above passage indicates that Darwin regarded the faculty of being sensitive to agency cues as an advantageous one. Recently, many authors have attributed the tendency to detect agency, even when it is inappropriate to do so, to a rational strategy: better safe than sorry (e.g., Guthrie, 1993; Boyer, 2001; Barrett, 2004). Indeed, the cost of over-detecting agency (e.g., an animal who reacts to a parasol’s move, and it is just the wind, does not lose anything) is lower than the cost of under-detecting it (e.g., an animal who does not react, and there is an enemy there, might lose a lot). As indicated above, the agency detector is hyperactive in our species, possibly because of the high degree of sophistication of our social life (Humphrey, 1984).

What could be the consequences of such a tendency? Following Darwin, modern scholars have argued that it is the source of animistic religious beliefs (e.g., Guthrie, 1993). It is likely, however, that it also play a major role in the emergence and diffusion of two other fundamental features of supernatural thinking: design stance and teleological stance. The first feature refers to the human propensity to use the designer’s intention to categorize objects and to infer their intended functions, ignoring the actual, and possibly messy, details of their physical constitution (Dennett, 1987). Beginning early in childhood, humans exhibit such a propensity. For example, 3-year-olds are more likely to call an object an hat, when they are informed that a piece of newspaper has been shaped with this intention by somebody, than when they are informed that a piece of newspaper has been incidentally shaped in this way (Gelman & Bloom, 2000). Unlike non-human primates, humans aptly use the design stance in learning how to interact with objects. When children are given a new tool, they use the intention of the individual who presents it, in order to understand how it works. By contrast, chimpanzees tend to rely on its perceptual features (Horner & Whiten, 2005). Besides emerging early in childhood, the design stance persists in adulthood across cultures, informing the acquisition and representation of knowledge about artefacts. Even individuals who live in nonindustrial, technologically sparse cultures are sensitive to information about design function. German & Barrett (2005) asked a group of adolescents of the Shuar, an hunter horticulturalist people of Ecuadorian Amazonia, to tackle problems whose solution implies the atypical use of an artefact (e.g., using a spoon to bridge a gap between two objects). When the design function of the target artefact was not primed during problem presentation (e.g., a spoon was presented alongside other objects), participants performed better than when the design function was primed (e.g., the spoon was presented inside a cup full of rice). In sum, information about the design function constrains problem solving just as it does with individuals living in technologically rich cultures (Duncker, 1945).

Taken together, these findings illustrate the adaptive value of the intuitive design stance and its role in human evolution.Without such an advantageous heuristic, our ancestors would probably not have been able to surpass the technologically poor cultures of the other primates, in which the customary or habitual use of tools ranges from five to at most twenty (Whiten et al., 2001). In sum, it is plausible to associate the design stance to the early emergence of technological abilities in the history of humankind (Ambrose, 2001).

Just as humans tend to over-attribute agency, they also tend to overattribute design. Young children, for example, attribute purpose not only to artefacts, but also to living (“The tiger is made for being seen at a zoo”) and non-living natural objects (“This prehistorical rock was pointy so that animals could scratch on it”). Children’s tendency to use teleological explanations
of this sort, rather than physical-causal explanations, decreases with formal education (Kelemen, 2003), but it may reappear in adult inferences. In particular, Alzheimer patients with degraded semantic memories (Lombrozo et al., 2007) and adults with minimal schooling (Casler & Kelemen, 2008) display teleological intuitions about natural entities and their properties. A recent study, however, has provided striking evidence that the teleological stance is a lifelong cognitive default. Kelemen et al. (2013) asked a group of professional physical scientists at high-ranking American research universities to judge sentences as true or false. Some sentences were false teleological explanations of natural phenomena (e.g., The sun makes light so that plants can photosynthesise). Others were incongruous teleological explanations concerning artefacts (e.g., Window blinds have slats so that they can capture dust). In a control condition, in which participants had no time limits to answers, they did not endorse false explanations of any sorts. However, when participants had to judge explanations at speed—a condition that hinders inhibition of automatic explanatory reactions—they showed higher acceptance of false teleological explanations. In sum, the strongest possible test of the teleological stance hypothesis yielded clear-cut results: Even individuals who have relevant scientific knowledge and explicitly reject teleological explanations of nature in their professional life, endorse them when their cognitive resources are taxed. This set of findings indicates that teleological intuitions emerge early in childhood and may be inhibited by later scientific education, but are never fully eliminated.

If there is an intuitive tendency to discern design in nature, is there also a tendency to infer the presence of a Designer? In other words, is there an intuitive equivalent of the design argument? In Paley’s (1802/2006) famous version, the argument is that if one observes the complexity of a watch, one is lead to infer that it was purposefully designed by a maker. Likewise, if one observes the complexity of the nature, one is lead to infer that it was purposefully designed by a Supreme Maker. Formally, the design argument implies the ability to relate observations and potential explanations via the vehicle of likelihoods (Sober, 2004) or probabilities (DeCruz & De Smedt,
2010). Preverbal infants seem to have an implicit understanding of the principles that connect observations and hypotheses (Teglas et al., 2011). And pre-schoolers manifest such an understanding in an explicit, albeit qualitative way, in their judgments and choices (Girotto & Gonzalez, 2008; Gonzalez & Girotto, 2011). Finally, children not only have the logical prerequisites for the design argument, but actually seem to endorse it. When nine-year-olds are explicitly asked to select one explanation about the origin of animals, they prefer creationism over natural selection, regardless of whether they have been raised by a creationist or a secular community (Evans, 2001).

Some authors have attributed the enduring appeal of the design argument to cultural factors, like the pervasive influence of the Aristotelian teleology (Wattles, 2006). The evidence reviewed in this section suggests a different conclusion: Unlike the a-teleological and purposeless evolutionary theory, the design argument rests on evolved tendencies of the human mind. Thus, it maintains its intuitive attractiveness one and half century after the publication of Darwin’s theory (Pievani, 2013b).