EVOLUTION AND ETHICS
From Moral Philosophy through the Ages (2nd edition), by James Fieser
Home: https://storage.googleapis.com/jfieser/300/Index.html
2001, updated 9/1/2024, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
CONTENTS
Introduction
Nineteenth-Century Theories of Evolutionary Ethics
Darwin and the Evolution of Moral Faculties
Spencer and the Evolution of Advanced Conduct
Evolutionary Ethics Today
Wilson's Sociobiology of Moral Ambivalence
Social Behavior in Animals
Three Evolutionary Mechanisms of Social Behavior in Animals
Criticisms of Evolutionary Ethics
Cobbe's Criticism: Evolutionary Ethics is Incompatible with Universal and Unchanging Morality
Huxley's Criticism: Ethics is a Creation of Human Culture, not of Natural Selection
Dewey's Criticism: Ethics isn't Biological Natural Selection, but Social Natural Selection
Moore's Criticism: Goodness is not Identical with being More Evolved
Lingering Issues with Evolutionary Ethics
The Origins of Morality and Evolutionary Relativism
Moral Standards and Higher Evolved Conduct
References
Study Questions
INTRODUCTION
We might think that moral behavior is unique to humans, and that behavior among animals is, well, animalistic. However, there are many accounts of animals performing actions that we would identify as "moral" if done by people. For example, a group of lifeguards in New Zealand was saved from a great white shark by a pod of dolphins. The dolphins swam in circles around the lifeguards, protecting them from the approaching shark for about 40 minutes until the threat passed. Also, a group of elephants in Kenya assisted an injured elephant calf after it was attacked by a lion. The adults lifted it to its feet with their trunks, nudged it away from danger, and continued to support it until it could walk again on its own. Observations like this both in the wild and in controlled laboratory settings are so common, that there is a scientific field of study devoted to it, namely, sociobiology. It examines the biological basis of social behaviors such as cooperation and altruism. Most importantly, it aims to show that such behavioral traits evolved through natural selection by contributing to the survival and reproductive success of those animals.
The implications of evolution on our conceptions of morality are far reaching. It means that human moral behaviors, such as altruism, cooperation, empathy, and even a sense of justice, may have similarly evolved through natural selection. This potentially challenges the traditional philosophical idea that morality is grounded in some eternal an unchanging metaphysical reality, such as Plato's moral Forms, or the mind of God. For, if human moral traits evolved merely as a consequence of natural selection, such a morality would not seem to be either eternal or unchanging.
Moral philosophy aims to answer two questions: (1) where does morality come from, and (2), what are the moral standards we should follow? Evolutionary ethics specifically addresses the first question by explaining how basic social traits helped lower animals survive, which over time became more complex as humans evolved. Is this explanation convincing? That's what we will explore here.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY THEORIES OF EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS
Theories of evolutionary ethics hinge directly on Darwin's theory of natural selection in his landmark book On the Origin of Species (1859), which championed the explanation of evolution that we ve come to accept. In Darwin's day, moral philosophy was divided between two camps: the intuitivists and inductivists. The intuitivists held that we have a special rational faculty that enables us to discover unchanging moral laws of the universe that guide our conduct. These theorists are also sometimes called moral intuitionists, moral rationalists, non-consequentialists, or deontologists. Samuel Clarke and Immanuel Kant, who we looked at in previous chapters, are defenders of this view. By contrast, the inductivists held that we discover moral standards by investigating human psychology and human behavior. These theorists are also referred to as moral empiricists, consequentialists, teleologists, or "derivativists" as Darwin called them, and the main examples of these are the utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Darwin entered this debate siding with the utilitarian inductivists.
Darwin and the Evolution of Moral Faculties
Darwin s theory of natural selection has three main elements. First, living beings undergo random mutations that are passed on to offspring. Second, most creatures are doomed to early death either because there is not enough food to go around or because other animals eat them. Third, animals that have the most beneficial mutations will survive and pass those attributes on to their offspring. For example, suppose that two animals are born of the same parents, but one of the newborns has longer legs because of a random mutation. The longer legs enable this animal to run faster than its sibling, and so it is better able to run down prey and to escape from predators. The normal sibling, then, dies while the mutated animal survives, reproduces, and passes the attribute of longer legs on to its offspring. Eventually, all the shorter-legged members of the species die out in the struggle for survival, while the longer-legged members live on. In this manner, attributes of a species change slowly over time, and a new species eventually emerges. For Darwin, species are mutable, and each group of organisms represents only the present status of its species. He argues that the apparent development of species over time, from less complex to more complex, is completely unguided, and we should not attribute it to a built-in natural purpose of things.
Darwin s Origin of Species focuses only on the evolutionary development of nonhuman animals. Privately, though, he believed that humans were just one more type of animal and thereby subject to the same evolutionary mechanisms as other animals. In his Descent of Man (1871), published twelve years after the Origin, Darwin openly addresses the issue of human evolution and devotes almost thirty pages to the evolutionary development of morality. His explanation that there are three components of our moral faculties: (1) social instincts that we share with many animals, (2) more evolved moral instincts of the moral sense and conscience, and (3) an extension of these social and moral instincts beyond our group to all humanity. All three of these are grounded in biological evolution, and are not social constructions.
First, he argues, our human moral faculties develop directly from our social instincts, such as our inclination to care for children and live in groups. Some animals, he argues, have similar social instincts that, in the case of dogs for example, enable them to sympathize with members of their social units and to respond to praise and blame. Humans, however, move beyond this and are, in Darwin s words, moral beings. For Darwin, a moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them (Descent, Ch. 4). Accordingly, the second part of his view is that we have evolved the two uniquely moral instincts of the moral sense and conscience. Our moral sense tells us what we ought to do, and, our conscience gives us the appropriate motivation to do the right thing by making us "feel remorse, repentance, regret, or shame" (Ibid.). He argues that any animal that developed social instincts would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as that animal reached a high level of intelligence (Ibid.). In point of fact, though, only humans so far have attained that intelligence level.
The third part of Darwin s evolutionary explanation of morality is the social enlargement of these social and moral instincts. As we move from a primitive to a moderate state of civilization, we adopt moral principles and attitudes that assist in the survival of our small social unit. We put aside individual interests for the good of the group and advocate patriotism, loyalty, obedience, and self-sacrifice. Darwin explains:
A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase. [Descent, Ch. 5]
As our societies become even larger and more advanced, we can trace the consequences of our actions to broader groups of people, and our sympathies become more diffused to all races. Darwin saw this expansion of moral concern as an important feature of moral development, insofar as our evolved capacity for sympathy gradually extends beyond family to tribe, nation, and eventually all humanity. This expansion demonstrates how our evolved moral faculties can develop in ways that move beyond their original survival function.
Ironically, once we reach an advanced level of civilization, we adopt many moral rules that are less related to the preservation of our individual social groups. For example, we care for physically weak and mentally impaired people, which, according to Darwin, is highly injurious to the race of man (Ibid.). We do this mainly as a byproduct of our enlarged moral sympathies. We also harm the human race when we send our strongest young men to fight in wars, thereby leaving procreation to the weaker men who stay behind. Darwin notes as well that the practice of inheriting wealth from our parents is damaging since it makes us useless drones (Ibid.). However, always looking to our survival, we create other moral rules that restrict the damage done by these practices. Thus, while Darwin acknowledges that advanced civilizations may adopt moral rules that seem to work against biological fitness, this is not a purely cultural creation. Instead, these social rules are the outgrowth of our evolutionarily-derived moral capacities, particularly our enlarged sympathies that themselves emerged through natural selection.
All combined, our social and moral instincts will direct us towards actions that serve the general good. For this reason, he says, the utilitarian standard of the greatest happiness principle will "become a most important secondary guide" for our conduct (Ibid.). It is not that utilitarianism is the starting point or foundation of morality. Rather, evolution itself is that foundation in so far as it shapes our social conduct in such a way that the moral principle of utility turns out to be the best rule of thumb for guiding our behavior. In contrast to Darwin's acceptance of utilitarianism, he rejects the rival theory of moral intuitionism and its heavy emphasis on reason to discover moral truths. He admits that reason does help us understand and refine our moral instincts, but reason does not create those instincts. For, he says, our moral decisions are fundamentally driven by our evolved social instincts and emotions rather than pure rational calculation. While specific moral rules sometimes vary between societies, Darwin says that there is a remarkable consistency and universality of basic moral behaviors across human cultures. This includes care for offspring, cooperation within groups, and aversion to killing, and it suggests that they are part of our evolved nature rather than purely cultural inventions.
Here are the main points of Darwin's theory of evolutionary ethics:
Human moral faculties develop from (1) social instincts such as sympathy, (2) the two moral instincts of a moral sense, which tells us what we ought to do, and a conscience, which motivate us through feelings of remorse and approval.
As societies become larger, we extend our social and moral instincts beyond our immediate group to all humanity.
A convenient indicator of our evolutionarily-evolved morality is the utilitarian principle that we should advance the greatest good.
Although Darwin s account of evolutionary ethics is suggestive, it does not systematically explore the subject of ethics in the way that philosophers do. Darwin s defenders took on this task, most notably by British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820 1903).
Spencer and the Evolution of Advanced Conduct
Spencer was a prolific contributor to evolutionary theory and is the one who introduced the term "survival of the fittest" to describe the process of natural selection. In his book The Data of Ethics (1879), he offers what is probably the most detailed nineteenth-century account of evolutionary ethics. Like Darwin, Spencer sees morality as grounded in biological evolution rather than pure social construction. Like Darwin, he also distinguishes between a biological and a sociological component of evolution. In fact, Spencer sees three interrelated areas of evolution in animals: (1) the animal s species, (2) the animal s bodily functions, and (3) the animal s conduct:
Three [evolutionary] subjects are to be definitely distinguished. . . the subject of conduct lies outside the subject of functions [movement of limbs, bodily actions], if not as far as this lies outside the subject of structures [types of animals, organisms] still far enough to make it substantially different. [The Data of Ethics, 2.3]
Ethics involves the last of these three aspects of evolution, namely, the development of the animal s conduct. Spencer argues that more biologically complex organisms have more complex conduct. Insects, for example, have a very low level of biological complexity and thus have comparatively less complex conduct. Humans, by contrast, have the most biological complexity and thus the most complex conduct, and ethics is the final stage in the development of that conduct. Spencer writes,
Ethics has for its subject-matter, that form which universal conduct assumes during the last stages of its evolution. We have also concluded that these last stages in the evolution of conduct are these displayed by the highest type of being, when he is forced, by increase of numbers, to live more and more in presence of his fellows. And there has followed the corollary that conduct gains ethical sanction in proportion as the activities, becoming less and less militant and more and more industrial, are such as do not necessitate mutual injury or hindrance, but consist with, and are furthered by, co-operation and mutual aid. [Ibid., 2.7]
During this final stage of behavioral development, our conduct is more complex because it involves such a high degree of mutual cooperation. Think of the mutual cooperation involved in making a city run efficiently. Utility companies, factories, truckers, retail stores, workers, and consumers all must carefully cooperate with each other. When enough people fail to cooperate, such as in work strikes or criminal activities, then society breaks down.
While both Darwin and Spencer see morality as rooted in biological evolution, Spencer has a more rigid and hierarchical view where ethics evolves in a series of stages, where the "final stage" involves universal conduct. Darwin held that moral instincts and behaviors evolved incrementally through natural selection, without clear-cut stages. He suggests that certain animals, like dogs, exhibit proto-moral capacities through their social instincts, where we can draw a continuous line between animal social behavior and human morality. By contrast, Spencer argued that ethics involves a big jump to a "final stage" of evolutionary development. As such, morality emerges only in "the highest type of being" that is capable of complex conduct, which sharply distinguishes human morality from animal behavior.
Both Darwin and Spencer link evolutionary ethics with utilitarianism. Darwin, we've seen, focused primarily on the psychological origins of morality, and he mentions utilitarianism only as a "secondary guide" (Descent, Ch. 4).
Spencer, however, places utilitarianism at the heart of his theory of evolutionary ethics. His view unfolds in four steps. First, he says that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain drive all human actions. For example, we might choose to eat a favorite meal because it brings us pleasure, while avoiding spoiled food to prevent discomfort. For this reason, morally good conduct must be tied to experiences of pleasure. Second, Spencer argues that we have both self-regarding and other-regarding impulses, each of which gives us pleasure when satisfied. For instance, achieving personal success can bring me pleasure from fulfilling my self-regarding impulses, while helping a friend in need can bring me the pleasure of fulfilling my other-regarding impulses. Third, as we live in larger social groups, the tension between my selfish and selfless impulses requires compromise. For example, my desire to enjoy personal success (a self-regarding impulse) might lead me to take less time for myself to assist a struggling colleague (an other-regarding impulse). Similarly, your other-regarding inclinations might prompt you to support me in my pursuits, but you would not let me disregard my responsibilities to the group entirely. Proper conduct, then, is that which produces the greatest satisfaction for both oneself and others, striking a balance between individual and collective interests.
Fourth, and finally, to apply this compromise in practice, we devise principles of equity, that is, fairness. Our present stage of morality is still only an early phase that needs improvement, and in this we advocate the principle that each [person] claims no more than his equitable share (Data of Ethics, Ch. 14). In time, however, we will evolve beyond this. We will be more other-regarding, and our principle of equity will be that each [person] restrains himself from taking an undue share of altruistic satisfactions (Ibid.). Ultimately, Spencer believes, we will evolve beyond even this and adopt the principle that each [person] takes care that others shall have their opportunities for altruistic satisfaction (Ibid.). Currently, these altruistic tendencies within us are occasional and feeble, but with further evolution they will become habitual and strong.
Spencer is often credited as the founder of a position called "Social Darwinism," the view that human societies should allow "survival of the fittest" to operate without interference, letting the poor and disadvantaged perish while the strong prosper. His most overt statement of this appears in an early political writing where he criticizes government programs that overly regulate society, such as providing assistance to weak people. This includes people who die from heart and lung disease, but also a person who dies from "his own stupidity, or vice, or idleness" (Social Statics, 28.4). For, he says, "if they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die" (Ibid.). The reason is that nature "insists on fitness between mental character and circumstances" just as it does "between physical character and circumstances" (Ibid.). To be clear, Spencer is only advocating governmental non-intervention, which is a passive approach. This stands in contrast to rather than a more extreme and active version of Social Darwinism held by later theorists, which seeks forceful efforts to remove the unfit from society. Still, Spencer's non-interventionist position is bad enough by today's standards. To his credit, though, in his later publications he retreats from his early non-interventionist position. For, he says, we have moral responsibilities of "positive beneficence", where, in varying degrees, we should actively assist those who are sick, abused, endangered, poor, or socially isolated. His rationale here is again utilitarian: "all conduct which in an indirect, if not in a direct way, conduces to happiness or misery, is therefore to be judged as right or wrong" (Principles of Ethics, 1879, Sect. 471). This, he says, includes all the above noted areas of positive beneficence.
To recap, here are the main points of Spencer s theory:
Ethical conduct is the most evolutionarily advanced stage of conduct, emerging only in the most developed life form and in the most advanced human societies.
The most advanced human conduct involves mutual cooperation, which in turn promotes universal pleasure.
In our present evolutionary condition, the promotion of universal pleasure involves a compromise between self-regarding and other-regarding inclinations.
As we evolve, ethical standards will become more altruistic, including areas of positive benevolence.
The evolutionary ethics of Darwin and Spencer was a short-lived phase in the history of moral philosophy. One reason for its limited appeal was that the most sophisticated accounts of evolutionary ethics, such as Spencer's, were simply versions of utilitarianism. Moreover, their theories lacked the scientific sophistication needed to explain the actual mechanisms by which evolution might shape moral behavior. In the early twentieth-century, philosophers became increasingly skeptical of attempts to derive moral obligations from biological facts, and evolutionary approaches to ethics were largely abandoned. In the late twentieth-century, though, evolutionary ethics has come back with a vengeance, principally through the vehicle of sociobiology, which we turn to next.
Wilson's Sociobiology of Moral Ambivalence
In his groundbreaking book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), Edward O. Wilson argues that questions of morality, and all other questions of human social interaction, are directly linked with evolutionary biology. As such, Wilson believes that issues of ethics are better treated by biologists rather than philosophers: "Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized" (Sociobiology, p. 27).
The morality of sociobiology is not the optimistic vision of altruism that Spencer describes as our evolutionary fate. Instead, Wilson believes that we carry around conflicting values, which are grounded in different genetic predispositions that have evolved for different survival reasons. Sometimes we are inclined to show loyalty to ourselves, and other times we are inclined to show loyalty to social groups: "The individual is forced to make imperfect choices based on irreconcilable loyalties between the 'rights' and 'duties' of self and those of family, tribe, and other units of selection, each of which evolves its own code of honor. No wonder the human spirit is in constant turmoil" (Ibid., 5). Spencer made a similar point, and argued that the tension between the two loyalties would eventually be resolved. Wilson, though, says, there is no such resolution. In Wilson's words, evolution makes us morally "ambivalent" insofar as we have perpetual conflicting moral loyalties between self-interest and other-regarding interest, where we hold to both at the same time. Evolution, then, is not a force driving us toward ever-greater moral perfection as Spencer held. Rather, evolution is a source of ongoing moral tension between selfishness and individual survival on the one hand, and altruism and group cooperation on the other.
As to the other-regarding interests we do have, Wilson argues that these are not arbitrary cultural inventions, but rather they emerge from interaction between our evolved predispositions and our social environment. He writes: "The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool" (On Human Nature, p. 167). Thus, while moral systems can vary across cultures, they cannot vary infinitely, and they must operate within constraints set by our evolutionary inheritance. This, he says, explains why certain moral behaviors, such as reciprocity and kinship obligations, appear in some form across virtually all human societies.
Wilson's claims about the biological foundations of morality raise an important empirical question: what evidence do we have that moral behavior has evolutionary roots? Darwin and Spencer certainly offered evidence based on their own studies of the natural world. However, new evidence comes from modern studies of animal social behavior that follow more standardized methods of investigation. Recent research in animal behavior has revealed sophisticated forms of cooperation, fairness, and empathy that suggest these moral capacities have evolutionary origins. We turn to this next.
Social Behavior in Animals
Our first direct encounter with animal social behavior is often with our own pets. A dog, for example, might greet us at the door with a wagging tail, bouncing with excitement, and show its joy and eagerness to reconnect after we ve been away. By contrast, a cat might sit beside us when we re alone, creating a sense of companionship just by being there. Animal researchers make similar observations, but under controlled settings and across many species. Their focus is largely on animal behaviors like sharing, cooperation, fairness, social bonding, conflict resolution, and empathy. For example, in studies of sharing, researchers have observed chimpanzees splitting food with others, particularly with close allies or family members, even when they could have kept it all for themselves. Researchers also have observed cooperation with dolphins who work together to herd fish into tight clusters, giving each dolphin a chance to feed. With fairness, when capuchin monkeys were given lesser rewards for the same task, they often react negatively, such as refusing the reward altogether if they feel they are being treated unfairly. With social bonding, elephants are often seen comforting each other by wrapping trunks around distressed herd members or standing beside sick or injured ones. With conflict resolution, wolves use behaviors such as submissive crouching or muzzle-licking, to de-escalate tensions within their packs and maintain social harmony.
As to empathy among animals, here is one scheme that analyzes this behavior in five levels from lowest to highest (Preston 2002):
Cognitive empathy: The subject mentally represents the object's state based on accurate perception of the object's situation, without necessarily matching that state (e.g., ravens that will call to alert others of food locations).
Emotional contagion: The subject experiences similar emotions through direct perception of the object's emotional state (e.g., one wolf's howling triggers howling in the pack).
Sympathy: The subject feels concern for the object upon perceiving their distress (e.g., mother elephants showing clear signs of distress while trying to help stuck or injured calves).
Empathy: The subject experiences a similar emotional state based on accurate perception of the object's situation (e.g., prairie voles showing increased grooming and protective behavior toward stressed partners).
Each level in the above represents a different degree of moral sophistication. The question is not simply whether animals display empathetic behavior, but what kind of empathy they are capable of and how it compares to human empathy. While the above spectrum of five levels is specifically about empathy, we could similarly plot out differing degrees of sophistication in other studied areas of animal social behavior, including sharing, cooperation, fairness, social bonding, and conflict resolution.
This research serves two valuable purposes. First, it improves our understanding of animals themselves, showing that their social capabilities are more sophisticated than we previously recognized. This in turn may have implications for how we treat animals. Second, these studies inform our understanding of human morality. Animals do not develop their sense of fairness or empathy through philosophical contemplation or religious instruction; rather, these behaviors simply emerge from their biology. Given our close evolutionary relationship with animals, especially other primates, we must consider that our moral behavior also emerges from our biology as shaped by evolution.
However, when viewing any of these animal studies, researchers warn us against rushing to the conclusion that animals have the same type of morality that humans do. While the parallels can be striking, we should avoid anthropomorphism, that is, our tendency to project human characteristics onto other entities. Such anthropomorphizing has misled researchers themselves in the past. Consider the widely publicized studies of the 1990s claiming that dolphins could understand complex sequential tasks and respond to specific combinations of gestures. Initial results seemed promising, with dolphins appearing to comprehend and respond to intricate series of commands. However, after further analysis, researchers concluded that the dolphins had simply learned to recognize patterns in their trainer's behavior rather than understanding the underlying symbolic meaning of the gestures. While dolphins are undoubtedly intelligent, the researchers overinterpreted their abilities from our human point of view.
We might be making similar mistakes when interpreting animal moral behavior. Take, for example, a study of cooperative behavior in vampire bats. When a bat fails to find food, other members of the colony will regurgitate blood to feed it, which appears to demonstrate sophisticated sharing and empathy. However, examining similar behavior in less cognitively sophisticated species raises questions. Consider how cleaner shrimp work together in pairs to remove parasites from larger fish, taking turns and appearing to demonstrate cooperation and fairness. But are these behaviors truly moral choices, or simply instinctive programming responding to environmental triggers? We could theoretically program robots to perform similar cooperative tasks based on simple if-then rules, without any moral understanding. Perhaps the most cautious interpretation of such cooperative behaviors in simpler species is that they represent mechanically programmed social responses rather than moral choices.
Three Evolutionary Mechanisms of Social Behavior in Animals
The above animal studies alert us to the existence of moral-like behaviors across species. But they also raise an important question: how could such social behaviors evolve considering that they often involve a cost to the animal, such as when it shares its own food with others? Evolutionary biologists have identified three key primary evolutionary mechanisms that explain how cooperative and altruistic behaviors could emerge through natural selection. They are kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and group selection.
The concept of kin selection was formally developed by W.D. Hamilton in 1964, who demonstrated mathematically that genes promoting altruistic behavior can spread in a population based on the degree of genetic relatedness. Suppose, for example, that a squirrel sees a predator and gives an alarm call that helps protect the squirrel's relatives but places the squirrel itself in more danger. Three factors determine whether natural selection will favor this behavior: (1) the risk the squirrel creates for itself by sounding the alarm, (2) the benefit that its related squirrels will receive from hearing the alarm, and (3) the degree to which the squirrels are related. The more closely related the squirrels are, the more risk an individual will take to protect them. This doesn't mean specific genes directly control altruistic behavior. Rather, it means that evolution has shaped organisms to behave more favorably toward relatives who share their genes.
Robert Trivers introduced the concept of reciprocal altruism in 1971, explaining how altruistic behavior could evolve between unrelated individuals. Unlike kin selection, reciprocal altruism depends on repeated interactions where individuals can repay good deeds or punish cheaters. A vampire bat, for example, may share blood with an unrelated hungry companion, expecting similar treatment when roles are reversed in the future. This mechanism requires organisms to recognize individuals, remember past interactions, and have sufficient opportunity for future encounters, which are capabilities we see in varying degrees across species. Reciprocal altruism helps explain the evolution of cooperation beyond family groups and may underlie human moral concepts like fairness and justice.
Group selection, while controversial, offers a third potential mechanism for the evolution of social behavior. First proposed by Vero Wynne-Edwards in 1962, group selection suggests that traits benefiting the group can evolve even if they have disadvantages to individuals. For instance, a group of cooperative primates might outcompete a group of selfish ones, even though selfish individuals might have advantages within each group. While initially dismissed by many evolutionary biologists, more sophisticated mathematical models have shown that group selection can work under certain conditions. This mechanism might help explain the evolution of strong group loyalty and self-sacrificing behavior in humans and other highly social species.
These three evolutionary mechanisms provide a scientific structure for understanding how moral behaviors could have emerged through natural selection, despite their apparent costs to individuals. By identifying specific systems through which cooperation and altruism can evolve, they move the discussion of evolutionary ethics beyond mere speculation about moral progress to precise hypotheses about how our moral capacities developed.
CRITICISMS OF EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS
From Darwin on through contemporary evolutionary biologists, there is a remarkable consistency in their explanations of how human morality has emerged through evolution. There are proto-moral behaviors in animals which evolved to increase their chances of survival, and this became enhanced within humans through our higher cognitive abilities. From the outset, however, proponents of evolutionary ethics have encountered criticisms from advocates of more traditional ethical theories. Here we will examine four such criticisms. Though they often target Darwin himself, many of their arguments are equally relevant to contemporary evolutionary accounts. We begin with one of the earliest objections.
Cobbe's Criticism: Evolutionary Ethics is Incompatible with Universal and Unchanging Morality
Criticisms of Darwin's theory of evolutionary ethics appeared just months after the publication of his Descent of Man. One of these was by American philosopher and activist Frances Cobbe (1822 1904), who argued that the random nature of evolution cannot serve as a basis for moral truths that are universal, unchanging and external to human beings. Cobbe states that she is not concerned about the religious implications of Darwin's theory of natural selection, since it in fact shows God's ingenuity. She writes, "the slow evolution of order, beauty, life, joy and intelligence" is "infinitely more religious" than the traditional view that the world was created in a sudden burst 6,000 years ago (Cobbe 1871). But the problem with Darwinism, she says, is that it undermines the moral intuitionist position that "there is a supreme and necessary moral law common to all free agents in the universe, and known to man by means of a transcendental reason or divine voice of conscience" (Ibid.). On Darwin's theory of evolutionary ethics, the moral sense and conscience evolve from conditions in the struggle for existence that are "merely tentative and provisional" (Ibid.). Under such a system, she says, imagine how primitive our evolution-created morals on Earth would appear to a more superior race of aliens from Mars. Our human notions of justice, for example, might be exclusive to us humans, "and may mean nothing to any other intelligent being in the universe" (Ibid.).
Cobbe continues that the doctrines of evolutionary ethics "appear to me simply the most dangerous which have ever been set forth" since the time of psychological egoists in the eighteenth-century, who founded morality upon an ever-shifting foundation of self-interest (Ibid). Even the utilitarians are not this bad, she argues, since they ground the greatest happiness principle upon moral instincts, which, for all we know, might be stable. But now Darwin tells us that these very same moral instincts are actually unstable: the moral principles that evolution produces can be transformed or reversed under different evolutionary circumstances. In such changing conditions, good might appear as evil, and evil as good. The problem, she says, is not just theoretical. For, even as things stand now with our stable conception of morality, "it has been hard enough for tempted men and women heretofore to be honest, true, unselfish, chaste or sober" (Ibid.). Imagine now how much harder it will be to resist temptation knowing that the rules of morality are "neither durable nor even general among intelligent beings" but instead vary based on the contingencies of our evolutionary development.
Is Cobbe right that Darwin's theory of evolutionary ethics is inconsistent with universal and unchanging morality? There are two ways we might respond. The first is to show how evolutionary ethics may actually be compatible with the intuitionist view of eternal and unchanging morality. This is the approach taken by American philosopher Frances Abbot (1836 1903). According to Abbot, human moral evolution is a scientific fact, and we should just accept that. However, he says, what is equally a fact is that "moral obligation is an objective reality" insofar as it is "part of the eternal and immutable nature of things", which we know through moral intuition (Abbot, 1874). The two sides, he says, are connected in the following manner. During each stage of human evolution, our moral sense develops through a "slow process of experience" where the minds of pre-humans interact with the immutable nature of things in the world around us. For example, if we assume that the immutable nature of things includes a law of justice, then when humans evolved, we could not help but be shaped by that law of justice. It is this constant interaction between the human mind and the nature of things that shapes are moral intuitions. Moral intuitions, then, are not a "phenomenon of purely subjective origin" which might change over time or location during the course of evolutionary development. Rather, our moral intuitions are shaped by the immutable nature of things, and they offer us the objective and universal foundation that we need for a true science of ethics. Thus, Abbot says, we "must smile when Miss Cobbe" warns us of the dangers of Darwin's theory of evolution: "her fears are groundless" (Ibid.). Abbot's solution is clearly a highly metaphysical one which might not have much appeal today. But, for those who do hold to the metaphysical reality of the immutable nature of things, he does offer a plausible way of evading Cobbe's charge.
There is, though, a second and less metaphysical way to respond to Cobbe's criticism that Darwin's evolutionary ethics undermines true morality. Let's again accept that human moral evolution is a scientific fact, but now let's reject the contention of moral intuitionists that morality is an objective reality grounded in the immutable nature of things. That being so, morality would originate entirely through natural selection, where psychological mutations of a moral sense and conscience would have given us a survival advantage, since early humans who had those mutations would form more successful societies than those that lacked those mutations. This alone offers at least some stability to morality to the extent that these mutations have been part of human DNA for hundreds of thousands of years, and have guided us through our efforts at society-building throughout this time. We can expect these mutations to be with us for hundreds of thousands more. Granted, this is not as stable as a moral reality grounded in the eternal and immutable nature of things. But for the limited human timespan we are talking about here on earth, the stability offered by both evolutionary ethics and moral intuitionism would be identical.
English science writer Arabella Buckley (1840 1929) argues even further that Darwin's theory of evolutionary ethics can offer stability to moral theories that are otherwise built upon shaky foundations. In her day, utilitarianism was the leading alternative to moral intuitionism. However, a liability of utilitarianism, she says, was that it never convincingly showed why we should pursue the greatest good for the greatest number. The best that utilitarians could say is that it was grounded in personal self-interest, where I somehow see that it is in my long-term self-interest to maximize the greater good. But self-interest changes from person to person and place to place, which makes it a bad foundation for the greater good. However, she argues, Darwin's theory of moral evolution changes that. For, Darwin offers "a reason for [social] development, distinct on the one side from mere happiness or pleasure, and on the other from the base feeling of selfishness" (Buckley, 1871). That is, thanks to Darwin, the best justification for the utilitarian principle is that evolution has given us a moral sense and conscience which directs us towards social good, independently of our individual self-interest. Further, she argues, Darwin's theory helps us better distinguish between social virtues like self-sacrifice on the one hand, and personal virtues like self-preservation on the other. The Darwinian answer is that social virtues are character traits based on our moral sense and conscience, whereas personal virtues are those based on self-interest. While none of this will fully satisfy the moral intuitionist, Darwin has nevertheless made utilitarianism a much stronger moral theory than it would have been otherwise.
Huxley's Criticism: Ethics is a Creation of Human Culture, not of Natural Selection
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist known for his advocacy of Darwin s theory of evolution, earning him the nickname "Darwin s Bulldog". He coined the term agnosticism and was a prominent figure in promoting scientific education and secularism. Near the end of his life, Huxley wrote an essay titled "Evolution and Ethics" (1894), in which he reconsidered the relation between evolution and morality proposed by Darwin. Rather than seeing ethics as the outcome of biological natural selection, Huxley argued instead that the natural processes of evolution are actually in conflict with human moral values. As such, ethics is a creation of human culture, not of natural selection. According to Huxley, evolutionary forces generate a war of all against all, just as Hobbes described. The only way to rise above our warring tendencies is to rely on ethical intuitions that are distinct from evolution. To make his case, Huxley argues that if we assume that evolution explains the origin of our social behavior, then we must also accept that evolution explains the origin of our antisocial behavior:
The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before. ( Evolution and Ethics )
Huxley believes that it is a mistake to think that, just because survival of the fittest is the source of our organic development, it is also the source of our ethical standards. The two forces are, in fact, at odds with each other, and there is a point at which the organic process of human evolution is replaced by that of ethical development.
This ethical process, Huxley argues, involves self-restraint instead of self-assertion, helping others rather than competing with them, and enabling many to survive rather than just the "fittest" individuals. The ethical process reminds us of the duty we have to our communities which protect us and give us a "life of something better than a brutal savage" (Ibid.). We must reject the "fanatical individualism" that tries to apply natural selection to society and emphasizes individual rights over duties to society. Progress, he says, requires actively combating the cosmic process, not imitating it. Through civilization, humans have built an "artificial world" within nature, where we use our intelligence to modify the cosmic process through law, custom, science, and technology. While we can't fully overcome our evolutionary nature, he says, through human intelligence we can significantly modify conditions of the natural process that are hostile to human society.
What should we think about Huxley's view that ethics is a creation of human culture, not of natural selection? He appears to be correct in two important ways. First, his initial description of the brutality of the cosmic process of evolution is accurate. In fact, according to American evolutionary biologist George Christopher Williams (1926 2010), Huxley actually understates the level of nature's brutality. Where Huxley describes nature as "morally indifferent", Williams sees it as "grossly immoral". He argues,
Natural selection, Williams says, maximizes "short-sighted selfishness" which results in animal conduct that, when done among humans, would be patently immoral. This includes widespread cannibalism across species, infanticide in many species including primates, sexual violence and coercion, brother-sister mating, killing members of an animal's own species, and destruction of its rivals' offspring.
Second, Huxley is correct that there are clear limits to how the notion of survival of the fittest applies to proper behavior. The following quotation from American zoologist Edward D. Cope (1840 1897) is a good illustration of when moral applications of survival of the fittest to wrong:
Were woman of the same sex as man, that is, were she simply another kind of man, she would soon be eliminated from the earth under the operation of the ordinary law of the survival of the fittest. . . . It is self-evident then that any system which looks to a career for women independent of man, such as man pursues, is abnormal, and injurious to her interests. ( On the Material Relations of Sex 1890)
Cope argues here that women should not have independent careers since their evolutionary survival hinged on protection by men. For the sake of argument, let s grant Cope s initial point, unfounded as it is, that a race of humans constituted like women might have become extinct in the struggle for survival. However, the subsequent inference of a rule against independent careers for women is far from obvious in the context of societies where humans no longer seek to survive through brute force. There is a point at which evolutionary considerations are irrelevant, and we base our moral rules about women s careers on social factors. Using Wilson s terminology, even if humans are genetically predisposed to have ambivalent loyalties to oneself vs. others, true morality attempts to move beyond this. Although Huxley himself is not clear about what non-evolutionary factors are relevant for forming our notions of morality, the history of philosophy offers us a variety of possible moral theories from which to choose, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Mill.
Despite these two areas where Huxley seems to be correct, there is a key weakness in his position. That is, he oversimplifies natural selection by focusing exclusively on its brutal, competitive aspects, and thereby creates an artificial divide between "natural" competitive impulses and "ethical" restraints. Evolution actually favors both competitive and cooperative strategies. We see evidence of this in our closest primate relatives: chimpanzees fiercely compete for status and resources, yet they also reconcile after conflicts, share food, and console distressed group members. Even more telling is evidence from human infant studies, which show that both self-interested and prosocial tendencies emerge in infants before much social conditioning could occur. Researchers have found that even 14-month-old infants will spontaneously help others achieve goals, such as reaching for objects they cannot grasp. They also show clear signs of distress when witnessing others in pain. At the same time, though, these same infants display resource-hoarding and other competitive behaviors, which suggest that both ethical and competitive impulses are part of our inherited nature. Accordingly, it seems best not to view ethics as purely a cultural creation that fights against our evolved nature, as Huxley suggests. Rather, it might be more accurate to say that human societies have built upon and refined prosocial tendencies that natural selection already favored, while simultaneously working to constrain our equally natural competitive impulses which sabotage our sociability. This helps explain both why ethical behavior often feels natural to us (because it builds on evolved prosocial instincts) and why it can also feel like a struggle (because we are repressing competing evolved predispositions). This, as we have seen, was Wilson's insight about our moral ambivalence which arises from evolution.
Dewey's Criticism: Ethics isn't Biological Natural Selection, but Social Natural Selection
John Dewey (1859 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, known for his contributions to the philosophy of pragmatism and functional psychology. In 1898 he wrote a review of Huxley's "Evolution and Ethics," in which he takes issue with both Darwin's and Huxley's views. Dewey argues that human morality is indeed an outcome of natural selection, as Darwin maintained, but not at the organic level. Instead, it emerges at the social level where the most useful values survive, as Huxley maintained. Like biological evolution in the physical world, Dewey says, ethical development follows a pattern of adaptation and survival. All that has changed is the environment in which the struggle takes place. He states, "The environment is now distinctly a social one" where "the term 'fit' has to be made with reference to social adaptation" (Dewey, p. 328). This should not surprise us, he argues, since,
as the conditions of life change, the modes of living must change also. That which would count in the Carboniferous period will not count in the Neozoic. Why should we expect that which counts among the carnivora to count with man, a social animal? [Ibid. 329]
When social conditions change, ethical values must either adapt or become obsolete. While biological adaptation occurs through unconscious mechanical processes, ethical adaptation happens through conscious deliberation. Yet in both spheres, the principle of survival of the fittest operates: ethical values that cannot adapt to new social environments will fade away, just as organisms that cannot adapt to their physical environment become extinct. For example, older values endorsing slavery did not survive against newer social environments that prioritize universal rights of everyone.
In short, Dewey agrees with Darwin that morality emerges through natural selection, but not at the organic level as Darwin suggested. Dewey also agrees with Huxley that morality emerges at the social level, but it as a continuation of natural selection, not as a replacement of it as Huxley suggested. The process of natural selection is the same, Dewey says, it's just that the environment of adaptation has shifted the organic to the social. In both contexts, there are environmental pressures which select for fitness. Accordingly, Dewey states that "The unwritten chapter in natural selection is that of the evolution of environments" (Ibid. p. 339). Modern industrial life, he argues, is especially unstable, and selection is "active as never before" (Ibid. p. 340).
Is Dewey's account of evolutionary ethics better than Darwin's or Huxley's? There are two main problems with it. First, his theory is a form of extreme moral relativism insofar as it sees moral values emerging out of ever-shifting environments. This is a criticism that pertains to any theory of evolutionary ethics, as we've witnessed above with Cobbe's criticism. However, the charge of relativism applies even more so to Dewey, since he is talking about social adaptations that occur more rapidly over centuries or even decades, not biological adaptations that occur over a 100,000-year span. Dewey himself would accept this as the honest reality of social change. But for even defenders of Darwinian ethics, this is too unstable a foundation for moral values that we at least hope are not this transient, such as the values of justice and equality.
But setting this criticism aside, there is a more basic problem with Dewey's view: the parallels between biological and social selection are not as strong as he thinks. First, biological evolution has clear mechanisms for how it unfolds, such as genetic inheritance from parents and random mutation. But Dewey's account of ethical evolution at the social level lacks such clear mechanisms of transmission, where ethical values can spread through multiple channels simultaneously, such as education, media, peer influence, cultural diffusion. Second, unlike genes, which pass essentially unchanged from parent to child, ethical values can be transmitted across a society, even backwards from younger to older generations, and can be selectively adopted or rejected by individuals. Third, and most importantly, when ethical values change, it is often not through a clear process of selection, but through social negotiations, power contests, and cultural intermingling.
However, even if ethical evolution is not literal natural selection in the way that it is in biology, Dewey's observation still has value if we understand the parallel metaphorically. That is, natural selection provides an effective analogy for understanding how we come to endorse at least some of our values. We might say that sometimes the behavior that we call "moral" is that which survives in social environments. People perform a variety of actions, some of which are suitable to current social environments and others of which are not. People who behave unsuitably are denounced, punished, or even executed. Ultimately, the unsuitable behavior dies out and the suitable behavior survives. For example, in past social environments, it was unsuitable for women to pursue independent careers, and women who attempted to do so faced insurmountable obstacles. In current social environments, by contrast, it is suitable for women to seek careers, and women who remain homemakers often feel compelled to defend their decision. This shift in attitudes about women's employment was the result of something like a "survival of the fittest" which occurred against the backdrop of changing social conditions. Such shifts in values might only last for the short-term, then die out or reverse. But when they do last for the long-term, as is the case with women's employment, these trends become more recognizable as moral , as Dewey suggests.
Moore's Criticism: Goodness is not Identical with being More Evolved
English philosopher George Edward Moore (1873 1958) was a key figure in the development of contemporary analytic philosophy, and his main contribution to ethics is his book Principia Ethica (1903). In this, Moore argued that many of the most influential ethical theories of his time, including evolutionary ethics, fail because they wrongly equate moral goodness with some natural or metaphysical property. Spencer, for example, identifies moral goodness with advanced evolutionary development. According to Moore, these philosophers commit what he calls the "naturalistic fallacy". Moral goodness, he says, is an undefinable property that we intuitively recognize in things. The fallacy, then, consists of attempting to define "moral goodness" as some property that we find in the natural world, such as "pleasure", "general happiness" or, in Spencer's case, "advanced evolutionary development".
Moore's observation draws on a conviction that many of us have, which is that important notions like "love" or "beauty" or "happiness" are incapable of being defined. With beauty, for example, we know it when we see or experience it, but we will fail if we attempt to describe what it actually is. Moore's example is the color yellow. We know what "yellow" is, but it is a simple concept that cannot be broken down into constituent parts that we might describe. "Yellow" just is what it is. According to Moore, the notion of "moral goodness" is the same: we can recognize it, but cannot define it in terms of its constituent parts. His critique is an important one for ethical theory: we cannot simply determine what is morally good by reading it off from natural features of the world, such as evolution. To do so misses the larger point about what moral goodness actually is as a simple and indefinable concept. While evolutionary theorists might be correct that actions which are highly evolved turn out to be morally good, Moore argues that we cannot take the further step of reducing the essence of moral goodness itself to merely highly evolved actions themselves.
The specific discussion of evolutionary ethics that Moore attacks is the passage we looked at earlier from Spencer's book The Data of Ethics, which, for convenience, is this:
We have also concluded that these last stages in the evolution of conduct are these displayed by the highest type of being, when he is forced, by increase of numbers, to live more and more in presence of his fellows. And there has followed the corollary that conduct gains ethical sanction in proportion as the activities, becoming less and less militant and more and more industrial, are such as do not necessitate mutual injury or hindrance, but consist with, and are furthered by, co-operation and mutual aid. [Data of Ethics, Ch. 3 (italics added for emphasis)]
Spencer's point is that, as the complexity of the organism increases from insect to humans, so too increases the complexity of conduct. Humans, the most complex organisms, have the most complex conduct, and ethics is part of that conduct. Thus, ethical conduct (1) has emerged only in the most developed life form, that is, human life, (2) is the most developed form of human social conduct, and (3) has emerged only in the most advanced human societies. Now, in the following passage, Moore explicitly accuses Spencer of committing the naturalistic fallacy by identifying being more evolved with gaining ethical sanction :
All that the evolution-hypothesis tells us is that certain kinds of conduct are more evolved than others; and this is, in fact, all that Mr. Spencer has attempted to prove in the two chapters concerned. Yet he tells us that one of the things he has proved is that conduct gains ethical sanction in proportion as it displays certain characteristics. What he has tried to prove is only that in proportion as it displays those characteristics, it is more evolved, it is plain, then, that Mr. Spencer identifies the gaining of ethical sanction with the being more evolved. [Principia, 2.31)
The phrase gains ethical sanction means that some conduct is ethically commendable. In this sense, Moore is criticizing Spencer for identifying more evolved (a natural property) with ethically commendable (goodness) and thereby commits the naturalistic fallacy.
Is Moore correct that Spencer commits the naturalistic fallacy by identifying ethically commendable with more evolved ? Maybe not, and to see why consider these two statements:
1. Ethical commendability is identical to more evolved conduct.
2. Ethical commendability is always accompanied by more evolved conduct.
The first statement clearly commits the naturalistic fallacy, but the second statement does not. For, we commit the naturalistic fallacy when we identify some property with goodness, not merely when we note that a property always accompanies goodness. If I say that "moral goodness" is always accompanied by "more evolved conduct", I am simply correlating the presence of two qualities, and not identifying them. There is nothing wrong with attempting to do this. In fact, Moore writes, "ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good (Ibid. 1.4). So, which of the above two statements best expresses Spencer s point? The most charitable reading of Spencer is the second one. We see this in the above quotation by Spencer where he is stating that ethically sanctioned conduct emerges in more evolved conduct, but he does not claim that they are the same.
Moore also criticizes Spencer for equating the natural term more evolved with the moral terms higher and better, and thereby commits the naturalistic fallacy again. As Moore states it, "What a very different thing is being more evolved from being higher or better. . . . But Mr. Spencer does not seem aware that to assent the one is not to assent the other (Ibid. 1.31). Again, however, there is a more charitable way of understanding Spencer's point. For Spencer, conduct is higher when it is ethically significant, that is, when it may be deemed either good or bad. By contrast, conduct is ethically superior when it is actually deemed good. Now look at these two statements:
1. More evolved conduct is ethically significant.
2. More evolved conduct is ethically superior.
Spencer endorses the first statement, but, technically, it does not commit the naturalistic fallacy since it does not identify more evolved conduct with goodness itself. The second statement does commit the naturalistic fallacy since it specifically identifies more evolved conduct with goodness. However, Spencer nowhere endorses this second statement.
As an analytic philosopher, Moore focused heavily on the precise meaning of words in philosophical discussions, and we certainly see this emphasis here in his criticism of evolutionary ethics. But Moore's larger point here is important: we may never be able to precisely define the notion of "moral goodness", much like we may never be able to precisely define the notion of "love" or "beauty" or "happiness". These are concepts that resist any attempt to reduce them to something else, such as to pleasure, to a Platonic Form, or to highly evolved conduct. While Spencer specifically did not make this mistake, a less careful defender of evolutionary ethics might easily do so. Moore's warning remains sound: even though moral goodness may accompany highly evolved conduct, the two notions are not the same.
LINGERING ISSUES WITH EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS
We noted at the outset that evolutionary theories of ethics aim to accomplish two things: first, explain the origins of morality through natural selection, and, second, identify the moral standards that we should follow as a consequence of natural selection. Does evolutionary ethics successfully address either of these aims? Let's consider each.
The Origins of Morality and Evolutionary Relativism
As to the origins of morality, consider again our opening story of the dolphins who protected lifeguards from a shark attack. According to Darwin, the social behavior of the dolphins represents a proto-moral trait in the lower animal world that became more sophisticated during human evolution. There are clear benefits to this evolutionary explanation of the origins of morality. First, it provides a naturalistic account that does not rely on supernatural or metaphysical foundations of morality, and thereby holds open the possibility of making the subject of ethics more scientific. Second, it gives a plausible explanation of how we are related to lower social animals, not just physiologically, but also psychologically and morally. But along with these benefits come potential labilities, the principal one being that it does not adequately account for our uniquely human moral concepts of rights, justice, and dignity. The heart of this problem is that evolution is all about the ongoing alterability of traits, whereas traditional morality is all about a core set of stable and unchanging values. Evolutionary ethics, then, seems to be yet one more relativistic account of morality that sides with moral skepticism. Let's consider in what ways evolutionary ethics may or may not be relativistic.
In an earlier chapter we saw that moral relativism is of two types: individual and cultural. Individual relativism is the view that each person creates their own moral standards (held by Protagoras). Cultural relativism holds that societies, not individuals, create moral standards, which then become authoritative for everyone within that society (held by Sextus Empiricus). In both cases, morality is not necessarily consistently stable and unchanging. Now, it is theoretically possible that by sheer coincidence two people or two societies could invent exactly the same moral values independently of each other. But that isn't something that we can count on, and our broad experience of human behavior over time suggests that moral values have indeed been highly variable. Evolutionary ethics is similarly relativistic, but here it is genetically-based behavioral traits that vary over time through mutation and natural selection. This relativism is in a different class from the creations of either individual people or societies of people. Again, it is theoretically possible that, through sheer chance, genetically-based traits of sociability popped into existence in their fully developed form and will continue unchanged for the duration of humanity's existence. But our experience of proto-moral in animals suggests that such traits emerged incrementally through evolution, and we have every reason to expect that such incremental changes will continue. We can call this evolutionary relativism, the view that natural selection is the origin of moral standards, which have developed over time from lower animals through humans. To avoid any confusion, we should see that individual, cultural and evolutionary relativism are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it seems apparent that our evolutionary predispositions to sociability are continually modified by individual and cultural preferences. But evolutionary relativism is the foundation of any resulting morality, and without it there likely would not be any morality at all, or even a human species for that matter.
On first appearance, it seems that evolutionary relativism presents a serious challenge to traditional theories of morality, just as individual and cultural relativism do. For, the ever-changing process of evolution appears to be directly incompatible with important ethical standards such as justice, which we presume to be universal and unchanging. On closer inspection, though, evolutionary relativism is not as threatening as it first seems, and, of the three forms of moral relativism, it offers the most stable foundation of morality. For, with individual relativism, values may differ radically from person to person, and may even shift every hour based on personal whims. Cultural relativism is slightly better, where values could potentially last for hundreds of years. With evolutionary relativism, though, the human values that emerged have lasted hundreds of thousands of years and may continue to do so for just as long. For all practical purposes, that is a decently stable foundation of morality. This was the upshot of our discussion of Cobbe's criticism. Thus, as an explanation of the origins of morality, evolutionary relativism is not the bogeyman of ethical theory.
Moral Standards and Higher Evolved Conduct
Turn next to the second aim of evolutionary ethics, which is to identify the moral standards we should follow as a consequence of natural selection. We've only touched on this briefly, for, as we have seen, both Darwin and Spencer deferred to utilitarianism as the standard of moral behavior that best represents our evolutionary development. The utilitarian idea of maximizing general happiness had been around in one form or another for 2,000 years prior to Darwin, and thus was by no means an innovation of evolutionary theory. There are good reasons why Darwin and Spencer both adopted utilitarianism as a pre-packaged standard of morality, rather than creating a uniquely evolution-based standard of their own. First, if there is a traditional moral standard already in place that is consistent with evolutionary theory, it is better to go with that, rather than propose something which might be unnecessarily controversial. Second, from a scientific perspective, the utilitarian standard of pursuing the greatest good was the perfect choice. For, it is based on empirical examinations of human psychology, specifically the observation that humans are both motivated by pleasure, and also consult pleasure as the standard by which we judge right behavior. Utilitarianism also takes a scientific approach to determining which actions indeed maximize universal pleasure. By contrast, natural law theories of rationally intuitive duties are based on metaphysical assumptions about eternal and unchanging standards embedded in the cosmos. The metaphysical approach both falls outside of the scope of observational science, and also is at odds with the evolutionary concepts of variation and change. Thus, for Darwin and Spencer, utilitarianism was the better choice for a pre-packaged standard of morality.
Suppose, though, that evolutionary ethicists wished to put forward a standard of ethics that had the unique character of natural selection, and not simply adopt utilitarianism. What would that be like? We already looked at the social Darwinian solution which equates moral superiority with the survival of the fittest. On this view, we should not give support to people who are poor, disabled, or otherwise disadvantaged, since this would interfere with natural selection, and supposedly weaken society by allowing less "fit" individuals to thrive. We of course reject this for being inconsistent with our long-standing moral convictions of helping others in need. We should further reject social Darwinism since it is inconsistent with evolution itself where, as we have seen, animals extend help to others of their own species or group that are in need. Our dolphin example shows how such self-sacrificing behavior is even cross-species.
Here, though, is a different way of devising a standard of ethics that builds off natural selection. British sociologist Leonard Hobhouse (1864 1929) suggested an approach that is about as opposite to social Darwinism as one can get. For Hobhouse, the most evolved human conduct is that which promotes progressive social values, such as individual freedom, equality, and social cooperation. Like Darwin, Hobhouse sees the origins of human morality in lower animals. He writes, "Let us observe first, that as we descend [down into] the animal scale the sphere of intelligent activity is gradually narrowed down and yet behaviour is still regulated", such as by animal sentinels who warn others of danger (Morality and Evolution, 1906, 1.1.1). Hobhouse describes four main stages of human moral and social evolution, where each is a further step forward from animal social behavior. First was a "primitive" stage, where small, kin-based groups of humans followed moral rules that focused on loyalty within one s community. There was no structured government, property was communal, and justice was often personal and revenge-based. People had limited moral obligations, mainly toward their kin or close group. Second was a "military authority" stage where societies grew and began relying on a ruling class, often backed by military power. Leaders governed with strict authority, and social hierarchies emerged, with people expected to obey and remain loyal to those in power. Class divisions, slavery, and serfdom became common, and rulers justified their control through religion or ideology, often adopting a paternalistic responsibility toward their people.
In the third stage, higher civilizations had more complex social structures and greater individual rights. Justice was impartial and handled by public courts, allowing for property ownership and contracts under equal laws. There was a shift toward values like equality, personal dignity, and universal human rights. This stage saw the rise of democratic participation, gender equality, and cooperation between nations. In the fourth stage, humans achieved rational morality and consciously-guided-progress. Here, morality moves from law-following to a conscious understanding of why moral principles matter. We need to deliberately preserve and build on past achievements through tradition and education, since we cannot rely on biological evolution to reliably sustain morality in its highest form. He states, "The laws of heredity are in large measure unknown" (Ibid. 2.8.7). The future of moral evolution, Hobhouse says, depends upon our ability to guide our moral principles through reason.
We now have three options for articulating a standard of ethics based on natural selection: utilitarianism, social Darwinian survival of the fittest, and Hobhouse's progressive social values. Each of these is theoretically plausible, yet they take us in completely different directions. This should warn us of the limitations of deriving standards of morality from biological facts of evolution: just as evolution itself is open-ended, so too are its implications on human moral standards. Biological evolution might inspire us to restructure moral standards in new ways, but it does not offer a litmus test for determining which theoretical structure is the best, the most correct, or most desirable one. For that we need to consult a moral reference outside of biological evolution. It is here that we should take seriously Moore's warning about committing the naturalistic fallacy. Bare biological facts are not enough to establish what is morally good. Rather, it is our independent concept of moral goodness that must determine whether any evolution-inspired moral standard truly deserves to be called "moral".
REFERENCES
Abbott, Francis Ellingwood. "Darwin's Theory of Conscience" The Index, March 12, 1874. 122-125.
Arabella Buckley. "Darwinism and Religion" 1871. Macmillan's Magazine 24 (May): 45-51.
Cobbe, Frances Power. "Darwinism in Morals" Theological Review, 1871 Vol 8, pp. 167-192.
Cope, Edward Drinker. On the Material Relations of Sex, Monist, 1890, Vol. 1, pp. 39 40.
Darwin, Darwin. The Descent of Man (1871), Chapter 5.
Dewey, John. "Evolution and Ethics," The Monist, 1898, Vol. 8, pp. 321-341.
Frankena, William. The Naturalistic Fallacy, Mind, 1939, Vol. 48, pp. 464 477.
Hamilton, William Donald. "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour." Journal of Theoretical Biology Volume 7, Issue 1, July 1964, Pages 1-16.
Hobhouse, Leonard. Morals in Evolution: A Study in Comparative Ethics. (New York: Holt, 1906).
Huxley, Thomas. Evolution and Ethics , in Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1894).
Moore, George. E. Principia Ethica (London: Cambridge University Press, 1903).
Preston, Stephanie D. and de Waal, Frans B. M. "Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases" Behavioral and Brain Science, 2002, Vol. 23.
Spencer, Herbert. The Data of Ethics (New York: Appleton, 1895).
Spencer, Herbert. Principles of Ethics (1879).
Spencer, Herbert. Social Statics (1851).
Trivers, Robert L. "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism." Quarterly Review of Biology, (1971) 46(1), 35 57.
Wilson, Edward O. On Human Nature (Harvard University Press, 1978).
Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
Wynne-Edwards, Vero C. (1962). Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.
STUDY QUESTIONS
Please answer all of the following questions.
1. Describe the intuitivist and inductivist schools of ethics at the time of Darwin.
2. What are the three main elements of Darwin s account of natural selection?
3. According to Darwin, what are the three components of our moral faculties?
4. For Darwin, what is the role of utilitarianism in evolutionary ethics?
5. According to Spencer, what are the three areas of evolution, and which of these involves morality?
6. According to Spencer, what are the four steps of utilitarianism?
7. Describe both the passive and active versions of social Darwinism.
8. What caused the decline of interest in evolutionary ethics in the early twentieth-century?
9. What is Wilson's view of evolution and moral ambivalence?
10. What are the main areas of research in the social behavior of animals?
11. What are the five levels of animal empathy?
12. Explain kin selection, reciprocal altruism and group selection.
13. What is Cobbe's criticism of Darwin's evolutionary ethics, and what is the response to this criticism given in the chapter?
14. What is Buckley's point about evolutionary ethics and utilitarianism?
15. What is Huxley's criticism of Darwin's evolutionary ethics, and what is the response to this criticism given in the chapter?
16. What is Dewey's criticism of Darwin's and Huxley's evolutionary ethics, and what is the response to this criticism given in the chapter?
17. What is Moore's criticism of Spencer's evolutionary ethics, and what is the response to this criticism given in the chapter?
18. In the discussion of the origins of morality at the end of the chapter, what are the benefits of evolutionary ethics?
19. How does evolutionary relativism differ from individual relativism and cultural relativism?
20. What is Leonard Hobhouse's theory of the evolutionary standard of ethics?
21. Short essay: pick any one of the following views in this chapter and criticize it in a minimum of 100 words. Darwin: moral sense, conscience, social component of evolution; Spencer: final stage of evolution, utilitarian connection with evolutionary ethics, social Darwinism; Wilson's view of moral ambivalence; criticisms by Cobbe, Huxley, Dewey, Moore; defenses of evolutionary ethics by Abbot, Buckley; Hobhouse's progressive evolutionary standard of ethics.