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Dawkins and Morality
Adrian R. Kumarasingham
Following atrocities committed, at least partially, in the name of religion in recent times, it is not surprising that books expressing anxiety over the nature of religious faith have been blazing out of shelves. Starting with Sam Harris’ The End of Faith in 2004, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great have followed as powerful polemics that have attracted a lot of discussion on religion. While all four publications are worth a good discussion, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion has probably attracted the most attention among them.
Dawkins reserves almost a third of his book for discussion on the relationship of religion and morality – attending to it from biological, philosophical, and pragmatic perspectives. Some of Dawkins’ criticism of religion is reasonable, and his arguments have their strengths. However, questions such as the purpose of religion in a scientific age, the place for theology or religion on questions concerning morality, and the criterion on which we make moral judgements, pose serious challenges for both the theist and atheist alike. Dawkins offers some answers to these issues in The God Delusion. The scope of this paper is to assess some of Dawkins’ solutions to these issues in relation to morality, and both complement and challenge, as appropriate, the coherence of his views.
After assessing the limits of Dawkins’ materialism in making moral judgements,[1] I shall concentrate on the relationship of moral judgements religious motivation. Dawkins assumes that the criterion on which we make moral judgements is available to the theist and atheist alike in what he calls “the moral Zeitgeist.”[2] Though Dawkins does not tell us how the “moral Zeitgeist” is created, maintained, or improved, he strongly holds that religion has no part with it. This paper will explore Dawkins’ perspective on the moral Zeitgeist while looking into the historical significance of Christianity in the west, and its influences. We shall show that the criterion on which moral judgements are made, both for the theist and atheist alike, is primarily rooted in culture – specifically in its religious heritage – which is inherent at the level of one’s self identity and consciousness.
This paper will aim at constructing a plausible defence of this view, while borrowing useful concepts from Dawkins’ own view. The purpose of my research is to shed some light on the concept on morality in the dialog between Science and Religion, and make room for further discussion on the topic.
1. Dawkins and the Gene
Richard Dawkins became popular as an authority on animal behaviour with the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976. His gene centred view of life is arguably the most economical position yet, that explains how natural selection works.
In Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966), G. C. Williams proposed that the best way to look at evolution was in terms of selection occurring at the lowest level of all.[3] This principle underlies the logic of The Selfish Gene. However, while Williams maintained that the lowest level was the individual (and not the group), Dawkins went a step further to argue as follows:
the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity.[4]
And, furthermore, that:
all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.[5]
Dawkins dedicated a significant portion of The Selfish Gene to defend the concept of, and the importance for, a gene eye view of life. However, that was not what the entire book was about – Dawkins was also looking for a way to extend the Darwinian logic to explain all aspects of life – including altruistic behaviour in the animal kingdom (including human altruism), and the evolution of ideas – whose replicators he called “memes.”
This section is about how Dawkins, since the publication of The Selfish Gene, has espoused human morality within the framework of his professional commitment to evolutionary biology. Meme theory may be of some relevance to our discussion here. However, since meme theory has been controversial among scholars both within and out side the scientific community, and not widely acknowledged as a scientific concept yet,[6] we shall limit our discussion to Dawkins socio-biological views of morality, which are far less controversial and much more relevant to my thesis.
Dawkins tells us that there are four plausible Darwinian answers to the roots of altruism and morality: (1) genetic kinship, (2) reciprocal altruism, (3) reputation acquiral, and (4) the potlatch effect. We shall look into each of these briefly and try to identify what makes Dawkins unique in comparison to some other popular socio-biologists.
1. 1 Genetic Kinship
In two influential papers published in the same journal in 1964, William Hamilton argued that altruism was explainable on genetic grounds.[7] Hamilton took the view, as Dawkins propagated a decade later, that the unit of natural selection was the gene – the selfish gene. According to the logic of Darwinism, the ultimate purpose for genes is to replicate and survive in the gene pool. The gene is by nature selfish – and the simplest way could ensure their survival was to programme individual organisms, that carry them, to be selfish.
However, if organisms were also programmed to behave altruistically, in certain cases or environments, survival could be ensured. For example, by programming organisms to behave altruistically towards their kin, genes can ensure their survival in organisms that are likely to share copies of themselves. Since each parent passes on 50 percent of their genes to their offspring, “being nice,” or “taking care” of one’s offspring ensures a Darwinian advantage towards the survival of one’s own genes. Biologists often refer to this concept of passing on genes as “kin selection,”[8] and kin selection is one of the main Darwinian principles that underpins most of the discussion of altruism in The Selfish Gene.[9]
Hamilton’s 1964 papers, at least the first of them, formulates a mathematical model to explain animal social behaviour. Though this model is highly theoretical, Dawkins, in the eloquence of a literary genius, has made the main concepts of Hamilton’s theory accessible to the non-professional: Each parent passes on 50 percent of his or her genes to their children. Ordinary siblings, therefore, share 50 percent of their genes with each other (this percentage would be different for twins). We share 25 percent of our genes with our grand parents and the siblings of our parents, 12.5 percent with our first cousins, and so forth. Within such a framework, one can make biological sense of being altruistic towards close relatives on the ratio of the genes that an individual possibly shares with their relatives. Moreover, even suicidal altruism could be understood within a biological framework, if, for example, a person was sacrificing themselves to save more than two of their siblings, or the equivalent of the percentage of those genes in other relatives (1 brother = 4 first cousins).
Applying the concept of kin-selection to socio-biology, let us look at Dawkins’ example: Let us suppose that in certain conditions members of a species moved around in small groups. There would be a good chance, in that species, that any one member of that species is related to another. Then, natural selection would almost certainly favour a rule of thumb that could be translated as the equivalent of, “be nice to the members of your own species,” in order to maximise the Darwinian survival value of genes. The genes would still be selfish, but foster unselfish behaviour among themselves and the organisms they build for the sake of a Darwinian rationale.
Biologists in favour of kin selection offer many other examples in favour of this theory. The most popular example of these probably comes from Hamliton’s research on hymenoptera (an insect group that includes ants, bees, and wasps).[10] In 1964, using the concept of kin-selection (though he did not use the term “kin-selection” to describe it then), Hamilton explained why sterile workers (a class within the species), who were females, in the hymenoptera devoted their lives to the benefit of their nest mates instead of creating their own offspring. According to the usual workings of nature, most species realise their Darwinian goals by producing as many children as they can. However, for the hymenoptera, the same goal seems to be realised when a female makes room for her mother to lay as many eggs as she can. The reason, as Hamilton showed, was to do with their production mechanisms. When young, a female hymenoptera would find a mate and receive enough sperm from him that she could use for years when she laid eggs. Some of the eggs she would lay would be fertile and others not. The un-fertile eggs turn out male and only the fertile eggs are female – therefore, only females have two parents. In this unique case for hymenoptera, each sister would be the equivalent of an un-identical twin who shares 75 percent of her sister’s genes (even though their mother would have only passed on 50 percent of her genes to each of her daughters). Therefore, it would make better Darwinian sense for female hymenoptera if they “cared” for their sisters, and “encouraged” their mother to produce more offspring than producing their own by finding a mate. Hamilton had solved an important biological puzzle – an importance Dawkins understood very well:
[Hamiltons’] two papers of 1964 are among the most important contributions to social ethology ever written, and I have never been able to understand why they have been so neglected by ethnologists (his name does not even appear in the index of two major text-books of ethology, both published in 1970) [until recent times].[11]
1. 2 Reciprocal Altruism
The other popular theory, to explain altruism biologically, alongside Hamilton’s kin-selection, is the concept of “reciprocal altruism” – introduced by the Harvard biologist, Robert Trivers, in 1971. Reciprocal altruism is usually described in the popular phrase: “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Developing this idea further, John Maynard Smith and others have also explained reciprocal altruism in mathematical terms in what is popularly known as “game theory.”[12]
Reciprocal altruism, unlike kin-altruism, is dependant on selfish gene theory but not on shared genes, and is probably the more popular of the two altruism theories. One reason for this popularity, as Trivers describes in the opening paragraph of his 1971 paper, is that altruism is best defined as an action that benefits another organism to whom the actor is not related. Trivers’ thesis is that Darwinian logic would favour two unrelated organisms to be altruistic to one another if (1) the cost of the altruistic act is smaller than the possible gain, and (2) if altruistic actions would be reciprocated in the future, allowing the total gain to be much higher than if organisms were out-right selfish.[13]
Over a long period of time, where there are constant natural hindrances for survival, natural selection would favour genes that are altruistic, simply because each organism’s survival chances would increase if they cooperated with other members in the population. Though there will always be cheaters who receive help but never pay back, Trivers points out that natural selection would discriminate against the cheater if that strategy gradually minimized the benefits of survival. Biologists such as Maynard Smith, Robert Axelrod, and others, have pointed out that in order to attain the best evolutionary stable strategy (ESS),[14] natural selection would discriminate against cheaters in most cases.
Dawkins’ discussion of reciprocal altruism and EES have at least been the focus of three chapters in The Selfish Gene. His conclusion, as exposed in chapter 12: “Nice Guys Finish First,” is based on experiments by Robert Axelrod on what kind of strategies would be most stable if a series of “Prisoner’s Dilemma” games were played. The best ESS turned out to be a simple “tit for tat” strategy. Players who started out being nice, but then shrewd with those who tried to cheat them, but were nice to those cheaters the next time they played, did better than any other strategy. This implied that the best ESS was when cooperation is sort after, but caution is taken when cheated once, but the next time round cooperation is sought after again. Using these results Dawkins argues that being nice or altruistic pays off well for the genes – suggesting a case for morality on biological grounds. Dawkins points to some evidence of such tit for tat behaviour in animals such as bats and some kinds of plants such as figs (taken from a study done by Hamilton and Axelrod) in which an ESS is maintained. These results were put together in a BBC documentary hosted by Dawkins that was televised in the mid 80’s under the title: “Nice Guys Finish First.” Dawkins point was that selfish genes would favour unselfish “vehicles,” or organisms, according to evolutionary theory – implying that the selfish motives of individuals could not be justified on biological grounds, as some thought.
1. 3 Reputation Acquiral
Acquiring reputation, or image scoring, as a biological phenomenon, is quite a new concept that has branched out of reciprocal altruism theory. Biologists have proposed acquiring reputation as a theory to solve puzzles about why some individuals behave altruistically to non-relatives who can never be expected to pay back. The logic of the concept is quite simple.