Evolutionary Ethics: Doing Philosophy Scientifically

Evolutionary Ethics

Raivydas Simenas

Creighton University

Evolutionary Ethics: Doing Philosophy Scientifically

Ethics is usually thought of as an esoteric discipline. Indeed, currently it is being taught in philosophy departments, and its instructors usually analyze the works of Aristotle, Kant, or John Stuart Mill. During the last few decades, however, a different way of doing ethics has emerged, which emphasizes the importance of scientific theories and primarily the theory of evolution. The basic concern of evolutionary ethicists is to provide an explanation for our ethical intuitions. While in order to do so the traditional ethics has invoked various implausible notions, such as objectively existing ethical facts to which we have access through some kind of sixth sense (Moore, 1903), evolutionary ethics draws its inspiration from the theory of evolution and game theoretical models to find out about evolutionary stable patterns of behavior.

From Social Darwinism to Evolutionary Ethics

One of the landslide intellectual achievements of the 19th century, dealing a major blow to the already weakening traditional worldview with its roots in the Bible, is Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. If up until then human beings had been largely considered to occupy the central place in the world, Darwin diminished the strict boundaries separating the species by advancing a theory according to which all living beings, human beings included, evolved from common simple ancestors. According to the principles of evolutionary theory, usually there are too many individuals of a given species competing for limited resources. The individuals with superior characteristics are more likely to win in the competition. This hypothesis, coupled with the laws of inheritance, according to which children inherit their traits from their parents and occasionally mutations occur, lead to the conclusion that the characteristics more useful in a given environment would gradually prevail.

Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer (1892) speculated on the ethical implications of evolutionary theory. His thought, known as Social Darwinism, emphasizes the progressive nature of the evolutionary process and equates this progressive nature with the moral good. The people who are better adept to certain social environment would naturally become better off than the rest. According to Spencer, the state intervention into the life of a society should be minimal. The laissez-faire principle maximizes the competition, thus mimicking the nature’s way of selecting the fittest individuals.

Darwin’s ideas had a somewhat different twist in the thought of a German thinker Ernst Haeckel (1868). For him, the basic unit of evolution is not the Spenserian individual, but rather the society as a whole. Impressed by Germany’s quick rise to become a world power, Haeckel glorified the cohesion of its institutions. In the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-71, according to Haeckel, it was Germany which triumphed over France rather than the Germans triumphing over the French. Haeckel thinks a modern human being is so absorbed into the social apparatus that his real strength lies in his functions relative to the apparatus rather than in his own individual abilities taken apart from the social structure. Therefore, Haeckel argues, the evolutionary process selects the social systems which are best organized as opposed to the individuals who are best suited for competition in the laissez-faire environment.

The problems with 19th century Social Darwinism are twofold. First, Social Darwinism is associated with the infamous eugenics movements in the first half of 20th century in the U.S. and Germany. For example, the notion that the failure to adapt to the current social environment can be entirely blamed on the unsuccessful individual or the social group permeated the Nazi ideology. The justification which Hitler’s government provided for sterilizing or putting to death the mentally ill and the mass extermination of the Jews was that these people were in some relevant sense “weak”. Most importantly, Hitler portrayed his actions as the ethically right thing to do. Thus, not surprisingly, many contemporary thinkers do not eagerly glorify the successful, which used to be so characteristic of Social Darwinism.

In theoretical context, Social Darwinism is accused of the naturalistic fallacy. Already in the 17th century, David Hume (1978) pointed out that you cannot infer a normative rule from a description. The way the world ought to be cannot be derived from the way the world actually is. Yet Social Darwinism attempts to do precisely that by giving a naturalistic account of ethical values based on the theory of evolution. In the most famous attack against reductionism in ethics, whether the reduction is done along Social Darwinist or some other lines, G. E. Moore (1903) argues that the ethical facts, in much the same way as the physical, are simply facts about the world and therefore ethical norms are valid only insofar as they reflect them. Any attempt to justify an ethical norm in terms of physical facts, according to Moore, is doomed since the gulf between the physical and the ethical is too wide. Moore thinks that there is a kind of sixth sense which gives us access to the ethical facts just as sight gives us access to color.

Although evolutionary ethics has its roots in Social Darwinism, they differ in some important respects. The notion of progress plays an important part in Social Darwinism, while it is not as significant in evolutionary ethics. Social Darwinists, such as Spencer and Haeckel, employ the idea of progress to close the gap between the descriptive ‘is’ and the normative ‘ought’. A typical Spenserian attaches some kind of moral value to the evolutionary development from simple to complex organisms. Consequently, human beings possess a higher moral status than, for example, ants. Spencer (1892) advocates competition which keeps the process going, and this competition in some sense is the moral law of the universe. The U. S. eugenics movement in the beginning of the 20th century and Nazism also emphasized the progressive nature of evolutionary development.

While evolutionary ethicists look at the evolutionary process to explain our ethical intuitions, some of them are hesitant to regard it as progressive. Michael Ruse (1995a), one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers of biology, argues that people discerning progress in evolution usually justify their view by invoking anthropocentric criteria. According to them, the evolutionary process is progressive since it produced human beings, and human beings are better than other organisms in many respects, such as intelligence or the ability to reflect upon their own actions. However, as Ruse argues, we can just as well set the criteria, such as the ability to survive in a variety of environments, according to which the AIDS virus is the supreme product of evolution. Moreover, Ruse observes that human beings, like the dinosaurs, might one day become extinct, perhaps as a result of an environmental catastrophe, which ironically might be caused by the industrial activities on behalf of the human beings themselves (Ruse, 1995a).

As for Moore’s (1903) naturalistic fallacy argument, it is unclear whether it seriously affects the evolutionary explanations of ethics. Moore’s argument depends on an implausible account of ethical good as indefinable in naturalistic terms (Moore, 1903). Such account requires some clarification of how physical human beings can get access to the non-physical features of the world. Platonism, which assumes that the world can be divided into physical and non-physical parts, has virtually no adherents among contemporary philosophers precisely because no adequate account of how the two parts interact has been proposed yet, nor is it likely to be.

Contrary to Moore’s judgment, an attempt to analyze an elusive concept, such as the ethical good in naturalistic terms, seems to be an asset and not a shortcoming. Given the implausibility of a dualistic worldview, which posits the existence of both physical and non-physical entities, it is unclear what the status of the seemingly non-physical items, such as the ethical good, should be. There are three options: you could either accept dualism and ignore its critics, you could deny that there is such thing as the ethical good, or you could attempt to give an account of the ethical good in physical terms. Maintaining dualism does not seem to be an intellectually viable option, since the interaction between the physical and non-physical simply begs the question of how precisely the interaction occurs. A nihilist view is also unsatisfactory. Most of us do have certain ethical intuitions, such as that murder is wrong. Since both dualism and nihilism are implausible, naturalism is the best route to take.

Evolutionary Metaethics

The subject matter of ethics can be divided into substantive ethics and metaethics (Ruse, 1995a). Substantive ethics discusses questions such as what is the right thing to do in given circumstances as well as provides explanations for particular ethical judgments. A typical substantive ethics question asks under what conditions killing is wrong. In answering this question, an ethicist is usually expected to give some kind of justification for his judgment. Metaethics looks at the ethical system as a whole. A metaethicist could be interested whether there are objective facts about the world corresponding to certain parts of an ethical system, or what the status of an ethical theory is given there are no such facts.

Evolutionary philosophers are divided on the central metaethical question about the sources of morality. Some, including Francisco Ayala (1987), claim that morality is essentially a cultural phenomenon and should not be viewed as an adaptation under the pressure of natural selection. According to Ayala, human beings are capable of making ethical judgments in virtue of their rationality, and rationality sets us apart from other animals. While Ayala would concede that our ability to reason is a product of evolution, he would nevertheless disagree that morality could be considered an adaptation on the grounds that obeying the currently accepted ethical norms in many situations is not “evolutionary advantageous” (Ayala, 1987, p. 237).

Ayala’s idea that there is a fundamental difference between human beings, who are full moral agents, and other animals, which are not, is implausible. Numerous biological studies have demonstrated that some animals, such as chimpanzees, have the ability to reason, which is in principle similar to that of human beings (Ruse, 1986). If morality, as Ayala argues, is the product of human rationality, then it is natural to conclude that chimpanzees also possess some form of morality, although probably less developed than that of human beings. The counterargument is that chimpanzee’s rationality is “either genetically determined or elicited by training (“conditioned responses”)” (Ayala, 1987, p. 241), while for human beings, apparently, there are some other factors operating. This counterargument, however, is at odds with the dominant scientific view that human behavior is the product of the interaction between genes and environment (Dr. Burk, personal communication, February 2004). Human reasoning, obviously, is way more complex than that of a chimpanzee, but both operate and develop under the same principles, namely, their ways of functioning emerge from the genetic composition of an organism interplaying with the surroundings.

An alternative evolutionary view about metaethics denies the supreme importance of culture in forming our ethical norms. According to this view, an ethical system is simply an adaptation (Ruse, 1995a), analogous, for example, to vision or hearing. Just like vision enhances the ability of an organism to find its own way around the environment, so the evolutionary advantage of an ethical system consists in the organism being better suited to function within a social group. While culture certainly does have a role in forming and especially transmitting ethical norms, on this view, as opposed to Ayala’s, the ultimate explanation for morality sociobiological.

Game Theory and Ethical Norms

A major concern for the ethics à la Ruse is to explain how altruistic behavior, which is often prescribed by our ethical norms, can be evolutionary advantageous. It seems that if I altruistically give you a certain portion of my resources, then I disadvantage myself in the struggle for survival and, ultimately, reproduction. Withholding the resources for myself and letting my starving neighbor die would apparently make more evolutionary sense, since I at once get rid of a competitor and keep intact all of my wealth, which I might need in the uncertain future.

In order to demonstrate the advantages of altruism, we can turn to the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma (Axelrod, 1987). The description of the dilemma is roughly this: two individuals, A and B, have to make a joint action. Both A and B have two options. They can either cooperate or defect. In case both of them cooperate, they get a modest payoff. If A defects and B cooperates, A gets a large payoff, while B suffers a large loss, and vice versa. If both of them defect, both suffer a modest loss. A and B must make their decision to cooperate or to defect prior to finding out what the other one of them has decided, and once made, the decision cannot be changed.

If we think of rationality as a selfish utility maximization, then the rational decision for both A and B is to defect. Let us consider the options A has. A knows that his decision is not going to affect that of B, and that B has already chosen his option before the joint action takes place. Suppose B has chosen to cooperate. Then A’s choice to cooperate would bring him a modest as opposed to a large benefit which he would get by defecting. Suppose that B has chosen to defect. Again, A is better off defecting, since in that case he would suffer only a modest loss. Similar reasoning also leads B to defect. Thus using rational selfish reasoning, A and B defect, and they suffer a modest loss, while both of them would have been better off cooperating.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma gets an interesting and important twist if we consider it played multiple times among a large number of individuals. Instead of having just A and B, suppose we have a population of A1, A2, …, AN, where N is sufficiently large, maybe 1000 or so. For the sake of simplicity, suppose that at each time period T1, T2, …, TM, where M is again reasonably large, some randomly selected individuals are paired off to play the Prisoner’s Dilemma and some skip the turn. At the end of the time sequence, the resources of each individual, which he has accumulated playing the game, are calculated and the winner is declared.

A few decades ago, Robert Axelrod (1980) invited scholars to submit strategies for an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma competition. Although numerous intricate strategies were proposed, Axelrod’s computer simulations suggest that the best strategy to play the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is tit-for-tat (Axelrod, 1987). Tit-for-tat is characterized by two simple rules: cooperate on the first encounter with player X and repeat the last X’s decision on subsequent encounters. Suppose A1 adopted tit-for-tat. He would cooperate with A2 on the first meeting. If A2 defected, A1 would defect on the second meeting. However, if A2 had a change of heart and chose to cooperate on the second meeting, then A1 would reciprocate on the third meeting, and so on.

Some studies suggest that certain important features of evolution could be thought of as an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (Dawkins, 1976). Suppose A and B are competing over scarce resources. If A decides to fight (defect) and B gives in (cooperates), then A kills B or drives him away and reaps all the benefits. A and B could also peacefully share the resources, in which case they each get a half, or they could both fight, in which case both A and B suffer some losses in combat and share the resources in the end. Although the real world is way more complicated, the Prisoner’s Dilemma captures the idea that joint cooperation is better than joint defection, although individually the players are inclined to defect.

It makes sense that during the course of evolution a stable pattern of behavior among a given population would emerge (Dawkins, 1976). In our model such pattern of behavior is a game strategy telling a player whether to cooperate or to defect given his past game history. Axelrod’s studies (1987) suggest that in most circumstances tit-for-tat would prevail. In a population made up only of tit-for-tatters we would never see defection, since a tit-for-tatter never defects first. If there is an occasional hawk, that is, a selfish player who always defects, he would do well on his first encounters. However, once a tit-for-tatter meets the hawk for a second time, both of them would defect and suffer a modest loss. Thus eventually, when most of the population finds out about the hawk, he would suffer losses on the majority of the encounters, while tit-for-tatters would successfully accumulate their resources by cooperating among themselves. Depending on the set up of the game, a tit-for-tatter would probably have more resources than a hawk (Dawkins, 1976).

Ethical norms prescribing altruistic behavior probably have emerged as useful rules-of-thumb for cooperation (Ruse, 1995a). As game theoretical models and computer simulations suggest, a society where social interactions are governed by such rules would do better than a society without them (Axelrod, 1987). Thus it is reasonable to suppose that during the course of history the former prevailed over the latter, and that is why today we have ethical norms. Ethical norms, just as vision, can be viewed as an adaptation, since it confers an evolutionary advantage upon the populations which adopt them.