Evolved Morality

What does it mean to be good? This is a question philosophers, scientists and religions have struggled with throughout recorded history. The least satisfactory answers, in my opinion, are the reliously inspired ones as they take away from our own responsibility and agency. This short post is an introduction, a start to invistigate and reflect on the complex and sensitive subject of morality.

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Morality is best understood as a set of solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict recurrent in human social live; we are social animals after all. The big question that I see debated most often is this: is morality a product of evolution or handed down to us from our devine creator? And consequently: is morality relative or absolute? Since I'm not a religious person and have no justified reason to believe in a supernatural being, and have a tendency to want to demystify as much as possible, I believe that morality is a product of our evolution as social animals. As such, there's nothing mysterious about morality, and there's no need to invoke an all powerful, benevolent being to prescribe absolute moral edicts for us to follow.

On several occasions in the past I've written about "moral laziness," the fact that in society we've devised written rules to answer our moral questions, thereby taking away our own responsibility to make moral judgements. This has the effect that we do things, not because we've made our own moral judgement, but because the rules say we have to do these things; it's not just the Bible and God Almighty, but the social hierarchy of the day that descends down upon us these moral rulebooks. It's not the case that morals are expressly encoded in law or divine commandment, they exist in our minds after all, but they do on many occasions provide us with an excuse to not do the right thing, to evade our own moral responsibility. The most extreme examples are the soldier who folows orders, or the religious zealot who kills for his or her divine authority. For both it has to be said that they may well be convinced of the fact that their immoral act is for the greater good of their societies. Even the sacrifice of a child can be explained by invocation of this "greater good"; as with everything in our complex social lives, there are no easy answers.

Therefore it's the easy answers, in my opinion, that expose us to the highest risk of getting it wrong. And it doesn't really matter if the easy answer is given to us by an authority, secular or divine, or inspired by our emotions. I think it's obvious to anyone who's thought about morality for more than a couple of minutes, that emotions play a huge role in making moral judgements. This fact is also a primary indication that morality is the product of our deepest instincts, regardless if the are written on our hearts by God or evolved from our reptile brain. When we witness a moral transgression, we're engulfed by emotions of anger and disgust, and when we witness moral excellence, like some sort of self-sacrifice for the good of others, we feel a sense of awe and admiration; we're all heroes in the stories of our personal lives, or at least we want to be ;-) The emotions can however steer us away from acting in service of the greater good, and can result in moral judgements that have no good rational explanation.

I like the variations on the famous trolley problem best to illustrate this. It's a thought-experiment in which you are given the choice to sacrifice one live in order to save 5 lives; a runaway trolley is on course to collide with and kill five people down the track, but you can intervene by pulling a lever to divert the vehicle to kill just one person on a different track. When asked, most people say they will pull that lever, as killing just one instead of five people is considered morally preferential. But here's a variation on that problem: as before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very large man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed? Here significantly less people are willing to save the five. It's interesting to ask why that's the case, since the calculation seems identical; kill one to save five. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

Resistance to this course of action seems strong; when asked, a majority of people will approve of pulling the switch to save a net of four lives, but will disapprove of pushing the large man to save a net of four lives. This has led to attempts to find a relevant moral distinction between the two cases.

One possible distinction could be that in the first case, one does not intend harm towards anyone – harming the one is just a side effect of switching the trolley away from the five. However, in the second case, harming the one is an integral part of the plan to save the five.
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We could expand even more: what if the large man is a villain? What if it's you father, or your son? I'll leave it to your imagination and moral judgement to provide the (obvious) answers. These answers can all be explained through biological and cultural evolution. Although evolution itself is an amoral process, it's beneficial for genes to survive into the next generation when our emotions promote behavior that steers us away from danger, towards the opposite sex and edible food, and towards cooperation. It's believed in evolutionary psychology that the emotion of disgust aimed to steer us away from poisonous food, we like the taste of sweet fruits because they're edible. When early man stood upright and traveled across the savannah, he was near the bottom of the food-chain; survival demanded wo banded together and cooperated. So when we see behavior that stands in the way of cooperation or ignores reciprocity, it's only a small step to apply the emotions of disgust and anger to those behaviors as well. As a result, a couple of hundreds of thousand of years later, we're now at th etop of the food-chain.

The Darwin Day Lecture 2018 with Dr. Diana Fleischman is a good source to start learning about the evolution of disgust in particular and its relation to our evolving morality. If we are created by a God, he or she created us as evolving creatures with evolving moral values. This is obvious in my mind by just looking at how we've changed our attitude towards slavery and women for example; from just family and members of the tribe we've included more and more people in our moral considerations by overcoming the moral restrictions from evolution weighing down on us. We're more likely, for example, to cooperate with people who look like ourselves, which can serve as an explanation for our changing attitudes towards slavery (not as a justification). In her speech, Diana Fleischman talks about our expanding scope for morality, even to the point that we may be able to include future generations, people that do not exist yet.

The big takeaway here is that our moral sensibilities and rules are rooted in survival as social animals and guided by our ability for organized cooperation. In the below linked video, morality is defined simply as a collection of cooperative rules. Rules that we find all over the world and in all cultures. That's not to say that they are exactly the same everywhere, but that they do conform to the importance given to cooperation in those cultures. I recommend you watch this video, and the one I linked in the previous paragraph if you want to get started with learning about morality in evolution. Now, this post nor the videos will give a clear answer to all our moral dillemmas. Just consider the variations on the trolley problem; no one will judge you immoral if you choose not to sacrifice your son for the greater good. At least I hope not. There are no simple answers in every situation, but I do hope this will at least clarify the questions and the root of the dillemmas.

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