Truth
Evolution and Animal Morality
Abstract
Are Animals Moral?
Hitler exploited the readiness of a civilized nation to shed the thin layer of its uncomfortably carried restraints, leading to the unspeakable events of the decade between 1935 and 1945. But the truth is—it must be admitted with sadness—that such events are not “bestial”… but are decidely human., 1972
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 19 July 2009
Evolution and Animal Morality
All mammals have a common ancestor from which they have differentiated in response to different environmental needs. Just as some evolved specialized wings or flippers, some retained more generalized limbs. In the same way, subtle features like sociality varied, and among the more social animals degrees of play led to a variety of co-operative and empathic responses. In humans, one such set of responses is called morality—responses like honesty, altruism, compassion, generosity and being fair. Morality is just a particular example in one familiar species of a general behaviour in social animals. It evolved as a result of the evolution of social living.
Darwin saw that human morality was an extension of the animal instincts of social animals. Stories of animals feeding disabled ones is remarkably common. Sighted animals have often been observed feeding blind ones. We can take morality further than animals, and consequently many people have refused to see the basis of morality that exists in animals too. But the difference between animals and humans is one of degree only.
So morality is rooted in evolution, particularly in the evolution of sociality. It is the quid pro quo of living in groups. It is not simply the opposite of selfishness. It is a broad adaptive strategy for social living that has evolved in social animals (M Bekoff and J Pierce, Wild Justice). Solitary animals cannot be moral at all, they have nothing to gain by it. Social animals help each other because they individually benefit by it. Morality is not altruism. It is a selfish strategy but depends on reciprocity.
Social animals restrict the behavior of their group members. The restrictions a group imposes offer the security, welfare, and fairness that makes group life beneficial. These are “self regarding” behaviors—they benefit each individual—but are also “other regarding” because they have to accept a duty to regard the other members of the group too.
Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules. That’s why we like them so much, even though they’re large carnivores.Frans de Waal
When dogs or wolves play with each other, savage biting is forbidden. The animals have an etiquette, and will “apologize” when they bite too hard. Pack animals like these also have manners, an order of precedent when feeding, by which the higher ranked animals get the first choice, but all get fed. Other animals have grooming etiquette, and formal methods of approaching each other which assure the animals they are not being threatened.
Like humans, animals living in groups have to lose some of their individual freedom to be a part of the group. To have the benefits, they have to compromise elsewhere. It is a trade off of freedom for security. Frans de Waals speaks of “community concern” as the characteristics of the group that confer benefits on to the individual. Any individual group member not promoting the desirable group characteristics will be treated as “bad” while those that do will be treated as “good”. The shriek marks here signify that the animals are not consciously reasoning which is “good” and which “bad”, but that they have evolved the ability to do it to their own advantage. That they do, by whatever means, looks very much like morality.
Yet some evolutionary biologists, still influenced by Genesis, have refused to accept that animals can have morals. In their view, only humans have morals because we are uniquely made in the image of God. Once morals are seen as an evolved trait, it is plain that other animals must have them, or the behaviour from which morality evolved. Animal morality is different only in degree from human morality, just as a wolf’s paw has the same basic structure as the human hand.
It is obviously possible to define morality so narrowly that only humans can be included, but that is neither scientific nor honest, and can only serve to hide important connexions. We differ from animals in being conscious of our beliefs and actions, and consciousness is the feature available to us that allows us to reason. Morality, though, does not have to be conscious. It is based on emotions, and they work quite well unconsciously.
That emotional reactions are nested in levels of evolution is suggested by the evolution of the brain itself which P MacLean saw as being in three distinct stages, each built on to the previous one. The most primitive is the reptilian brain (the R-Complex) which controls basic functions like breathing, heartbeat, and flight or fight. Next up is the limbic system which controls emotions. Lastly, the most recent addition is the neocortex, the outer brain which controls abstract thought and speech. In humans and perhaps apes, emotions might be refined by the work of the neocortex, but the essential emotional responses are in the limbic system, and there is no reason to suppose that mammals do not experience it despite it being there!
Equally animals cannot attempt to describe their emotions, but humans have symbolic language to try to describe them. Their inability at articulating their emotions does not stop animals from having them. Rather the opposite. We can be confident that we share the faculties of our limbic systems, a lower level of mental exertion for us, but one animals surely have. What language in humans has done is provide more efficient means of transmitting important skills necessary for effective social life, like empathy, fairness and trust. It emphasizes the higher degree achieved by humans in codifying justice and morality, but cannot affect the roots of it shared by other social animals. Reflective judgement is not a precondition of moral behaviour.
Prosocial Behaviour and Animal Morality
So, morality is a trait that has evolved. Evidence of morality has been observed in animal behaviour studies of great apes, some monkeys, wolves, hyenas, dolphins, whales, elephants, rats and mice. Studies of the levels of morality in these animals can help us understand the emergence of morality in human beings as we evolved from apes. Of course, morality in a non-human species might look rather different from human morality, though all of it is social. Human morality is related to law. Law is imposed by the group when voluntary restrictions—morals—are not applied.
Studies show that, in primates, bats, social carnivores, and toothed whales and dolphins, the larger the social group an animal is in, the larger the size of the individual’s neocortex. The social intelligence hypothesis is that social living promotes higher intelligence. The need to keep track of one’s companions in the group, handling them socially and knowing how to treat them and trust them pushes for the growth of the brain and of intelligence. Teaching young ones the communal codes, forming alliances, and even using deception all require greater intellect.
The components of morality are sociality, intelligence and emotion. Rats and mice might seem lowly creatures to us, but they are social, emotional and intelligent. They show empathy for other rats or mice.
Empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats.Frans de Waal
Rats will not take food once they realize another rat nearby will get a shock by it. J Paaksepp has shown rats experience joy when they are playing, and even let out a rat laugh when tickled. Reactions like joy seem to be brought on by the release of opioid chemicals into the blood, giving a sort of high from the experience.
Socially favourable factors are called prosocial. The behaviour patterns that contribute to prosocial behavior, and so to morality, appear as several broad characteristics, important among them being co-operation, empathy and justice.
- Empathy comprises sympathy, compassion caring, helping, grieving and consoling.
- Co-operation comprises altruism, reciprocity and trust, and for those animals that hesitate in any of these are the sanctions of revenge and punishment.
- Justice comprises fairness, sharing, equality, just desserts, fair treatment, and then the sanctions of indignation, retribution and spite.
Morality implies immorality. To have one, the other must be possible. The same applies to some of the components of morality. Empathy implies cruelty. To imagine the suffering of another does not only lead to a helping hand, it also leads to the sadistic torturer. The prevalance of honesty makes dishonesty a potentially advantageous tactic.
Many people, even ethologists, will not use the word “moral” of animals, preferring to stick to “prosocial”, but prosocial actions are not necessarily moral. Parental care is not considered moral, but an instinct common to most advanced animals. When actions among animals seem to be moral in some sense, they are inadequately described as simply prosocial, though prosociality is the basis of morality. Social insects are very social animals but the degree to which they make choices, as opposed to acting purely on instinct is much less clear. Mammals do seem to make choices, and so can be more accurately described as moral.
Do Animals Choose?
Religious people find that consciousness of our actions is the essential moral difference between us and animals. Can animals decide for themselves what to do? Are they moral agents? Can they act autonomously? The religious view has long been that animals are robots. It is not a view that anyone, religious or not, that has owned a pet can accept. And human history has advanced through us training certain animals—dogs, horses, mules, camels, elephants, llamas—by rewarding some things they did, and punishing others. The rewards and punishments condition the animals to make the “right choice”—the choice we want!
But the animal is choosing, and sometimes the animal will choose to disobey. A dog might sit obediently looking at a beefsteak on the kitchen table even when his master is out of the room, but it might snatch the steak and make the most of it. The dog has chosen to “sin”, despite all its contrary training. Darwin certainly thought animals had the power of self command—they could make choices:
Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with social instincts, which in us would be called moral. And I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very much like a conscience.C Darwin, The Descent of Man
Plainly animals do choose, and it is often hard to believe they are not consciously aware of their bad deeds. They often behave as if they are guilty, so must expect to be punished. That surely is the point of the training. The animal is, of course, being made to behave in ways that might not be natural to it, at the command of a human being. But animals can still have agency within their own societies:
Wolves have a keen sense of how things ought to be among them.R Solomon, A Passion for Justice
All we are trying to do is to extend it to suit ourselves, but we should not use human standards for comparison in cases of animal morality. That the animals choose to obey the group’s restrictions is shown by them sometimes disobeying them, and the avoidance being punished when noticed. Crows, intelligent birds, can recognize and remember others’ bad deeds, like those who steal from their cache, and they will help another that requires help in driving off a thief, even if they did not see the act of theft themselves. They trust their friends:
It was a moral raven seeking the human equivalent of justice because it defended the group’s interest at potential cost to itself.Bernd Heinrich, Mind of a Raven
Animals obviously make choices in their own societies, like whether to play, and whether to help another animal. Any animal that can respond flexibly must be making choices in the same way, and we now know that highly trained human activities like playing tennis involve unconscious decisions—we reach to make a shot before we are conscious of it. So we highly intelligent animals are much less conscious than we think. The difference in degree of consciousness in humans and other advanced mammals is less then we ever thought.
Training is simply conditioning, and much of human morality is conditioned. Parents condition their children in the culture of their tribe, or society. So do elephants. When families break down, as we are now observing in our own societies, all too often, the proper acculturation of our children does not happen, and the next delinquent generation just does not know how they are meant to acculturate their own children. We are in a vicious downward cycle. The same is true of elephants that have been ravaged by poachers in the African wild life parks. Elephant matriarchs, the group leaders, are being shot before they have passed on their skills to their young, and a generation of delinquent elephants has arisen. Impulse control in children is essential to the development of morality, yet animals need to do it too.
Empathy
In the 1990s, neuroscientists noticed that certain neurones in macaque monkeys fired off when they watched the researchers pick up food. The same neurones fired when the monkeys were themselves picking up food, so they were firing from the recognition of the same act by the researchers. The neurones mirrored the activity itself when observed in others, so they were termed “mirror neurones”. Mirror neurones have since been found in songbirds, like swamp sparrows—they help them to learn their songs—suggesting that they occurred as far back as the common ancestor of birds and mammals.
As they fire when the animal sees or hears the action being performed, they give it the same feeling as it experiences when it does the same thing itself. They therefore stimulate imagination and concern. They trigger when we imagine ourselves doing what others are doing. They are signals of empathy! If another is hurt, the observing animal can sense what it feels like:
Mirror neurones allow us to grasp the minds of others, not through conceptual reasoning, but by direct stimulation—by feeling, not thinking.G Rizzolatti, neuroscientist
Since 2007, neurones throughout the human brain have been identified as mirror neurones. Humans give others signals which they involuntarily recognize and respond to, like giggling triggering a spate of it, and similarly yawning triggering yawning. They let us understand the emotions of others, and are vital for comprehending language. Other primates have the same sort of responses, Orang Utans, for example, and, besides primates, empathy has been observed in elephants, whales, rats, mice, and social carnivores.
Until they were found in whales, scientists thought the large neural cells called spindle cells occurred only in humans and apes. They play a role in empathy, intuition and feelings. In whales they appear in just those parts of their brains where they help in them making rapid reactions from quick decisions, such as whether another whale is in distress and a quick response is needed. Whales have three times the spindle cells of humans. They are likely to have an advanced emotional life.
Certain brain chemicals have been linked with moral feelings. Oxytocin, a hormone, relates to levels of trust, giving an utterly unconscious and unreasoned response to others in our social network. Once we know someone, we just trust them without any need to think about it.
There is now no doubt that animals have emotions, but there are still scientists who preserve the theological dogma that human beings are distinguished from animals by their emotions. The old notion of refusing to consider emotion in animals on the grounds that only humans have feelings, is ridiculous and counter intuitive. As we all have a common evolutionary heritage, it is sensible to judge what looks like emotion in an animal when we would expect it as that emotion.
We are human and cannot avoid the language and knowledge of our own emotional experience when we describe a strikingly similar reaction observed in another species.S J Gould
Emotions are not the highest product of evolution. They had evolved long before reason and language. Admittedly, we should not anthropomorphize the animal, but, though it will not be philosophizing about its experience, it nevertheless still feels it. You do not need to be able to describe your joy or sadness to experience it, and that is just how animals are. We are simply recognizing after an awfully long time failing to appreciate it, that we have feelings in common with animals. It is just that we can tell others of it.
Do animals have emotions? Few would doubt that animals can get angry when provoked, and anger is an emotion in human beings. Our physiologies have a lot in common. It is absurd to deny animals, with which we are so similar, any emotions at all on the grounds that God made us in His image, and not animals! It is not extreme to see that we are all mammals, and as a first approximation will experience pain, joy, love and anger in comparable ways. I will cry out in pain if I burn my finger, and my cat will shriek if I tread on its tail. But if we both feel pain, what stops us both from feeling fear or love? Admittedly, an emotion will not be felt in precisely the same way across species, but, when it involves the same neural architecture or opioid responses in the same contexts, then there is no reason for us not to think the feeling will be of a similar kind. Indeed, it is perverse not to think it.
Empathy is the ability to understand another’s emotions, and to respond in an helpful way. In humans, we can use our imaginations to share the other’s perspective, but the essence of empathy is emotional linkage. It might have started as an extension of the emotional linkage of a mother and her infant. Empathy is the outcome.
The basic response to alarm calls—startled behaviour—has been refined through evolution until the distress and anxiety of the alarm call is manifested by seeing another suffering. Such a phenomenon is quite basic in vertebrates at least. Many cruel experiments have shown how distressed animals are when they see others of their kind being killed. When a rat sees a nearby rat being decapitated, its stress reaction is clear. Even throwing a rag bloodied with the murdered rat on to the cage of another makes it stressed. The witnessing rat can sense what is happening, and experience it. It is empathy!
Rhesus monkeys will not feed when they know another will get an electric shock as a consequence. Frans de Waal (Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, 2006) explains that a rhesus monkey was subjected to an experiment in which it pulled a chain to get food. Monkeys learn such tricks immediately. But then the experiment was arranged so that, besides delivering food, another monkey in the next cage got an electric shock when the chain was pulled. The monkey pulling the chain soon realized it was causing the other monkey distress, and it stopped doing it, and would not do it again for five days, until it was really hungry. Another starved itself for twelve days before it was forced to by hunger to pull the chain again. The monkeys would rather starve than cause pain to another monkey nearby, and it was not only when the other monkey was kin. When the monkeys were related, the longer they would starve themselves rather than cause distress, showing that genes and evolution were invoved even though the concern the monkeys had for each other was not limited to close kin. In monkeys and apes, as well as humans, the compassionate trait has extended to unrelated creatures in close enough proximity to notice distress in others of their kind.
Rats will not depress a lever to get food once they realize that by so doing they cause a rat in an adjacent cage pain through an electric shock. Stanley Milgram doing the same experiment to humans (who pretended to be shocked) found many were willing to apply such serious shocks that the victims would have died if the shocks were real. In another experiment with rats, one was suspended uncomfortably in the air, but another rat perfectly free to do as it wished could press a lever to release the suspended rat. The free rats did just that!
Even mice have been shown to be capable of feeling empathy. They are observably distressed when nearby mice are tortured. Empathy in small mammals like mice shows it is probably common to all mammals, and certainly to more sophisticated species. Once it is accepted that many mammals can sense the pain of another of the same kind, the basis of morality must exist.
A chimpanzee in an American zoo was unusual. It had cerebral palsy, the only confirmed case of it in chimps. Did the chimps tease it and take advantage of it, as humans do to disabled people? Not a bit. All of them showed kindness, helping it to feed, and grooming it, and even an alpha male was gentle towards it. Great apes will console another ape that has been worsted in a fight. It is a sign of cognitive empathy. The same has not yet been observed in monkeys. Monkeys have mirror neurones that are associated with empathy, but do not seem to have spindle cells which also seem necessary. Faults to the spindle cells of humans seem to cause autism.
Whales and dolphins grieve for a lost relative. A Rodrigues fruit eating bat has been seen acting as a tutor and a midwife to a young pregnant female. It has not been easy to observe bats in the wild giving birth, but having been seen, the experts think midwifery might be the normal practice among bats. More remarkable still is that the two bats were not related, so the act was one of altruism.
In an oft quoted case, a young female elephant with a crippled leg was harrassed by a young male showing off. A mature matriarch defended the crippled elephant, chasing off the bully, and returning to caress the young female’s bad leg with her trunk, and generally showing concern. Elephants grieve, and are the only other animal besides humans that are curious about the corpses and bones of the dead of their species. Compassion for the ailing and grief for the dead indicate concern for others—empathy.
Elephants that found a herd of antelope locked in pens in an African National park, followed the lead of their matriarch and released the catches on the gates of the pens letting the captive animals escape. Was that perversity or empathy?
Empathy is at the core of justice, and empathy for those who can be seen to be unjust, like tyrants and torturers, evaporates—they are likely to get their just deserts if their guard falls.
Co-operation
Evolutionary fitness is not at all only shown by mutual fighting, as many still seem to think. Animals co-operate much more in Nature than they show aggression towards each other, quite contrary to the popular “Darwinist—red in tooth and claw” capitalist idea of animal behaviour. Social animals spend much more time co-operating with each other than fighting. Peter Kropotkin (Mutual Aid) showed at the beginning of the twentieth century that co-operation was a much more reliable way for animals to survive than competition, but it has taken 100 years for anyone to catch on to the truth. Animals in groups much more often will be found helping each other than squabbling:
Real competition and struggle between higher animals of the same species came very seldom to my notice.P Kropotkin, Mutual Aid
Mainly it was mutual aid. Even the so-called feeding frenzy is not as frenzied as it sounds. Social animals take their food in a set order of precedence, and, before the feeding, they will communally defend the kill against scavangers keen to steal it, irrespective of their place in the feeding hierarchy. Even animals of different species are known to help each other, just as humans and dogs or horses do. Ravens have been seen leading wolves to the carcase of an elk. The animal is too big and tough for the ravens to pull apart, but they are happy to let the wolf pack do it, then they get a lot of bite size pieces themselves.
Co-operation is the widespread basis of animal morality. Co-operation is behaviour by which both parties benefit at the time. There is usually no, or very little cost to the parties above that which arises out of the social nature of the animals. Some animals co-operate more readily and more often than models of animal behaviour predict, even though the act of co-operating might not yield any immediate benefit. The benefits must be longer term, but if the behaviour is to be repeated, the animal must experience some affective state that rewards the activity. The most basic such state is “affiliation”—liking and feeling close to others. It happens from family closeness but also from pair bonding (love) and friendship.
Social interactions among primates was mainly affiliative, and only occasionally agonistic. Chimpanzees have been known to help humans retrieve things lost in the animals’ pen or cage, with no reward as an incentive. They also freely share their food and have developed ideas of reciprocity, division of food and co-operation to ensure it is done in an orderly way. Chimps remember those who have shared their food with them, and act in a friendly way towards them. It can only be described as gratitude. Capuchin monkeys do much the same.
Animals that have to live in close proximity, perhaps for security in numbers, can put up with it better when they enjoy social contact. Social animals, kept isolated form each other, suffer stress and psychosis. Endogenous opioid peptides (EOPs) make animals more inclined to associate closely and co-operate. Positive contact leads to the release of EOPs, and that makes the animals seek contact. The EOPs effectively give animals in groups a high—they feel pleasure or joy in social contact. Equally mutual aid or co-operation makes people feel good.
Co-operation also activates the reward centers of the brain, releasing dopamine, which then makes the co-operation feel pleasurable, and so encourages it. Being nice to others does indeed bring its own rewards in a feeling of wellbeing and that promotes co-operation. Oxytocin is another chemical that helps co-operation—promoting mutual trust, and trust is helpful when people wish to join together in co-operative ventures. R Axelrod and W Hamilton showed long ago that animals co-operate more with those that have given them reason for trust.
Reciprocal altruism is the zenith of co-operative behaviour, and some think only humans are capable of it. Yet dogs and hyenas have social mechanisms for peacemaking as complex as those of primates. Ethologists reporting such behaviour in dogs, hyenas, rats and crows have found peer reviewers of their reports rejecting them purely on prejudice not on science. They judge such low animals as absolutely incapable of reciprocal altruism so they refuse to consider evidence of it.
It ought not to be said that science should not be prejudiced against anything, and rejection should only be based on science better than that submitted. Novel observations can therefore only be rejected on the basis of identifiable flaws, and not because they do not happen! What, anyway is too low? In colonies of initially indistinguishable amoeba called slime moulds, in certain conditions some of the animals volunteer to die by becoming a stalk to suspend the fruiting body and propagate the colony. R Hudson, et al, who observed this happening, called it altruism, and what better word is there for it, yet these are animals that are so low, they normally live as individual cells.
Morality as Play
Mammals, birds, and even, it is said, crustaceans, will play. In young animals, play emerges to build them up through exercise, and to let them develop life skills. It hones physical and mental skills. Yet they need an incentive to do it, and the incentive is pleasure. Because play is so useful in physical and mental development, it has become pleasurable. It stimulates the release of endorphins, and that makes it fun. It is Nature’s way of doing what is good for us, and the species.
Morality seems to have evolved from play. Morality has the form of a game with rules, and punishments for breaking them. Animals play out of choice, and continued participation depends upon fairness, co-operation and trust. As play is by mutual agreement, animals that habitually cheat don’t get played with. Among coyotes, 60% of yearlings that left home died, but only 20% of the ones that remained at home until they were more mature died. Those that tend not to play fairly tend to get isolated and might be the ones more likely to leave the family group. It seems that the ones more tolerated by their kin, because the play fairly, stay at home until they are more mature, and, being better prepared, succeed better when they eventually do leave.
Play therefore is necessarily fair. Through it, each animal gets to understand what is acceptable to others and what is not—what is right, and what is wrong! Once all understand the rules, the game is stable, and all can enjoy it while they choose to play. Play, for social animals, is therefore essential practice for sociality, and the rules of sociality for any species are its morals. If justice and morality are seen as social rules meant to maintain group harmony, then they are equivalent to play.
Tests even on young human children show they have developed a sense of justice from early on. They can judge a kind person from an unkind one from their behaviour towards others maybe as early as 15 months. As it appears so young, it suggests that it might also appear in apes and other social animals. It emerges too young in humans to be learned, so must be instinctive—an evolved behaviour.
Among human beings, there is no doubt that those who feel they are being justly treated are more content and physically healthier than those who do not. R Wilkinson (Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality) found that Scandinavians living in fairly egalitarian societies are healthier than people living in manifestly unequal societies like the USA. Inequality causes ill-health through the physiological effects of social stress. L Mitchell (Stacked Deck) adds that trust of others is difficult, if not impossible in societies like the USA where self interest is vaunted above everything else.
Without trust everyone becomes suspicious and defensive. Effectively, unfairness breeds mistrust, and mistrust breeds social instability. Trust is essential for group cohesion, and, without it, societies fall apart. Pack size in wolves depends on social factors, not availability of food. It is the pressure between social attraction and social competition, and when competition gets too much, a rebellion causes the pack to splinter. Justice presumes a personal concern for others, but it is a sense, a feeling, first, and is rationalized second. So reason or logic is not essential to the “sense” of justice, and that is why justice does not require an human intelligence. Having it simply means we have been able to catalogue and canonize our morality, but the moral code existed in society already.
Religion and Morality
Most people think that morals have been given to us by God, and God’s laws should be applied in practice. They have been fixed forever, whence the laws of Moses, Sharia law, and the inerrancy of the Protestant New Testament. God’s law is unchanging, but the trouble is that no one can agree on what it is that He has prescribed! The whole of human history has seen laws changing constantly—evolving!
The laws in relationship to women now give them much closer equality to men than they have enjoyed under the dominance of the patriarchal God for 2500 years. The aim is that both sexes should be legally equal. The law in relation to race has similarly evolved by leaps and bounds in the last few hundred years after millennia of gross inequality under the patriarchal God. Human beings everywhere are increasingly being seen as equal, quite properly. The progress has been made painfully slowly, despite the faith of Christian believers in the divinity of Jesus, who insisted that his followers should consider all men, even enemies, as if they were God Himself. Christians have almost universally ignored this commandment as too hard.
The one whom many Christians treat as if he were God, Paul, condoned slavery and the inferior status of women. He was sufficient for them to ignore the word of the man who is meant to be God. Let anyone actually look at evidence—what actually happens in history—and they will see that law always evolves, like everything else. If God has left an unchanging law, it is the law of evolution.
If God has prescribed human morals, it is up to us to think about what God has told us and apply his moral rules. But Michael Gazzaniga, an eminent US neuroscientist, reports that most scientific studies of morality find no correlation between moral reasoning and moral behavior such as helping others. Whatever the basis for anyone’s morals, most people behave well. Yet some supposedly highly pious religionists from Catholic popes to Protestant televangelists have been rotten to the core. The fact is that most people are moral, irrespective of their justification of it.
It looks as though morality is the way we behave as humans—with the exceptions behaving badly—yet we do not have to struggle with moral problems on a daily basis. Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology says “what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment”. Each moment we meet a new situation, and our brains instantly assess what they see and make judgements, some of which we might consciously consider, and many more remain in our unconscious minds. These instant judgements are the basis of our morals.
It is like tasting something new, according to David Brooks, (“The End of Philosophy”, NY Times, 6 April 2009). When a child, particularly, does not like it, they spit it out, often with an obvious show of disgust. Adults might show more decorum, but usually there is little weighing up of the pros and cons. It is the same when you come across a wonderful sight. You do not consider its merits at length to get your impression of it. You can judge it instantly. The same is true of moral judgements. We make quick intuitive decisions about what feels right or not. Having made a judgement we might try to rationalize it, but many people cannot, and the whole process begins at a young age, before we can speak, and before our brains have started formal reasoning.
When a child tastes something strange and unfamiliar, its instant reaction is to find it disgusting. In that way, it has a natural defence against noxious food. It is an instinct that has evolved. Those without it often died by eating poisonous or rancid food. Those who remained had inherited the trait to find new food disgusting. They have to be persuaded by people they trust that the food is wholesome. They have to acquire the taste. The same applies to a landscape. We have evolved to like certain landscapes because they are our natural home. A landscape of blackened rocks devoid of vegetation is not inviting. Nor is a baking hot desert, or a malarial swamp. But a green valley with a lake, trees and deer roaming about looks inviting to us. It is a natural home for us, and we have evolved to know what is good for us.
Morality is similar. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia says the emotions control morality, and our emotions have evolved. The evolution of morality depends on our social nature. People are not separate units but combine together into groups and communities of mutual assistance.
Conservatives and religionists have long ago decided that evolution is a matter of vicious competition—a dog eat dog contest red in tooth and claw—and humans are essentially the same, basically competitive animals saved from bestiality by God’s morals. Human competition is the biological justification for the capitalist economic system but morality mediates it slightly, and that slight modification is what makes it acceptable, or even divine.
But the competition invoved in evolution does not have to be savage, or even direct, the way the naïve right wing likes to maintain. Social animals band together in groups because each individual among them benefits. Sociality is about co-operation within groups. Social animals stand together against common threats, then more advanced social animals like human beings help each other, build houses together, take on different jobs in a division of labour, and evolve such that these communal and co-operative traits are reinforced. And besides obvious changes like these that evolve, so too hidden or more subtle emotional changes evolve too, often driven by the hormonal secretions, opioids and brain chemicals like dopamine noted above, which make us feel good by helping, trusting or being friendly with others. By being social, we end up caring about the rights of other people, as well as our personal rights, and loyalty, respect, culture, and traditions, all social issues. We are all descended from successful co-operators.
As Darwin saw, competition has made us co-operative, empathetic and altruistic towards others of our kind, and, through it, even to animals not of our kind. The only trouble so far is that we tend still to distrust other humans who are not in our own local group, with the definition of “local” itself slowly evolving from family, to clan, to tribe, to nation, to empire and ultimately to the world.
Intuitive morality explains how we lead practicable social lives without excessively pausing to make judgements about others. We trust others to be moral like ourselves. If they betray our trust, we expect others in society like ourselves to punish the betrayers. That is the law! Our judgements are largely instinctive, but have been codified to some extent with our use of language and reason. So, sometimes we have to use reason to supplement or substitute for our moral intuitions.
Brooks thinks the realization that morals are not external—imposed by God, or worked out by reason—but are largely instinctive is “an epochal change”. It challenges much of how philosophy is imagined—the metaphysical problem of ethics is no longer a hard one. It challenges the traditions of all “the religions of the book”, for religion—God—is shown not to have been the source of the distinction between right and wrong. Trying too hard for balance, Brooks writes:
It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.
What, though, has morality to do with irrational faith? What the evolutionary theory of morality has done is remove the connexion between morals and faith that religions have seen as necessary. The theory of evolution is the pinnacle of reason, and now it explains why we have morals, and how properly socialized human beings apply them instinctively with no recourse to religions, bibles or God.
Evolution is a scientific idea which is continually giving us new insights, though it is almost impossible to get anyone indoctrinated with religion to appreciate it. Science has naturally explained many of the phenomena considered by religious people to be signs of God. Just as morality can be explained by evolution, so too can feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self sacrifice. Indeed, they are mainly traceable to the same facts—that we have evolved and are social. Our societies transcend us. We are in a social contract with other human beings, a mutual bargain that we treat others as we ourselves would want to be treated. Our loyalty to society has metamorphosed to our loyalty to God. Society is God!
Further Reading
- More about morality, and justice as fairness, and more, the Principle of Humanity
- A lot more on religious origins—five linked webpages
- More on the death of God and secular Christianity
