Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 6 December 2009

Biology provides a broad source of information about humans that has no substitute. It clarifies long standing paradoxes. It shows that some things have indeed been missing from the debates about morality, and that they have been missing because the process of organic evolution that gave rise to all forms of life has been left out of the discussions.

R D Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems (1987)

Evolutionary Necessity

In 1739, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote: “When any hypothesis… is advanc’d to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both.” A century later, Darwin showed that all forms of life have a common origin. Yet, to this day, the idea that humans and animals share characteristics and abilities, including mental ones, as a result of shared evolutionary history, still seems hard to swallow for some.

Frans de Waal

Some ethicists accept that evolution explains our physical nature, but deny it explains our moral nature. Thus a Christian author of some apologetic site wants atheists to explain where their morals come from, and how they can distinguish right from wrong. They are popular Christian questions, but they never listen to the answers and so keep asking the same things over and over again. Is not that a sign of some form of dementia? Perhaps it is equally demented to keep answering, but since Christians think that if you do not answer their endlesly repeated inquiries, they start to say you cannot, the atheist has a reason for continuing to play the demented Christian game.

Theists and agnostics do not behave less morally than religious believers, even if their virtuous acts are mediated by different principles. They often have as strong and sound a sense of right and wrong as anyone, including involvement in movements to abolish slavery and contribute to relief efforts associated with human suffering.

M Hauser and P Singer, Morality without Religion, 2005

Millions of people with no religion live moral lives, and millions more who do not subscribe to Christianity do too. You do not need any religion to live a moral life. Religious communities are no more moral than secular ones. Psychological studies have not found any significant correlation between frequency of religious worship and moral conduct, but criminal convicts are more likely to be believers than atheists. We have an intuitive moral faculty that guides our judgements of right and wrong, the outcome of millions of years in which our ancestors lived as social mammals. It evolved!

Of course, evolution is not teleological—it has no purpose, no goal, but the theory of evolution can show what is necessary in given circumstances of environment and current evolutionary state. Thus, it explains convergent evolution. A torpedo shape with fins suggests a creature requires water to survive. It has evolved characteristics that show it needs water around it. Similarly wings suggest flight. Equally, evolution suggests animals have evolved a set of behaviours necessary for harmony when they live in social groups. Human morals are what we have recognized as these behaviours in our species.

Animals that would be rivals and perhaps enemies in a solitary state have come together to live jointly because it gives them an edge over their solitary ancestors they left behind. But they have to restrain what was once a natural way of behaving in the interest of preserving the social set up. Dogs will play together, apparently quite roughly, but they do not bite each other with the savagery they could. They have an instinctive social code not to bite seriously during play with another group member:

Instinct is any action that does not require learning or experience for the animal to perform it and is done without the animal necessarily knowing what the benefits or consequences of that action will be.

Professor Steve Jones

It is an instinct that has evolved along with the group form of living, but if dogs were to become intelligent enough to think of their behaviour and to codify what is good behaviour, calling it their moral code, biting savagely would be forbidden. That is what the intelligent ape, humans, have done. In a sentence, humans evolved morality as part of our nature, just as ants evolved a characteristic scent trail as part of their nature—to promote social cooperation.

So, we can see we are social creatures, and we can see that living socially requires conventions called morals, and we can see that morals that do not strengthen, or at least preserve our instinct for social order, are bad for us. Evolution therefore can, in this sense, prescribe what our behaviour should be, given that we wish to preserve our circumstances, our success at sociality and civilization, and our mutual cooperation.

Once we had religion to tell us who we are. Then, for a while, we had Freud. Now we have evolutionary psychology, which, as an attempt to construct a science of human nature on Darwinian principles, marshals two of the most powerful ideas in contemporary culture—science, our most authoritative way of knowing, and nature, our highest ground of moral appeal.

William Deresiewicz

Edward O Wilson, a Harvard professor emeritus, initiated the study of evolutionary biology, then called “sociobiology” with his eponymous book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, (1975). Evolutionay psychology is “the study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior in human beings”, but as a study based on evolution, it draws on the study of behaviour in other social animals and particularly other primates.

Emotions evolved in much more primitive animals that ourselves, evidence that our moral emotions also have evolved. Primatologist, Frans de Waal argues that components of moral psychology, such as the sense of fairness and the emotions evoked by it, like gratitude and inequity aversion, are homologues of psychological systems in other primates. He asks:

Do animals show behavior that parallels the benevolence as well as the rules and regulations of human moral conduct? If so, what motivates them to act this way? And do they realize how their behaviors affect others?

Are the emotions, dispositions, and mental abilities—empathy and the recognition of norms—required by moral behavior present in our closest living relatives, the apes, and even in more distant relatives like monkeys?

To test it, female capuchin monkeys, trained to swap coins for food, were put in adjacent cages. To get an item of food in a transparent bowl in front of them, they had to give up a coin. The experiment was to test the monkeys’ reaction to manifest unfairness. When they were given the same item, say a piece of cucumber, they did not react. When one was given a tastier morsel, say a grape, the one who only got cucumber refused to give up its coin, expecting the same reward. When one got nothing at all, or kept getting the poor deal, it might throw the coin down in apparent anger and disgust.

So, the female capuchins seem to measure reward in relative terms, comparing their own rewards with those available, and their own efforts with those of other monkeys. They are quite like human beings who judge rewards on the basis of fairness. In an economic game in which a monetary prize is divided by one person, and the share offered is accepted or rejected by the other, both men and women incline to reject low offers considered unfair, even though acceptance gives them something rather than the nothing they get by rejection. They would rather punish the unfair dealer than to gain only a small share, and so they forego their share, when the dealer’s is disproportionately high, to punish him by depriving him of a much larger sum.

The female monkeys, like people, seem to have social emotions displayed in response to their efforts, gains, and losses in relation to others. However, the same is not true of male capuchins. Any slight behavioral variation between human sexes are uncertain (Fehr finds some, see below), unlike the clear distinction in behaviour of the sexes of the monkeys. And when the game is varied so that rejecting the deal does not hurt the person who offered the unfair deal, people tend to accept the deal, but to the female monkeys in equivalent situations it makes no difference. They reject the deal anyway.

Certainly, female capuchin monkeys have a marked sense of fairness, though males do not show it. Of course, there is no need to imagine that monkeys would behave like humans at all, so the differences between male and female capuchins need not be surprising, and might have something to do with capuchin society. Perhaps it is male unfairness that concerns female capuchins! The experiment shows an unsophisticated animal compared with a human being has some sort of sense of fairness, and feels disgust over lack of it. Frans de Waal has done far more work on other primates and has written popular books about it. Lower animals have a moral sense, and that suggests morality evolved.

How the Evolutionary Argument Works

Many Christians seem proud they do not get what is a simple argument. In a transcript of a commentary from the radio show Stand to Reason, someone called Gregory Koukl argues that morality is evidence for the existence of a moral God, the moral standard of the universe. The reason he offers is that the evolutionary argument does not work, and therefore the God argument must be so. The one, does not follow from the other, of course, but Christians cannot understand that either.

Normative cognition—the capacity to grasp norms and to make normative judgments—is a product of evolution. Norms are ancient and universal and from an early age, people are adept at reasoning about normative matters. It shows that normative cognition evolved—normative cognition is an adaptation, and this is supported by an as yet small but significant body of sociological and psychological evidence, and by evolutionary models.

Richard Joyce has suggested that the capacity to make moral judgments is a specifically human adaptation for motivating us to act in a prosocial way. He writes that morality—the tendency to make moral judgments—exists in all known human societies. The universality of morality is evidence that it evolved—it is not just cultural.

As we evolved, moral judgments promoted prosocial behavior. They expressed to our ancestors the common judgement of the group of why anyone should act favorably to others in society, even though directly it might be somewhat detrimental to themselves. People had this instinct because those without it had been unable to live in a group. Those with it could, and the group was stronger for it. Moreover, morals are particularly suitable to us because we can speak. The evolution of speech will have enhanced the adoption of spoken moral condemnation and praise, promoting the reciprocation of prosocial behavior to cement human groups.

Moral systems are systems of indirect reciprocity.

R D Alexander

Joyce distinguished seven ways that moral judgments differ from other kinds of normative judgments. They:

1. are often ways of expressing approval, contempt, and generally departure from standards, when spoken publicly, but they are also assertions, expressions of belief
2. are uttered, when pertaining to some word or deed, as disinterested criticism irrespective of the interests and aims of those criticized—they are not simply advice
3. are obligatory, not optional
4. transcend human conventions
5. govern social interpersonal relations, particularly to combat selfishness
6. imply punishment, justice
7. induce a feeling of shame or guilt, a moral conscience being necessary to regulate moral conduct.

So morality is present, according to Joyce, in every known human culture—in every one there are norms with all or most most of the seven features he identifies as distinguishing moral norms from any other norm.

Moral norms and conventional norms can be distinguished in use. Moral norms hold independently from any authority, are considered universally applicable, are justified by the harm done to others, whether social rights, or social justice, and violations of them are treated as serious. Conventional norms depend on authority, apply only locally, are justified by reference to convention, and violations of them are considered less serious than violations of moral norms. Elliot Turiel et al argue that early in their development and panculturally, children can distinguish moral norms and conventional norms. Moreover, infants’ react with concern and care—empathy—to others’ suffering, and they display helping behaviors towards other kids. These findings suggest the ability to make moral judgments is innate, and therefore are evidence for the evolution of morality.

So, did morality evolve? From the evolutionary history of specific aspects of moral psychology, it is uncontroversial for anyone except fundamentalists that morality evolved. It is difficult at this stage of the work to be sure that any particular human moral trait has evolved, but the generality of such traits have a long evolutionary history.

The only convincing answer to the origin of morality is the one Christians refuse to accept—that morals come from our evolutionary history, which has brought us to be social animals. Yet, many American Christians seem to think we are not social, mainly because the word “social” is taboo in the USA where they have invented the word “societal” by adding a syllable—as is their wont—often out of ignorance rather than intention, but here because the proper word “social” is too much like socialism, a notion they have been trained to hate.

Americans think capitalism, the notion they are trained to love, means that all humanity are selfish, we are all in competition, and that is the law of nature we humans follow. People who hate Darwinism are suddenly social Darwinists. It is almost the opposite of the truth. All animals are selfish to a degree because they have to have some sense of difference from the rest of the world to survive at all, but some animals, of which humans are the prime example, have discovered that they improve their chances of survival, not by fighting each other, but by clanning together to fight everything else. Clanning together is the meaning of the word “social”.

A major implication of social living is that without it we would be much less able to survive than we are with it. All we need to do to confirm this is to look at the other apes that still survive in the world, and we see that they are often solitary, or live only in family groups or small bands, so they are not social, or are only social in a small way. Though humans began in similarly small groups, they made such a success of their sociality they now live in vast cities, or in well populated countries where no one is far from another human being or even a large city of them. The benefit of living socially is cooperation whereby social groups can do far more than a man, his wife and his children can do alone.

But such cooperation requires some sacrifices so that the benefits can be enjoyed, and the sacrifices are precisely the source of our morals. We cannot do certain things when we live together in extended groups that we might do as solitary hunters. We cooperate for safety, for obtaining food, and so that our children who are helpless for a remarkable number of years, unlike other animals, can be protected while parents help to feed them or educate them. We each have to give up a little freedom to get the benefits of society. That is something the diehard US Christian indoctrinated with capitalist propaganda cannot bear. Society has the function of reducing competition between humans so as to improve the ability of humans to succeed in solving other problems by cooperation! Social Darwinism is an oxymoron.

Yet the morals we get from social living, respect for other humans, honesty in dealing with them, eschewing theft from them, caring and sharing with them to our mutual benefit, living frugally rather than lavishly, all of this is advocated by the world’s major religions, not because some all powerful god has told us to do it, but because an even more important imperative demands it—the need to preserve society and civilization for our own good. The same moral teachings are common to all humans because we all of us need society to live as humans. The absence of a supernatural god does not leave morality relative. It does not, in other words, leave it arbitrary. Morality is conditioned by our lives—the fact of social living. It is a more certain absolute than God because society is real. Indeed, society is the origin of God. God is society writ larger than life!

No It Does Not!

Koukl understands the evolutionary argument itself, but says it is inadequate, simply labelling inherited conduct as morality. Moral behaviour is formed through the process of natural selection allowing some animal to continue to survive. It as inadequate because it merely describes past behaviour, but morality is prescriptive, it is normative, it looks forward to how we ought to behave, not just at how we do behave. To refute the evolutionary explanation Koukl asks a series of questions, thus:

• “Why ought anyone be unselfish in the future?” When a group of chimpanzees punished one chimp for being selfish by withholding food, the errant chimp learnt the moral norm of the group. The chimpanzee ought not be selfish.
• “Why ought the chimp (or human) not be selfish?” The answer is that selfishness hurts the group.
• “Why ought we be concerned about the health of the group?” The answer is that the species does not survive, when the group does not survive.
• “Why ought I care about the health of the species and whether the species survives or not?” The answer Koukl gives is that, if the species dies out, then I will not survive.

He thinks he has reduced the evolutionary argument to absurdity, to the contradiction that we ought to be unselfish because it is better for us—but that is selfishness. If not in logic, in real life, an animal can be both selfish and unselfish, depending on whether its motivation is ultimate or proximate. An ultimate motivation is what the final outcome will be, whereas a proximate motivation is what motivates it in any particular situation. The Christian might wish to appear caring to the poor and meek, an apparently proximate motivation, yet really be motivated ultimately by their fear of hell fire, and preference for entering God’s pearly gates. Animals are driven by the instinct to reproduce at all costs, yet social animals often have a highly developed instinct of empathy towards other animals of their own kind, and sometimes even not of their own kind. There need be no contradiction.

The bigger fault in Koukl’s reasoning is that he presents it as being reasoned, as if the animal is making thought out choices. Evolution works by elimination of the bad, not by picking the best, and none of it consists of conscious choices. The chimps do not figure out that they will be unselfish. The chimps that survive are the ones who are unselfish. The selfish ones die out, the unselfish ones, sheltered by the group, reproduce. Eventually chimp societies consist of a majority of unselfish chimps, so that when chimps get intelligent enough to be aware of their behaviour, they appreciate unselfishness as the norm, and disdain selfishness as being abnormal. We might say wrong. So, the selfish one gets punished. If it teaches the animal a lesson, then it has learnt to be unselfish. That is what intelligence can do for us. If not, it will be repeatedly punished, and might be expelled from the group, when it will probably die. So that is the end of another selfish animal in the line.

At no point are the chimps thinking about whether they will survive or not. The survival is simply the more probably destiny of the unselfish ones. What we can do, as even more intelligent animals is hypothesize reasons for unselfishness. We get to realize that unselfishness can be a benefit to the group in that it survives better, and therefore we each of us are better off in the survival stakes by living together in unselfish groups. We can do what Koukl does, pretending that lesser animals do it, and that is what constitutes evolution, thus making the argument seem absurd. It’s just the way you tell ’em.

Incidentally, Koukl seems unconscious of the fact that the main motive in his society is selfishness, the motive of capital accumulation, yet it directly opposes what he considers to be moral, unselfishness. As already noted, should this remain the case for much longer, western society will end up on its knees. These Christians ought to be looking at their own incoherent beliefs, and deciding what their morality actually is, selfishness or unselfishness.

Morality, then does not arise as something that some clever man or philosopher, like Kant, decided a priori was a good thing deserving of being taught to our children whose minds hitherto were empty of all thoughts. John Tooby of the university of California, Santa Barbara, and an editor of The Adapted Mind denies that the brain is a blank slate, shaped almost entirely by learning—the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). He suggests humans have evolved a variety of systems to handle social and environmental challenges faced in the past by our ancestors—natural selection separates the brain into behavioral categories, indeed as Kant realized.

What happened was that reason dawned slowly in people who awoke to find themselves living in a society set in the natural world. In other words, society was to them part of Nature, a given. No one consciously invented society, but people already were living according to certain rules, not laws, not written down, but nevertheless held instinctively as self evidently true and necessary. They were morals! Society had morals already, and they were a puzzle, just like everything else in life to the earliest people to think. They had to explain them, and they explained them as being intrinsic to the tribe.

David Sloan Wilson, in Darwin’s Cathedral, argues from historical data that religion is a group adaptation, but Scott Atran thinks religious behavior is a byproduct of evolution (In Gods We Trust). Of course it might not be easy to distinguish them. Religious behavior arose from the general culture of the tribe as part of its function of group adaptation. Culture was the group adaptation, and religion was an aspect of it, but one that did not begin with any need for concepts such as gods or a God. The tribe was held together, they speculated, by a power called the totem, and morals were handed down by this power or with it. Eventually, the totem became what we call God. So, God is the tribe, the human group, and nothing more is needed to explain morality.

Animals before they evolved consciousness could hardly have anticipated death or pain, and so could not have evolved behaviour that assumes it. Loneliness however is a central feeling associated with social living. Social animals like being together and felt uncomfortable alone. Solitary animals are the opposite. It was the communal gathering of the people of the tribe, and their reservation of certain areas and objects for communal usage that led to religion and the idea of the holy when the gathering began to concentrate on veneration of the tribal totem, which eventually became its god, and led on to religion as we know it today.

Sex and Love

Besides morals, Christians have trouble accepting that such abstracts as love and beauty can be treated by science, especially drawing on evolutionary theory. Love, like sex, is scientifically measurable. Humans do not just mate with anyone. The brain helps detect and promote appropriate responses to the sexual signals for sex and love.

Attraction between people comes from the evolved urge to reproduce. The human body advertises by certain signals the suitability of the human as a sexual partner. In studies of children, physical attractiveness was related to balanced facial and body symmetry. In studies of adult men, the size ratio of a woman’s waist and breasts correlated with a man’s preference for a woman. Women who develop pronounced hips and breasts bear the signs that signal easy child bearing, and an ability to feed them:

…MacCann, with one hand on The Origin of Species and the other hand on the New Testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and yours.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

So males, in their desire to reproduce, favour features of the female body promoted by hormones characteristic of sexual maturity. In studies of adult women, a deep voice and broad shoulders were popular factors in finding a man attractive. Men with a deep voice and muscular physiques signal their masculinity, and these signs indicate to a woman they will father healthy offspring.

Besides that, the smell of a potential mate contributes to the decision. Subconsciously, people determine compatible genes by smell, helping to explain otherwise unaccountable physical attraction between people. All of it seems to be driven by chemicals, the pheromones of armpits and crotches, and the hormones that make and signal maturity, as well as the corresponding chemicals that produces responses in the brain and therefore behaviour. The potential partner detects the pheromones, their brain recognizes them, and initiates flirting behaviour towards the scent target.

These are some contributing factors towards sexual attraction, but what about love? The purpose of a longer lasting attraction is plain enough. Human children take a lot of looking after while they are growing and filling their large brains with experience. A permanent or semipermanent bond ensures that the father as well as the mother will remain together to help the child mature. People have evolved to become partially addicted to each other while they have sex and therefore children—it is love. It explains the pain felt from unrequited love, or the loss of someone loved to another—cold turkey, withdrawal symptoms!

What of rape? Is rape an evolutionary adaptation—a trait encoded by genes that confers an advantage on those who possess them? Maybe, in the late Pleistocene, 100000 years ago, men with the rape gene could sire children not only with willing mates but also with unwilling ones. So, the rapist had more chance of leaving offspring with the rape gene. That, the theory deduces, is why we still have rapists in our midst in our civilized world. Those without the gene were less successful and eventually died out.

The whole idea leaves out the role of society. Bands of humans were small, and no rapist could escape being known by others in the band. Rapacious men might be notionally fitter in evolutionary terms than ones who mate by consent, but only when they can get away with raping. Even in primitive societies—indeed, possibly in prehuman primate societies—the cuckolded men are not likely to stand by and allow the behaviour in society. They will get others in society to join with them to stand up to the rapist to punish him, and the punishment will have been death or expulsion from the tribe—which probably amounts to the same thing.

Anthropologist, Kim Hill, checked it out. For decades, he had studied the Ache, hunter gatherer tribesmen in Paraguay. The Ache live much as humans did 100,000 years ago, so he could use his knowledge of Ache life as a proxy for the humans of a ten myriad years ago. He never heard of rape among the Ache, but he could study the effect of rape on the evolutionary prospects of a late ancestor of modern humans, by studying the prospects of a young Ache man. He carefully calculated the odds of raping being evolutionarily successful in Ache society.

Hill assumed that rapists target only women of reproductive age, benefiting the rape hypothesis because girls younger than 10 and women over 60 are also often raped in our society—rapes that can lead to no evolutionary advantage. Then he calculated rape’s fitness costs and benefits from his studies of Ache society. Rape increases a man’s evolutionary fitness providing that the rape victim is fertile (15 percent), that she will conceive (7 percent), that she will not miscarry (90 percent), and that she will not let the baby die even though it is the child of rape (90 percent). The rapist lost fitness points when he was socially snubbed as a known rapist—in a small hunter gatherer tribe, rape and rapists indeed cannot hide from public view. Then he might be expelled from society, probably to die. Rape obviously costs fitness points, too, when the husband or some other relative killed the rapist.

Calculating the reproductive costs and benefits of rape, the cost exceeded the benefits by a factor of 10. Such low odds of benefiting do not suggest any advantage for the rapist in evolutionary terms, but quite the opposite. The rape hypothesis fails in practice when people are socially organized.

Moral Dilemmas

Now one can postulate situations where morals clash. Ethical decisions are not completely rational. Put into the situation of a railway signalman faced with a decision to direct a runaway carriage down one track or another, when one man will be run down in one case, but five in the other, most people act rationally and decide it is more moral to let one man die than five. Neuroimaging of their brains confirms that rational regions became active when they were making the decision. Nothing in the bible says saving several lives by sacrificing one life is the moral thing to do, yet that’s what most people, even of different cultures, accept as moral.

Yet the same people mostly consider it wrong to decide a healthy man should be killed so that his organs could allow five others to live, even though the logic is the same in most ways. The difference is that, in the first case, external circumstances dictated that someone had to die—the decision was not to kill. In the other, it was! The decision was to kill someone to harvest his organs, a repugnant thought to most people. If all six were in a ward and were dying, and someone had to decide—from data on their lives and prospects for future life—which ought to die first, thus letting the other five live, there would be less moral trauma.

Indeed, even in a variation of the first case, when the only way to save the five is to shove a man off a bridge into the path of the runaway carriage, 80% thought it immoral. When people suffering damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex make the judgement, they are twice as likely to be willing to shove the man off the bridge. This region of the brain is responsible for “prosocial sentiments”, such as guilt and compassion. It is activated by viewing morally evocative photographs, such as ones of a hungry child, even when no judgment is required, and when volunteers elect to donate money to charity.

So rational centers of the brain and emotions seem both to be invoved in making moral decision, but few people can give convincing reasons for their different choices. Indeed most people cannot explain their choices in much more common moral dilemmas. Choice seems to be based on emotion. Joshua Greene, a cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher at Harvard, thinks emotion and rationality have to compete in the brain. The main difference between the original case and that of shoving a man from the footbridge is the negative emotion in actively killing someone overriding reason. He finds the medial frontal gyrus and other emotional centers in the brain are activated when people contemplate personal moral dilemmas, like those described of killing the man, though others benefit.

Emotions tell us we’ll feel terrible if we push the man, cognition says—Push him! Five is greater than one.

Stanley Milgram showed that moral trauma is much reduced when some authority commands that some deed is necessary, and when technology intervenes between decision and act, so that the intervention of the mechanism to switch the railway points make the decision easier than it is to hold the gas mask over the victim’s face. And when the victims are never seen at all, as when they are being bombed from 6 miles high, or shelled from a ship twenty miles offshore, there is no trauma among those ordered to do it. People’s moral sense yields to authority, and physical and technological distance. The trauma of antisocial behaviour, of torture and murder, is relieved when people feel they are not to blame, it is not their decision, or the act is attenuated somehow by distance and they cannot see the consequences of their deed, just as Milgram showed. They satisfy themselves by the rationalization that it is not their fault.

Psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, university of Virginia, thinks morality has five components, concern for harm and fairness being two commonly accepted, but he adds respect for authority to them, as well as group loyalty, and purity or sanctity. He finds that liberal people emphasize the concern for harm and fairness, but conservatives balance those with equal attention to the other three. Purity, for US conservatives seems to boil down to sexual propriety. For Jews and Hindus, the purity is freedom from pollution or disgust, which arises from the idea of the purity of the sacred, profane things polluting the sacred, but the sacred began in primeval society as whatever was reserved for tribal use, and preserved from personal use—improper use was pollution and therefore disgusting. Moslems are most outraged at any disparagement of Allah, their God being a supreme authority meriting the utmost respect, but other fundamentalists—like right wing authoritarians in the US—are almost as bad in the value they place on the authority figure they carry with them. Socialists and communists seem to emphasize communal loyalty and material equality (fairness), but another reflexion of community loyalty is nepotism valued by western businessmen and politicians.

A popular example of a moral clash is that of the moral to feed one’s children, and the moral not to steal, when you find you have to do one or the other because you are too poor to buy food. What do you do? The blogger at Evaluating Christianity at Wordpress considered this. But the situation as outlined is of a family group isolated from others in our modern society, the capitalist scheme of human selfishness and indifference. It would not arise in a primitive society because the others in society would know of this man’s plight, they would do what society is meant to do in one of its functions, they would care for the man and his children in the absolute expectation that he will do the same in return should the situation arise. It looks like a conscious tit for tat, but the consciousness is the rationalization of what happens naturally in any well ordered society that people would be willing to die to preserve. Again, put rationally, or in a Kantian way, the motive to help is duty. Everyone in a tribe feels it their duty to help others. Nothing is wrong with that surely. Didn’t Christ teach the same, you indoctrinated false Christians?

In summary, neuroscientist, Jorge Moll, sees prosocial sentiments as the core of morality and thinks they evolved to allow our ancestors to form attachments and cooperative groups in primitive societies. J Haidt speculates that morality is an elaboration of primate social behavior that evolved to promote cohesiveness in groups of early humans, giving them an advantage over less cohesive groups. M Hauser (Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, 2006) agrees that morality comes from primate social behavior, though he puzzles that…

when you say something is moral, how does the brain know it’s moral as opposed to just social?

Well, let us hazard a guess that the distinctive moral feeling is different because it is instinctive, whereas what he means by “just social” is a social convention.

For Hauser, moral intuition is not the product of culture and education, nor is it the result of rational and deliberative thought, nor does it reduce to the workings of the emotions. Instead, it is human nature to unconsciously and automatically evaluate the moral status of human actions—to judge them as right or wrong, allowed or forbidden, optional or obligatory.

Paul Bloom and Izzat Jarudi, Nature

Hauser sees moral instincts in terms akin to Chomsky’s idea of an “ultimate grammar” as a refined instinct behind our language skills. Chomsky is probably wrong, and probably Hauser too, the actual instinct being much less inchoate than any grammar or code. Even so, these ideas take us further forward than did the idea of God.

Moral Differences

Given certain circumstances, Sharon Begley tells us people respond in different ways when faced with a moral dilemma, falling at different places in the spectrum from selflessness and empathy to selfishness and gratuitous cruelty. The question is whether this range is unalterable, or whether society can change people’s inclinations. Historically, one would imagine people can certainly be influenced by a society’s culture, but investigation and confirmation is needed, and then the best ways of making desirable changes have to be decided.

Little research had been done on the moral differences between people until recently. Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich says women tend to be more altruistic than men, older people tend to be more altruistic than younger ones, and, although people with higher IQs tend to be more altruistic than the rest, students are less altruistic than nonstudents. No standard personality traits such as shyness, agreeableness and openness to new experiences correlate with altruism.

Christian Smith of Notre Dame University has studied what motivates people to give. He finds that many westerners think they are badly off:

Consumer capitalism makes people feel they don’t have enough, so they feel they don’t have enough to give away.

Their perceptions are relative to the wealth they see around them, and so they do not feel well off when they see much wealthier celebrities and stars parading glamour and consumption on TV with little to merit their status. Despite that, the spectrum remains, and some people do give generously. Smith says:

Being taught that it’s important to give and, even more, having that behavior modeled for you makes a big difference.

The corollary of that is that we westerners have been taught to be greedy, taught not to be generous. Our society teaches us to be selfish. How people react depends on how they see others reacting. Poor people help each other, but the rich feel there is no need to do it. Their friends are all wealthy, and those who are not should help themselves—just as they did!

Yet financial security is not the whole of it. Empathy and compassion are emotional states, and depend on the general emotional condition of the individual. Emotionally secure people who feel in charge of their lives and do not feel threatened have most empathy and compassion for strangers. Those who are anxious and less secure, or feel worthless and incompetent and have few and insecure relationships are less altruistic and less generous. Psychologists Philip Shaver, the University of California, Davis, and Mario Mikulincer, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, found in a series of experiments that such people are less likely to care for the elderly, or to donate blood. Shaver wondered if it would be possible to induce feelings of security and self worth, thereby strengthening the neural circuitry that underlies compassion and altruism.

If only people could feel safer and less threatened, they would have more psychological resources to devote to noticing other people’s suffering and doing something to alleviate it.

It illustrates the dysfunction in western society. Society is meant to stop people from feeling threatened, supposed to make them feel safe, but they do not feel it is working, so they feel no need to contribute. They see it as a question of fairness, like the female capuchin monkeys.

Shaver and Mikulincer had volunteers watch a young woman perform a series of unpleasant tasks. She had to look at gory photographs of people who had been severely injured, had to pet a rat, had to immerse a hand in ice water, and then was asked to hold a tarantula. Faced with this latter effort, she seemed to try, but apologetically had to give up. As in the Milgram experiements, she was a plant, acting the part. The experimenters, feigning perplexity, announced that the experiment had to continue, and would anyone be willing to take the apparent subject’s place. This was, of course, the real experiment. Volunteers who previous tests showed were trusting and secure in themselves were four times more likely to swap places as those who were anxious and insecure.

Making someone feel more secure had a beneficial effect on everyone. When people show they are concerned that everyone should be safe and secure, the unsure ones will return the effort. Virtue can be improved when people feel others are willing to help, and they begin to feel more secure and confident in themselves. In short, when society is doing its job!

In the Milgram experiment, a minority of subjects actually refused to obey their orders and would not apply any more shock treatment to people they thought were truly suffering. One attributed his refusal to continue with the torture to being brought up to see society as a class struggle, which taught him that authorities had a different view of right and wrong than his own. Moreover, in those different times, his army training told him that soldiers had a right to refuse illegal orders. Being taught to be critical and independent in everyday life was good mental training for morality. Passive acceptance and dependence on others for every thought bred callousness and lack of consideration.

Forgiveness and Revenge

Psychologist Michael McCullough of the University of Miami (Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, 2008) argues that both forgiveness and revenge solved evolutionary problems for our ancestors. By the time we are adults, our history in society of being betrayed, violated, having our trust broken—or their opposites—has conditioned us to one characteristic behaviour or the other. In a social setting, forgiveness has obvious benefits, whereas revenge is not too obviously beneficial. But it is a deterrent against taking someone for granted, cheating or freeloading. A cheat, knew what to expect. It was primitive justice. The trouble is that it leads to tit for tat vengeful actions whch are hard to break, whence the need for forgiveness at, preferably, an early stage to break the cycle of revenge threatening to follow. McCullough says:

Evolution favors organisms that can be vengeful when it’s necessary, that can forgive when it’s necessary and that have the wisdom to know the difference.

When people can count on society, on the rule of law, for punishment, they are less likely to seek personal revenge. Conversely, when society lacks a mechanism to defend people’s rights, they cultivate a tough reputation not to be messed around, develop vigilante sub groups, and gangsterism. Justice in a well ordered society is reliable, and has no need to be savage. In a badly organized society it is unreliable, and the lack of reliability means that people demand disproportionately savage punishment for those found guilty.

The primitive morality is based on the evaluation of each and every one of us as being valuable to the others, and worth preserving to such an extent that it has been partially hard wired into us to do it. Modern capitalist society, attempting to train us to be selfish to suit a few who are, is going quite against our nature. Capitalism is making us greedy, selfish and consequently antisocial, and the outcome will be the end of our present society. We should not think we are being good or altruistic by helping others, but that such action is what is expected, it is natural. Being bad, being greedy and selfish beyond our needs, is unnatural.

Duty or responsibility is a feeling we have brought on from living socially. We all have to take responsibility for our words and deeds, and that requires the precondition that we take responsibility for our thoughts too. Guilt is the feeling normal humans have when they fail in their duty, when the act irresponsibly, or even think irresponsibly. We feel guilt by thinking irresponsibly, by speaking irresponsibly and acting the same way. The Persian religion had the central tenet of purity of thought word and deed, and this is the source of it. We ought not to behave in a way that does not consider the consequences of what we say or do for others in society.

We cannot ignore other humans because we have a responsibility towards them as members of our society. They are not some means for us to make a fast buck, they are fellow citizens and human beings. If the person we are intending to use would not agree to being treated in that way, and if we would not agree to being treated ourselves the way we intend to treat others, then we have a warning it is not right, and we should not do it. It is the universal moral law—the Golden Rule. When we neglect it, we feel guilty. Those who do not are already desocialized. They have lost, or are losing, their humanity.

Good and Bad

One blogger complains that the evolutionary explanation makes no reference to evolved morals being true. Is it true that the leopard has spots? How can something that is multiply verified not be true? Morality exists. That is true. That truth is not in question. The question evolution answers is how did morals come to be?

The questioner seems to be thinking of morals as God given absolutes, or metaphysical universals. Is “Thou shalt not kill” true? Though this blogger seems to favour the evolutionary answer, the question is typical of Christian question begging because it implies the answer desired—that morals are indeed some sort of God given absolutes.

Evolutionary theory can identify what is good and what is bad in some prescribed conditions, such as social living—the human situation. So, the answer is that human morals are an evolved instinctive behavior to permit animals to live harmoniously together. Badness, evil to godfearers, is what goes counter to our need to promote social well being, cooperation and mutual assistance. Good is what is meant to promote sociality and cooperation. That is why the leaders of the world’s religion taught us to help one another, and not to do each other down. Yet the capitalist ethic is the opposite of this, so it is plain that capitalism is immoral.

Morals are not absolute because nothing like an absolute God exists to ensure they are absolute, and human beings can choose to ignore their instincts, but if they were to break down widely, then society would end, and if that breakdown could not be repaired, humanity would die out. We have good reason to treat them as absolutes for us! If we hope to remain human into the future and continue human civilization that extends back into the past, then we had better consider morality seriously, and particularly what we have been doing to destroy them in the interest of an economic dogma.

Because of evolution, empathy, the instinct for helping and sharing and mutual regard are hard wired into many people’s brains, and were selected because human groups with these instincts succeeded better than those without them:

Research suggests that we are hardwired with a strong and intuitive moral impulse—an urge to help others that is every bit as basic as the selfish urges that get all the press. Infants as young as 18 months will spontaneously comfort those who appear distressed and help those who are having difficulty retrieving or balancing objects. Chimpanzees will do the same, though not so reliably, which has led scientists to speculate about the precise point in our evolutionary history at which we became the “hypercooperative” species that out nices the rest.

Harvard psychologist, Daniel Gilbert

We have not evolved into “ants”, perhaps because the hard wiring is far from being that complete, or more probably because complex animals like us do get some benefit from the tension that remains between the selfish and the unselfish ones among us. Careful studies show that groups benefit from some selfish behaviour provided that it can be controlled by shame… by the moral authority of the group exerted upon freeloaders to conform with social standards. Maybe the trouble with human society and its religions is that the freeloaders have taken control of group morality by taking control of the religions meant to promote it. These are what Christians call the shepherds, and the rest are the flock.

Shepherds too often have been greedy selfseekers, while the flock are the ones who cooperate and share to get things done under what the shepherds claim is divine guidance. Shepherds want them to retain their innocent motivation, as long as it does not threaten their position. When it does, they start inquisitions and local genocide to keep the trouble makers suppressed or dead.

Religions in historical times have always been conservative, and morally backward, which is why the fossilized morals and immorality of behaviour of the world’s ancient holy books have been preserved. There is good in them, but it is good mixed with ancient immorality, and modern pastors and prelates pretend is is all God’s word, and therefore necessarily good, even when God is carefully describing how Midianite virgins should not be spared death, but kept alive to be ravaged by the conquering Israelites. The innocent punters do not know what to believe, but are trained to believe their minister, of whatever denomination they may be. Absurdly, the fossilized books ignore everything that has happened in the last 2000 or so years. According to the clergy and their devout slaves, we have nothing morally to learn from all these years of human triumph and misery.

The inborn absolutes of equality, compassion and personal liberty, were all too often disguised to believers by scheming shepherds while in full view to anyone able and willing to read Christ for themselves, but, through science, in the years since the Enlightenment, they are re-emerging in their native purity. Christians had little to say about slavery except approving and encouraging it until the Enlightenment, but since then they have claimed they abolished it. The same is true of the exploitation of women, the blessing of armies, the perversion of justice, in respect of liberty and human sexuality or innocence. Even as it goes on unabated, clerical protest is essentially limited only to direct victims. Morality seems nowhere to matter in it except as a reason to seem contrite while apologizing with deep insincerity.

Christianity and the Abrahamic religions, if not the Asian ones, keep people from taking responsibility for their actions, and that is essential to any personal morality. Christianity is “Truth”, complete with emphatic capital and citation marks. So, truth is merely what they believe of the teachings of Christianity, teachings that most scarcely know, and do not understand for what they are when they do. The propagation of this “Truth” goes on generation to generation with no examination and no justification except the authority of the previous generation, and each generation is taught to be certain about it. It is God’s Word. So the religious chain letter passes on in perpetuum.

Truth as something verifiable is unknown to them, and they are taught to disparage it. They are deliberately kept ignorant by the shepherds. There is no other explanation for it. And why should the shepherds want to do that? To keep them malleable, obedient and dependent.

For the innocent and unsuspecting convert, Christian faith comes with a great deal of secular political belief, and it is invariably conservative. In the US ministers tell their congregations who to vote for—the Republicans—unless there is a more right wing democrat available. Christians get to make donations not just for the upkeep of their pastor and his radio or TV station, but also for the pastor’s preferred political candidate. That means that believers in Christian “Truth”, ancient morality tales that few people now understand properly—and mostly those that do are not Christians—are controlling the secular state, and are telling others, who refuse to believe the nonsense they propagate, they should believe the same lies and mythology.

The Golden Rule

To survive, society requires us to actively practice the Golden Rule that expresses out fundamental instinct to be merciful and helpful to other human beings. It simply says treat other people well if you wish to be treated well yourself. That is the purpose of society, and the purpose of religion is to propagate what is good for society:

And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.

Luke 6:31, Christian Version

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.

Talmud, Jewish Version

Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you.

The Farewell Sermon, Islamic Version

Never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self.

Mahabharata, Hindu Version

Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.

Analects, Confucian Version

Just as sorrow or pain is not desirable to you, so it is to all which breathe, exist, live or have any essence of life.

Acaranga Sutra, Jain Version

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

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History