The Evolution of Morality

It is altogether apt that the metaphor of a trial should appear in the Darwin debate, as if an injured party wished to take action in a court of judgment. This theory was and is dangerous, and any evidence of its limits should clearly be labeled on the package. The abuse of Darwin’s theory has been so grotesque that its proponents are under permanent suspicion. It is ironic therefore that this theory is now increasingly pressed into service to account for ethics. Here is the Achilles heel of scientific thought. We are given to assume that scientific methods can account for all aspects of reality, and that a kind of bootstrap reductionism can start at the most fundamental and proceed to explain the most complex. While in principle this gesture is entirely valid, taken ‘as if’, in practice we should suspect a breakdown in definition of ‘naturalism’.

Why are we to grant the assumption? Newton did not grant it. Absent a demonstration, this betrays the ambition of science to control, more than to explain. Apparently Laplace whispering in the ear of Napoleon is the beginning of this campaign. The attempts to push Darwin’s theory to the limit to account for the evolution of morality suggest the failure of this assumption. It trips the failsafe of the religionist, or at least the fundamentalist, leaving us to wonder at the compliant sophistries of the mainstream churches. The author should state at the onset that he himself tends toward this assumption, in different form, but only as an operational hypothesis, with a sense that the inability to account for the emergence of consciousness in current science puts the whole question on hold.

The main source of difficulty with religionists lies in this ill-conceived Darwinization of ethics as an ad hoc byproduct of selectionist theory, using population genetics. Here scientific thinking has proven both limited and inept in its attempts at carrying out the implications of reductionism. There would be no problem with an operational hypothesis, but the concoctions of technocratic junk science here in advance of the facts are the prime instance of Johnson’s charge of ‘naturalism’ prejudging an issue. The result is the paradox of value-free science confronted with the domain of values. These statements may be debatable. But the sudden dogmatism that arises here suggests that this kind of theory is really that suspected last ditch attempt at total explanation, without which the control of social worldviews becomes impossible. And such theories need to be tested, and confirmed by the facts, and not just by a few special cases. These theories are really guesswork, trying to save Darwinism from its hidden contradiction.

This is in fact an old issue, and the secular philosophical verdict of an earlier period is that science is intrinsically limited here, witness the clear distinction in Kant of theoretical and practical reason as a way to mediate causal phenomena and intentional action. The world of Kant reminds us of the immensity of early modern discourse in this area, and what many saw as the decline from this peak in the onset of positivistic sciences. He certainly demonstrated the great complexity of the question and the limits of rational endeavor in this regard. Modern scientific education systematically misleads students here, and we are left with technical experts trained in a scientific religion, and a facile contempt for the Two Cultures dilemma.

Current science seems determined to make all these mistakes all over again, as students are carefully coached to reject the philosophic tradition as pre-scientific. Here the great absurdity starts again, and we see the very implausible, and never verified, claims using population genetics used to derive ethical facts from selectionist scenarios. The final irony here is that this ‘laying down the law’ is altogether scofflaw ideology in action, resulting in the permanent crisis of theory, Social Darwinism . Religionists are jeered and ridiculed but they would like to know if they are really obliged by sound evidentiary science to find the phenomenon of conscience a function of natural selection . It makes a big difference to the cultural life of man. On this issue we are not required to believe in advance ‘just so’ stories about the evolution of morality, nor to give scientists the benefit of the doubt on the basis of future research.

Selectionist accounts of ethics are thin gruel, and seem to violate the first requirement of producing an ethical agent to make ethical choices. We have no clear picture of the evolution of such an agent, leastwise by natural selection. Darwinists seem satisfied to account for ethics on an ad hoc basis, e.g. showing how natural selection could produce altruism. This agent must choose, yet is granted no choice, in what must be, on scientific grounds, the blind mechanization of ethical action. Those who take Darwinian accounts of morality as established often fail to see the implications of what they are saying. Yet to render judgment on social issues in this vein creates a heavy obligation to get straight, and examine historically, the limits of causal explanation in the realm of morality. Where extreme caution is required, and a tentative exploration open to review, we find instead a persistence of dogmatism matched with theoretical carelessness. The problem here is that the level of software and hardware is scrambled. The most obvious possibility is that altruism is simply counterevidence to theory. We will soon see from the study of history that the evolution of religion is something completely different. How did it happen that such unverified theories have been taken as science? Physicists would never propose such simplistic models for their own subject, knowing full well they would have to be tested by experiment.

Darwinists speak of ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’ , almost in a Nietzschean boast, with a rebuke to our cowardice in failing to meet the challenge of realism in ‘hard men’. It would seem a dangerous idea deserves a second look, there to see Darwin’s dangerous goof, and the misapplication of theory to social complexity. Since Darwinism shows clear correlation with militaristic and genocidal history, deferring to experts is not an excuse if we can see that expertise has not proven sufficient or that it is itself influenced by political or institutional ideology, the ethics of competitive economies. At rare moments, such as the induction of capitalist economies in formerly communist societies, the truth comes out (not that it is concealed at other times), and we hear the language of ‘shock treatment’ and ‘greed programming’, as a system of non-altruistic ‘ethics’ is wished for on economic grounds. Thus theories of ethics are the politician’s wild card, theory now caught up in Machiavellian raison d’état. The Darwinian backdrop is altogether useful here.[i]

The confusion of foundational science as legitimation, ideology, and the basis of ethics neutralized in economic environments, was prefigured in the figure of Malthus, one source of the confused thinking of both Darwin and Wallace. The Malthus debate was an early cousin of the Darwin debate, in the ‘better they starve’ version. A recent philosophic critique of Darwinism by the philosopher David Stove , in Darwinian Fairytales , skewers the mechanization of ethics. The author targets the confusion generated by Darwinism in the sociobiol ogical attempt to derive altruism from adaptationist scenarios. Stove points out the most obvious fact:

If Darwin’s theory of evolution were true, there would be in every species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which on a few in any generation can be winners. But it is perfectly obvious that human life is not like that, however it may be with other species.[ii]

Nothing in archaeology, the search for fossils, or DNA, is required to see this, or able to contradict this. We have no scientific proof that massive population catastrophes lead to evolutionary advance in the crucial questions under consideration. History shows any number of semi-Malthusian episodes, but its advances spring from a different source.

We are left to wonder at this obsession with altruism on the part of theorists falling head over heels to justify economic selfishness. Not a difficult riddle. We know this game when we see it. ‘Good for the economy’, the prime suspect when smart people play dumb. It is stuck in their craw, and some fancy mathematics to the rescue seems the best way to keep the masses confused in the progress of de-ethicization of market behaviors. We can rapidly throw some very chilled water on these arrogant scenarios. The simple conclusion is that Darwinism has a problem. It can’t handle ethics. Reductionist science fails here. And that means that reductionist methodology is flawed. And that means that a scientific ideology is inadequate for modern culture. And that means that the tremendous social power as a de facto popery is exploitative and should be shown to be so publicly so that the public is properly informed about the limits of science. In general the scientist ceases to be the shaman and should take a pay cut upon demotion. And all that means that these tactics are the last chance for a full scientific world-view of man, a fake then.

[i] Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).

[ii] David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995).