The Limits of Evolutionary Explanations of Morality - Arizona Philosophy [PDF]

The Limits of Evolutionary Explanations of Morality: The Inclusivist Anomaly and its Implications for Evoconservatism Abstract. Traditional conservative arguments against the possibility of major moral progress or fundamental institutional reform relied on under-evidenced assumptions about the limitations of human nature. A number of contemporary thinkers from a variety of disciplines have attempted to fill this empirical gap in the conservative argument by appealing to evolutionary theory. These “evoconservatives” infer from evolutionary accounts of morality that it is unrealistic to think that cosmopolitan and other “inclusivist” moral ideals can meaningfully be realized. In this paper, we argue that contemporary evoconservative arguments are no more successful than their pre-Darwinian predecessors, because they have overstated the explanatory reach of evolutionary theory and underestimated the scope of the explanandum. We argue that no adequate evolutionary explanation has been given for several important features of contemporary human morality, namely the very inclusivist moral commitments that prominent evolutionary explanations appear to rule out. We examine putative selectionist and byproduct explanations of morality and show that they fail to account for significant aspects of the morality of substantial numbers of existing human beings. We argue that to the extent that evolutionary explanations of morality succeed, they do not imply that morality is severely constrained, such that inclusivist morality is a utopian fantasy that is incapable of shaping important moral beliefs, practices and institutions. We go on to attribute the evolutionarily anomalous features of human morality that we have identified to a flexible capacity for open-ended normativity, which we argue presents a serious obstacle to theorists who wish to draw substantive moral and political lessons from human evolutionary history. Finally, we consider the implications of open-ended normativity for empirically informed versions of the “ought implies can” thesis.

Introduction Increasing philosophical attention is being paid to evolutionary explanations of morality, reflecting a more general trend toward empirically informed ethics. Whether evolutionary explanations of morality succeed is an important philosophical matter in its own right, compelling us to investigate the nature of the explanandum as well as the adequacy of proposed evolutionary explanations. Yet in addition, some authors maintain that evolutionary accounts of morality have important implications for ethics and political philosophy. Conservative thought in the secular tradition has long held that human nature places severe limitations on the plausibility of systematic social and moral reform (Kirk 2001), but it has offered little in the way of scientific evidence to support this skeptical claim. A number of contemporary thinkers from a variety of disciplines, whom we will refer to as “evoconservatives,” have attempted to fill this empirical

1

gap in the conservative argument by appealing to the prevailing evolutionary explanation of morality to show that it is unrealistic to think that cosmopolitan and other “inclusivist” moral ideals can meaningfully be realized. In this paper, we argue that contemporary evoconservative arguments are no more successful than their pre-Darwinian predecessors, because they have overstated the explanatory reach of evolutionary theory and underestimated the scope of the explanandum. First, we summarize the predominant evolutionary account of morality and show that even if it is vindicated, this leaves unexplained a number important features of contemporary human morality—namely, the very cosmopolitan and other inclusivist moral commitments that prominent evolutionary explanations appear to rule out. We argue that these features of the morality of substantial numbers of human beings, which we refer to collectively as the “inclusivist anomaly,” are not amenable to any standard type of evolutionary explanation, whether of the selectionist or byproduct variety. Second, we show that to the extent that evolutionary explanations of morality succeed, this does not show that morality is severely constrained such that progressively inclusivist moralities—and institutional orders that increasingly rely on inclusivist moral commitments— are a utopian fantasies or destined to play a trivial role in human, ecologyically irrelevant fantasy. Third, we attribute the evolutionarily anomalous features of human morality that we identify to a flexible capacity for open-ended normativity—the capacity to change our behavior through reflection and modification of existing norms. We sketch an alternative evolutionarily informed explanation of inclusivist morality that adverts to this capacity, but which has no conservative implications. We argue that the capacity for open-ended normativity presents a

2

serious obstacle to theorists who wish to draw substantive moral and political lessons from human evolutionary history. Finally, in light of these results, we conclude that Principle of Minimal Psychological Realism—according to which moralities and moral theories must take into account evolved psychological capacities in framing their conceptions of moral virtues and duties—is far less informative than its proponents have assumed, and cannot salvage the evoconservative argument. Given the capacity for open-ended normativity, the boundaries of what humans “can” do and be are so indeterminate that the naturalistic philosopher’s version of the “ought implies can” thesis provides little guidance for the evaluation of moral theories or proposals for institutional reform.

1. Selectionist Explanations of Morality: The Received View In broad strokes, “morality” in the relevant evolutionary literature refers to a social commitment to authority-independent and/or preference-independent norms, modulated by other-directed and inward-directed moral emotions and judgments, and typically enforced through institutionalized sanctions. Painting a finer-grained picture would involve filling in specific moral content, such as a sense of fairness, prohibitions against particular behaviors (e.g., murder, stealing, gluttony, etc.), conceptions of virtues, specific punitive reactions to norm violations, and so on. Why think that morality at any level of description might be amenable to evolutionary explanation? One reason is that moral systems are spatiotemporally ubiquitous in human societies. Moral rules structure the behavior of all known hunter-gatherer bands, nomadic tribes, and sedentary agricultural populations, on all habitable continents and across all ecological niches and modes of subsistence. Moral systems are presumed to have been in place at least since the origins of behaviorally modern humans in the upper Paleolithic, and possibly much

3

earlier as evidenced by high levels of cooperative foraging in the paleoanthropological record. Although moral systems vary considerably, they exhibit significant commonalities in form and content (Brown 1991; Knauft 1991; Joyce 2006; but see Prinz 2008).1 In any system with variation and heredity, including biological and cultural systems, such patterns cry out for a selectionist explanation, or else indicate the existence of pervasive constraints. Furthermore, moral systems present as “adaptively configured” so as to foster cooperative social structures, resulting in a functional match to coordination problems that is incredibly unlikely to arise by chance alone (i.e., in the absence of selection).2 The received view among evolutionary theorists who believe that human morality can be given a selectionist explanation goes roughly like this. Morality developed and spread among small, scattered hunter-gatherer groups in the middle-to-late Pleistocene, where it was selected for the effect of managing patterns of interaction that resulted in costly intra-group conflicts. In particular, morality helped solve collective action problems by reducing free-riding, enabling individuals to resist temptations to act selfishly, and preventing dominant individuals from monopolizing the fruits of cooperation—generating an evolutionary return that was greater for each individual than would have been possible if each had acted alone or as part of a group that did not cooperate

1

Cross-cultural universality should not be taken, in itself, to imply “innateness,” but as theoretical work on adaptation, developmental systems, and cultural evolution has shown, evolutionary explanation is not wed to any particular mode of trait acquisition. An evolutionary response to selection only requires “like-begets-like” heritability, and this condition may be met by genetic, epigenetic and cultural modes of transmission. Thus, it does not matter for present purposes whether moral traits are genetically prepared or socially acquired or both, so long as they were proper objects of selection or discernable byproducts of other adaptations. The underlying mode of acquisition may be relevant here insofar as it bears on the flexibility of moral morphology, but both genes and cultural variants act to bias human behavior and neither is determinative of the same (see §2). 2

To say that something is an “adaptation” is a strictly backward-looking statement—it is a claim about the selective etiology of a trait, not about its present utility or current contribution to survival and reproduction. Thus, to the extent that morality is associated with reproductive costs in the modern environment, this does little to undermine the selective-etiological claim that significant aspects of morality are adaptations.

4

effectively (Haidt 2012; Boehm 2012/2001; Sterelny 2012; Kitcher 2011; Joyce 2006; Wright 2000). The morality of hunter-gatherer societies, which is widely regarded as the ancestral state of human morality, is ubiquitously anti-hierarchical, in the sense that individuals with authoritarian or despotic tendencies are actively and normatively opposed by alliances among the rank and file, group decisions are not dominated by any single individual, and sharing is a central organizing principle that governs the distribution of certain highly prized resources, such as meat (Boehm 2001). Anthropologists and philosophers of science characterize this type of morality as “egalitarian.”3 Violations of egalitarian norms in hunter-gatherer bands—especially attempts to monopolize resources or to exercise authority over fellow group members—are met with forceful sanction ranging from social ridicule to ostracism to execution (ibid). Egalitarian moralities are inferred to have existed at similar frequencies in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, dating back at least to the origins of behaviorally modern humans and possibly as early as the emergence of Homo sapiens itself.4 Various accounts have been offered to explain stable cooperation in moderate-sized nonkin groups, such as reciprocal altruism (Trivers 1971), indirect (reputation-based) reciprocity (Alexander 1987), and punishment-reinforced cooperation (Boyd et al. 2003). There is, however, broad agreement on the basic Darwinian logic: In a population of competing cultural groups, 3

For the sake of clarity and convenience we will follow this convention, though we will consider problems with this characterization below. 4

A number of contemporary evolutionary theorists have converged on the hypothesis that cooperative foraging was the key “ecological design problem” that prompted the evolution of the egalitarian ethos (e.g., Sterelny 2012; Boehm 2001). Though somewhat speculative, the hypothesis is as follows: Early in human evolution (~400kya), there was a shift to hunting large dangerous quarry, particularly during frequent periods of glaciation when edible plants and small game animals were scarce. For much of human history this cooperative feat was accomplished with rudimentary stone-tipped wooden spears and other non-projectile weapons. This required not only meta-cognitive capacities (such as “shared intentionality”) that were lacking in the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, but also sophisticated normative mechanisms for underwriting the equitable distribution of the spoils once the fruits of cooperation were realized.

5

those that developed effective moralities, i.e. moralities that were capable of avoiding the lost opportunity costs associated with cooperation failures (Kitcher 2011), were more likely to pump hominins into the next generation, to persist as groups, to sustain and transmit their social structures, and/or to give rise to offspring groups.5 These ecological conditions, so the argument goes, conferred a reasonably high probability on the evolution of morality in broad strokes, and go some way toward explaining its more specific contours, such as our evaluative attitudes toward kin, kith, strangers, non-reciprocators, gluttons, cheaters, murderers, and the like. Focusing on the prosocial effects of prehistoric morality can obscure its darker side. Ethnographic and modeling work indicates that the evolution of egalitarian and other altruistic moral norms in moderately sized populations hinges on institutionalized punishment (Boyd et al. 2003; Boehm 2001); and the evolution of punishment appears to pose a higher-order altruism problem that only group-level selection can solve. Group-level selection, in turn, is only strong in the context of frequent and frequently lethal intergroup conflict (Bowles 2009; Boyd et al. 2003; Boyd and Richerson 2002). Groups that contained more altruists and moralizing punishers—and hence more cooperative social structures—tended to outperform groups with less effective moralities in economic and military contests between groups. A striking feature of the received selectionist explanation, therefore, is that it implies morality is essentially an intra-group affair. The same ecological conditions and selection 5

There is continued controversy over the level at which selection must operate in order to stabilize cooperative interactions among non-kin. A growing chorus of biologists, anthropologists, and philosophers of science now argue that robust cooperation in moderate-sized groups of non-kin is only likely to evolve through a process of selection at the group level, given the costs of altruism and norm enforcement to individual fitness within groups (Sober and Wilson 1999; Boehm 2001; Boyd, Gintis and Richerson 2003; Bowles 2009/2008; Wilson and Wilson 2007; Haidt 2012; for a partially dissenting view, see Sterelny 2012). For purposes of this paper, it does not matter whether selection for moral traits can be cashed out at the level of individuals in a group-structured population, or at the level of cultural groups proper, since in either case a selectionist explanation would be vindicated. We will not consider evolutionary explanations of morality at the level of cultural variants themselves, since the received selectionist explanation conceives of moral traits as parts of the individual or group phenotype, rather than as units of selection in their own right.

6

pressures that made moral traits adaptive would have imposed a fitness cost on extending “evolutionarily excessive” moral consideration to out-group members. Just as free-riding on ingroup members will tend to undermine group performance in a competitive intergroup arena, so too will excessive moral consideration toward members of the out-group, particularly given that there were (until perhaps very recently in human history) no institutional capacities for punishment at the meta-group level. The selectively optimal combination appears to have been reasonably expansive moral consideration toward members of one’s in-group (with a caveat for gender), and highly strategic—including predatory, antagonistic and apathetic—behavior toward strangers, who were often distrusted, dehumanized, and delegitimized (Navarette and Fessler 2006; Pinker 2011).6 Careful examinations of the ethnographic and archeological records attest to this pattern (Pinker 2011; Bowles 2009; Boehm 2001; Keeley 1996). Pervasive intergroup violence is not an artifact of civilization, but rather a deeply rooted aspect of the human condition: Morality was born and coevolved in a Darwinian crucible of intergroup conflict.7 To say that this is the received selectionist explanation of morality is not to say that it is the received view. Some prominent moral psychologists and philosophers of science argue that allegiance to specifically moral norms is an evolutionary byproduct of adaptive tendencies toward norm compliance in general (Machery and Mallon 2010; Sripada and Stich 2006), or that certain moral norms are byproducts of moral emotions and non-moral capacities (Lieberman 6

Our claim is not that intraspecific aggression is always adaptive, as the costs of aggression will often outweigh its benefits. Nor do we intend to claim that cooperation between groups was never fitness enhancing. Under certain conditions, intergroup hostility can lead to lost opportunity costs, such as the benefits of material trade and mate exchange that would have flowed from non-antagonistic interactions. Nevertheless, patterns of intergroup homicide in pre-state humans, as well as in common chimpanzees, indicate that intergroup predation often reaps evolutionary rewards, and this would have been particularly true for weapons-wielding hominins with the cognitive prowess to make case-by-case risk-benefit calculations. 7

Sterelny (2012, 190) argues, contra Bowles and his collaborators, that “cooperation and altruism are the fuel of war, but not warfare’s child.” Even if Sterelny is right that primitive cooperative capacities predate intense intergroup conflict, they were likely coopted and honed in coevolution with the latter. The skills required for hunting dangerous game are readily transferrable to hunting dangerous hominins.

7

2008; Prinz 2008). Edouard Machery (personal communication) holds that the generic capacity for norm following is an adaptation, but maintains that morality per se cannot be an object of selection because moral norms cannot be adequately delineated from non-moral ones. Others remain unconvinced that genuinely altruistic motivations exist or are cross-culturally robust (Stich 2013). To further complicate matters, when some theorists maintain that morality didn’t evolve, what they mean is that it didn’t evolve via gene-based selection, whereas they accept that specific moralities could have been culturally selected for. Our aim here is neither to evaluate the standard selectionist account nor its detractor theories. Instead, we will argue that even if a selectionist explanation of certain aspects of morality could be given along the lines sketched above, this would still leave much of contemporary “moral morphology” beyond the scope of evolutionary explanation altogether. This, in turn, will be taken to show that morality is not constrained by human evolutionary history to the degree that evoconservatives and others might presuppose.

2. Evoconservatism and Two Types of Morality It is important to recognize that many proponents of the standard selectionist explanation of morality do not subscribe to a conservative brand of politics, nor have they suggested that the evolutionary explanations they give, if vindicated, would have any conservative moral or political implications. Philip Kitcher (personal communication; see also note 15), for instance, maintains that although morality has the evolutionary function of solving cooperation failures within groups, its emergence prompted an ongoing ethical discussion, which due to our deliberative faculties can go in any number of directions, including inclusivist ones.

8

Nevertheless, authors from a variety of disciplines have inferred from the received selectionist explanation of morality that the content of human morality is seriously constrained— and evolutionists have done little to disabuse them of this notion. These “evoconservatives,” as we will call them, contend that the ecological challenges our distant ancestors faced generated selection pressures for evaluative tendencies that circumscribe effective moral commitments to members of one’s own kin, group, tribe or nation—and that these putative facts about human evolutionary history significantly constrain the shape of plausible moralities and the scope of other-regarding concern. This, in turn, is thought to suggest that cosmopolitan and other inclusivist moral principles (see §3) are not appropriate or realistic for beings like us. Stephen Asma (2013), for instance, argues that moral emotions “cannot stretch indefinitely to cover the massive domain of strangers and nonhuman animals,” given that our other-regarding dispositions were limited by evolutionary design to our “affective communities” of kith and kin (see also Asma 2012, 45-46). U.S. appellate judge and legal theorist Richard Posner defends species-based moral discriminations by appealing to similar evolutionary considerations (Posner and Singer 2001), which are also read as supporting Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner’s contention that it is a mistake to try to create an international legal order grounded in cosmopolitan moral principles because “we should not expect individual altruism to extend to people who are physically and culturally more distant” (2005, 212). Francis Fukuyama (2002, 127-128), a prominent conservative bioethicist, holds that political orders must be grounded in a substantive conception of human nature that pays heed to our evolved biases toward kin and ingroup as well as the evolutionarily evidenced limitations of our capacity to sympathize with all human beings. Leading psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has stressed the moral psychological significance of in-group loyalty, expresses a similar view about the limits of inclusivist morality:

9

It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love—love within groups— amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish (2012, 245).

Larry Arnhart (2005), a self-proclaimed proponent of the “Darwinian Right,” goes further in arguing that evolved constraints on human morality make moral impartiality not only implausible but also morally repugnant insofar as it entails a rejection of our evolved human nature. Thus, evoconservatives believe that there are significant psychological constraints on the shape of human morality, that these constraints are essentially fixed, and that they result in an other-regard that is effectively restricted to groups. The chief ‘improvement’ of evoconservatism over traditional conservative philosophies is that it appeals to contemporary evolutionary theory to ground its empirical claims about the moral limitations of human nature. In short, evoconservatives hold that the content of morality—in particular the scope of moral duties and the class of beings who are recognized as having moral standing—is severely constrained due to evolutionary history. This in turn limits the set of social practices and institutions that are feasible and, according to some natural law theories, morally desirable.8 This view has much more radical implications than those who endorse it acknowledge. If human morality is explainable according to the selectionist logic that evoconservatives endorse, then it is an understatement to say that inclusivist morality is a nonstarter. It implies that the scope of moral consideration tout court is very limited, not just the scope of equal basic moral 8

There is a much weaker evoconservative claim that might be distinguished here. This weaker view holds that selectionist explanations of morality imply limited sympathy or feelings of positive regard for distant strangers, but that this psychological claim in itself has no conservative political implications. That is to say, humans may develop institutions and cultural practices that allow them to treat distant strangers as being worthy of moral consideration, even equal consideration, even if they are incapable of “loving” them (to use Haidt’s words). In other words, social practices and institutions may produce inclusivist morality, or a broadened range of what Kitcher calls “behavioral altruism,” without unlimited sympathy or love. Some of the writers discussed above are unclear as to whether they are only making the psychological claim or also making the mistake of assuming that if the psychological claim is true, then conservative moral or political conclusions follow. Some, including Posner and Goldsmith, clearly make the mistaken inference from the former to the latter. As we will see, to do so is to fail to appreciate how cultural developments, in particular institutions, can expand our capacities for behavioral altruism.

10

consideration. In other words, it implies that not only is it implausible to expect people to regard all human beings as worthy of equal basic moral consideration, but also that it is implausible to expect people to regard most human beings as worthy of any moral consideration at all. It is important to disentangle claims about adaptive constraints on moral morphology from claims about the underlying mode of acquisition. The innateness of a character is often associated with its rigidity, un-alterability or resistance to modification. Yet it is widely acknowledged that both genes and environment (including culture) can bias human development toward particular outcomes. We should not assume that behaviors produced by gene-based dispositions are more difficult to alter—either at the individual or populational level—than behaviors produced by culturally acquired dispositions. This is a matter of developmental contingency: In some cases, outcomes that result from cultural biases can be more entrenched and hence more difficult to modify than outcomes that result from biological difference-makers. So although the evoconservative inference hinges on claims about the rigidity of human moral behavior, the plausibility of these claims need not turn on a resolution of the moral innateness debate (even if many evoconservatives assume that it does).9 Although tThe received selectionist explanation does not make any explicit claims about constraints on the shape of human morality, but it could be read to suggest, in line with the evoconservative inference, that the only sort of morality that humans are capable of engaging in is what we will refer to as morality as cooperative group reciprocity (Gauthier 1989). Indeed, evolutionary theorists have explicitly linked the evolutionary narrative to a strategic, prudence-

9

Some evolutionary psychologists (e.g. Haidt 2012) have proposed that human morality clusters along innate, content-specific foundational attractors, such as justice, harm, in-group loyalty, sanctity, and so on; even if this were true, if there are great differences between the relative weights placed on these foundations across cultures (as there seems to be), then this will not have any obvious evoconservative implications.

11

based theory of morality, such as that of Gauthier (see e.g. Frasner and Sterelny, unpublished).10 According to morality as cooperative group reciprocity theories, moral standing is something that members of a cooperative group confer on one another—and only on one another. Individuals excluded from this reciprocal arrangement have no moral standing at all, and hence there are no moral duties constraining how out-group members should be treated. Moral status is conferred on individuals who can either disrupt or contribute to cooperation—i.e., on the basis of “strategic capacities” relative to a cooperative scheme. This is not to say that each moral action necessarily involves explicit strategic calculations—but rather, that our motivation for acting morally emanates stems from the fact that doing so was and is in our cooperative self-interest. As we noted earlier, in the circumstances in which human morality emerged—in the environment of evolutionary adaptation (“EEA”)—a highly instrumental attitude toward strangers, not an acknowledgement that all human beings count morally, was most likely conducive to fitness. This strategic conception of morality is not only consistent with evolutionary explanation—it is

Formatted: Space After: 0 pt

arguably central to evolutionary theories of morality. It is helpful here to distinguish morality as cooperative group reciprocity from what we refer to as subject-centered between two quite different types of moralitiesy (Buchanan 1990).

Formatted: Font: Italic

The first type we have already noted: Morality as cooperative group reciprocity, which ties moral standing to strategic capacities. Subject-centered morality, in contrast, recognizes individuals as having moral standing on the basis of their possessing certain non-strategic capacities, such as practical rationality, responsiveness to reasons, sentience, and so on. We will now argue that insofar as it ties moral status to non-strategic and non-group-based properties, subject-centered 10

Alexander (1987: 3), for instance, writes that understanding human morality requires that we view societies as “collections of individuals seeking their own self-interest.” Even evolutionary theorists who recognize that contemporary human morality is not confined solely to morality as cooperative group reciprocity (e.g., Joyce 2006, ch. 4) still view reciprocity relations as dominating contemporary moral behavior.

12

Formatted: Font: Not Italic

morality (and its associated moral culture and institutions) constitutes a glaring anomaly from the standpoint of the received selectionist account. 3. The Inclusivist Anomaly One major flaw in the evoconservative appeal to evolutionary theory is that contemporary morality, as experienced and exhibited by significant numbers of people, is strikingly more inclusive than one would expect if selectionist explanations were the whole story, or even most of it. We will highlight in particular four anomalous aspects of this “inclusivity.” First, significant numbers of people now regard at least some nonhuman animals as proper subjects of moral consideration; that is, they believe that there are moral constraints on how we are to treat animals that do not derive from contingent human interests or sensitivities. There remains, of course, much disagreement over precisely what treatment is due certain nonhuman animals and from what moral principles such obligations are derived. However, there is an increasingly broad-based consensus that animal cruelty is a wrong to animals qua moral subjects (DeGrazia 2009)—a moral judgment that is enshrined in the laws of developed nations. Animal blood sports are widely illegal and seriously punishable, increasing legislation is aimed at enhancing the welfare of agricultural animals, and there are significant, institutionalized constraints on the use of certain non-human animals in medical experimentation—with some usages, such as research on great apes, having been prohibited categorically because of the high subject-centered moral status that is attributed to these animals. Second, many people regard valid moral norms as universalizable; that is, they regard it as incorrect to say, for example, that X is permissible for me but not for you, or for Blacks but not for Whites, or for men but not for women—without adducing a morally relevant differencemaking feature. Importantly, belonging to or identifying with a particular group, such as a race,

13

gender, religion or ethnicity, is widely and increasingly held not to be an acceptable differencemaker when it comes to ascriptions of basic moral status, including political and civil rights (for a discussion, see Pinker 2011, ch. 7)—and this belief is widely institutionalized. Third, there is the culture of human rights: Many people now recognize that all human beings ought morally to be treated in certain ways by their own governments, irrespective of whether there are local laws are in place that protect those rights, and irrespective of the contingent strategic properties that people possess. This is the foundation of “cosmopolitan moral principles,” by which we mean principles that accord an equal basic moral status to all human beings, irrespective of group membership and strategic capacities. These principles have been codified in international human rights law, which has been incorporated into the domestic law of, and legally binds, over two hundred nations. Although enforcement of human rights by international institutions is weak, there is substantial enforcement through domestic courts in a growing number of countries. The concept of basic inalienable rights, which served as the bedrock of modern constitutional democracy as well as the motivation for the anti-torture, abolitionist and decolonization movements (Buchanan 2012), is an affirmation of the equal status of all people regardless of their group membership and the threats they pose to cooperation—and thus constitutes an explicit rejection of reciprocity-based theories of morality. Fourth, is the emergence of a subject-centered morality that compels us to recognize the moral standing of individuals who pose no threat to us or who do not contribute to cooperative goods. Even if a vulnerable minority group can safely be exploited or oppressed without incurring any long-term risks to the majority group, it is widely held that such treatment is inconsistent with the moral status of those individuals. Likewise, it is widely held that persons who lack strategic capacities, such as severely disabled individuals or young children, may not

14

justly be denied access to social resources or excluded from the class of beings that are proper subjects of moral concern. The best explanation for this constellation of considered judgments is that the moral worth of such persons is thought to derive from properties other than their strategic capacities. The third feature, the emergence of human rights culture, can be seen as a shift from a cooperative group-based morality to a subject-centered morality, insofar as human rights are thought to be grounded in the “dignity” of the human individual and where the possession of “dignity” does not depend on one’s strategic capacities or group membership. None of these inclusivist moral features are plausibly explainable in standard selectionist terms, that is, as adaptations that arose in the EEA. The survival of human groups in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene depended crucially on the exploitation of animals, which lack the relevant strategic capacities. Early human groups that treated nonhuman animals as subjects of moral worth would have paid a high fitness price, for this would have placed severe restrictions on the exploitation of animals for protein and other valuable materials like skin and bone, and as beasts of burden. This would have been particularly true for nomadic hunter-pastoralist tribes and other post-Neolithic populations who relied more heavily on domesticated animals for their subsistence. Competition among these groups would have placed a fitness premium on maximizing control over animal domesticates and their life cycles. Similarly, the tendency to universalize moral judgments may have been adaptive if it were restricted to members of one’s own group, along the lines discussed above; but it is hard to see how the tendency to universalize would have contributed to a group’s survival if it were extended to out-group individuals regardless of their strategic capacities. Doing so would have had two negative consequences: First, it would have made the group vulnerable to predation by groups that did not acknowledge that moral judgments or norms should be universalizable, and

15

second it would have limited the group’s ability to exploit other vulnerable groups in fitness enhancing ways. Nor is the core commitment of human rights culture—the belief that every human being has certain basic moral entitlements—something that is explainable in terms of morality as cooperative group reciprocity. Especially in cases of armed conflict, but in many other kinds of interactions as well, members of a group that act on a commitment to human rights (which prohibits a no-holds-barred approach) may be disadvantaged, rather than advantaged, in fitness terms. The fact that nations could enhance their overall productivity by oppressing certain groups, or by withdrawing basic measures of support for, say, certain disabled individuals or children, is not considered morally legitimate grounds for doing so. Subject-centered morality thus comes with attendant fitness costs that morality as cooperative group reciprocity avoids. We have shown that inclusivist moral commitments cannot plausibly be explained as adaptations derived in the EEA. We think it is equally implausible that these inclusivist features could be explained as objects of selection in a more recent environment. Consider, for instance, the view that the social environment has changed so profoundly, due to the increasing interconnectedness of human communities, that a more inclusive morality is actually a groupbeneficial trait; and further, that the spread of inclusivist moralities in recent human populations is due to the advantages or fitness benefits they conferred. If that were true, then the inclusivist anomaly would vanish. Note, however, that even if inclusivist morality could be explained in this way, the evoconservative argument would have little force, since it would imply that moral inclusivity is limited not by a rigid, evolved moral psychology but rather by ecological circumstances that make it beneficial—which leaves open the possibility of further significant expansions of the moral circle.

16

Philip Kitcher (2011) appears to favor something along these lines. He holds that the function of ethics is to replace altruism failures with behavioral altruism, and that this replacement is constitutive of moral progress. Though Kitcher does not explicitly define “altruism failure,” we infer from his analysis that this refers to fitness costs that result from noncooperation in circumstances where cooperation would be fitness enhancing (for a similar reading, see FitzPatrick 2012). Kitcher seems to believe that moral progress is achieved only when morality-as-reciprocity enables us to expand our circle of cooperators to include previously excluded strategic partners (236, 307).11 It is worth noting that on this interpretation of Kitcher, many of the putative achievements of subject-centered morality, such as basic rights for persons with disabilities or children, will not count as instances of moral progress. This is because such moral inclusions do not avoid fitness costs, as they do not implicate a group of persons who would, if treated well, contribute to the net cooperative good, or, if treated poorly, undermine it. Nevertheless, Kitcher argues that in the current environment, the costs that arise from social practices and institutions that disregard the interests of some of the world’s population are so severe that a more cosmopolitan morality is actually prudential. Emphasizing the strategic capacities of oppressed and marginalized groups, Kitcher contends that inegalitarian distributions cannot be long maintained “given the technological possibilities for violent retaliation now increasingly available to the poor and oppressed” (311). Kitcher seems to believe that recent expansions of our moral circle has begun to expand, and that it will continue to do so, are due to the presence of ecological conditions that make such expansions fitness enhancing or advantageous. 11

On the other hand, if Kitcher’s notions of “altruism failure” and “moral progress” are not descriptive but rather normative, as he has suggested in personal communication, then Kitcher must advert to a moral theory whose content and force is independent of the evolutionary function of morality. In this case, it is unclear what role the evolutionary function is playing in Kitcher’s substantive ethical project, particularly if it does little to constrain the shape of human moralities (see §2).

17

As we see it, there are two problems with this view. First, it clearly cannot account for one dramatic departure from morality as cooperative-group reciprocity: The growing recognition that there are moral constraints on our treatment of nonhuman animals, which lack strategic capacities and whose unrestrained exploitation continues to have advantages (e.g., economic). The fact that Kitcher (2011) recognizes the difficulty that the animal welfare movement poses for his view suggests that Kitcher’s account of ethics is more closely bound to cooperative groups than he has acknowledged. Second, under present and foreseeable conditions, the costs of social practices and institutions that discount or disregard the interests of the world’s worst off people fall disproportionately on the world’s worst off. It hardly seems likely that the richest societies are suffering any major disadvantages or a loss of reproductive fitness because of their support for the deeply inegalitarian global order. One might argue that the exploitation of vulnerable populations could lead to terrorism and other forms of “blowback” against powerful nations— and that this gives powerful nations a wholly self-interested reason not to exploit vulnerable peoples but rather to bring them into the cooperative fold. But the empirical linkages here are too dubious and contingent to ground a global expansion of the moral circle. Thus, inclusivist morality is not merely a “scaled up” contemporary version of the strategic, group-restricted morality that arose in the EEA. In sum, standard selectionist explanations of morality not only fail to cite ecological conditions and selection pressures that can explain these inclusivist features of modern morality—they render these features inexplicable (cf. Lazari-Radek and Singer 2012).12 12

Could inclusivist features of morality, which entail doling out evolutionarily excessive doses of altruism, be explained instead as a product of sexual selection: That is, as hard-to-fake signals of vigor that are appealing to the opposite sex in the mating arena? To make this case, one would need to show that acquiring inclusivist moral traits supplies an advantage in sexual competition that outweighs its straightforward costs to fitness outside of the mating context, and that this advantage has resulted in the prevalence of these traits in human populations. As neither of these claims seem plausible to us, we will not examine them here.

18

4. Byproduct Explanations of Inclusivist Morality Even if selectionist explanations of inclusivist morality fail, the latter could still be afforded an evolutionary explanation if it can be shown to be a byproduct of other adaptive features. For instance, some theorists argue that cultural moral norms, such as the incest taboo, are not objects of selection in their own right but incidental byproducts of disgust reactions and other moral sentiments (Lieberman 2008; see also Prinz 2008). In this section we will consider whether inclusivist morality can be given an evolutionary byproduct explanation and, if so, whether this might have any evoconservative implications. We will consider three types of byproduct explanation that might be put forward to account for inclusivist morality. The paradigmatic byproduct explanation is what we will call a “causal byproduct explanation.” This describes the scenario in which one trait is causally linked to another trait that is selected for, thereby “hitchhiking” its way to populational prominence. We might say that functionless trait X is an evolutionary causal byproduct of adaptive feature Y only if X is causally related to Y such that when Y occurs X reliably accompanies it. The term “byproduct” is often used in the evolutionary psychological literature as a catchall for any trait that cannot be given a plausible selectionist explanation (Buss et al. 1998), such as art, music, and science. However, a causal byproduct explanation must do more than simply show that some other type of explanation is implausible; it must provide a positive account that meets the standards of adequacy for scientific explanation. In their classic architectural spandrel analogy, Gould and Lewontin (1979) compared (initially) functionless byproducts to the unavoidable, roughly triangular, geometric space created by resting a dome on top of contiguous arches. A “spandrel” in the evolutionary sense is

19

any necessary, predictable side consequence of selection for another trait, be it genetic, structural, physiological, genetic cognitive or behavioral (Gould 1997). An instructive example relates to the large and fully erectile clitoris of the female spotted hyena, which is comparable in size to the male counterpart’s penis and is explained as a byproduct of selection for increased aggression (Gould 1983). The causal pathway from adaptation to byproduct is postulated to run as follows: Female hyenas that are more aggressive tend to be socially dominant and thus able to commandeer more resources for their offspring; consequently, hyena populations experienced selection for increased female aggression; increased aggression in mammals is typically produced by increasing levels of testosterone; and a direct side effect of increased levels of testosterone in females is an enlarged clitoris. Here, the same reasonably well understood proximate mechanisms that produce the underlying adaptation (aggression dominance) are also shown to reliably produce the byproduct (a hypertrophied clitoris). So far as we are aware, no one has so much as sketched such a causal pathway in the case of inclusivist morality. Just as altruism is not an unavoidable byproduct of nepotism, inclusivist morality is not an unavoidable byproduct of group-restricted morality. Indeed, humans were perfectly capable, for hundreds of thousands of years, of restricting the universalizability of their moral judgments to members of their own group. —aAnd without itin the absence of a description of the relevant causal connections, there is no basis to reach any evoconservative conclusions about the plausibility or ultimate potential scope of moral inclusivity. Whether the sympathy or other-regard one feels for kith and kin will translate into sympathy or other-regard felt toward all human beings and even nonhuman animals will depend on the conceptual, cognitive and affective motivations that underlie group restricted morality and how they interact with the social environment. In the absence of these details,

20

there is simply no basis to say that the extension of sympathy or other-regard to strangers or out-groups is inevitable or likely. Indeed, humans were perfectly capable, for hundreds of thousands of years, of restricting the universalizability of their moral judgments to members of their own group. Just as altruism is not an unavoidable byproduct of nepotism, inclusivist morality is not an unavoidable byproduct of group-restricted morality. More importantly, even if we set aside the matter of causal linkages, inclusivist moral features are not plausible candidates for byproduct explanation because they have not reliably accompanied any of the putatively relevant adaptations thought to have arisen in the EEA. For tens or hundreds of thousands of years, human beings possessed the whole suite of cognitive and emotional adaptations that plausibly underpin morality—such as capacities for norm following, perspective taking, preference for consistency in belief, and the parochial altruism characteristic of group-restricted morality. And yet very few if any human beings exhibited inclusivist moral features until very recently in human history. Further, there are still many people, and even entire cultural groups, whose morality lacks one or more of the above inclusivist features. This time lag problem is fatal to causal byproduct explanation here,13 for it shows that inclusivist morality is not a “necessary,” “inevitable,” “predictable,” “enjoined” or even “highly likely” result of selection for group-restricted morality or any other adaptation listed above, and thus it is not amenable to causal byproduct explanation. Therefore, even a complete description of ecological conditions of the EEA, in conjunction with evolutionary laws (such as natural selection), would not confer a high 13

The power of this point can be illustrated by imagining a similar pattern in the context of a paradigmatic byproduct explanation, such as the hyena’s clitoris: If there was a one hundred-thousand-year temporal gap between increased hyena aggression and clitoral enlargement, this would completely vitiate the byproduct explanation, as selection for increased aggression would no longer be sufficient for, or confer a high probability on, or be a difference-making cause of, the hypertrophied clitoris.

21

probability on inclusivist morality—neither as an adaptation nor as a causal byproduct. Accounts of evolutionary explanation that advert to difference-making causes fare no better in explaining the proliferation of inclusivist morality as a causal evolutionary byproduct. Why do humans increasingly exhibit inclusivist morality rather than more truncated forms of morality? The prehistoric evolution of basic moral capacities may be a precondition for the more recent emergence of inclusivist moral features in the hominin lineage, just as a nervous system is a precondition for the development of complex cognition in general—but this is a far cry from an explanation. The existence of basic moral adaptations may help to explain why humans exhibit inclusivist moral capacities while, say, chimps (which presumably lack these basic moral adaptations) do not; but it does not help to explain why some behaviorally modern humans exhibit inclusivist moral features while other behaviorally modern humans do not, since both possess basic moral adaptations. Whatever the crucial difference-makers here might be, they will not be evolved psychological capacities.

Formatted: Font: 10 pt

A second type of byproduct explanation involves selection for some generic or overarching capacity, which in turn enables the development of some lower-level or nested capacity. For instance, one might describe astrophysics as a byproduct of selection for symbolic thought (which is often thought to be associated with the evolution of language). In the case of inclusivist morality, the claim would be that a range of generic adaptive capacities, such as reasoning, theory of mind, norm-following and so on, in conjunction with as-yet-unspecified sociocultural circumstances, conspire to produce inclusivist morality as a byproduct. Those who endeavor to provide this sort of byproduct explanation of inclusivist morality are in good company. In The Descent of Man, Darwin not only offered a proto-selectionist

22

account of the origins of altruism and moral virtue (1871, 156), but he also advanced what appears to be a byproduct theory of expansive other-regard: As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

On Darwin’s account, sympathy for one’s kin and kith may be adaptive, but the expansion of moral sentiments beyond the group to all human beings is a product not of selection but of logical extension. Notice that there is no suggestion of a causal by-product explanation in Darwin’s remark. Instead, he suggests that the extension of regard beyond the narrow confines of the tribe is a result of the operation of reason combined with the human capacity to reflect on the norms we now follow, conclude that their scope is arbitrarily restricted, and then be motivated to act on less restrictive norms. The first thing to note about this type of byproduct explanation is that, unlike its paradigmatic counterpart, it is not much of an explanation at all. Without filling in the crucial socio-historical-psychological details, the proposed generic capacities only make the explanandum possible but not likely, and they fail to pick out causal difference-makers (evolutionary or otherwise) that explain why some human populations developed inclusivist moral features while others did not. But even if one finds this type of byproduct explanation adequate, the generic capacities that it features are consistent with an indefinite disjunction of lower level capacities and behaviors, including a dramatically expanded inclusivist morality. If this type of evolutionary byproduct explanation were successful, therefore, it would imply that evolved constraints on moral morphology are far weaker than evoconservatives, and even some evolutionary psychologists, have presupposed (see §2).

23

A third type of byproduct explanation, one that promises to be more explanatory and perhaps more constraining, attempts to account for some phenomenon by showing that a certain adaptive capacity is “misfiring” or operating outside of its selected domain. “Misfire” explanations will first specify the range of stimuli that trigger the proximate mechanisms underlying a given adaptive capacity, and then show that modern ecological circumstances are configured such that they trigger this capacity in a non-fitness-enhancing context. For instance, the fact that marriage rates among unrelated children raised together on Israeli kibbutzim are unusually low, despite social pressures to marry, is attributed to the misfiring of an incest avoidance mechanism that produces a sexual aversion between individuals that are in regular physical proximity for their first few years of life. One might assert that we can account for inclusivist morality by showing that humans have an innate, adaptive empathy response: That is to say, a moral aversion to causing harm, and an innate moral inclination to alleviate suffering, when these are up close and personal. In the EEA, this empathy response would have been limited to interactions with one’s immediate group members. —and that mModern technology, however, bombards contemporary humans with images and information that familiarize strangers and their plight, triggering the misfire of an ancient empathy outside of its selected domainresponse that was hitherto limited to interactions with one’s immediate group members. Yet as the record of intergroup conflict makes clear, humans have little difficulty acting on truncated sympathies at close range. This may be explained, in part, by neuropsychological data showing that empathy (1) is modulated by kin relations and group identification, (2) can have relatively minor effects on moral behavior, and (3) in some cases will exacerbate intergroup conflict by enhancing in-group/out-group dynamics (see Pinker 2011, ch. 9). We do not believe, therefore, that the shift to subject-centered morality

24

and its associated expansion of the moral circle can be explained as the result of manipulating sympathies designed for small group living. Arguably more important than any ‘misfiring’ empathy is thatWe we have instead developed institutions and cultural practices that encourage us to treat strangers and out-group members as if they warrant moral consideration, even if the empathy we feel toward them is quite limited. Could the inclusivist anomaly be explained instead as a misfire of the adaptive egalitarian ethos derived in the EEA? The received view in evolutionary anthropology is that huntergatherer egalitarianism, the ancestral state of human morality, is effective in small-scale nomadic groups but incapable of preventing large, sedentary populations from devolving into vertically complex (and highly unequal) societies. Even theorists who helped to explode the myth of the peaceful hunter-gather band have argued that the shift to modern constitutional democracy and human rights constitutes a partially successful restoration of our prehistoric egalitarian moral psychology (Boehm 2012, 96-97). One might argue, therefore, that the egalitarianism motivating the inclusivist anomaly is structurally homologous to that which underpins hunter-gatherer morality. If this is the case, then cosmopolitan morality can be explained as the misfiring of an adaptive ancestral trait in the modern environment. Once again, even if an evolutionary explanation along these lines were successful, it would not support the evoconservative inference, since it would imply that we are capable of creating institutional orders that allow for the expression of our hunter-gatherer moral psychology well beyond its selective domain. In any case, there are several problems with this “misfire” explanation. The first is that hunter-gatherer morality is manifestly not subjectcentered, since it readily excludes from moral consideration similarly situated subjects belonging to other groups (§1). A second and related problem is that hunter-gatherer morality is not

25

“egalitarian” in the sense that human rights and other inclusivist moralities are egalitarian. In extant hunter-gatherers, egalitarian norms are not only group-restricted—but even within the group, they apply mainly to interactions between males and are rarely extended to family units (for a discussion, see Boehm 2001). This is precisely what one would expect if hunter-gatherer morality were an evolutionary solution to the ecological problems posed by cooperative hunting, cooperative defense, and intergroup warfare. Even if some of the altruistic behaviors performed within hunter-gatherer groups outwardly resemble those prescribed by the robust egalitarianism of genuinely cosmopolitan morality, this should not be taken to imply that they emanate from the same moral concepts or motivations. It is unlikely that ancestral morality would have been grounded in proximate motivations that readily extend moral community to out-groups, given that other means of demarcation—such as group-based cues—would easily have prevented such costly extensions. Again, we’re not suggesting that putatively innate adaptive capacities, such as empathy and a sense of fairness, are not important components of inclusivist morality. But we think that the trend toward inclusivist morality is too robust, on too many levels, to be explained as the simple manipulation of sympathies and sentiments designed for small group living. Moreover, even if the misfire explanations were correct, there’s no reason to think that they would support the evoconservative inference unless we knew just how far our small group sympathies and sentiments could be stretched by altering the conditions under which they are expressed—and this is an open empirical question. In sum, standard selectionist and byproduct explanations fail to account for inclusivist moral features, and thus no viable evolutionary explanation of these ecologically important

26

aspects of contemporary morality has yet been put forward—certainly none that has any important conservative ethical or political implications.14

5. Rebutting the Charge of Utopianism Let us return to the view, advanced by evoconservatives, that because morality is a product of natural selection, or a byproduct of adaptive features, it is highly constrained as to its content. We have already dedicated much ink to showing that there are significant limits with respect to the scope of morality that evolutionary theory can plausibly be said to explain. However, those who advance the constraints view might reply that we have not in our discussions of the inclusivist anomaly shown evoconservatism to be mistaken. At best, they could argue, we have shown that human beings have the capacity to expand their conception of duty or their understanding of moral status beyond the confines of their evolved group-based morality. This does not show, however, that a more inclusive morality actually exists. This is because morality is more than a set of beliefs about duty and moral status; it must be realized in behavior, patterning human interactions in meaningful, predictable ways. Human beings will not live an inclusivist morality, so the objection goes, even if they possess inclusivist beliefs about the content of morality and the scope of the set of beings with moral standing. People may entertain the notion of equal moral worth, but it is clear that they often fail

14

Our conclusions also have significant implications for so-called “evolutionary debunking arguments,” which appeal to evolutionary explanations of morality in an attempt to refute varieties of moral realism or to demonstrate their incompatibility with biological theory (Kahane 2011). The most prominent evolutionary debunking argument is due to Sharon Street (2006), who argues that if evolutionary explanations of either sort—selectionist or byproduct—can be given of our evaluative tendencies, then there is no reason to believe that moral judgments would track mind-independent moral truths even if these existed. Street’s argument hinges on the claim that evolutionary forces have played a “tremendous” (109), “enormous” (114) role in shaping the content of morality (e.g., our evaluative attitudes). Many authors have attempted to resist evolutionary debunking arguments while endorsing this premise (e.g., De Lazari-Radek and Singer 2012, 13). As should be clear from the foregoing discussion, we do not think this premise should be conceded.

27

to act in accordance with it, as might be inferred (e.g.) from the minuscule proportion of GDP dedicated to alleviating global poverty. Furthermore, the argument continues, to the extent that inclusivist moralities are in fact deployed, like failed communist utopias they will be short-lived and come with morally prohibitive costs (see, e.g., Asma 2012, 45-46). This retort fails. It simply begs the question by assuming what is in dispute, namely, whether human beings have the capacity to act on inclusivist moral conceptions, whether they have so acted, and whether they have done so without morally unacceptable costs. It ignores the fact, discussed earlier, that inclusivist morality is not merely an idea—it is significantly realized in individual behavior, social practices, international and domestic law, and institutions. It is a fact that there have been remarkable changes in attitudes and behavior toward nonhuman animals in the last few decades. It is also a fact that there are functioning institutions that implement, though imperfectly of course, cosmopolitan moral norms, the most obvious of which are those that comprise international and regional human rights regimes. Furthermore, the fact that a moral norm is imperfectly realized does not make it a lofty, unrealistic ideal. Virtually all moral norms are imperfectly realized (consider, for example, “Do not lie”). The key point is that the capacity for critical reflection on moral norms and conceptions of moral standing, combined with our ability to create new social practices and institutions, have substantially transformed human morality for significant numbers of human beings—and have done so without imposing any substantial (let alone prohibitive) social or moral costs. This fact alone demonstrates that morality is more flexible than evoconservatives acknowledge. And the fact that evolutionary theory cannot account for the trend toward moral inclusivity is further evidence that human morality is only weakly constrained by its adaptive underpinnings—at least with respect to the entities that are taken to have moral standing and

28

their relative moral worth. This is important, because one might take the conjunction of plausible evolutionary explanations of morality on the one hand, and the limited penetration of inclusivist moral concepts and behaviors on the other, as lending support to the evoconservative inference. In contrast, once we recognize the limits of evolutionary explanations of morality, and the significant steps toward inclusivist morality that have already been achieved, —suggests that we can reasonably infer that we are far from the outer limits of our capacities for moral inclusivity. Unfortunately, proponents of evolutionary explanations of morality, and the evoconservatives who draw upon their findings, have tended to overlook actual and potential these inclusivist transformations. This oversight is due in part to the fact that some many evolutionary psychologists have , as a matter of methodological policy, tended to focus on the developmentally rigid aspects of human nature that supposedly emerged crystallized in the EEA, while ignoring—appropriately, to their mind—what might be viewed as contingent, fleeting, ecologically insignificant cultural fads that have no real capacity to shape the future of human morality. However, the dynamics of cultural transmission allow for the stabilization of a very wide range of norms and behaviors notwithstanding their costs to fitness (Boyd and Richerson 1992). Importantly, these can be norms that we have retained after a process of critical reflection, and they need not be group-beneficial or geared toward remedying altruism failures. But tThe plasticity of human morality, and the inclusivist features it has produced, are not some superficial overlay on an unyielding groupish moral nature. They are a crucial part of who we are and what we want to become—and they will likely play an important role in where human morality is going.

29

6. The Open-Ended Normativity of the Ethical An explanation is needed of the curious fact that, although human beings apparently began with highly constrained, group-based moralities, many of them have come to have moralities that are much more inclusive. We believe that any explanation of this phenomenon will feature a capacity that we shall call the open-ended normativity of the ethical (Buchanan 2012). This is the capacity to reflect on and revise our moral norms and modify our behavior accordingly, even when doing so is not only not fitness enhancing, but even fitness reducing.15 Darwin’s remarks about inclusive moral regard, which we noted earlier, suggest that he was aware of this capacity and thought that it helped explain how humans can transcend the narrow confines of cooperative group morality. It is crucial to emphasize that the capacity for critical revision extends not just to duty norms (moral ‘oughts’ and ‘ought nots’), but also to something more fundamental: Judgments about which kinds of beings have moral standing. If humans are capable of deliberately and radically revising the grounds by which the moral community is delineated, then constraints imposed by the natural history of morality will be far weaker than many have supposed. It is clear that this capacity exists. There have been significant revisions both in our conceptions of duties and in our assumptions about moral standing, as we have already noted. To say that some humans possess this capacity, however, is not to say that the capacity is sui generis. It may well be that the capacity is acquired and exercised under certain conditions, including certain configurations of interests and resulting motivations. The point is that we have

15

Kitcher (2011, 97, 104) argues that morality was shaped in part through deliberative, collaborative discussions “around the campfire” regarding how to reduce costly conflicts in group living (cf. Boehm 2001, 12). We agree that moral change can and has been brought about by social deliberation, but think that whether this takes place around a campfire or a session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, it will not, going forward, be limited to matters of strategic morality.

30

strong evidence for the existence of this capacity, in the form of what many of us regard as the most progressive developments in morality, even if we do not possess a good account of the conditions under which the capacity is likely to be effectively exercised. We have already shown that inclusivist morality is not amenable to standard evolutionary explanations. Could this more general capacity for open-ended normativity be afforded an evolutionary explanation? Both selectionist and byproduct explanations of the standard sort will come up short here for the same reasons that that they came up short in connection with inclusivist morality. For instance, if we attempt to show that open-ended normativity is a byproduct of, say, our preference for consistency in belief, we are once again confronted with the fatal time lag problem. It is likewise unclear how our ability to critically reflect on and revise our moral norms might be explained as a specific application of one or more generic adaptive capacities. One might assert that open-ended normativity is a byproduct of a general cultural learning device, or a nested capacity of a more generic, adaptive cognitive flexibility that helped humans to cope with variable ancestral environments. But these would hardly constitute evolutionary explanations, let alone ones that have any interesting upshot for moral theory or practice. Similarly, if mental processes like rational moral decision-making could ultimately be cashed out in pseudo-Darwinian terms (e.g. Wilson 2002, 31), this would be consistent with the open-ended nature of moral cognition and behavior and would thus have no evoconservative implications whatsoever. What matters for present purposes, therefore, is not whether openended normativity can be given an evolutionary explanation per se, but whether it can be given an evolutionary explanation that implicates the sorts of constraints on human morality and society that evoconservatives suppose. [Return to broad strokes point—say that it does not support evoconservatism, although specific contours constraints might]

31

So far, we have argued that standard evolutionary explanations fail to account for the four inclusivist features of contemporary morality. We do not mean, however, to advocate any mysterious or transcendental view regarding their origins. Rather, we contend that prevailing evolutionary explanations cannot account for inclusivist morality, and that any naturalistic explanation of the same must feature the capacity for open-ended normativity. Explanations that advert only to the modern manipulation of innate, adaptive moral responses will not suffice. We will now sketch an alternative naturalistic explanation that makes use of evolutionary facts and principles while acknowledging the importance of open-ended normativity. A virtue of this alternative explanation is that it explains both the possibility of inclusivist moralities and the obstacles to their emergence and persistence. We begin with a hypothesis about the psychological underpinnings of cooperative group morality: At some earlier point in the human lineage some of our ancestors developed what might be characterized as a nondiscriminating capacity for altruistic response, most likely, a disposition to respond positively toward the perceived needs of other, unrelated human beings. However, unless this capacity for altruism were somehow rendered more discriminating, it would be unlikely to spread through human populations for reasons already noted (namely, that individuals with undiscriminating altruism would be ripe for exploitation). Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that the nondiscriminating capacity for altruistic response co-evolved with adaptive cultural practices that modulated it, restricting the response to members of the in-group. The keystone of this cultural adaptation would be practices that served to delineate members of the in-group from those of out-groups, using markers such as language, differences in dress, bodily adornment, scarification, tattoos, rituals, and so on.

32

In addition, for the cultural modulation of nondiscriminating altruism to work, it would be necessary to develop relatively entrenched beliefs about the risk or unsuitability of cooperation with out-group members. Lawrence Hirschfeld and others have argued that there is a virtually universal tendency in human children, regardless of the particular culture in which they find themselves, to exhibit what might be called a deterministic, essentialist categorization of other human beings, based on highly visible but culturally salient phenotypic traits (e.g., skin color). In brief, children, from a very early age and apparently without any instruction, tend to sort humans into groups, think of groups as natural kinds rather than as social constructs, and believe that members of a group share an “essence” that rigidly determines their behavior (Hirschfeld 2008). The point is not that children are “naturally” racist or ethnocentric, but that they have a capacity for sorting human beings which, under certain cultural conditions, can come to be expressed as racism or ethnocentrism of one kind or another. The next step in our explanation is to suggest that at some point humans developed what we call the capacity for open-ended normativity: They (or some of them) acquired the capacity to be aware of and critically evaluate the enculturated beliefs about natural differences among groups of humans that had hitherto constrained the originally nondiscriminating altruism response. In other words, the capacity for open-ended normativity enabled us to dismantle culturally evolved constraints on the altruism response, resulting in a morality that was more inclusive—as appears to be the case, for example, with the abolitionist and animal welfare movements.16

16

Abolitionists attacked the common belief that African slaves were less than fully human and hence not possessors of “natural rights” by providing public venues in which freed slaves could exhibit rationality. Similarly, advocates of “animal liberation” have worked to make the public aware of the intense pain, fear, and anxiety that animals raised for food can suffer under conditions of “factory farming” and in the processes by which they are slaughtered. In such cases, changes in beliefs and a motivation to act consistently across like cases has resulted in removing

33

On the one hand, this explanation sketch shows why we should expect the shift toward inclusivist morality to not come easily and to be less than universal. Given how heavily the success of the group would have depended on the ability to constrain the altruism response within the group, one would expect that the cultural adaptations that fostered constraint would be robust, durable and require a great deal of teaching to overcome. So the task of disabling these constraints would be equally formidable, and one would expect there to be considerable variation across human groups as to when and how fully the task of relaxing the constraints on altruism would be achieved. On the other hand, our explanation sketch also acknowledges two facts about contemporary morality that standard evolutionary explanations ignore: The fact that for many humans morality is no longer a strictly intra-group affair, and the fact that many human beings exhibit the capacity for reflecting on and revising their moral norms, including those that determine which beings have moral standing. Thus far our explanation sketch accounts for the first fact but not the second: It provides a naturalistic explanation of the inclusivist aspects of contemporary morality, but it does not explain the capacity for open-ended normativity. The foregoing analysis suggests that this capacity cannot be explained in standard evolutionary terms. What we wish to emphasize, however, is that even if an evolutionary explanation of the capacity for open-ended normativity is eventually provided, it will not imply that there are constraints on the content of morality, or limitations on the possibilities for institutional reform, that evo-conservatives have thought were the necessary concomitants of evolutionary explanations.

7. Evoconservatism and Minimal Moral Psychological Realism restrictions on the scope of moral norms and even revisions in our understandings of which beings have various moral statuses.

34

As we noted earlier, some authors appeal to evolutionary explanations of morality, infer from these explanations that the content of morality is highly constrained, and then draw conservative ethical and political lessons therefrom. We think that such authors have operated with a seriously deficient grasp of the explanandum and the scope of evolutionary explanation. At best, they have selectively focused on those aspects of existing morality that are plausible candidates for evolutionary explanation. Less charitably, their penchant for evolutionary explanations may have shaped (or rather truncated) their conception of what morality now encompasses, causing them to overlook the great flexibility of moral cognition, behavior and norms as illustrated by the success of inclusivist morality. Evoconservatives can be seen as attempting to heed the Principle of Minimal Psychological Realism (PMPR), which was given its first clear statement by Owen Flanagan (1991). The PMPR holds that moral theory and moralities should take the psychological capacities of human beings into account in framing their conceptions of moral principles, duties and virtues. “Taking into account” our psychological capacities here is usually understood to mean recognizing the empirically evidenced limitations of those capacities. A moral ideal satisfies the PMPR if its prescriptions are presently realizable by “all biologically normal human beings” or “asymptotically realizable” by their descendants (340). The PMPR can thus be seen as the naturalizing philosopher’s version of the slogan, “ought implies can.” Evoconservatives appear to be taking the PMPR seriously. They think that moralities and institutions should be realistic in the sense that they should not overestimate human abilities to extend sympathy—and more fundamentally, moral community—to out-groups. They reason that because our moral traits are products of selection in the EEA, or constrained byproducts of the same, our capacities for other-regarding concern are highly circumscribed. Once we recognize

35

that humans have the capacity for open-ended normativity and robust culture—especially in the form of constructing institutions—it becomes clear that the motivational limits of our evolved “internal” psychology are not nearly so constraining as evoconservatives assume. “Ought implies can” makes sense, but one must be careful not to underestimate the “can.” The human capacity to reflect on and revise our conceptions of duty and moral standing can give us reasons here and now to expand our capacities for moral behavior by developing institutions that economize on sympathy and enhance our ability to take the interests of strangers into account. This same capacity may also give us reasons, in the not-too-distant future, to modify our evolved psychology through the employment of biomedical interventions that enable us to implement new norms that we develop as a result of the process of reflection. In both cases, the limits of our evolved motivational capacities do not translate into a comparable constraint on our capacity for moral action. The fact that we are not currently motivationally capable of acting on the considered moral norms we have come to endorse is not a reason to trim back those norms; it is a reason to enhance our motivational capacity, either through institutional or biomedical means, so that that it matches the demands of our considered morality. The PMPR is therefore less informative than often assumed. The evoconservative misappropriation of the PMPR is the contemporary version of a classic foible of conservative thought. Traditional conservatives have been justly criticized for basing their pessimistic predictions about the possibilities for significant social progress and institutional reform on an a priori, unscientific conception of human nature—and more specifically, on the idea that human nature suffers serious and permanent cognitive and motivational limitations. Modern conservatives—some of whom might properly be called evoconservatives—give the appearance of improvement, because they appeal to science, and to

36

evolutionary explanations in particular, to ground their pessimistic conclusions. But we have shown that old and new conservatives have something in common: They both fail to appreciate that even though human beings have limitations, they also have the capacity to stretch these considerably. Evolutionary psychologists and empirically savvy ethicists are right to reject the antiquated view that morality is purely a rational, cultural construct that reins in the evolved, base impulses of human nature. Nothing we have said in this paper suggests that our evolved psychology can be discounted, either in moral theory or in the design of institutions. Furthermore, evolutionary explanations of morality can help to explain why inclusivist attitudes were both a long time coming and remain imperfectly realized today. Our point is not that human beings have slipped the “leash” of evolution, but rather that the leash is far longer than evoconservatives and even many evolutionary psychologists have acknowledged—and no one is in a position at present to know just how elastic it will turn out to be. Acknowledgements [omitted for blind review]

References Alexander, Richard D. 1987. The Biology of Moral Systems. New York: De Gruyter. Arnhart, L. (2005). Darwinian conservatism. Imprint Academic. Asma, S.T. (2013). The myth of universal love. The New York Times. ________ (2012). Against fairness. University of Chicago Press. Boehm, C. (2012). Moral origins: The evolution of virtue, altruism, and shame. Basic Books. ________(2001). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press. Bowles, S. (2009). “Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social behaviors?” Science 324(5932), 1293-1298. ________(2008). Conflict: Altruism’s midwife. Nature 456, 326-327.

37

Boyd, R. and Richerson, P. (1992). “Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups.” Ethology and Sociobiology 13: 171-195. Boyd, R. and Richerson, P.J. (2002). “Group beneficial norms can spread rapidly in a structured population.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 215: 287-296. Boyd, R., Gintis, H., Bowles, S. and Richerson, P.J. (2003). “The evolution of altruistic punishment.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100(6), 3531-3535. Buchanan, A. (2012). “The Egalitarianism of Human Rights.” Ethics 120(4): 679-710. _________(2012). “The open-ended normativity of the ethical.” Analyse & Kritik: Zeitschrift fur Sozialtheorie, Jarhgang 34(1), 81-94. _________(1990). “Justice as reciprocity versus subject-centered justice.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 19(3), 227252. Buss, D.M. et al. (1998). “Adaptations, exaptations, and spandrels.” American Psychologist 53(5), 533-548. Darwin, C. (1871). The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. John Murray. DeGrazia, D. (2009). “Moral vegetarianism from a very broad basis.” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6, 143-165. FitzPatrick, W.J. (2012). Review of Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project. Ethics 123(1): 167-174. Flanagan, O. (1991). Varieties of moral personality: Ethics and psychological realism. Harvard University Press. Fraser, B. and Sterelny, K. (unpublished manuscript). “Evolution and moral realism.” Fukuyama, F. (2002). Our Posthuman Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gauthier, D. (1989). Morals by agreement. Clarendon Press. Goldsmith, J.L. and Posner, E.A. (2005). The limits of international law. Oxford University Press. Gould, S.J. (1983). Hen's teeth and horse’s toes. W.W. Norton & Co. _________(1997). “The exaptive excellence of spandrels as a term and prototype.” PNAS USA 94: 10750-10755. Gould, S. J. and Lewontin, R.C. (1979). “The Spandrels of St. Marcos and the Panglossian Paradigm: a Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.” Proceeding of the Royal Society of London B 205: 581-598. Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind. Pantheon. Hirschfeld, L.A. (2008). Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds. MIT Press. Joyce, R. (2006). The evolution of morality. MIT Press. Kahane, G. (2011). “Evolutionary debunking arguments.” Noûs 45(1): 103-125. Keeley, L. (1996). War before civilization. Oxford University Press. Kirk (2001). The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing.

38

Kitcher, P. (2011). The ethical project. Harvard University Press. Lazari-Radek, K.D. and Singer, P. (2012). “The objectivity of ethics and the unity of practical reason.” Ethics 123: 9-31. Lieberman, D. (2008). “Moral Sentiments Relating to Incest: Discerning Adaptations from By-products.” In W. Sinnott Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, v.1, MIT Press, pp. 165-190. Machery, E. and Mallon, M. (2010). “The evolution of morality.” In J.M. Doris (ed.), The Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press, pp. 3-46. Navarrete, C.D. and Fessler, D.M.T. (2006). “Disease avoidance and ethnocentrism.” Evolution and Human Behavior 27: 270-282 Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of our Nature. Viking. Posner, R. and Singer, P. (2001). “Animal rights: A debate between Richard Posner and Peter Singer,” Slate, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dialogues/features/2001/ animal_rights/_2.html Prinz, J. (2008). “Is morality innate?” In W. Sinnott Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology v.1, MIT Press, 367-406. Sober, E. and Wilson, D.S. (1999). Unto Others. Harvard University Press. Sripada, C. and Stich, S. (2006). “A framework for the psychology of norms.” In The Innate Mind: Culture and Cognition, P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich (eds.). Oxford University Press. Sterelny, K. (2012). The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique. MIT Press. Stich, S. (2013). “Why there might not be an evolutionary explanation for psychological altruism.” ISHPSSB Meeting, Montpellier, France. Street, S. (2006). “A darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value.” Philosophical Studies 127: 109-166. Wilson, D.S. (2002). Darwin’s Cathedral. University of Chicago Press. Wilson, D.S. and Wilson, E.O. (2007). “Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology.” Quarterly Review of Biology 82(4): 327. Wright, R. (2000). Nonzero: The logic of human destiny. Pantheon.

39