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The Origins of Morality: An Essay in Philosophical Anthropology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Andrew Oldenquist
Andrew Oldenquist
Affiliation:
Philosophy, The Ohio State University
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Extract

By what steps, historically, did morality emerge? Our remote ancestors evolved into social animals. Sociality requires, among other things, restraints on disruptive sexual, hostile, aggressive, vengeful, and acquisitive behavior. Since we are innately social and not social by convention, we can assume the biological evolution of the emotional equipment – numerous predispositions to want, fear, feel anxious or secure – required for social living, just as we can assume cultural evolution of various means to control antisocial behavior and reinforce the prosocial kind. Small clans consisting, say, of several extended families whose members cooperated in hunting, gathering, defense, and child-rearing could not exist without a combination of innate and social restraints on individual behavior.

I shall argue for a naturalistic theory of morality, by which I do not mean the definitional claims G.E. Moore sought to refute, but a broader and more complex theory that maintains that a sufficient understanding of human nature, history, and culture can fully explain morality; that nothing is left hanging. A theory that coherently brings together the needed biological, psychological, and cultural facts I shall call a philosophical anthropology; it is a theory that:

1) takes the good for humans – both an ultimate good (if there is any) and other important goods – to depend on human nature;

2) argues that a rudimentary but improving scientific and philosophical theory of human nature now exists, and thus denies that people are “essenceless”;

3) takes this theory to be evolutionary and historical, making the question “How did morality originate?” pivotal for ethical theory, but leaves open the empirical question of the relative importance of biological and cultural evolution; and

4) takes the origin of the moral ideas to be explainable in terms of human nature and history.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , Autumn 1990 , pp. 121 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1990

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References

1 For example, Jeremy Bentham's claim that “good” means “pleasant,” a similar claim that Moore attributed to John Stuart Mill, and the claim of some moralists that “right” means “commanded by God.”

2 Boyd, Robert and Richerson, Peter J., Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 1.Google Scholar

3 Philosophers who defend an objective status for morality, currently called “moral realism,” are defensive about what they mean by “moral facts” or “moral properties,” and spend more time saying what they do not mean than what they do. Philosophers' claims about moral facts range from hard ontological claims about moral properties to a mere indication that they take folk morality at face value, by which I mean they endorse lay claims that torture is wrong and (if asked by philosophers) that it is true that torture is wrong.

4 In the Treatise, bk. III, pt. I, sec. I, where I interpret his remarks to imply a proto-emotivism.

5 As developed by him in Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).

6 I shall emphasize aversions rather than desires, because most moral rules are prohibitory and function to protect people from what they very much fear. Nonetheless, the bridge theory also lets us infer moral beliefs about positive duties of compassion, loyalty, and so on.

7 I give an explanation of a bridge theory for retributive justice, together with an argument for the social necessity of retribution, in “An Explanation of Retribution,” Journal of Philosophy (September 1988).

8 In Hare, Freedom and Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).Google Scholar

9 Kohlberg, Laurence stages are described in many of his writings. A late version of them is in The Unstudied Curriculum (Washington: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1970)Google Scholar: The Pre-Conventional Level

Stage 1. The punishment and obedience orientation. Morality is avoidance of punishment and unquestioning deference to power.

Stage 2. The instrumental relativist orientation. Right action is what gets you what you want, sometimes by trading favors.

The Conventional Level

Stage 3. The “good boy – nice girl” orientation. Morality is earning approval by conforming and being “nice.”

Stage 4. The “law and order” orientation. Morality is doing one's duty in the sense of respecting authority and the social order.

The Post-Conventional or Principled Level

Stage 5. The social-contract orientation. Morality is based on law, rights, and social utility.

Stage 6. The universal ethical principle orientation. Morality is a matter of self-chosen universal principles of justice.

10 See, for example, numerous passages in Boas, FranzThe Mind of Primitive Man (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1938)Google Scholar, Benedict, RuthPatterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1959)Google Scholar, Lewis, I. M., Social Anthropology in Perspective (New York: Penguin Books, 1976)Google Scholar, and Shils, Edward, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).Google Scholar

11 Marx explains alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (first published in 1932).

12 Seeman, Melvin, “On the Meaning of Alienation,” American Sociological Review, 1959.Google Scholar

13 Discussed and defended at length byDurkheim, in Suicide, first published in Paris in 1897.Google Scholar

14 See especially Gehlen, Der Mensch, Seine Natur und Seine Stellung in der Well (Wiesbaden: AULA Verlag, 1986).Google Scholar

15 Most modern analyses of alienation view alienated people as victims either of the social/economic system or of something else that is not their responsibility. Common moral opinion, however, is that people ought to have a sense of possession and regard for their family, community, or organization, and that alienated people are proper objects of criticism. In modern industrial societies, however, the matter is complicated because of the general sense that there is also something wrong with the social structure if it produces significant numbers of alienated people.

16 This suggestion was made by Sober at a conference on evolutionary biology, The Ohio State University, December 1988.

17 In pt. I, secs. I and II, of bk. III of Hume's Treatise. In sec. II he tells us that “The very feeling constitutes our praise or admiration…. We do not infer a character to be virtuous because it pleases: But in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.” Of all the classical theories of the nature of moral beliefs and judgments, Hume's is most consonant with what I am proposing.

18 One might think that I have ignored the “performative” role of moral utterances. I think that “S said ‘I promise’” is a special case and that “S believes lying is always wrong” is sufficiently like “S believes he has an ulcer” that S can be mistaken about each. The grain of truth in the idea of the creative power of moral words, however, is that in the appropriate circumstances “I believe that lying is always wrong” can be self-justifying – that is, my saying it will make it true that I believe that.

19 That is, the conditions that satisfy a bridge theory and under which they would, were it not for their quirk about moral language, call them wrong and wicked.

20 That is, a Prisoners’ Dilemma matrix for cooperative, exploitative, and mixed societies shows that in the best society (as defined by summed utilities) the individual is second best off, and is best off as the benefiting party in an exploitative relationship.

21 Not all biological evolution is by natural selection. Some of it instead results from chance combinations of genes, harmless mutation, or genetic drift. There are equally non-adaptive reasons for much of cultural evolution. Moreover, some products of natural selection may have been useful at the time, but no longer are today. I shall consider this last point in more detail when I come to Richard Alexander's views about the evolution of morality.

22 See, for example, Nagel, arguments about the badness of pain in The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Sturgeon, attempt, in “Moral Explanations,” eds. Copp, D. and Zimmerman, D., Morality, Reason and Truth (Rowman and Allanheld, 1984)Google Scholar, to refute Gilbert Harman's ethical relativism; and Brink, criticisms, in “Moral Realism and the Sceptical Arguments from Disagreement and Queerness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 62 (1984), pp. 111–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, of Mackie, John arguments in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Viking Penquin, Inc., 1985)Google Scholar against the existence of moral facts.

23 As presented in Mackie's Ethics; Inventing Right and Wrong.

24 See Blackburn, Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

25 Murphy, Jeffrie, Evolution, Morality, and the Meaning of Life (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982).Google Scholar

26 ibid., p. 76.

27 ibid., p. 85.

28 ibid., p. 87.

29 See various sections of Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate, trans. Geoffrey, Strachan (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), especially pp. 155–65.Google Scholar

30 If group selection were true, the structure of morality probably would have been different; the varieties of altruism and sexual strategies would also have been different, and therefore sexual morality too. But there is no good evidence that it is true, with the exception of an ingenious model of group selection devised by David Sloan Wilson that actually works, but probably only for some of the social hymenoptera. See Wilson “The Group Selection Controversy: History and Current Status,” Annual Review of Ecological Systems, 1983, and a number of other papers by him.

31 Evolutionary theorists commonly speak of genes as wanting, sacrificing themselves, and being selfish or altruistic. They feel comfortable speaking this way because they know they can unpack that talk into a much more cumbersome account of, say, a gene's selfishness as its disposition to cause its animal host to behave in ways that tend to get the gene-type replicated in the next generation, and so on.

32 A good example of possible technology upsetting concepts is the science fiction case of replicating an object of love: we evolved to love our own child, but what if the machine makes ten, exactly alike? We just get confused, for reasons not unlike our confusion about personal identity in the face of thought experiments about replication of the self.

33 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate, p. 98.

34 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 140.Google Scholar

35 The Nagas were (and apparently no longer are) head hunters from Northeastern India, and are described in detail by (among others) von Füher-Haimendorf, Christoph in Morals and Merit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).Google Scholar It would be hard to find a better example of a determinate boundary to one's moral community. Within their villages, the Nagas observed civility, law, rules of social morality, and a sense of community; outside, the state of nature and heads.

36 Alexander, Richard, The Biology of Moral Systems (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1987), pp. 77–78.Google Scholar I have criticized Alexander's theory in a review of his book in Mind, June 1989.

37 Trivers, Robert, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology, 1971.Google Scholar

38 Indeed, no one knew this for sure until Robert Axelrod showed that the Prisoners’ Dilemma strategy called Tit-for-Tat, which in form is nearly identical with reciprocal altruism, wins against all known competitors. See his The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984), and also described by Hofstadter, Douglas R., “Metamagical Themas,” Scientific American (May 1983).Google Scholar

39 I mean particular passions as Bishop Butler explains them in Sermon XI, direct desires that aim only at their objects: to play, satisfy one's curiosity, rescue a person from the river, and so on.

40 Phenotypic self-sacrifice puts the individual animal at risk; genotypic self-sacrifice is action that tends to diminish the representation of the animal's gene types (and not merely its gene tokens) in subsequent generations.

41 Alexander, p. 160.

42 See especially Lorenz, King Solomon's Ring, trans. Marjorie, Kerr Wilson (New York: Crowell, 1952).Google Scholar

43 It should be mentioned that Boyd and Richerson are interested in cultural evolution as often a superior basis for the explanation of cultural diversity, whereas my interest, and the general goal of a philosophical anthropology, focus on cultural universals (rather than differences) as clues to human nature.

44 See Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, Lewontin, Richard C., Rose, Steven, and Kamin, Leon J. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)Google Scholar, and much of the writing in the newsletter Science for the People.

45 See the essays in Ideology of in the Natural Sciences, eds. Hilary, Rose and Steven, Rose (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980).Google Scholar

46 Audrey, Robert, The Territorial Imperative (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 102.Google Scholar

47 See Goodall, Jane in In the Shadow of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1971)Google Scholar on the incest avoidance of the otherwise promiscuous chimpanzee Flo, , and Shepher, Joseph, “Mate Selection Among Second Generation Kibbutz Adolescents and Adults: Incest Avoidance and Negative Imprinting,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 1971Google Scholar, on the lack of sexual liaisons among unrelated young people raised communally in Israeli kibbutzim.

48 William Lycan first called my attention to this puzzle in a conversation a number of years ago.

49 This is discussed in my The Non-Suicidal Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), chs. 2, 9, 10, and 18.