Evolutionary Origins of Morality:
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (EOM), edited by Leonard Katz,
contains a collection of papers originally published in the Journal
of Consciousness Studies (vol. 7, no. 1-2, 2000). EOM is divided
into four sections, each taking a different approach to explaining the
possible contribution of evolution to our understanding of human moral
behaviour — primate ethology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and
game theory (dynamic systems modelling). Each section includes a target
article, a number of commentaries on the paper, and the author’s reply
to these commentaries.

In soliciting papers for this volume, Katz did not specify a firm definition
of ‘morality’, and this is clear from the distinct approaches to the concept
of morality adopted by each author. For example, for Brian Skyrms, it is
the idea of fairness; for Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, it is psychological
altruism; for Christopher Boehm it is the social management of conflict.
Perhaps Jessica Flack’s and Frans de Waal’s paper comes closest to our
everyday understanding of moral behaviour – the basic idea of having concern
for others.

This collection is a welcome addition to the literature on morality,
since it offers a perspective that differs considerably from our commonsense
intuitions about the nature of morality. We all (I hope) have intuitions
about what is good and bad, and about the rightness or wrongness of certain
acts. But we do not often consider what underlies or gives rise to these
intuitions. EOM offers an evolutionary response to this question.
However, many believe that Darwinian evolution, with its catch-cry of ‘survival
of the fittest’, is a poor basis for a moral system, since it suggests
that our primary concern is to advance our own interests and needs at the
expense of others. In contrast, the papers in
EOM demonstrate how
evolution is implicated in the establishment, development and maintenance
of moral systems.

Since there are too many papers to comment on individually in such a
short review, I shall focus on the first two, and comment only briefly
on the latter two. Jessica Flack’s and Frans de Waal’s target paper, ‘Any
Animal Whatever: Darwinian Building Blocks of Morality in Monkeys and Apes’,
addresses the relationships and continuities between primate and human
moral behaviour. Flack and de Waal provide evidence for what they believe
is proto-moral behaviour in the social interactions of both monkeys and
apes, our closest evolutionary ‘relatives’. These behaviours, they suggest,
are ‘building blocks’ for the evolution of human morality. Underlying these
behaviours are a number of psychological traits, sentiments and capacities
that primates seem to share with humans. Flack and de Waal describe four
broad categories of behaviour that are significant to primate ‘moral’ systems
(p. 22). Firstly, there is sympathy related behaviour, such as succourance,
emotional contagion, special treatment of the disabled and injured, and
cognitive empathy (the ability to ‘trade places’ with others). Secondly,
there is norm related behaviour. This includes evidence of prescriptive
social rules, the internalisation of these rules and the anticipation of
punishment, a sense of social regularity, and expectations about how one
ought to be treated. Reciprocity is central to primate groups, involving
the concepts of giving, trading and revenge, as well as moralistic aggression
against violators of reciprocity rules. Lastly, primates demonstrate ‘getting
along‘ behaviours, such as peacemaking and the avoidance of conflict,
community concern and maintenance of good relationships, and negotiation
to accommodate conflicting interests. Notice that, in one form or another,
these behaviours are also manifest in human moral and social systems (especially
empathy, the internalisation of rules, a sense of justice, and community
concern).

The commentaries on this paper vary in their focus. For example, Bernstein
(p. 31) discusses the difficulty of identifying the motivations underlying
primate behaviour. How does one provide sound evidence of the traits, sentiments
and capacities that Flack and de Waal note? Call (p. 34) highlights the
difference between the use and the perception of social norms.
Humans use and perceive social norms, but it is not clear that primates
do. Gruter and Morhenn (p. 38) claim that the social norms regulating primate
behaviour parallel norms found in human legal systems (e.g. compare conflict
resolution mechanisms in primates, and dispute resolution in law). Kagan
(p. 46) claims that primates lack essential elements of moral competence
— the concepts of good, bad, guilt; or acting from conscious intention
— that humans possess.

For me, this is the most interesting and revealing of all the papers.
The evidence provided is compelling, suggesting that the difference between
human moral systems and primate ‘moral’ systems is not one of kind, but
of degree (or complexity, reflecting the complexity of social/living arrangements,
perhaps). A common intuition associated with morality is a sense of universality
or objectivity – acts are either just good or bad simpliciter. But
philosophers have yet to definitively identify the property (or process,
quality, substance, object, deity…) that grounds such judgements. However,
the evolutionary approach may actually provide a basis for this sense of
universality, and how better to demonstrate it than to show that the basic
elements of moral behaviour are not only found in humans, but also in our
non-human relatives? Yes, humans may be highly rational animals, but this
does not mean that there aren’t elements of human morality that are shared
with other creatures. As Flack and de Waal comment, ‘while there is no
denying that we are creatures of intellect, it is also clear that we are
born with powerful inclinations and emotions that bias our thinking and
behavior. It is in this area that many of the continuities with other animals
lie’ (p. 23).

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s paper ‘Conflict and the Evolution
of Social Control’ addresses the question ‘How, When and Why Did the
Unique Aspects of Human Morality Arise?‘ He believes that the early
identification and collective suppression of within-group conflict (resulting
from ‘deviance’ against social norms) may provide a basis for the emergence
of human moral systems. Thus, his paper focuses on within-group conflict
and the social control of that conflict. Moral systems are driven by considerations
of power (both of deviants to hurt others, and of the social collective
to eliminate deviant behaviour), as well as the ‘common agreement as to
which behaviours are unacceptable…it also involves a group’s overall conception
of a satisfactory quality of social and political life’ (p. 80).

Boehm’s evidence is based on data from studies of the two Pan
species (chimpanzees and bonobos) and Homo (anatomically modern
humans). Boehm assumes that features shared by all three species are ‘likely
to have been present in the ancestor shared by Homo and Pan,
who lived five million years ago…’ (p. 81). Common behaviours include a
foraging lifestyle, territoriality, community living, proneness to status
rivalry and competition, and the forming of political coalitions. These
features all lead to conflict, thus all three species need to (and do)
engage in deliberate conflict resolution and management of deviant behaviour.
Conflict, then, becomes a stimulus for moral behaviour. Social control
mechanisms, Boehm claims, are found in modern-day nomadic, foraging or
hunter-gatherer groups, who are also uniform in their social, moral and
political structure. They uphold values by applying sanctions to deviants,
and they are uniformly egalitarian by suppressing undue competition and
pre-empting domination or controlling behaviour by individuals.

In effect, Boehm is providing a hypothesis about how social contracts
emerge. His approach is reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes’ account of morality
based on the social contract. According to Hobbes, morality is a solution
to a practical problem arising from human self-interest – morality incorporates
those rules that individuals must abide by in order to gain the benefits
of living in a social collective. Humans are primarily self-interested.
However, if individuals are completely egoistic or selfish, there would
be no community, only a ‘state of nature’ (individuals compete for the
resources to satisfy their own needs, and cannot rely on the help of others).
However, under the social contract, everyone agrees to abide by moral rules
and to co-operate. The rules are also enforced by the state, to minimise
cheating. Group members occasionally forego their individual needs but,
overall, they (and everyone) will benefit by being a co-operating member
of the social group.

This sounds like a plausible theory. Boehm seems to provide anthropological,
historical and other evidence for how such a social contract may have arisen.
But there is a problem with his hypothesis – it is not empirically testable
(this point is highlighted by Bernstein, p. 105). Boehm’s paper reads like
a ‘just-so’ story, based on what appears to be quite diverse (and sometimes
quite weak) evidence. Both Hobbes and Boehm offer descriptions of the circumstances
that seem to be logically required for a moral community to arise, but
it does not follow that this is what actually occurred. It would
be difficult to devise a method of demonstrating Boehm’s hypothesis, especially
since much of that evidence is out of reach, in human pre-history and in
the ‘minds’ of non-human creatures. Dentan (p. 123) also agrees that Boehm’s
metaphysical speculations are not either scientifically testable or
falsifiable.

But Boehm’s interpretation and presentation of the evidence is also
problematic. Black (p. 107) cites counter-evidence to Boehm’s view that
the group as a collective suppresses the deviant behaviour of individuals:
hunter-gather societies rarely handle conflict in a law-like way, and society
as a whole is rarely the agent of social control. In fact, there is considerable
variability between social groups in how offences are defined and dealt
with depending, for example, on the social distance and level of inequality
between the relevant parties – and this applies to both humans and non-humans
(p. 108). Gardner (p. 128) notes that mobile, egalitarian foraging groups
may not be representative of our past. Thierry (p. 144) claims that in
the simple hunter-gatherer societies on which Boehm focuses, there are
more prohibited behaviours than those relating to domination behaviour.
Knauft (p. 130) criticises the implicitly patriarchal nature of Boehm’s
hypothesis, claiming that the role of females needs greater emphasis (Flack
and de Waal’s paper, for example, provides evidence regarding the role
of female chimpanzees in facilitating conflict-resolutions).

The evolutionary biology perspective is presented in the third section,
‘Are We Really Altruists?‘ Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson
provide a summary of their 1998 book Unto Others: The Evolution and
Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Their project is a descriptive one
– to determine whether evolutionary altruism exists in nature, and whether
our motives involve an irreducible concern for the welfare of others. While
evolutionary altruism is defined as behaviour that involves a fitness cost
to the donor, and fitness benefits to the recipient (e.g. reproductive
success), psychological altruism concerns the underlying
motives
for behaviour. Sober and Wilson suggest that the evolution of psychological
altruism is facilitated by the mechanism of group selection. They suggest
that group selection is a conceptually coherent concept, that it is empirically
well-documented, and that it is particularly relevant to human evolution.
‘We propose an evolutionary argument for the claim that human beings have
altruistic ultimate motives’ (p. 185).

The final paper by Brian Skyrms, ‘Game Theory, Rationality and Evolution
of the Social Contract’ is a response to the question ‘Can Fairness
Evolve?‘ Game theory provides a mathematical or symbolic representation
of the rational strategies of a number of individuals in game-like human
interactions. In this paper, Skyrms compares two types of game theory –
the classic version, based on rational choice, and an alternative based
on evolutionary or adaptive dynamics. He illustrates the differences by
discussing a number of ‘games’ that model interactions common to any ‘social
contract’.

These last two papers are both difficult – particularly for the reader
(like myself) not overly familiar with the subject-matter. The use of probabilistic
formulae may also deter some readers uncomfortable with this methodology.
For example, from Sober and Wilson, the table below sets out the fitness
payoffs for altruistic and selfish individuals when they interact (group
size: two). The formulae determine the fitness of the two traits, Altruism
and Selfishness (p. 189-190):

 

		the other	player is
		A	S
Fitness of a	A	x + b – c	x – c
player who is	S	x + b	x

w(A) = p(x+b+c) + (1-p)(x–c)
= pb + x – c

w(S) = (q)(x+b) + (1-q)(x) = qb
+ x

Or, from Skyrms: ‘U(A|B)’ represents the playoff of strategy A when
played against strategy B. Thus, the ‘expected Fitness for a strategy is
an average of its payoffs against alternative strategies weighted by the
population proportions of other strategies’ (p. 273):

U(A) = SUM_i U(A|B_i) P(B_i)

This symbolic notation is not explained clearly enough for the non-expert
to follow. This is disappointing, since the material presented not only
provides an insightful perspective on, but is clearly relevant to, our
understanding of the basic ‘calculus’ of moral behaviour. But we must allow
for the fact that these are concisely written journal articles, which typically
focus very closely on their subject-matter, and allow little room for scene-setting.

Nevertheless, as I said earlier, this volume is a welcome addition to
the literature on morality. The mainly descriptive approach taken by the
principal authors and their commentators provides a number of alternative
answers concerning the influences or motivations underlying human moral
behaviour. And for those still wary of Darwinian evolution, note that morality
can still be a result of evolutionary processes, without being directly
selected itself. The evolutionary approach still leaves room for the effects
of social, cultural and other dynamic processes, as these papers admirably
demonstrate.

© 2001 Maria Trochatos

Maria Trochatos is
a philosophy postgraduate student at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia).
Her general field of interest is philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
Her specific research focuses on folk theories, and their relation to ‘formal’
theories of mind, biology and physics.

Categories: Philosophical, Genetics

Tags: Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences