(PDF) Evolution and Ethics: An Overview

21 Evolution and Ethics: An Overview Catherine Wilson INTRODUCTION Ethics in its broader sense is the study of how best to live. In the narrower sense, iden- tiied with “morality,” it is the study of right and wrong, obligations, prohibitions, and permissions, as these pertain to the actions of individuals and groups that bring harms and beneits to others. A long tradition in Western philosophy teaches that moral awareness and agency dis- tinguish human beings from non-human animals. he former are regarded as endowed with free will, or at least a deliberative faculty, and foresight, along with language and rationality. hey are seen as subject not only to civil laws which they understand to some extent and can represent to themselves, but also to moral laws commanded by a divinity or issuing from some analogous authority, perhaps even from oneself. he position that human moral agency is a form of reason responsiveness unavailable to other life forms continues to be defended (Katz 2000: 1–162; Korsgaard 1996). Evolutionary ethics takes a diferent point of departure. It treats morality as a set of dispositions and behaviors that represent transformations of the “prosocial” or “proto- moral” dispositions and behaviors of extinct human ancestors. hese dispositions and behaviors are theorized as adaptive, as having contributed to the chances of leaving a lineage, by the animals that possessed them. Insofar as human reasoning and emotion- ality depend on cortical mechanisms, they, like morphology and metabolism, can be supposed to have been shaped by evolutionary forces. As human anatomy resembles that of the apes who are our closest living evolutionary relatives, whilst being distinctive with respect to posture, brain size, dentition, hairiness, and many other features, so, the evolutionary ethicist maintains, human social behavior will exhibit analogies to, but also marked diferences from, theirs. Empathy, aggression, paciication, friendship, sexuality, and altruism have been studied in chimpanzees and 295 15034-0222d-1Pass-PV-021-r01.indd 295 5/9/2017 4:55:10 PM 296 CATHERINE WILSON bonobos, our closest living relatives, as well as in gorillas and baboons. he great apes and some monkeys appear to have the representational abilities to understand what other animals experience and know (Povinelli 1996; Russon et al. 1996). hey form friendships and alliances, and display loyalty, reciprocity, and revenge (Smuts 1985; Silk 1992). hey show distress at the deaths of ofspring and comrades (Barley 2010). Humans are less emotional and irritable than apes and their behavior is noteworthy for its impulse control. Human representational abilities extend to the remote past, the distant future, and to merely possible states of afairs. We do not only behave according to discernible patterns, but also represent, conform to, and in some cases revere norms, including those of grammar and decorum. Language and literacy permit the consoli- dation and transmission of knowledge alongside social and technological development. hese features give human morality its breadth, diversity, and cultural importance. hey do not, however, imply the irrelevance of biology for normative and metaethical moral theory. Eighteenth-century theorists of the moral sentiments such as David Hume and Adam Smith as well as ancient and early modern materialists rejected divine command theories of ethics and discussed the social function of morality, but it was Darwin’s Descent of Man of 1871 that set the present course of investigation. Darwin found precursors of the moral and the aesthetic sense in birds and mammals. Although he regarded conscience as a particular human endowment, he speculated that “any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and ilial afections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man” (Darwin 1879: 120–121). He believed further that “habits” acquired in an individual’s lifetime could become cemented into “instincts” (Darwin 1859: 208–218). he notion of hereditary habit has since been supplanted by the notion of “niche con- struction” (Odling-Smee et al. 2003), and the neo-Darwinian framework assumes the existence of multiple units of heredity (the “genes”) that direct growth and function- ing in their “vehicle” (the “phenotype”) so as to get themselves into the next generation (Dawkins 1976). Although the “gene’s eye” view raises numerous problems that Darwin himself did not foresee, including diiculties associated with the deinition of the gene (Godfrey-Smith 2009), the number and type of independent mechanisms driving evo- lution, and the levels at which it can occur (Lloyd 2012, Chapter 2 this volume), it has provided fruitful new models for understanding organisms and their interactions. On the descriptive side, evolutionary ethics comprises a number of interrelated empir- ical and computational studies. First, there are ield investigations of the behavior of other species that bear a resemblance to human moral agency. Second, there are investigations of practices and attitudes with respect to aggression, sexual behavior, cooperation, dom- inance and submission, and punishment in humans, and the presentation of adaptive hypotheses to explain them. he few remaining hunter-gatherer societies—although they are not Palaeolithic relics and although they show wide variation in their attitudes and practices from place to place—are favored targets of study, especially when they do not engage in extensive contact with outsiders or employ metal technology. hird, investiga- tors employ simulation studies to show how behavioral strategies, such as vengefulness, promiscuity, or cooperative behavior, might fare in a population over many generations when they encounter the same or opposing strategies. Evolutionary stable strategies are 15034-0222d-1Pass-PV-021-r01.indd 296 5/9/2017 4:55:10 PM EVOLUTION AND ETHICS: AN OVERVIEW 297 those that, once established, cannot be invaded by alternative strategies (Axelrod & Ham- ilton 1981; Maynard Smith & Price 1973; Skyrms 1996). On the prescriptive side, some philosophers maintain that what is known about her- itable species-speciic traits and dispositions ought to enter into our assessment of cur- rent social practices and institutions. his position has generated extended controversy. It irst appeared in the form of Social Darwinism associated with the eugenics movement, imperialism, and genocide in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Crook 1994, 2007); then, ater the Second World War, it reappeared in a series of sensational popular books focused on territoriality and implying masculine supremacy (Ardrey 1961, 1966; Tiger & Fox 1971), reinforcing the distaste amongst the educated public and professional ethicists for this line of enquiry. Since the 1990s, the ield has largely succeeded in shaking of this dismal legacy and presenting a paciic, emancipatory, and egalitarian face. However, it remains rife with oversimpliication and hasty inference. In the popular literature, male– female relations and interactions have largely dominated the agenda (Ridley 1994; Buss 2003). Discussion of these issues is reserved for the section “Metaethics and Prescriptiv- ity” below following a survey of descriptive approaches. DESCRIPTIVE EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS Altruism and Cooperation Altruism in evolutionary theory is deined as any disposition to behavior that has costs in viability or fecundity to the donor whilst beneiting the recipient; cooperation implies the acceptance of short-term certain losses for longer-term larger but riskier gains. As Dar- win observed, group-living animals undergo risks and deprivations to nourish and pro- tect their conspeciics, citing many examples of warning, grooming, feeding, and rescuing which he supposed conducive to group survival (Darwin 1879: 123–136). Where apes share food in response to begging, groom one another, and tend one another’s injuries (Koehler 1927: 308–310), humans ofer food and perform numerous tasks cooperatively, including hunting, cooking, building, and child-minding. hey care for the old when they cease to be economically productive and for their children—even when these children, by reason of some misfortune, are exceedingly unlikely to have children of their own. Some dive into icy rivers or dash into burning buildings to save the lives of strangers. Darwin saw no conlict between his hypothesis that individual organisms are in com- petition with their conspeciics to survive and reproduce and his observations of helping behavior. heir hereditary moral habits, he supposed, gave some tribes a survival advan- tage over others, a proposal revived in recent theories of group selection (Darwin 1879: 110; Sober & Wilson 1998). he neo-Darwinian paradigm of the 20th century, by con- trast, demanded explanations that could demonstrate the competitive advantage to the individual organism (or, more precisely, its genes) of altruistic behavior. Much altruistic behavior, it was argued, is directed at kin, and genes that direct the animal to incur some risk or sacriice to beneit close relatives who share that gene can be selected for (Ham- ilton 1964). Altruistic behavior directed at non-kin could then be explained as under- taken in the expectation of reciprocity (Trivers 1971; Alexander 1987). If I feed you when food is scarce and I have some, I can expect that you will feed me when food is scarce and you have some. Bats and other mammals do this, without language or ratiocination 15034-0222d-1Pass-PV-021-r01.indd 297 5/9/2017 4:55:10 PM 298 CATHERINE WILSON (Wilkinson 1988). Emotion-based mechanisms that punish selishness with exaggerated retaliation might be expected to evolve alongside altruism and cooperation. However, there is a great deal that such beneit-to-self-or-kin explanations leave mysterious. Why do we feel duty bound to look ater our aging parents when they are not going to produce more copies of our genes? Why do we feel impelled to follow our leaders into war when we are likely going to get killed and produce no ofspring at all? Why do we lavish our love and attention to men or women who will never give us any more children or even help us with the ones we already have? One possibility is that our most useful underlying altruistic dispositions can be hijacked. he behavior of organism A may be controlled in part by organism B for the latter’s advantage (Dawkins 1982: 209–249). When a parent rushes to the assistance of their own crying child this is probably kin selection at work; when a parent rushes to the aid of a stranger’s child (or writes a check to a welfare organization) this is probably manipulation that works via the arousal of anxiety, a “save the endangered child response,” that is deeply and strongly wired in because the child is likely to be one’s own. A complex approach to the problem of non-reciprocal altruism has been ofered by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (1996), who contrast the “selectionist” approach of artiicial simulation exercises in favor of an “adaptationist” efort to identify the necessary psychological mechanisms and behavioral contingencies that underlie empirically observable behavior. hey suggest that costless, unintentional beneits emitted by an individual (I allow you to follow me home, or toss my half-eaten apple over my shoulder where you hungrily pick it up) might be met with social rewards consisting of displays of warmth, loyalty, or gratitude on the part of the recipient, facilitating the transition to the emission of more costly intentional beneits. he “Baldwin Efect,” whereby organisms are selected for latent morphological or behav- ioral traits initially exhibited only under stressful or unusual circumstances, may prove helpful in understanding how this might occur (Ananth 2005). he performance of altruistic actions will in any case be facilitated by a psychologi- cal reward system that is not only gratiied by a good outcome but also gratiied by the agent’s role in bringing about the good outcome and dismayed by its failure. his explains the popularity of the Ciceronian notion that “virtue is its own reward” and the focus in modern moral theory on agency and responsibility (Williams 1981). he heroic actions of sappers and ireighters are likely supported by a complex mixture of beneit-to-self- or-kin and manipulation-by-other mechanisms relating to the social rewards obtainable and the intrinsic satisfactions obtained from moral heroism. Feelings of kinship can be exaggerated by social learning. A charismatic leader who inspires me to donate resources and efort to his cause at my own risk is a classic manipulator. Coercion and Control In any population, individuals of the same species vary according to age, size, strength, cunning, irritability, risk-friendliness, and along many other physical and personality dimensions. In many mammalian species, these diferences translate into dominance hierarchies or multiple sets of dominance hierarchies in one or both sexes that deter- mine privileges with respect to feeding, mating, grooming, and choice of location (Noë et al. 1980). Dominant males in harem-forming species collect the majority of females for insemination and thus sire the most ofspring, and high-ranking females in some species 15034-0222d-1Pass-PV-021-r01.indd 298 5/9/2017 4:55:10 PM EVOLUTION AND ETHICS: AN OVERVIEW 299 appear to suppress ovulation or access to resources in lower ranking females through behavioral or chemical means (Stockley et al. 2013). Although the dominance enjoyed by a more aggressive, cunning, or hormonally well supplied animal can thus confer beneits in the form of prolonged survival and more and better reproductive opportunities, dominance behavior is obviously relational and not a heritable trait as such. Logic demands that we understand hierarchies as arising from the adaptive tendency of smaller, weaker, less aggressive members of a species to give way, for the sake of their own well-being, to larger and more aggressive animals, acting in their own interest (Rowell 1974). Dominance can perpetuate itself within a family lineage only to the extent that, within a given environment, forceful characteristics are signiicantly heritable. Facile claims to the efect that human females prefer to mate with “alpha males” for evolutionary reasons should be regarded skeptically on both logical and empiri- cal grounds. First, the term “mating” covers a range of human behaviors from lifelong marriage with a brood of co-parented children to leeting, inconsequential encounters. At diferent stages of the life cycle, and under diferent socio-economic arrangements, women’s preferences will vary, and people’s actual situations do not in any case reliably relect their preferences as stated in surveys. Women in one relatively careful study, how- ever, did not prefer as “romantic partners” males described as aggressive or dominant, though they valued conidence and assertion along with “easygoingness” and sensitivity (Burger & Cosby 1999). Most anthropologists believe that human beings evolved away from a putative common ancestor of chimpanzees, bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), and humans, with selection for the inhibition of aggression, the reduction of the size of canine teeth, and reduction in sexual dimorphism (Shine 1990). Michael Chance has argued that the reduction in our species of a preoccupation with rank order has freed attention and energy for other pur- poses such as tool use (Chance 1978: 144). he bonobo (Pan paniscus), with its more luid social structure, hypersexuality, and female dominance over males, has been appealed to as a better model for human society than the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) (De Waal & Lanting 1997; though cf. Stanford 1998). Christopher Boehm ascribes a prefer- ence for equality to male groups of hunter-gatherers (Boehm 2000: 85). He notes, how- ever, that this implies a readiness on the part of groups to exile or assassinate intensely disliked individuals, and that sexual jealousy accounts for a high homicide rate in these societies. A disposition to obey authority—a trait Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph (2004) argue to be one of ive fundamental to human psychology—implies that I may accept another individual’s wanting me to do something as a reason for my doing it, even when it is by no means to my beneit (see also Geiger 1993). he disposition to submit and obey, and the psychological tendency to follow, and even to revere and protect violent, charismatic leaders can be supposed to have evolutionary roots. However, it assumes the economi- cally productive but morally destructive forms it does in human societies only through late appearing cultural mechanisms. Under conditions of large population, technological development, ownership of the means of production, money, and writing, human groups spontaneously take on a despotic form, with kleptocratic, legislating governments, administrative bureaucracies, military and priestly castes, occupational hierarchies, and slavery. All ancient urban societies imposed control over the movements of elite females, 15034-0222d-1Pass-PV-021-r01.indd 299 5/9/2017 4:55:10 PM 300 CATHERINE WILSON and permitted the sexual use of male and female slaves. hese institutions and practices raised new moral questions that could not have been asked in the environment of evolu- tionary adaptiveness (EEA). Aggression and Pacification Animals do not usually engage in lethal combat with members of their own species. Pri- mates can, however, be remarkably hard on one another. In baboon and chimpanzee soci- eties, males may attack, injure, and sometimes kill females, and infanticidal behavior is widespread, occurring in langurs, baboons, gorillas, and chimpanzees (Hrdy 1977, 1979). It is an efective reproductive strategy in males to kill the ofspring of females to induce ovulation and receptivity when the probability of paternity is low. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson (1994) have argued that the remarkably prevalent aggression against infants and small children by stepfathers is the human version of this behavior. he evolution of “social monogamy”— implying association and interaction amongst a male–female pair and, in humans, shared parenthood of 70–99 percent (Anderson 2006) depending on the degree of efective regulation or norm compliance—has been proposed as the basis of reduced infanticide in those primates that practice it (Opie 2013). When it comes to the treatment of unfamiliar conspeciics, primate behavior depends on the species and the circumstances of the encounter. As Edvard Westermarck pointed out, in tribal societies and in the ancient world, the stranger was regarded as someone to whom the concepts of the sanctity of life and property did not apply, or did not apply as strictly as the prohibitions against harming fellow citizens (Westermarck 1932: 199–200). Cannibalism is observed in our own species and in chimpanzees, and Richard Wrang- ham and Dale Peterson created consternation in their 1997 book Demonic Males, which described chimpanzee male raiding parties that cooperated in order to kill, savagely and excitedly, red colobus monkey. Although the monkeys were of an unrelated species and constituted a food source, the authors suggested that this behavior was a precursor to human warfare. While the extent of Palaeolithic warfare is much debated, with some writers arguing for genocidal behavior (Keeley 1996), recent analyses have argued that conlict avoidance through migration of expanding populations was the more typical pattern (Kelly 2004). he manufacture of iron tools and weapons, the invention of the bow, and the use of horses, fortiied dwelling places, and wheeled vehicles, together with high population densities, wealth accumulation, and scarcity of resources, contributed to the development and spread of militarism. Frans de Waal has argued that bonobos—although they hunt small prey, do not engage in infanticide or raiding parties, and are relatively tolerant of immigrants and one another—employ sex to ease social tensions. He cites instances of peace-making eforts amongst both forms of chimpanzee and reconciliation amongst individuals who have been involved in some altercation (de Waal 1990). In any case, there is little point in arguing over whether humans are “innately aggressive” or are made aggressive by “soci- ety.” Along with the capacity to be roused to homicidal rage and to enjoy participation in coolly coordinated military exercises, most humans are averse to killing those of whom they are not afraid and with whom they have no quarrel. he interest of groups to which they belong may diverge in this regard from their personal interests. Particular societies, from gangs to nations, strive to inform their members, by direct instruction and by the 15034-0222d-1Pass-PV-021-r01.indd 300 5/9/2017 4:55:10 PM EVOLUTION AND ETHICS: AN OVERVIEW 301 presentation of salient models, as to obligatory, permissible, and prohibited forms and targets of lethal aggression. Reproduction and the Sexual Division of Labor Of particular interest for evolutionary ethics are patterns of behavior related to reproduc- tive strategies and parental behavior. Because this is an intriguing and popular subject, much oversimpliication has infected the discussion. It is commonly observed, for exam- ple, that male fertility is “in principle” much higher than female fertility across a whole range of sexually reproducing taxa. Female fertility is accordingly regarded by biologists as a universal “scarce resource.” From this it is held to follow that males and females have diverse and sometimes conlicting reproductive strategies: that females are choosy and coy, males bold and undiscriminating; that males provide “resources” in the form of sub- sistence to females to acquire “mating opportunities,” and that human females choose, once for all, “good providers” or males with “the best genes” as a lifelong mates, while human males make more “mating efort” and choose their many temporary mates on the more supericial criteria of face and igure. With reproductive strategies supposedly imprinted into the respective psychological templates of human beings, these generalities are held to explain many social observations and to have prescriptive implications. hey can, however, be criticized as irrelevant, contradictory, or misleading, especially when the term “mating” is used sometimes to mean “marrying” and sometimes to mean “having sex with.” Chimpanzees have not one but three main patterns of sexual association: consort- ships, in which a female and a male sequester themselves from the rest of the group and remain together as a sexually exclusive pair for as long as a month; possessive rela- tionships, in which a dominant male tries to monopolize a female or several females in estrus; and opportunistic mating, in which several males take turns mating with a single female in estrus. here are parallels to all these forms in human relationships, but an exceptional feature of our species is that human life relects “the direct, deliberate, and conscious intervention of parents and other close kin on the sexual lives of their descen- dants” (Walker et al. 2011). Arranged marriage is arguably a basic pattern of human pair-bond formation, dat- ing back at least 50,000 years. In those hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied, such marriages produce somewhere between 70 and 99 percent of a woman’s ofspring, depending on the degree of social policing and internalization of norms (Anderson 2006). he preferences of parents may accommodate or coincide with personal attraction between the pair, but factors such as status, kinship relations, and intertribal alliances, as well as parental estimates of factors conductive to the production of a healthy lineage, are apt to enter into it. his inluence may render much discussion of mate-preferences in evolutionary psychology, such as the male preference for a particular waist-to-hip ratio (Singh 2002), somewhat beside the point, along with the theory that good moral charac- ter and “creative intelligence” were targets of sexual selection in the EEA (Miller 2000). Extra-pair mating is, however, more likely to relect the personal choices of the partici- pants, and if it produces many ofspring, it is clearly of evolutionary signiicance. Humans are one of a small number of species in which males engage in paternal care (Geary 2000). Male chimpanzees do not know who their ofspring are, and it does not 15034-0222d-1Pass-PV-021-r01.indd 301 5/9/2017 4:55:10 PM 302 CATHERINE WILSON concern them; human beings, by contrast, attach importance to social fatherhood even in conditions where biological fatherhood is not understood, or where it is less signiicant than the paternal or avuncular role played a man who has a relationship with the child’s mother. Reproductive skew in humans—the greater variance in the number of ofspring born to males than to females—is also unusually small in humans relative to other mammals, making over-general points about the massive number of sperm theoretically available largely irrelevant to the human case. he average number of living ofspring—four to ive—outside of societies practicing contraception, abortion, and infanticide is obviously the same in both sexes. Although men can father children in advanced old age while new motherhood ater age ity is highly unusual, few males in fact become fathers ater the age of ity in hunter-gatherer societies (Buller 2005: 220). Both sexes have incentives to be choosy and coy, as well as indiscriminate and sexually aggressive, especially when eco- nomic dependencies enter the picture. Pursuit can be costly and choosiness a waste of time. “Promiscuity” can enhance fecundity or be a disliked trait and a basis for rejection. he notions that women do not sufer from sexual jealousy and have no biological motives to adultery can only be understood as some people’s wishful thinking (cf. Harris 2004). he observation that both sexes are specialized for reproduction but in diferent ways raises questions as to the natural and morally defensible division of labor. Foraging patterns and predation practices do not difer in most mammals, but they are subtly diferent in chimpanzees and bonobos, and most societies assign special roles and occu- pations to men and women respectively. he portrayal in countless museum dioramas of a nuclear cave-family consisting of a couple of children and a maternal parent waiting at the campire and a male parent returning from a successful all-day hunt with the family’s nourishment is nevertheless a fantasy. Sarah Hrdy (2009) has provided strong evidence that human were originally “cooperative breeders” with “allomothers” including boys and girls, aunts, and grandparents sharing childcare, permitting and encouraging the human pattern of long dependency, long life, and fairly rapid reproduction. In hunter-gatherer societies, women with or without their children in tow cover large territories, ish, hunt small game, and in the southern latitudes provide most of the calories (Lee & DeVore 1968; Estioko-Griin & Griin 1981) Conscience and the Moral Sentiments he “moral sentiments” described by Adam Smith in the 18th century (Smith [1759] 2009— including sympathy, concern for the welfare of kin, the diminishing intensity of moral concern with social distance, and regard for the “merit” and “propriety” of actions—accord well with the sort of psychological platform needed to support group living in the human mode. Morality is frequently opposed to immediate self-interest, and its psychological platform involves an understanding of and concern for the Other. It is strikingly manifest in situations in which an agent could perform an action in their own interest but to the disadvantage of another without experiencing retaliation, either because the action is carried out in secret or because the other is powerless to retaliate. Moral systems are in the main prohibitive; their “duties” are concerned with the avoid- ance of practices of deception, abandonment, disobedience, non-fulillment of contracts and promises (Wilson 2004). 15034-0222d-1Pass-PV-021-r01.indd 302 5/9/2017 4:55:10 PM EVOLUTION AND ETHICS: AN OVERVIEW 303 Both Smith and Darwin laid importance on “conscience” as a distinctive human men- tal feature. Smith pointed out that guilt and shame in the perpetrator tend to follow deceptive and unkind or unjust action, even when human punishment is not anticipated. Although there is the expected spectrum of guilt-proneness in any population, people who harm others and do not experience remorse are characterized as psychopaths and regarded as dangerous and as needing to be immobilized. Humans are disposed to believe that supernatural forces can perceive and evaluate all their motivations and actions and will punish them for infractions of moral rules and the breaking of other restrictive taboos by visiting them with death or illness. Religiosity in this sense has been proposed as an adaptation underwritten by cortical mechanisms that make human morality possi- ble and co-existence productive (Atran & Norenzayan 2004). hat selish behavior, espe- cially female sexual indulgence and unsanctioned male violence, entails punishment or death brought about by inexorable cosmic forces is a view expressed and inculcated in myths and stories not only in traditional societies but also in sophisticated iction. METAETHICS AND PRESCRIPTIVITY All cultures demand restrictions on killing, bullying, some forms of sexual behavior, and deception, and operate with notions of fairness, purity, and propriety. Darwin, like many of his predecessors, was nevertheless impressed by the distance between the morality of “savages” and that of his own highly proper Victorian culture which was at the same time inluenced by Benthamite ideals of the general welfare and wealthy enough to realize them. He noted and approved the existence of hospitals and orphanages that extended care and the preservation of life to the sick, disabled, insane, and abandoned, whose fate would likely have been otherwise in prehistoric times. He commented on the tendency of artiicial helps to perpetuate socially undesirable physical and psychological traits, but argued that such institutions probably added little to the genetic burden since their inmates did not produce large families. In any case, he said, we could not check our sym- pathy “even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature” (Darwin 1879: 134). Darwin’s worries on this score raise irst the question of the relationship between human nature (to the extent that we can sensibly employ this term) and the evaluation of attitudes and practices; and second the question of the epistemological status of moral claims. For a number of writers, evolutionary ethics holds out the old promise of taking us back to a life according to nature, ofering formulas for the construction of a social world which “matches our tendencies” and erases the distortions of civilization (Hobel et al. 1976; see also Dennett 1996: 268). Steven Pinker says that the new sciences of human nature, which include evolutionary psychology, “can help lead the way to a realistic, bio- logically informed humanism . . . hey promise a naturalness in human relationships, encouraging us to treat people in terms of how they do feel rather than how some theory says they ought to feel” (Pinker 2002: xi). Most moral theorists and some biologists have been skeptical of such claims (Kitcher 1985; Lewontin et al. 1984). Among the venerable 19th-century opponents of the natural life were the philosopher J. S. Mill and the Darwinian comparative anatomist homas Henry Huxley. Mill claimed that the term “nature” was “one of the most copious sources 15034-0222d-1Pass-PV-021-r01.indd 303 5/9/2017 4:55:10 PM 304 CATHERINE WILSON of false taste, false philosophy, false morality, and even bad law” (Mill [1874] 1904: 7). Huxley agreed with Darwin regarding the existence of an evolutionary basis for morality but declared in his Romanes Lectures that the struggle to exist at the expense of others was frankly opposed to morality (Huxley [1893] 2004: 27). As noted earlier, appeals to evolutionary theory were associated with racist and eugen- icist programs that took progress and improvement as their goals, also with a low esti- mation of the non-reproductive capabilities of women. he various “races” were seen as engaged in competition in a struggle for existence, with the imperial powers able to speed nature along in this regard. Demands for women’s emancipation and access to the visible and lucrative positions were argued to be incompatible with conditions condu- cive to optimal reproduction. If the morally good was to coincide with the set of behav- iors regarding kin, treatment of animals, sex, aggression, cooperation, and hierarchy that appears to be species-typical in the ways suggested above, and so to characterize human nature, we would have a prescriptive morality that endorsed the following: 1. Homosexuality is permissible. 2. Be kind to your close relatives. 3. Don’t deceive your fellows for your own beneit. 4. Help your friends but not your enemies. 5. Be omnivorous. 6. Infanticide is permissible. 7. Polygynous and polyandrous relationships are permissible. 8. Marriages ought normally to be arranged by one’s elders, but adultery is permissible if detection can be avoided. 9. Males and females should contribute diferently to subsistence. 10. Respect for the lives of strangers belonging to other groups is optional. 11. Assassinate anyone in your group who is behaving too obnoxiously or endangering others. 12. Rape is a permissible human mating strategy. Tested against the sensibilities of academy-trained moral theorists in the West, we would probably ind general agreement with 1, 2, and 3; some degree of support for 4 and 5, but also resistance from peacemakers and vegetarians; serious reservations and demands for further qualiications about 6, 7, 8, and 9; and outright rejection of 10, 11, and 12. Few would sign up to this code as a “realistic, biologically informed humanism.” A feature of moral theory as it has developed since the 18th century is its evolution toward generality and abstraction. Rights and obligations as enshrined in written laws have become less conditional on social class, sex, and race, and moral theory has introduced universaliza- tion and equalization motifs such as Kant’s universality test and Bentham’s greatest good for the greatest number criterion. Hume’s observation that “ought” cannot logically be derived from “is” (Hume [1740] 1978: 302) is apt to be triumphantly presented in any critical discussion of evolution and ethics. he fact that some trait or tendency has survived attempts by nature to eliminate it from the gene pool does not imply, it is frequently argued, that a modern human soci- ety would not be better of repressing its expression. But contrary to this assumption, reasonable arguments for why we ought to do or forbear from doing particular things 15034-0222d-1Pass-PV-021-r01.indd 304 5/9/2017 4:55:10 PM EVOLUTION AND ETHICS: AN OVERVIEW 305 are normally inferences from “is”s. We believe inebriated pilots cause plane crashes, and that therefore pilots ought not to be allowed to drink before lying planes. We think abused children sufer pain and confusion with lifelong efects, and ought therefore to be removed from abusive homes. he invisible premises needed to make these argu- ments into what look more like “logical” deductions are statements of value, which are themselves disguised “ought”s and “ought not”s (e.g., “Plane crashes, pain, and confusion are bad; they ought to be prevented”) that are taken to be minimally controversial. he resulting arguments are not conclusive insofar as they invite objections and qualii cations that appeal to competing values or additional facts. On the minimally controversial assumption that a morally better world is one with less exploitation and parasitism (as opposed to productive symbiosis), less human- induced sufering and deprivation, and more opportunity for people to express and enjoy the fruits of their own capabilities, evolutionary ethics has a good deal to ofer. It is not, as is sometimes claimed, essentialist: the observation that individuals within a popu- lation vary with respect to their physical and psychological traits and employ a multi- plicity of context-sensitive strategies to live and reproduce is fundamental to biological thinking. he evolutionary perspective quickly reveals the absurdity of the intellectual tradition that teaches that women are the bodies of the world, seeing to the continuation of the species, while men are its minds, seeing to its cultural development. Everyone’s “purpose”—what our minds and bodies have been shaped to do—is the same: to get our genes into future generations. But everybody can use them for other purposes, and the diminution of rationality that biological purpose implies afects both sexes equally. Where exploitation and deprivation are concerned, a long and distinguished literary- anthropological tradition, memorably represented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau ([1754] 1990), depicts the trade-ofs between economic and technological development and indi- vidual happiness. More recently, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins describes the !Kung of East Africa, who had modest wants and technologies to address them that were simple but adequate, in a famous of the cuf remark, as “the original aluent society” (Sahlins 1968). He contrasts the classical economists’ view of the human being as a creature of almost unlimited wants and limited means to achieve them. Meaningful work on behalf of oneself, kin, and friends, that involved personal control over foraging, manufacture, and decoration, were prominent features of the EEA that have been lost in the modern organization of labor. Moral progress would restore to our species as much as possible of the autonomy its members formerly enjoyed in this regard. A fuller and more accurate understanding of the range and variety of male and female reproductive strategies and the psychology underlying them, might encourage a critical attitude toward punitive divorce laws and the double standard. Recognition of the economic role of females in prehistoric times and the importance of “alloparent- ing” ofers a way of meeting arguments that women are not psychologically suited to working outside the home and that their full-time presence is critical for the intellectual and emotional development of their children. Further, we may learn to see abortion as a vastly preferable alternative to infanticide in coping with the age-old problem of unwanted ofspring. We can understand that rape, though not amongst the most com- mon male reproductive strategies, and likely much rarer in an era without automobiles, weapons, and apartments with soundproof walls, will occur where the incentives are powerful and the disincentives weak, because there is suicient human dimorphism 15034-0222d-1Pass-PV-021-r01.indd 305 5/9/2017 4:55:10 PM 306 CATHERINE WILSON in size and strength to make it possible, and because female choice works powerfully enough to reject courtship overtures. he evolutionary perspective can explain the robustness of manipulation and par- asitism in the natural world and sensitize us to its efects in the social world. We can understand how cooperation and competition can operate simultaneously in dyads and in larger groups and cease to be surprised when this happens. We can become more cyn- ical about the powers of charismatic leaders and less credulous about the excellence of the socially dominant. We can learn from a consideration of the behavior of our non-human ancestors that the liability to destructive homicidal rages on the part of some members of our species is not a set of baling singularities resulting in unforeseeable tragedies, but to be expected in populations whose members vary in their coeicient of irritability. Because some persons lack the inhibitory mechanisms that function in most people’s frontal lobes, we should design our laws so that such people cannot get their hands on lethal weapons unavailable to them in the EEA. Moral realists (Brink 1989; Shafer-Landau 2003; Copp 2008) maintain that the facts about what to think, how to behave, and how to react morally, exist independently of all existing beliefs and practices. 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