stretch and challenge
What has evolutionary theory got to do with ethics?
Peter Manning explores how ethics and ethical theory have developed in modern moral philosophy
All exam boards: ethics options
In the last issue of RELIGIOUS STUDIES REVIEW (Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 28–33) we considered the influence of the problem of knowledge over ethical theories. Over the next two issues we will unpack the proposal made at the end of that article.
Ethics has not come to the end of the road in a sea of relativism or emotivism — in other words, ethics is not just down to what individuals choose to want or like. A universal, naturalistic foundation for ethics can be argued from the basis of evolutionary theory, and this has implications for how we discuss normative ethics. Before we address the positive arguments that build this new, emerging perspective in ethical theory, it might be helpful to readdress the problem of knowledge in relation to ethics.
Postmodern ethics
The American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007) argued that the world is indifferent to our descriptions of it. Our talk and understanding of things are conveyed through language. The meaning of language is discerned through the use of language. Meaning is thus trapped in language and has no essential connection with reality. Any meanings our language use may create are dependent on using language in a way that creates that meaning. There are multiple ways to relate to and think about reality through the use of language. Language use cuts us off from reality and denies us certainty because of the constant trace of other possibilities. Understanding can always be otherwise. Knowledge becomes pragmatic — what works the best, that which is most useful. Some writers refer to philosophy and ethics purposefully pursued within the context of no foundations to knowledge as postmodern.
What kind of ethic can knowledge produce?
If knowledge is pragmatic then what kind of ethic can it produce? Rorty recognises that we exist in a world in which humans clearly live in communities, and communities consist of many individuals. Whatever the truth of things, that we cannot know, we have to contend with this basic aspect of our lived experience. It is in this context that Rorty argues we should live in the best possible society by maximising freedom, and by making the best possible effort to make our communal institutions and practices more just and less cruel.
Such a proposal goes beyond the democratic ethos of preference utilitarianism because it sets at the centre of ethics humanitarian virtues of justice and the avoidance of cruelty. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that, even in a democracy, a majority in a society under pressure might elect a Fascist or fundamentalist government that doesn’t mind less justice and increasing cruelty to parts of its population. However, why should the just and kind virtues favoured by Rorty be given pride of place? From a postmodern perspective it could be argued that the decision is pragmatic and not based on knowledge of reality. Living in a violent, unjust society could be less of a happy or desirable place to be as there is no guarantee that injustice and violence would not be turned against you. Experience of life teaches us this.
Nominalism or essentialism in knowledge
Debates about language have always been at the heart of the problem of knowledge and ethics. In medieval philosophy a position known as nominalism argued that reality is made up of ‘atomic facts’, which is to say that everything exists individually from other things. The human mind imposes on reality its perception of universal truths in order to organise our sensory experience of these individual things. Such universals are constructions of the mind using language and do not exist in reality. These ideas, along with the rediscovery of the ancient Greek writings of Pyrrhonian scepticism, played themselves out in the influential thought of the French philosopher Montaigne (1533– 92).
Opposed to this nominalist approach was the essentialist school of thought, which argued that things have attributes that make them what they are independent of context. It is in the essential nature of the thing to be the way that it is. The human mind does not impose universals to make sense of our experience, but rather perceives reality the way it does because reality is ordered in that way in the first place. For essentialism, universals exist outside of the human mind and exist eternally.
‘I think, therefore I am’
The problem of establishing access to universals as a foundation for knowledge eventually led Rene Descartes (1596–1650) to attempt a rationalist foundation for knowledge in his famous turn to personal experience to ward off scepticism in our knowing – ‘I think, therefore I am’. This foundation was challenged by the nominalist philosophy of David Hume (1711–76) that reduced our understanding of reality to the status of ‘habits of the mind’. Kant, in his turn, developed his own response suggesting that the mind orders and shapes our experiences of the world through its own organising capabilities. These are the forms of intuition (e.g. time and space) and categories of understanding (e.g. quantity and quality).
This gives mind a clearer role in how knowledge is formed in the way that it is but also puts these organising capabilities of mind between us and reality. The world of our everyday experience (the phenomenal world) is divorced from the world as it is in itself (the noumenal world). Kantian philosophy establishes no necessary connection between the two. The noumenal world remains opaque to us however rich our descriptions of the phenomenal world become. It is the far country we assume is there but can never arrive at no matter how far we travel.
Gunton’s reality
Theologian Colin Gunton (1941–2003) argues in his book The One, The Three and the Many (1993) that it was a mistake for Kant to rest the ultimate responsibility for the shape of our knowledge on these capabilities of mind. Mind works the way it does in sensing time, space, quantity and so on because the mind relates to features perceived in the nature of reality that are present in everything. Through these features the mind engages with reality in ever deeper and richer ways. Rather than the mind being cut off from the world, the world structures the very way the mind works. Gunton calls these features ‘open transcendentals’: perichoresis (a technical term from Christian theology), relationality and substantiality. In brief, Gunton argues that everything is in relation to that which exists around it.
Things interpenetrate and influence each other as the relations between things create, give form to, and keep particular things in existence. Reality is dynamically relational and our capabilities of mind, as a product of this relationality, enable us to experience the complex relational nature of reality. Reality is not hidden from us as reality subsists in and is constituted by the relationships our minds are geared to make sense of. However, it is as humans that we are sensing and understanding the relationships between things around us, we don’t see through noise as bats do. Knowledge is conditioned by our human nature and is therefore coming at reality from a particular perspective, a set of relationships.
This perspective does not make our knowledge less valid, as in a relational world there is no non-perspectival way of approaching the world. In a relational reality there is no static universe from which we can derive certainty in our knowledge but that does not mean we cannot know reality for we are embodied within it. To chase certainty is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of reality because knowledge, rather than being concrete, is relational, dynamic, perspectival and realist. This realisation provides foundations upon which a naturalistic theory such as evolution may begin to provide essentialist-leaning insights into human nature.
Human nature is a product of evolution
When discussing human nature, the theory of evolution cuts against the idea of any species having a necessary essence — for all living things are evolved in relation to their environment and changing through time. However, in any given moment in evolutionary history a given species has specific capabilities and facets that are common for that species. It is in this less eternal sense that we can rescue something of the realist intent of essentialism, and also rein in the scepticism of nominalism.
The biology of Aristotle (384–322 BC) is focused on how species have functionally adapted in their environment. In contrast the biology of Charles Darwin (1809– 82) is focused on how these adaptations originated through evolutionary history.
Darwin makes his naturalistic intent clear in saying that, regarding the classification of species, it ‘must be strictly genealogical in order to be natural’ (On the Origin of Species, 6th edition, p. 323). Homo sapiens have a continually evolving nature derived from evolutionary processes.
The drive to understand
Language provides a means of furthering our understanding of relationships between things so that we might produce more useful metaphors, models and theories. The more meaningful and useful a metaphor or theory is, the more likely its success in symbolically grasping characteristics of the relationships between things in reality. Technical applications of scientific knowledge show us that our minds can successfully model something of the complex nature of reality through language.
But why is the drive to understand represented in language through our creation of theories and stories so strong in us as a species? Evolutionary theory would suggest that our natural curiosity, imagination and creativity provide a survival advantage. That through technology we might end up wiping ourselves out with nanotechnology or the atomic bomb is a new cultural problem that does not invalidate hundreds of thousands of years of adaptive success. Through language we express our relationships to the world and our understanding of it. Evolutionary theory is extraordinarily rich in meaning and explanatory power.
Are humans social animals by nature?
Within the nominalist perspective Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) states in Chapter 4 of his book Leviathan that there is ‘nothing in the world universal but names…for the things named are every one of them individual and singular’. In the same vein David Hume declares in A Treatise of Human Nature that all ‘beings in the universe, considered in themselves, appear loose and independent of each other’. Given the relational nature of reality, is construing things, let alone human beings, as individual the right starting point?
Hobbes sees humans as individualistic, selfish and predatory and argues that reason applied through society needs to be used to rein in our brutish inclinations through the development of a social contract and its constructed morality. Such an antisocial view of humanity echoes that of Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic (p. 336 ff). In contrast to this perspective stands Aristotle who suggested in Generation of Animals (753a8–14) that the time and energy invested in rearing human children promotes a social nature in humanity.
Darwin agreed, stating in The Descent of Man (1936, p. 478):
‘The feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of the parental or filial affections, since the social instinct seems to be developed by the young remaining for a long time with their parents; and this extension may be attributed in part to habit, but chiefly to natural selection.’
In psychology the evolutionary theory of attachment developed by John Bowlby (1907–1990) directly supports this. We rely on significant relationships from birth to nurture us. We are hard-wired in the brain to respond to infants in caring ways. Evidence for this and the nurturing instinct has been found to exist through various cross-cultural studies (Ainsworth 1967, 1971; Fox 1977; Tronick 1992).
Cross-cultural studies are important because they indicate that such a capability is part of our adapted nature rather than a product of culture (nurture). In short, it is hard to argue against the idea that humans are social by nature. This rejects a nominalist and individualistic approach to understanding what it means to be human. This rejection ought to inform our understanding of ethics — for example, it shows the problems inherent in basing ethics on egoism, or acting out of self-interest, as an approach to ethics.