Ethics and evolutionary theory Can an ‘ought’ be derived from an ‘is’?

stretch and challenge

Ethics and evolutionary theory Can an ‘ought’ be derived from an ‘is’?

Peter Manning explores the perennial issue of whether a matter of fact can lead logically to a matter of value

As the American political philosopher Larry Arnhart shows in Darwinian Natural Right (1998, p. 72), David Hume argues that although politicians can persuade people to display moral sentiments of kindness and sympathy, this only succeeds because our ‘nature must furnish the materials, and give us some notion of moral distinctions’. Hume’s appeal to sympathy as a foundation for ethics founders, however, on his nominalism because it looks like special pleading. In other words, sympathy has no foundations apart from those an artificially constructed social contract might provide. Hume appeals to nature but has not worked out a basis upon which such nature might be known due to knowledge being little more than ‘habits of mind’.

Kantian ethics and utilitarian ethics develop within the dualistic framework of nominalism in which the self is divorced from the world as it truly is. Within this context G. E. Moore (1873–1958) argued that what is good should be limited to what we intuit as good. In limiting the good to intuition he created his naturalistic fallacy which argues that moral imperatives cannot be derived from the way the world is. An ‘ought’ cannot be derived from an ‘is’. The door is closed on any special pleading that seeks to ground ethics in the natural world.

Our natural sentiments

It is part of the genius of Darwin that he rejected a dualistic divorce of humanity from the world by focusing on nature and the natural sentiments of sympathy and sociality as arising from our natural history. Nominalism is rejected for a middle ground between it and essentialism. Even Moore cannot be said to have totally let go of the idea of some kind of ethical universal, as he defines the good intuited as relating to the ‘pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects’ (Principia Ethica, p. 188).

The sociality of humanity is present in Moore’s notion of good. The natural basis of such human sociality was explored in Darwin’s 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin argued that there is an innate link between types of facial expressions (e.g. anger, joy) and emotional states, which allows us to interact as a social species. Such interactions in their turn promote empathy, the ability to imagine another person’s state of mind, and through one’s own experiences of pain and pleasure as an infant to experience sympathy for others. Various cross-cultural studies in psychology have supported a specieswide link between facial expression and the emotions (Mesquita and Frijda 1992; Ekman 1973).

Emotions and behaviours

David Hume also felt that the emotions were key to human motivation, as they promote goal-directed behaviours. When he states ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’ (Treatise II, iii, 3) Hume admits the primacy of emotions in directing our behaviours. Indeed, the psychologist Antonio Damasio discusses in his book Descartes’ Error (1994) his research using brain imaging and measuring skin conductivity which shows that our emotional response to situations comes before our reasoned thought processes. The expression of reason through thought and language promotes the preferences already evoked by our emotional assessments of the situation — in which case reason can never be free from the emotions as required by Kantian ethics. Psychopaths reason without emotion, but I don’t think anyone would say that is normal or healthy. Thought and emotion work together in promoting and sustaining our behaviour. Such behaviour may be more or less rational depending on its fit to the situation.

Hume hinted towards a Darwinian way forward for ethics when suggesting alongside his focus on sympathy that the ‘science of human nature could be rooted ultimately in biological sciences such as anatomy and physiology because (quoting Hume) ‘the lives of men depend upon the same laws as the lives of all other animals’ (Arnhart, p. 71).

For Aristotle too, the emotions are key to human flourishing as they promote better judgements about how to relate to the world around us. Hume signals a move away from nominalism but could not quite resource it. However, evolutionary theory and developments in psychology can. The way things are in reality can promote how we ought to respond because sympathy has a biological, evolutionaryderived foundation. Sympathy is part of the outworking of our adapted caring response towards infants that in promoting sociality increases the probability of survival of the species.

Biology as goal directed

To talk of survival of the species sounds like some kind of directed purpose is being fulfilled. How the universe and evolutionary processes came to be can be pursued within a theistic or non-theistic worldview. But what is important for our argument here is the recognition that that worldview debate can be left open as part of the mystery of existence while recognising that goaldirected purposefulness exists in biology. Organisms seek to maintain an internal balance that is stable. The biological term for this is homeostasis. Through it the brain signals when the body needs to eat, drink and sleep, and regulates our internal temperature, among many other factors.

Teleology

Hans Selyle in The Stress of Life (1976) shows how the body physically responds to stress but also seeks to return itself to a nonstressed state through the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of our nervous system. In short, teleology (biologists sometimes prefer the term teleonomy) is goal-directed activity that is present in biological organisms. To recognise this is to go beyond a descriptive focus on how things work and to also explain why things happen in the way they do. Science in all its richness focuses on both ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions when it moves from description to the provision of functional explanations.

In manifesting such goal-directed activity, biology cannot be simply reduced to its underlying physics and chemistry, as the relational nexus enables capabilities to emerge that would not exist without that relational coming together of different elements and properties. These now emergent capabilities have their own dynamic effect on future interactions at both the chemical and biological level (e.g. psychosomatic illness) which make limiting explanations to the causal processes within physics and chemistry problematic and too reductive. Or to put it another way, emergent properties create, in the words of Arnhart, ‘the structure of boundary conditions within which the physical and chemical interactions occur’ (Darwinian Natural Right, p. 247). Such an approach is also supported by the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi (1891– 1976) in Knowing and Being (1969).

Direction and orientation

Darwin’s explanation ‘of biological adaptation as the result of natural selection established a scientific teleology’, as Arnhart explains in Darwinian Natural Right (p. 244). Meaningless matter becomes filled with meaning through the organisational emergentism present in living organisms. Research by Schaffer (1989), among many other psychological studies, that provides witness to the innately preadapted gearing of human infants and their carers to engage in social relationships, also provides a powerful case for teleological-directed behaviour in humans. If sympathy is goal directed and natural then ethics can never, if we are being true to our nature, be about ‘anything goes’. Ethics has a directionality and orientation that is specific.

Nurturance

Through experience of life from a basis of nurturance as infants, sympathy plays itself out and develops in our communities the virtues by which we live. Experience, and our response to it, builds habitual behaviours in each of us as a person. Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics knew and argued this through his stress on the importance of different virtues. For Aristotle, ethics is goal directed and the cultivation of virtue through practice allows us to flourish as a person belonging to a particular community. But the virtues are not randomly chosen. Aristotle talks about moral virtues of good character such as friendliness, modesty and sincerity because he sees the lack or excess of these as vices which do harm to us and others. (Sometimes, though, behaviour that would be a vice if expressed as a norm of a person’s character can be appropriate given the needs of the situation.)

Aristotle’s idea of a golden mean between vices and virtues for each character trait can be overdone. But what these virtues speak of within our Darwinian context is sociability. It should not be a surprise to us that such qualities of character might be the focus of the good life if sociality is such a natural part of what it means to be human. Unfortunately for Aristotle, his focus on functional adaptation in biology left it for Darwin to forge the connection between nature and ethics through Darwin’s biological focus on the origin of adaptations. Be that as it may, nurturance is a natural foundation stone of human ethics, and one that females are predominantly inclined towards through their biological primary role in caring for young and a stress response more wired towards ‘tend and befriend’ than males.

Dominance

Aristotle recognises other virtues such as courage, just resentment and good temper. Within an evolutionary context these relate to the moderation of dominance-type behaviours towards others. Dominance as an evolved characteristic of human beings promotes survival through challenging dangers, ensuring access to mates, and the protection of young. The male stress response, calibrated more towards fight or flight, inclines males rather than females predominantly in the direction of dominanttype behaviours. Darwin argues that as social animals we are predisposed to group cooperation based on familial bonds and reciprocity. We have a natural concern for the general good of the group to which we belong.

For the good of our own group

Utilitarian ethics misses the point when it places concern for ‘the greatest happiness’ at the centre of its morality. Happiness is important and desirable, as Aristotle recognised by linking it to his notion of the good life, but it is not primary. In an evolutionary framework, happiness will often follow in seeking the general wellbeing of those we count as our own.

For the good of our own group we can be moved to violence — in war we may fight over resources or to protect our homes and loved ones. That we might continue to live with the values of our own group rather than have another way of living imposed on us matters to us. But violence and competition have limits if nurturance is to find its fullest expression. It is part of the job of ethics within cultural life to put limits on and productively direct the natural drive to dominance. This is best done by ensuring dialogue and participation in decisions which influence people’s lives, whether in the political, social or medical domains of cultural life.

On love, selfish genes and altruism

Dominant behaviours, with their protective orientation, work hand in hand with nurturant behaviours and their focus on enhancing human flourishing. From infancy onwards, our socialised experience within this evolved context helps form our habits of character for better or worse. On the one hand, as neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux argues, to talk of ‘selfish genes’ is unhelpful as group membership (group selection) promotes survival at the higher organisational level of species activity within the world — which is itself an expression of genetics in relation to environment. On the other hand, talk of altruism, or selfless actions, is also misplaced. Sociality and its competing pulls towards nurturance and dominance to promote survival live through us and make selfishness an aberration and pure altruism probably impossible.

It is through the interplay of the natural drives of nurturance and dominance that we learn what love is. Perhaps it is by learning to accept ourselves through self-love that our ability to love others is empowered. In terms of a psychology of personal relations, Alfred Adler’s (1870–1937) ‘individual psychology’ fits well within an evolutionary framework. Its focus on feelings of inferiority and superiority echoes concerns with dominance.

Social interest, another key aspect of Adlerian psychology, echoes sociality and nurturance. How we relate to each other as people is key in building communities of virtue which can make the most of the ethical framework that nature has handed to us.

Reciprocity

The idea of reciprocity, fairness, sharing and equitability in social relations finds expression in a wide variety of ethical theories and religious traditions. The golden rule as expressed in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth when summarising the ethical intent of the Old Testament states that we should ‘do to others whatever you would like them to do to you’ (Matthew 7:12). Kant’s categorical imperative restates the sentiment as ‘act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law’.

The utilitarianism of J. S. Mill echoes the same principle in his definition of utility, in relation to society, when he states that ‘actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness’. Even the postmodern ethical approach of Richard Rorty puts reciprocity at its pragmatic heart by asserting in its own way that if you look out for me, I’ll look out for you.

That such a sentiment and value occurs across cultures and recorded history would normally be taken to indicate the origin of reciprocity in nature rather than in nurture. But because of the pull of the naturalistic fallacy on modern thinkers there is a marked reluctance to admit this. Yet we can argue, as this article illustrates, that in ‘our natural human inclination to secure the benefits of social cooperation while protecting ourselves from being exploited by others, we appeal to reciprocity as the fundamental principle of fairness in relationships’ (Arnhart, p. 195).

Natural, cultivated and virtuous

The German philosopher Hegel (1770–1831) rejected the individualism within Kantian philosophy and stressed how the human self is constructed by its social relations. Meaning also becomes a product of those social relations. What Hegel did not have the means to achieve was the placing of such sociality within a naturalistic framework. Post-Darwin, with evolutionary theory we are able to do so. But that does not mean we have to follow Hegel’s other suggestion that humanity is the product of some kind of cosmic progress which finds its fullest expression in the self-awareness of sentient beings. The palaeontologist Stephen J. Gould (1941– 2002) argued against such a progress-driven view of evolution and the birth of morality. Rather we can say that, whatever arguments over metaphysics we might have, the natural world has made us what we are. Whether this is by chance or design does not change that, for nature constitutes our very being.

Ethics starts with care for others, fairness, and proportionate controls on violence. As social relations involve interplay between these three elements, within any given context there can be no universal definition of what good is. But good is not without content due to its basis in our adapted natures. Ethics is dynamic, personal and communal. As such, building on natural foundations, the cultivation of virtues in social life allows us to flourish. Both Aristotle and Darwin are right.

Any ethical system developed through culture which fails to adequately address fairness, care and violence will find itself subverted by our natural sensibilities at every turn. We do best in meeting the ethical challenges faced by a sentient species thrown into existence in the world, by working with our nature rather than pretending things are otherwise. But rather than aiming at consensus in ethical deliberations, which often just sharpens our differences, perhaps our evolutionaryderived capacity for innovation and creativity can be the key to finding agreed ethical solutions to the problems of life, society and technology. As chair of the French bioethics advisory committee, Jean-Pierre Changeux encouraged just such an approach. With all this in mind, let us practise the art of ethics — for, whatever we do, its expression finds its form in how we live.

Peter Manning is head of psychology at King Henry VIII School, Coventry.