"Common" morality on everyone's part (except for a basic DNA mortality completely unsuitable outside of the small societies in which its imperatives developed) has its roots in a fixed and defined higher moral frame of reference such as The Bible, not in the vagaries of moral relativism."
It’s far more likely that the religious apologists have their argument back to front. It makes more sense to consider that Scripture (which allegedly comes from God) is actually a product of humans and their morality. Religion and scripture are defined by morality - not the other way around. So...
How do we explain why we know good from bad if there is no God?
1 In the beginning
Approximately 200,000 years ago, the process of evolution by natural selection resulted in a primate species emerging that was physically identical to its predecessors and contemporaries, but with a tiny difference in its DNA. This resulted in brain functions capable of taking many abilities that had evolved over millions of years to a spectacular new level of sophistication. These included reasoning, learning, explanation, language, emotions, knowledge sharing and many more. This species was homo sapiens and initially they lived in the same way as their predecessors, using their inherent morality to be successful and survive. We still observe this inherent morality in other primates as well as ourselves.
2 Natural selection
Natural selection ensures that behaviours which are successful become dominant, but that's an incredibly slow process. Homo sapiens were able to use reasoning to identify those behaviours and teach them to subsequent generations, and so small structured societies were formed with structured rules and explanations of the natural world. The knowledge gained by one generation wold be passed on to the next. As societies slowly increased in size over hundreds of thousands of years, so the rules of societies also evolved. As knowledge increased over time, so our explanations became more accurate. And so we fast forward to the present day, where we see a variety of societies with a variety of rules and beliefs, but we are still learning, still evolving our ideas, improving our knowledge.
3 Biology and Culture
So what of the principles which distinguish between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour which is what we call "morality"? These are are the same principles given above. Our inherent morality is determined by our emotions and in particular our empathy. We suffer when we cause suffering, we feel happy when we reduce suffering. These feelings, like all emotions, cannot be learned. That's why even if we just read stories of suffering and pain, we feel disgusted or angry. This inherent morality results in our general abhorrence of the obvious wrongness of killing, selfishness, stealing, etc. This inherent morality was identified in our distant past, the oldest descriptions of which is in ancient Buddhism and Hinduism. Note that the ancient philosophers didn't invent the rules of good and bad - they observed them and wrote down what they reasoned to be true. Selfishness, killing and stealing can have short term benefits, but are not sustainable. They are bad. By definition.
4 Right from Wrong
How do we know what is right and wrong? Well, because of inherent morality, we just "know". But because we are homo sapiens we can extend that inherent knowledge using reason and learning. Being good is therefore a combinations of what we emotionally feel (which governs the "big" moral questions) and what we learn (which has a more sophisticated influence, described later). It can be described in a nutshell as respecting people's rights, minimising suffering, and increasing happiness. The earliest known codification of this principle is in ancient Buddhism, but it appears over and over again in every written, human moral code, because it works and it makes sense.
5 Not Universal
Note that there are a minority of individuals who do not share the same emotional responses as the vast majority. We can consider this minority to be "abnormal" and neuroscience is explaining how this happens. Psychopaths are the most extreme examples. So from this point on, when I refer to "people" or "we" or "us" or whatever, I am referring to the "normal" people who from the vast majority of any society.
So, both our biological imperatives and society contribute to individual morality, and in any society the vast majority of individual moralities coincide and are common, thereby forming the basis of social morality, which gives further feedback to each individual's morality, and so on. The wellbeing of the individuals depends on the wellbeing of society, and vice versa, so they work together. Morality continues to evolve way beyond the obvious basics of killing and stealing, so that nuanced moral decisions on human rights, free speech, discrimination, safety, quality of life, punishment, justice, healthcare and so on gradually become enshrined in law as we learn more and more with each generation.
Slight diversion… I know Richard Dawkins is a pompous, po-faced, opinionated, individual when it comes to religion, but his explanations of genetics and evolution are superb. I recommend the book "The Selfish Gene" for a great explanation on why we act for the "greater good" without realising it. Anyway, back to the story…
6 The Evolution of Democracy
The success of a society is compromised when the common morality is overruled by the will of a powerful few (a dictatorship). Even worse, the powerful few can indoctrinate people into believing bad things are good, typically by de-humanising their enemies. History shows that such societies result in suffering and natural selection results in such societies becoming extinct over time. The most successful societies are based on the common morality (democracies). This evolution is of course ongoing, and today we can see a whole range of societies, including dictatorships that are either doomed to failure or on the road to democracy. We see democracies with a range of political systems, some more successful than others so that democracy itself is still evolving. Various political systems come and go as we seek the best way to represent the common view of the people.
The reason dictatorships don't work is that the principle of common morality is removed because the morality of a powerful few takes over. And to become one one of the "powerful few" typically requires very bad behaviour. So it's extremely unlikely that a powerful few would be a group of good people whether they are atheists or theists. If a "powerful few" somehow take control of a democracy and its military and law enforcement, then it is no longer a democracy, and will eventually fall apart and become a democracy again. The transition from dictatorship to democracy is never smooth. Democracy cannot be created - it has to evolve. Fledgling democracies can fall apart spectacularly into dictatorships and then bounce back into democracy, perhaps several times, until democracy gets traction. And all of these transitions typically result in a lot of blood being shed. But the observed fact over thousands of years is that human society is naturally tending towards democracy.
7 The Fact of Moral Relativism
A result of human morality is moral relativism. This is the term that describes the fact that although people agree on the basic inherent moral code described above, they can (and do) disagree on more subtle aspects of morality, so that 100% of morality can never be 100% absolute. Different cultures have different moral standards and they vary over time. Misconceptions about moral relativism include the idea that it advocates the tolerance of all behaviour regardless of how bad it is. Moral relativism is simply the observation that different moral or ethical frameworks can be seen in various historical and cultural circumstances. Some religious apologists equate an extreme form of moral relativism (there is no such thing as right and wrong) with atheism. Needless to say, hardly any person in their right mind thinks in that way. You don't need God to be good!
8 Absolute Morality?
There are also religious apologists who advertise that they have an absolute definition of right and wrong, which is manifested in what they call "Scripture". This concept doesn't hold water because each person interprets Scripture according to what they feel is right and wrong and over time, Scripture has been (and still is) used as the basis for a range of contradictory moral judgements. This is not a criticism of Scripture - it is simply a demonstration that our interpretation (based on our emotions) overrules the words of Scripture that don't make moral sense to us, and confirms the words of Scripture that do make moral sense. That process happens all the time with everything we read and everything we are told. That's why religious apologists who disagree with each other, all agree that Scripture is absolute. It's absolute to them as individuals. When people are asked to write down a list of what is right and wrong, the vast majority produce the same list regardless of their backgrounds or religious belief or non-belief. We don't need that list in order to know right from wrong. The list comes from what we know is right and wrong, and what we've learned.
9 Biology meets Psychology
The science behind cultural evolution is known as Dual inheritance theory (DIT) and there's a good summary on wikipedia
9.1 DIT
DIT holds that genetic and cultural evolution interacted in the evolution of Homo sapiens. DIT recognizes that the natural selection of genotypes is an important component of the evolution of human behaviour and that cultural traits can be constrained by genetic imperatives. However, DIT also recognizes that genetic evolution has endowed the human species with a parallel evolutionary process of cultural evolution. DIT makes three main claims:
9.1.1 Culture capacities are adaptations
The human capacity to store and transmit culture arose from genetically evolved psychological mechanisms. This implies that at some point during the evolution of the human species a type of social learning leading to cumulative cultural evolution was evolutionarily advantageous.
9.1.2 Culture evolves
Social learning processes give rise to cultural evolution. Cultural traits are transmitted differently than genetic traits and, therefore, result in different population-level effects on behavioural variation.
9.1.3 Genes and culture co-evolve
Cultural traits alter the social and physical environments under which genetic selection operates. For example, the cultural adoptions of agriculture and dairying have, in humans, caused genetic selection for the traits to digest starch and lactose, respectively. As another example, it is likely that once culture became adaptive, genetic selection caused a refinement of the cognitive architecture that stores and transmits cultural information. This refinement may have further influenced the way culture is stored and the biases that govern its transmission.
DIT also predicts that, under certain situations, cultural evolution may select for traits that are genetically maladaptive. An example of this is the demographic transition, which describes the fall of birth rates within industrialized societies. Dual inheritance theorists hypothesize that the demographic transition may be a result of a prestige bias, where individuals that forgo reproduction to gain more influence in industrial societies are more likely to be chosen as cultural models.
9.2 Not By Genes alone
Also recommended is the book "Not By Genes Alone" by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd...
Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth using an incredible variety of tools and subsistence techniques. Our societies are larger, more complex, and more cooperative than any other mammal's. In this stunning exploration of human adaptation, Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that only a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can explain these unique characteristics.
Not by Genes Alone offers a radical interpretation of human evolution, arguing that our ecological dominance and our singular social systems stem from a psychology uniquely adapted to create complex culture. Richerson and Boyd illustrate here that culture is neither superorganic nor the handmaiden of the genes. Rather, it is essential to human adaptation, as much a part of human biology as bipedal locomotion. Drawing on work in the fields of anthropology, political science, sociology, and economics—and building their case with such fascinating examples as kayaks, corporations, clever knots, and yams that require twelve men to carry them—Richerson and Boyd convincingly demonstrate that culture and biology are inextricably linked, and they show us how to think about their interaction in a way that yields a richer understanding of human nature.
In abandoning the nature-versus-nurture debate as fundamentally misconceived, Not by Genes Alone is a truly original and groundbreaking theory of the role of culture in evolution and a book to be reckoned with for generations to come.
“I continue to be surprised by the number of educated people (many of them biologists) who think that offering explanations for human behavior in terms of culture somehow disproves the suggestion that human behaviour can be explained in Darwinian evolutionary terms. Fortunately, we now have a book to which they may be directed for enlightenment . . . . It is a book full of good sense and the kinds of intellectual rigor and clarity of writing that we have come to expect from the Boyd/Richerson stable.”
-Robin Dunbar, Nature
9.3 The Way Things Are vs. The Way Things Ought To Be - The Science of Morality
Religious apologists tend to argue about the way things ought to be - rather than the way things are. So let's understand the facts of morals and values.
The "primary unit of biology and society" is a human being, and in this example it is human beings who are individually the target of evolution by natural selection and as a population, the target of social evolution. The survival and flourishing of the organisms is the basis our values and morals, and we can observe the conditions by which humans flourish. Examples:
- Behaviour genetics shows that half of the variances among people in temperament, personality, and many political, economic, and social preferences, are inherited.
- Evolutionary theory shows that the principle of reciprocal altruism is universal; people do not by nature give generously unless they are likely to receive something in return.
- Evolutionary psychology shows that the principle of moralistic punishment is universal; people do not long tolerate free loaders who continually take but don't give.
- Behavioural game theory explains "within-group amity" and "between-group enmity", i.e. a trust in-group members until they prove to be distrustful, and a distrust of out-group members until they prove to be trustworthy.
- Behavioural economics explains the almost universal desire of people to trade with one another, and how trade establishes trust between strangers and lowers "between-group enmity", and produces greater prosperity for both trading partners.
So we can see that science provides evidence for the philosophical ideas on morality from Aristotle, Kant, and Mill.
9.3.1 Democracy (again)
By Michael Shermer
Question: What is the best form of governance for large modern human societies? Answer: a liberal democracy with a market economy.
Evidence: liberal democracies with market economies are more prosperous, more peaceful, and fairer than any other form of governance tried.
Data: In their book Triangulating Peace, the political scientists Bruce Russett and John Oneal employed a multiple logistic regression model on data from the Correlates of War Project that recorded 2,300 militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 2001. Assigning each country a democracy score between 1 and 10 (based on the Polity Project that measures how competitive its political process is, how openly leaders are chosen, how many constraints on a leader's power are in place, etc.), Russett and Oneal found that when two countries are fully democratic disputes between them decrease by 50 percent, but when the less democratic member of a county pair was a full autocracy, it doubled the chance of a quarrel between them.
When you add a market economy into the equation it decreases violence and increases peace significantly. Russett and Oneal found that for every pair of at-risk nations they entered the amount of trade (as a proportion of GDP) and found that countries that depended more on trade in a given year were less likely to have a militarized dispute in the subsequent year, controlling for democracy, power ratio, great power status, and economic growth. So they found that democratic peace happens only when both members of a pair are democratic, but that trade works when either member of the pair has a market economy.
Finally, the 3rd vertex of Russett and Oneal's triangle of peace is membership in the international community, a proxy for transparency. The social scientists counted the number of IGOs that every pair of nations jointly belonged to and ran a regression analysis with democracy and trade scores, discovering that democracy favors peace, trade favors peace, and membership in IGOs favors peace, and that a pair of countries that are in the top tenth of the scale on all three variables are 83% less likely than an average pair of countries to have a militarized dispute in a given year.
The point of this exercise, as further developed by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, is that in addition to philosophical arguments, we can make a scientific case for liberal democracy and market economies as a means of increasing human survival and flourishing. We can measure the effects quantitatively, and from that derive science-based values that demonstrate conclusively that this form of governance is really better than, say, autocracies or theocracies. Scholars may dispute the data or debate the evidence, but my point is that in addition to philosophers, scientists should have a voice in determining human values and morals.
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