Doing Ethics

Robert Traer
For the Ian Ramsey Centre Oxford 2009 Conference
July 15th – 18th, at St Anne's College

Is there evidence of an ideological use of the Darwinian theory of natural selection in texts about ethics? By “ideological use” I mean presenting a disputed issue within a discipline as if it were resolved. By the Darwinian theory of natural selection I mean the process: “by which random mutations of genetic material produce variants of a species, and those variants which are best able to survive in the environment in which they live are those that prosper and have offspring inheriting similar characteristics. It has an important role in the evolution of life forms, but it is not the only means by which evolution takes place.”[1] Of course, more can (and will) be said, but this definition by scientist Henry Haslam in his brief book on The Moral Mind is sufficient for now.

An ideological use of natural selection in ethics might mean presenting—when this is not the case—an interpretation of natural selection as generally accepted by biologists and psychologists, or an inference for ethics concerning natural selection as generally accepted by moral philosophers. On the basis of my research, I identify four examples of an ideological use of the theory of natural selection in ethics. I illustrate these ideological uses and then offer an analysis of each.

First, Darwinian evolution is used to falsify teleological assertions. In Intervention and Reflection: Basic Issues in Medical Ethics (published by Thomson) Ronald Munson argues that: “The fundamental difficulty with Aquinas’s argument for natural law is caused by the assumption, borrowed from Aristotle, that the universe is organized in a teleological fashion.” Because, he claims, “the apparent purposive character of evolutionary change can be accounted for by the operation of natural selection on random mutations,” Munson concludes that science and “reason alone” do not support teleology. The inference he draws for ethics is significant. “Without its foundation of teleology, Aquinas’s theory of natural law ethics seems to collapse.”[2]

Second, natural selection is understood as confirming that natural facts have no ethical relevance. In The Elements of Moral Philosophy (published by McGraw-Hill, 2003 and 2010) James Rachels writes that the world “as described by Galileo, Newton, and Darwin…gives us a picture of the world as a realm of facts….Whatever values may be, they are not part of the natural order.”[3] The inference here is that all naturalistic arguments in ethics are fatally flawed.

Third, Darwinian evolution is seen as verifying a determinism making moral freedom illusory. In Ethics: Theory and Practice (published by Prentice Hall, 2009) Jacques P. Thiroux and Keith W. Krasemann assert that “[b]iological determinism is best exemplified by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.” They proceed to argue that “the problem with biological determinism is identical to the problem with physical determinism, in that both theories tend to limit human beings strictly to their physical and biological makeup and structure, ignoring the possibility that a mental or spiritual side may exist.”[4] It would seem that human beings lacking a “mental side” could hardly be expected to be ethical.

Fourth, natural selection is understood as constituting our moral nature. Michael Boylan’s Basic Ethics (published by Pearson, 2009) includes a chapter entitled “Are People Good or Bad?” that uses evolution to support either conclusion. The argument that humans are simply driven by self-interest, Boylan writes, “can be explained in evolutionary terms via the survival advantage of phenotypes who act for their own benefit versus those who do not.” What “appears to be altruistic behavior is really an instance of the selfish gene strategy.” However, “some sociobiologists argue that there may be an evolutionary advantage to being open to altruism. This is because altruism breeds cooperation that may enhance social frameworks.”[5] If Boylan believes evolution proves that homo sapiens are either good or bad, one wonders why he is writing about ethics.

Given the problems with these statements, should we be glad that most moral philosophers simply ignore the Darwinian theory of natural selection?[6] I think not, as this neglect means rejecting the relevance of contemporary biology for moral philosophy.[7] Moreover, as there is a cottage industry of biologists describing the implications of biology for ethics, it would be helpful for philosophers to clarify their thinking about the relationship between these two disciplines. Edward O. Wilson notes that philosophers, “most of whom lack an evolutionary perspective, have not devoted much time” to questions concerning the origin of morality.[8] Mary Midgley, however, sees reductionism in both philosophy and science, and in particular “the Social Darwinist reliance on psychological egoism,” as ideologies that we should “keep on battering.”[9]

The four examples that I have identified of an ideological use of Darwinian natural selection challenge us to enter the fray in moral philosophy concerning teleology, naturalism, determinism, and altruism. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more...

On the basis of his reading of contemporary evolutionary theory, Munson asserts: “Science and ‘reason alone’ do not support teleology.” Most scientists would likely agree, but some argue that teleology is inherent in biology.[10] Stuart Kauffman carries this banner into the battle: “agency, meaning, value, and doing are real parts of the universe and are not reducible to physics, in which only happenings occur. What is the simplest system to which we might be willing to apply teleological language? When biologists talk of a bacterium swimming up a glucose gradient ‘to get’ sugar, they are using teleological language.” The agency of a single-celled animal, Kauffman explains, depends on “molecular self-reproduction and performance of one or more work cycles,” and evolutionary theory suggests that these metabolic processes, “through self-reproduction and heritable variation,” were likely of “selective advantage.” Therefore, he says, it is reasonable to suppose that agency, as well as “meaning, values, doing, and purposes emerge in the universe” and are “natural and expected.”[11]

This means, Kauffman asserts, that in biology “teleological language cannot be replaced by physical language….A philosophical position called reductive elimination holds that such a replacement is needed so that the action statement is just a ‘short-hand’ description for the more accurate physical statement. If there can be no such replacement, [however,] then teleological language, the language of agency, cannot be eliminated and replaced by a physical account of events. Teleological language is beyond reductionism.”[12] In biology.

Robert Wright, a former editor for The Sciences, makes a case not only for the use of teleological language in biology, but also for a “direction” to evolution. Believing that a digital pen is mightier than a sword, he writes: “The more closely we examine the drift of biological evolution and, especially, the drift of human history, the more there seems to be a point to it all. Because in neither case is ‘drift’ really the right word. Both of these processes have a direction, an arrow.” He draws on the concept of non-zero-sum games—where players have common interests and a win-win solution is possible, in contrast to zero-sum games that only allow a winner and a loser—to suggest that evolution is overall a non-zero-sum game, even though it includes many zero-sum interactions. That is, predator and prey species coevolve in a habitat even though this involves the zero-sum activity of the one kind of organism eating the other. Moreover, “Through natural selection, there arise new ‘technologies’ that permit richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction among biological entities: among genes, or cells, or animals, or whatever.”[13]

Wright acknowledges that scientists, such as Stephen Jay Gould, believe: “Humans are here by the luck of the draw.”[14] Yet, Wright’s reading of the scientific evidence is that “greater intelligence is something that has been invented billions of times. In all kinds of animal lineages—in mammals, fish, reptiles, insects, birds —there has been extensive growth in behavioral flexibility, and the growth has come in small increments.” He notes that some evolutionary biologists, such as William D. Hamilton and Edward O. Wilson, believe that, given long enough “a human level of intelligence…was very likely to evolve.” Therefore, Wright concludes: “It may be that evolution is not teleological. But if that’s the case, then evolution is the only thing I can think of that exhibits flexible directionality via information processing and isn’t teleological.”[15]

Philosophers defend teleological language with at least four arguments. First, they point to the scientific evidence for identifying an “immanent teleology” in every organism. Second, they note that biological explanations of behavior rely on notions of purpose, intention, and motive—words that are inherently teleological. Third, they argue that lack of evidence in evolution for a cosmic purpose does not prove the universe is without purpose. Or fourth, they defend natural law ethics.

First, as Kauffman and Wright argue, there is evidence for “immanent teleology” in biology. Evan Thompson in Mind in Life notes that this view of organisms goes back to Immanuel Kant’s observation that “nature organizes itself” in a teleological way and thus, in a world defined by Newton mechanics, Kant saw that “the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us.”[16] Michael Polanyi says that all “physiology is teleological,” for it describes the functional purposes of the parts of organisms.[17] Larry Arnhart argues that this kind of teleological language “developed in the tradition of functional morphology….The functional morphologists begin with the facts of organic form and function as biological phenomena that depend upon, but are not reducible to, the laws of physics and chemistry….For biological science, therefore, teleological explanations and mechanistic explanations do not contradict but rather supplement one another, because they work at different levels of biological reality.”[18]

Second, moral philosophers argue, as do Kauffman and Wright, that biological explanations of behavior rely on notions of purpose, intention, and motive—words that are inherently teleological. Arnhart writes: “even if modern physics seems to deny teleology, modern biology does not. Although modern physicists try to explain inanimate nature without reference to ends, modern biologists must explain animate nature as serving certain ends.”[19] Midgley makes the same point: “In seeing and describing an action, people constantly need to take account of the intention behind it and of its social context—variables which play no part in the life of a quark or a carbon atom.”[20]

“The term teleology has been so much knocked around,” she says, “that I avoid it entirely.” But “the word ‘evolution’ commits us in some sense to taking what happens, or at least much of it, as being in order,” because to “evolve means to unfold or unroll….This means both that certain definite potentialities were present from the start, greatly limiting what could emerge, and that these, rather than many other changes that must have been possible, were in some sense the right or suitable candidates.” Midgley also argues that considering human behavior requires language about intention: “countless ordinary verbs that describe actions—hurry, fetch, seek, find, place, offer, call—are most naturally used to describe conscious deliberate activity carried out for some end.”[21] The behaviorist approach, which eschews such language in describing animal behavior, has been rejected, Midgley notes, by the zoological discipline of ethology, which assumes that some animals have “subjectivity” and thus are best described using “the regular vocabulary already employed to describe human motive.”[22]

Keith Ward strives to clarify the role of teleology in describing human actions by distinguishing between two kinds of causality. What he identifies as nomological[23] causality “operates when brain activity proceeds in accordance with purely physical laws,” whereas “teleological causality…has a directive or informational function in influencing neural states.” Teleological causality, involving “rational thought and intentional action,” is a “conscious aspect of neural states that brings about further neural states for the sake of an envisaged and valued goal.”[24] With a velvet glove he challenges those claiming that teleological causality is unnecessary to explain our purposeful action, by accusing them of denying that conscious deliberation plays any causal role in human behavior.

John Searle brings to the battle an historical perspective. “In the great scientific revolution of the seventeenth century the rejection of teleology in physics was a liberating step. Again, in the great Darwinian revolution of the nineteen century the rejection of a teleological account of the origins of the species was a liberating step. In the twentieth century there was an overwhelming temptation to complete the picture by rejecting teleology in the sciences of man. But ironically the liberating move of the past has become constraining and counterproductive in the present. Why? Because it is just a plain fact about human beings that they do have desires, goals, intentions, purposes, aims, and plans, and these play a causal role in the production of their behavior. Those human sciences in which these facts are simply taken for granted, such as economics, have made much greater progress than those branches, such as behavioristic psychology, which have been based on an attempted denial of these facts. Just as it was bad science to treat systems that lack intentionality as if they had it, so it is equally bad science to treat systems that have intrinsic intentionality as if they lacked it.”[25]

These facts, Searle says, are clearly relevant for ethics. “The biologically primitive sense of the other person as a candidate for shared intentionality is a necessary condition of all collective behavior and hence of all conversation.” Because social behavior manifests “collective intentionality,” which is a social fact that must be taken into account in any explanation of the behavior, “social phenomena have factual features that are logically different from the facts of the natural sciences…first, that the form of causation is essentially intentional causation and, second, that social facts have a logical structure different from natural facts.”[26] It is obvious, he cautiously concludes, that we are teleological and well as biological beings.

A third defense of teleology asserts that lack of evidence in evolution for a cosmic purpose does not prove the universe is without purpose. Lawrence Vogel summarizes this counter argument by Hans Jonas: “Rather than interpreting mind as an utterly novel and sudden emergence coinciding with humans, Darwin makes room for the idea that the whole lifeworld is a chain of psychophysical organisms whose minds and bodies co-evolve so as to allow for greater freedom and individuality.” Humans are, Jonas suggests, “the outcome of a teleological process whose immanent purposes are self-knowledge and freedom: an evolution in which mind ultimately answers to the qualities that nature shows forth and individuality, rooted in each organism’s concern for its own being, reaches its maximal intensiveness in the capacity of each person to speak for himself and forge his own unique story.”[27]

Our subjectivity, Jonas says, which is manifested “as interest, purpose, goal, striving, longing (in short, ‘will’ and ‘value’) raises anew the whole question of teleology, and, along with it, the question of the causality of the world in general: issues that the physical data alone appeared to decide in favor of random causes.” Because “finality—striving for a goal—occurs in a certain natural being, i.e., a living being, in a manifestly subjective way and becomes effective there in an objectively causal manner, it cannot be entirely foreign to nature, which brought forth precisely this kind of being.”[28]

Theologian James Gustafson enters the breach watching his back. He sees Darwinian evolution as requiring that Christian claims “about the powers of God must be altered accordingly,” and so he accepts that the “presence of order and ordering [in nature] does not warrant the confirmation of a final purposiveness in nature.” Any claim for teleology in “nature as a whole requires other convictions than the confirmed theories of particular sciences. Nor can one say that the remarkable ordering, and the even more remarkable capacity of the human mind to discern and understand it in greater and greater detail and accuracy, is sufficient in itself to warrant belief in a Designer.” But Gustafson points to scientific evidence of order in nature as giving, at least, some credence for faith in the purpose of creation. “At most one might say that a ‘governance’ is occurring. Its presence, however, evokes awe and respect, natural piety, toward nature. And it warrants the affirmation within piety that the powers and the ultimate power are ordering; they are not purely contingent or chaotic.”[29]

In contrast, Holmes Rolston III has unsheathed his sword. “The creation of matter, energy, law, history, stories, of all the information that generates nature, to say nothing of culture, does need an adequate explanation…In the materializing of the quantum states, bubbling up from below; in the compositions of prebiotic molecules; in the genetic mutations, there are selective principles at work, as well as stabilities and regularities, form and in-forming these materials, which principles order and order up the story.” Therefore, he concludes: “This portrays a loose teleology, a soft concept of creation ,one that permits genuine, though not ultimate, integrity and autonomy in the creatures….God is the atmosphere of possibilities, the metaphysical environment in, with, and under first the natural and later also the cultural environment, luring the Earthen histories upslope.”[30]

A fourth argument in support of teleology involves a defense of natural law ethics. Arnhart asserts that “far from refuting Aristotle’s teleology [in natural law philosophy], modern biology confirms living nature’s irreducible potential for form. If Aristotle’s teleology is, as one commentator on Aristotle’s Physics says, ‘nothing but his claim that all natural beings are self-maintaining wholes,’ then modern biology supports such teleology.” Therefore, Arnhart concludes, “We can accept Aristotle’s biological teleology while still giving material causes their proper weight.”[31] Craig Boyd adds a theological thrust by arguing that biology reveals “all life has a drive to preserve its own being…[and humans also] have desires and goods that require the exercise of reason….The self-directed nature of human behavior is a critical aspect of natural law morality. It requires a teleological dimension that is simultaneously given by God but also manifested in free choice.” For Boyd, “the teleological orientation of the natural law is fulfilled by an account of the virtues…[because] all the acts of the virtues fall under the sphere of the natural law since they are prescribed by reason.”[32]

Two introductory textbooks on ethics provide a striking comparison to Munson’s conclusions about natural law ethics. In Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues (published by Thomson, 2007) Barbara MacKinnon writes: “the natural law assumes that nature is teleological, that it has a certain directedness. In Aristotle’s terms, it moves toward its natural goal, its final purpose. Yet from the time of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, such final purposes have become suspect.” Thus, she concludes, “If natural law theory does depend on there being purposes in nature, it must be able to explain how this can be so.”[33]

She responds to this challenge by considering the Christian answer posed by Thomas Aquinas, and then recognizes the argument that “natural beings may simply develop in certain ways as if they were directed there by some plan, but there is no plan. This may just be our way of reading or speaking about nature.” A footnote directs the inquisitive reader to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. MacKinnon notes that: “Evolutionary theory also may present a challenge to natural law theory. If the way that things have come to be is the result of many chance variations, how can this resulting form be other than arbitrary?” She concludes, however, that: “There is no necessary conflict between belief in God and evolution. Chance, then, would not mean without direction.”[34]

In Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy (published by Thomson, 2006) Joseph DesJardins also acknowledges that “modern evolutionary science provides a significant and perhaps insurmountable challenge to the natural law tradition. The process of natural selection offers an account of the apparent design found in nature without appealing to any purpose or telos. The order that is found in nature comes not from a divine plan but from the process of species adapting to their environment, typically through a process of random mutation and natural selection….In this view, nature as we find it today is the result of hundreds of millions of years of random evolutionary change. Nature is neither good nor bad; it just is.”[35]

Nonetheless, DesJardins observes, “the appeal of the natural law tradition remains. Contemporary biologists are very comfortable using teleological categories when speaking about the natural world. Even within a Darwinian framework, such teleological concepts as function, purpose, goal, and design are used regularly by scientists and philosophers.” After giving several examples, he writes: “Much modern science, particularly as it developed under the influence of physics and mechanics, argues that the only legitimate scientific explanations are those that refer to some antecedent causes. Thus some challenge the legitimacy of any teleological explanation in the biological sciences. Other skeptics argue that even though some teleological explanations are legitimate, no value conclusions can be drawn from this. Still others argue that although value conclusions might be drawn from biological facts, the values are always qualified and conditional.” Therefore, he concludes much like MacKinnon that “although the natural law tradition provides a framework for thinking and reasoning about relations between nature and ethics, it is not without significant philosophical challenges.”[36]

I believe that Munson’s statement concerning teleology is ideological, because it does not adequately reflect the current debate in moral philosophy, as I have tried succinctly to represent it. The texts written by MacKinnon and DesJardins offer a sharp contrast by presenting a more cogent summary of the issues. As Thomson publishes the texts by MacKinnon and DesJardins, as well as the text by Munson, one can only wonder why an editor has yet to suggest that Munson revise his discussion of natural law and teleology to reflect the more balanced presentations of MacKinnon and DesJardins.

Naturalism

Rachels argues in The Elements of Moral Philosophy that Darwinian evolution describes a natural world without values, but this characterization of Darwin’s writings is inaccurate. There are scientists and philosophers who press for a sharp distinction between facts and values, but this is not the view of Darwin. In The Descent of Man Darwin not only describes “the moral sense” of homo sapiens, but asserts “that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense of conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.” Moreover, he suggests that “sympathy,” however it “may have originated…increased through natural selection,” for “those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”[37] Darwin did distinguish his view of morality from the utilitarian calculation of what seems best for the greatest number of individuals, because he believed moral action developed from social instincts favoring the common good.[38] But the natural world Darwin describes clearly includes values.

The alleged separation of facts and values, which Rachels attributes to Darwin, takes the form in ethical debate of three related “dichotomies”—feelings and reason, what is and what ought to be, and nature and culture (nurture). With respect to feelings and reason, Arnhart asserts: “A Darwinian theory of human nature can support the conclusion that human beings have been shaped by natural selection to have the moral reasoning and the moral sentiments that promote reciprocity as a foundation for social life….Contemporary Darwinian theorists argue that the moral sense emerges as the joint product of both rational and emotional capacities. Human beings have the rational capacity to formulate parental care and reciprocity as norms of conduct. They also have the emotional capacity to enforce these norms through moral passions such as love, gratitude, guilt, shame, anger, and indignation.”[39]

In support of his argument, Arnhart refers to research on chimpanzees conducted by Frans De Waal.[40] “Although human beings are the only moral beings in the strict sense,” Arnhart writes, “at least insofar as morality requires deliberation of the sort that is uniquely human, other animals do have many of the emotional dispositions and cognitive abilities that support human morality. Other animals—and particularly chimpanzees—show sympathy, reciprocity, the establishment of prescriptive social rules, and the concern for reconciling conflicts to preserve social order, which are all necessary for the evolution of human morality.”[41] Paul Ricoeur, however, cautions against de Waal’s conclusion, arguing “that we always interpret animal behaviors from a human perspective.”[42]

Even so, Midgley says, “the normal emotions are as necessary for morality as thought is.” Writing with Darwin in mind, she argues that intelligence “develops partly as an adaptation” to deal with emotional conflicts: “The structure of feeling demands a corresponding structure of thought to complete it. The reason of a social species is not programmable in just any direction. It arises as an aspect of stability and friendliness.” When humans reason about what action to take, “they are wondering what would be best ‘for such a creature as man.’ The range and pattern of possible aims is given with the species.” Reason is not “detached from all aims…[and simply] stamped on brute matter. The only picture that makes evolutionary sense is the Aristotelian one where matter fits its form….”[43]

As for the facts and values “dichotomy” between what is and what ought to be, Ian Barbour says many philosophers “hold that it is impossible to derive prescriptive conclusions from purely descriptive premises.”[44] Midgley, however, rejects G. E. Moore’s intuition that “naturalistic” arguments based on factual evidence are irrelevant in defining certain ideas.[45] “Concepts such as nature,” she observes, “which seem to combine reports of fact with judgments of value, have worried moral philosophers.” Of course, calling “something natural is sometimes just reporting that it happens; but usually it is also making a suggestion about how to treat it. Often it recommends some sort of acceptance, sometimes strong approval. Putting the point another way, we all believe that understanding what we are naturally fit for, capable of, and adapted to will help us to know what is good for us and, therefore, to know what to do.”[46] She sees this as common sense and also as the better view of traditional moral philosophy.

Midgley also explicitly rejects the idea of a “naturalistic fallacy” that separates what is from what ought to be. She is critical of Social Darwinists and “evolutionary moralists,” because “the facts of evolution cannot guide us directly. They matter only insofar as they can help us to understand our nature, our emotional and rational constitution.” Yet, she argues, “our understanding of that does give us practical guidance. Facts about it are directly relevant to values. Values register needs.” Biology and psychology, therefore, can make an important contribution to ethics, because: “All moral doctrines, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.”[47]

Midgley suggests that Social Darwinist ideology concerning “survival of the fittest” may be what moral philosophers have in mind when they say that “facts” tell us nothing of values. But, she writes, this reflects a misunderstanding of natural selection. “Though conflict and opposition are extremely important elements in every sort of life, it is absurd to suggest that, even at the unconscious level, they could be its central feature….[For life processes] depend on an immense background of harmonious co-operation that builds up the system within which the much rarer, though still important, phenomenon of competition becomes possible. In an ecosystem, plants normally exist in interdependence both with each other and with the animals that eat them, and those animals depend both on one another and on their predators. Even at the chemical level, there is a tendency to form bonds and to move towards greater complexity….It is not surprising, then, that conscious life, arising out of such a background, acts in fact in a way that is much more often co-operative than competitive.”[48]

Like Midgley, Arnhart notes “Darwin’s argument for the continuity between human beings and other animals” and he, too, claims that “Darwin’s ethical naturalism” revives Aristotle’s approach to ethics. Arnhart also argues that Hume’s statement—about not deriving an ought from an is—is not accurately applied to an ethical approach that relies on Darwinian evolution. “Far from denying that moral judgments are judgments of fact, Hume claims that moral judgments are accurate when they correctly report what our moral sentiments would be in a given set of circumstances. Moral judgments [for Hume] do not have cosmic objectivity in the sense of conforming to structures that exist totally independently of human beings. Yet neither do moral judgments have only emotive subjectivity in the sense of expressing purely personal feelings.”[49]

In support of this argument, Arnhart notes that: “Political scientists such as Robert McShea, Roger Masters, and James Q. Wilson defend a naturalistic theory of ethics similar to that proposed by Hume and Darwin. They argue that contemporary biological theories for explaining social behavior confirm Darwin’s view of sociality and morality as rooted in sympathy, mutuality, and reciprocity.” Furthermore, “evidence from neurology, behavioral biology, and the social sciences supports this belief that there is a natural sense of justice that arises in the human brain from the interaction of reason and emotion.”[50]

In Why Good Is Good biologist Robert A. Hinde has a section entitled “The relation between ‘is’ and ‘ought’.” Here he argues: “natural selection has acted not to promote rigid characteristics, but lability[51] according to the prevailing circumstances—and in particular the development of an appropriate balance between prosociality and selfish assertiveness. In turn, systems of moral precepts have been elaborated, though differing in some respects in content and in balance between cultures. Our behavior is guided by the relation between the moral precepts embedded in our self-systems and our perceptions of our own actual and intended action. It is that relation that we refer to by the term ‘moral sense’.”[52]

Kauffman’s sharp sword, used first to defend teleology in biology, has a second edge to its blade. “With agency, at whatever level of evolution we are willing to recognize it, meaning, values, doing, and purposes emerge in the universe….With agency, with the bacterium swimming up the glucose gradient, values enter. Once this is true, meaning and ‘ought’ enter the universe.”[53] Rolston, too, defends bacterial dignity. “We cannot correctly value what we do not to some degree correctly know.”[54] We can observe a bacterium and see that it maintains its identity “by making sense of the world so as to remain viable.”[55] Also, to maintain its identity, a bacterium (like every organism) must constantly change its material composition by metabolizing nutrients from the environment. “If the organism,” however, “must change its matter in order to maintain its identity, then the organism must aim beyond itself.”[56] This means: “Every organism has a good-of-its-kind; it defends its own kind [its own way of life] as a good kind.”[57]

There are no conscious intentions in the actions of bacteria or most animals. Yet, the emergent properties of self-organization and sense-making, and the forward trajectory of every organism in seeking its own good, may be seen as evidence that all life has value for itself. This is true of plants as well as animals, for plants “sense all sorts of things about the plants around them and use that information to interact with them.”[58] Rolston cries out over the din: “Ecology discovers simultaneously (1) what is taking place in ecosystems and (2) what biotic community means as an organizational mode enveloping organisms. Crossing over from science to ethics, we can discover (3) the values in such a community-system and (4) our duties toward it.”[59] Here “an ought is not so much derived from an is as discovered simultaneously with it.”[60]

Here, Gustafson hurls his theological lance: “The patterns and processes of interdependence of life in the world are a basis, foundation, or ground upon which ethical reflection is further developed, and which must be taken into account in determining the values and principles that are to guide human ends and action….They are the ‘is’ on which ‘oughts’ depend, though the oughts are not deduced simply from an ‘isness.” They are ‘facts’ which ground values, though what is valued is not derived simply from their facticity. They indicate necessary conditions that have to be met for the realization of human purposes. They back, or support, the reasons given for human ends and values, and for moral principles.”[61]

Finally, the facts and values “dichotomy” also involves a fight over nature and culture (nurture). Arnhart acknowledges that some Darwinians have seen “culture as a uniquely human realm of activity transcending biology. Thomas Huxley, in his famous lecture entitled ‘Evolution and Ethics,’ implicitly rejected Darwin’s ethical naturalism by denying that ethics could be ‘applied natural history’….Interpreting Darwin’s ‘struggle for existence’ as a Hobbesian war of all against all, so that there was no natural ground for social cooperation or moral concern, Huxley concluded that ‘the thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.’ Social progress could arise, therefore, only from a checking of the [natural] ‘cosmic process’ by the [cultural] ‘ethical process,’ and thus building ‘an artificial world within the cosmos.’” Arnhart defends Darwinian natural selection against Huxley’s social Darwinist thrust with the shield of truth—Darwin denied the separation of facts and values.[62]

Hinde follows Darwin rather than Huxley into the breach, for he proposes that morality in society is “a joint project of human nature and of the nature of the world, social and physical, in which humans live and have lived.” He writes with the hope “that understanding how, in a qualitatively historical sense, basic propensities and principles have been translated into moral precepts,” may help us “evaluate the latter and the conflicts between them.”[63] Midgley also presses forward, asserting that “culture is not an alternative or replacement for instinct, but its outgrowth and supplement,” and thus concludes: “(1) Culture is essential to us; we cannot live without it. But (2) it is essential because of our innate needs.” We are not merely like animals, but we are animals that evolved. Our intelligence as well as our emotions do not replace our natural instincts, but refine them. “It is nonsense,” she scoffs, “to suppose that intelligence or rationality could replace instinct. And I have said that the structure of our instincts is inherited from our primate forbears, though of course with many alterations evolved by our own species.”[64] We are, after all, ethical primates.[65]

Simon Blackburn, however, wields his cudgel of reason under the flag of the Huxley forces. In Being Good Blackburn does not deny our evolutionary past, but affirms that culture is the source of ethics. He agrees with Aristotle that we “should educate people for whom we care into the habits that are most likely to benefit them,” yet cautions against thinking that “living virtuously is somehow written into things by nature. Insofar as it is approximately true, it is because it is written into things by culture. It is in the first place an educational and also a political achievement, and one that needs constant attention.”[66]

We see, therefore, that the position taken by Rachels reflects a tradition in moral philosophy that is not a consensus or even clearly the majority point of view. Moreover, Rachels’ claim that Darwin’s naturalism necessarily involves a separation of facts and values would not be accepted by Darwin and is rejected by at least some scientists and moral philosophers. The stance Rachels takes in The Principles of Moral Philosophy is more fairly defended by Blackburn in Being Good.

In a section of Ethics: Theory and Practice entitled “Biological and Genetic Determinism” Thiroux and Krasemann say: “Biological determinism is best exemplified by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which he presented in his most famous work, The Origin of Species. Darwin (1809-1882) believed that various species in nature evolve at different stages in the history of the world and that only the fittest survive. For example, even though some prehistoric animals (dinosaurs, for example) were extremely large and powerful, their brain capacity and mental ability were so limited that they did not survive, whereas smaller and more intelligent beings, such as humans, did. Darwin suggested that this process of natural selection essentially has nothing to do with freedom. He believed that it is nature that governs, through its various processes, the makeup, strength, and survival potential of the various species, and that the species that emerge as dominant are determined by the stage along the evolutionary scale at which they appear.” In a second paragraph, the authors add: “A more modern and sophisticated version of this theory is concerned with genetic makeup, especially that of human beings. None of us has any say over the identity of our parents, from whom we inherit our genes; and because our genes determine so much of our makeup—our sex, mental potential, and eye, hair, and skin color—how can we be said to be free in any real sense of the word?”[67]

This is, of course, an attack on naturalism framed in the language of determinism. In response, I first suggest that Darwin (and most Darwinians) assert that natural selection is not the only cause of evolution. Second, many scientists and philosophers who agree that genes do constrain our behavior, do not see this natural fact as negating moral freedom. Third, I think it is fair to say that Darwin thought humans do not have freedom from nature, but do have freedom within nature. And fourth, it seems reasonable to hold that real freedom requires the constraints on human nature resulting from natural selection.

First, evolution involves more than natural selection. There are “dogmatic neo-Darwinists,” Midgley reminds us, who seem to be “sure that every development in evolution has been a response to a particular form of selection and must therefore serve a definite function.” However, she parries this assault with the observation that Darwin never claimed natural selection “was the only force involved.”[68] For Darwin, natural selection was “the main but not the exclusive means of modification.”[69] This is also clear in Haslam’s definition of natural selection quoted earlier, which asserts that natural selection “has an important role in the evolution of life forms,” but “is not the only means by which evolution takes place.”[70]

Unlike Darwin, we know that many of these “variations” involve mutations of genes, and Gabriel Dover reminds us that new forms can “arise through a combination of internal pressures generated by the unruly genes (molecular drive),” as well as through Darwinian natural selection reflecting “external pressures generated by an unruly environment.”[71] Darwin did claim, Haslam notes, that “any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed” by natural selection, and this has been understood by many to mean that “natural selection determines, in every detail, what features will prosper.”[72] This false view of natural selection, which Haslam identifies as “evolutionary correctness,” is found “in many writings on sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, and has been promoted “as a doctrine to which all right-thinking people must assent.”[73]

We need not, Haslam argues, “accept the tyranny of evolutionary correctness,” because “theory and observation support the role of natural selection in weeding out the worst, but also allowing other processes to play their part in shaping evolution. In every edition of The Origin of Species Darwin himself clearly stated his belief that natural selection was not the only process involved in evolution, and in the 1872 (and last) edition he expressed his displeasure at the way that his views had been misrepresented by those who stated that he attributed the modification of species exclusively to natural selection.”[74]

Second, biological determination does not make ethical concerns irrelevant. In Taking Biology Seriously Immaculada de Melo-Martín argues that it is a mistake to think “that we can evaluate human traits and behaviors by referring only to their biological origins or determination,” in that “biological traits have to be evaluated in the environment where they are expressed. Because humans are social creatures, their environment includes not only the natural environment, but also social values, arrangements, and institutions. Biological or genetic determinism can thus, at most, give us partial information about the value of particular human traits and behaviors….[C]laims that societal moral responsibility decreases with the truth of biological determinism are mistaken because they incorrectly presuppose that the social environment is irrelevant, either as a causal contributor to a biological trait or behavior or as a contributor to the judgments about such a trait.” Therefore, de Melo-Martín concludes, “a correct understanding of human biology can inform arguments supporting the need for critical evaluation of our value system and of our social and political institutions. Social transformation can go a long way toward curtailing the possible limitations that biology might impose on human beings.”[75]

Hinde agrees that “partial determination is not incompatible with apparent choice and free will.” He argues that: “from a scientific perspective my brain determines what I do, but this involves a complex series of neural events, so that my choice of action is only partially predictable by an outsider, and this gives the latter a sense that I am exercising free will. My self-concept depends on my perception of how outsiders perceive me,” and, as they treat me “as if I had free will, I believe that I have. This in turn does not mean that those complex processes may not ultimately be understandable in causal terms, and leaves the philosophical question of whether I ‘actually’ have free will open.” We should conclude, Hinde says, that “the scientific analysis of causation is not incompatible with the existence or presumption of free will, and therefore is not incompatible with the suggestion that morality is elaborated from biological bases.”[76]

Richard Joyce understands that offense is the best defense. “The early opponents of sociobiology were so eager to discredit the program that they kept charging ‘genetic determinism!’ until this accusation lodged in the popular consciousness. But in fact no sensible person is a genetic determinist, and certainly none of the prominent sociobiologists were….By claiming that human morality is genetically ‘programmed,’ one doesn’t deny the centrality of cultural influence, or even imply that any manifestation of morality is inevitable.”[77] Robert Wright joins this counterattack by adding: “the phrase ‘genetic determinism’ exudes ignorance as to what the new Darwinism is about….[For]everyone (including Darwin) is a victim not of genes, but of genes and environment together.”[78] Darwin saw, Wright says, that “all influences on human behavior, environmental as well as hereditary, are mediated biologically. Whatever combination of things has given your brain the exact physical organization it has at this moment (including your genes, your early environment, and your assimilation of the first half of this sentence), that physical organization is what determines how you will respond to the second half of this sentence. So, even though the term genetic determinism is confused, the term biological determinism isn’t—or, at least, it wouldn’t be if people would realize that it’s not a mere synonym for genetic determinism.”[79]

Thiroux and Krasemann compound their error by identifying “genetic determinism” as a more modern and sophisticated version” of biological determinism.[80] Blackburn explains that “whatever our genetic make-up programs us to do, it leaves room for what we can call ‘input-responsiveness.’ It leaves room for us to vary our behavior in response to what we hear or feel or touch or see (otherwise there would be little point in having these senses in the first place). It leaves room for us to vary our desires in accordance with what we learn (discovering that the glass contains sulphuric acid, I lose the desire to drink it that I had when I thought it contained gin). It leaves room for us to be influenced by information gathered from others. Finally, it leaves room for us to be affected by the attitudes of others. In other words, it makes us responsive to the moral climate.”[81]

Third, we need not be free from nature to be free within nature. Kant would reject this distinction, Arnhart says, but: “For Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin, the uniqueness of human beings as moral agents requires not a free will that transcends nature but a natural capacity to deliberate about one’s desires.” Morality for Aristotle, Arnhart asserts, involves acting voluntarily and deliberately: “for Aristotle, being morally responsible is not being free of one’s natural desires. Rather, to be responsible one must organize and manage one’s desires through habituation and reflection to conform to some conception of a whole life well lived.”[82] We are free to become the persons we naturally may be.

Darwin thought that “every action whatever is the effect of a motive,” and thus resisted the idea of a will “free” from natural influences. Yet, he believed that we have the capacity for moral action, because we are able to evaluate our motives and assess our circumstances. “A moral being,” he says, “is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals.”[83] Neuroscientists, relying on studies of damage to the frontal lobes of human brains, find evidence for Darwin’s conclusion, for “human beings can use images and words to compare alternative courses of action through mental trial and error and then choose between them.” Roger Masters and James Q. Wilson acknowledge that criminal behavior is influenced by biological factors, but argue that this “does not deny human freedom” because biological mechanisms “are too complex to be explained in a simple, reductionistic manner.”[84]

Fourth, it may well be that freedom requires the constraints on human nature resulting from natural selection. Daniel Dennett in Freedom Evolves presents a deterministic argument for freedom. After clarifying that by determinism he means the thesis that “there is at any instance exactly one physically possible future,” he distinguishes this from three false notions: “First, many thinkers assume that determinism implies inevitability. It doesn’t. Second, many think it is obvious that indeterminism—the denial of determinism—would give us agents some freedom, some maneuverability, some elbow room, that we just couldn’t have in a deterministic universe. It wouldn’t. Third it is commonly supposed that in a deterministic world, there are no real options, only apparent options. This is false.”[85]

These assertions require a detailed explanation, which Dennett happily provides, but for our purposes the following statement may be sufficient. “Our natures aren’t fixed,” Dennett explains, “because we have evolved to be entities designed to change their natures in response to interactions with the rest of the world.” We have, he says, “the long-range knowledge capable of identifying and then avoiding the pitfalls on the paths projected by our foresightless genes. Shared knowledge is the key to our greater freedom from ‘genetic determinism’…[for unlike baboons] we can engage in the practice of asking, and giving, reasons.” Moreover, it is “this kind of asking, which we can also direct to ourselves, that creates the special category of voluntary actions that sets us apart.”[86]

Kauffman defends a scientific theory of emergence that contests the deterministic argument known as reductionism. “Emergence says that, while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are also real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it, and are central to our lives.” Unlike Dawkins and Dennett, Kauffman understands Darwinian natural selection as emergence, rather than as a chain of causes that in principle could explain whatever is by what was: “The vast tangled bank of life, as Darwin phrased it, arose all on its own. This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative. So, too, are human history and human lives. This creativity is stunning, awesome, and worthy of reverence.”[87]

Kauffman asserts that Darwinian natural selection “is emergent in two senses. The first is epistemological, meaning that we cannot from physics deduce upwards to the evolution of the biosphere. The second is ontological, concerning what entities are real in the universe. For the reductionist, only particles in motion are ontologically real entities. Everything else is to be explained by different complexities of particles in motion, hence are not real in their own ontological right. But organisms, whose evolution of organization of structures and processes, such as the human heart, cannot be deduced from physics, have causal powers of their own, and therefore are emergent real entities in the Universe. So, too, are the biosphere, the human economy, human culture, human action.” Kauffman notes that we “do not understand consciousness,” yet there “is no doubt that it is real in humans and presumably among many animals.” Whatever its source, “consciousness is emergent and a real feature of the universe.”[88]

Jonas uses Darwinian reasoning to construct a naturalistic argument for free will. He identifies in every organism an independence with respect to its material form (its “needful freedom”)[89] that through natural selection has, in humans, become thought that is free (in more than a “needful” sense) in three ways: thought can choose its object, use imagination to transform sense information, and contemplate notions that are beyond materiality. “The first freedom liberates us from attachment to the pressing theme of the moment, i.e., from the situation determined by the external world and one’s own body. The second freedom liberates us from attachment to the given character of things and the preprogrammed behavioral response to it. The third freedom liberates us from attachment to the being of worldly existents in general.” Moral freedom, Jonas argues, involves the capacity of thought “to turn back upon itself, to make itself and its subject, the ‘self,’ into its own theme…the freedom of reflection.”[90]

Dennett, Kauffman, and Jonas present different arguments for asserting moral freedom in a world largely determined by the laws of nature. From different places on the battlefield, they launch a devastating counterattack against the charges made by Thiroux and Krasemann in Ethics: Theory and Practice. Darwin defends a naturalistic view, but he does not argue for a biological determinism that denies moral responsibility or mental creativity. Moreover, Darwin did not, as Thiroux and Krasemann claim, believe that “various species in nature evolve at different stages in the history of the world.” This misunderstanding is reinforced by the assertion—“the species that appear as dominant are determined by the stage along the evolutionary scale at which they appear.” Darwin did not propose an evolutionary scale.

Thiroux and Krasemann also ask, because “our genes determine so much of our makeup…[including our] mental potential…how can we be said to be free in any real sense of the word?” As we have seen, scientists and moral philosophers have given much thought to this question, and it is irresponsible in an introductory text on ethics to ignore the complexity of this debate. Also, to claim “biological determinism is identical to the problem with physical determinism” overlooks the distinction between biology and physics, which Kauffman and Arnhart suggest is crucial for ethical reflection. Thiroux and Krasemann conclude by asserting that Darwinian natural selection, because it is deterministic, rejects “the possibility that a mental or spiritual side may exist.” One can only hope these authors will read Midgley, or Arnhart, or Jonas, or Darwin, or perhaps simply peruse a few pages of Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion.

In Basic Ethics Boylan says selfish genes account for altruism, which “breeds cooperation that may enhance social frameworks. Those who live in a robust functioning social framework may be more likely to pass on their genes to the next generation than those who do not. Thus, cooperative behavior may be evolutionarily advantageous to the agent.” Boylan presents a summary of this argument and attributes it to Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson, authors of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. He claims this position “does not necessitate egoism or hedonism” and “is supported by the prominent sociobiologist, E. O. Wilson.”[91] I assess these claims by briefly considering: the current debate about altruism, Darwin’s view of the evolution of moral behavior, and the argument that ethics cannot be reduced to biology.

Gilbert Harman, after reviewing the scientific literature, offers a summary of alternative explanations for the evolution of morality. “(1) There might be group selection in favor of groups containing altruists. Although altruists may not do as well as nonaltruists within any given group, groups with larger percentages of altruists in them are more likely to reproduce themselves than groups with smaller percentages of altruists in them. (2) Altruism arises from conditioning. Unhappiness leads a child to cry. Classical conditioning leads the child to associate the sound of crying with being unhappy. So, in particular, hearing other children cry makes the child unhappy, so he or she is motivated to do things that will stop others from crying. (3) There is a straightforward egoistic advantage to reciprocal altruism. Tit for tat is an excellent strategy in repeated Prisoner’s Dilemmas. This is something children can learn. (4) One can have selfish reasons to be concerned that other people’s lives go well, if the other people are potential benefactors. Such concern develops over a period of time into direct concern for others, just as a miser tends to come to love money for its own sake. (5) There is random variation with respect to altruism: some people have more of it, others have less. The advantages and disadvantages tend to cancel each other out.” As far as he knows, “none of these explanations is clearly preferable to the others.”[92] If Harman’s candor reflects a realistic assessment of the debate, one can only wonder why Boylan presents an argument for only the first of these five alternative explanations.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins seems to have launched this conflict. More recently, Dawkins has objected to what he characterizes as a “misunderstanding” that puts the emphasis on the adjective “selfish” as opposed to the noun “gene.” From behind his rebuilt barricade, he writes: “The logic of Darwinism concludes that the unit in the hierarchy of life which survives and passes through the filter of natural selection will tend to be selfish. The units that survive in the world will be the ones that succeeded in surviving at the expense of their rivals at their own level in the hierarchy. That, precisely, is what selfish means in this context.” For Dawkins the distinction between genes and the organisms that merely serve as their “robot vehicles”[93] is crucial. “The whole idea of the selfish gene, with the stress properly applied to the last word, is that the unit of natural selection (i.e. the unit of self-interest) is not the selfish organism, nor the selfish group or selfish species or selfish ecosystem, but the selfish gene.”[94]

Using italics for the noun gives emphasis, but using the adjective (selfish) six times in the sentence hardly seems to reduce its important role in Dawkins’ battle plan. And Dawkins does not disappoint in this regard: “The most obvious way in which genes ensure their own ‘selfish’ survival relative to other genes is by programming individual organisms to be selfish.” Dawkins then explains how a selfish gene “that programs individual organisms to favor their genetic kin is statistically likely to benefit copies of itself. Such a gene’s frequency can increase in the gene pool to the point where kin altruism becomes the norm.” Dawkins attributes to evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers the theory of reciprocal altruism, which is the “other main type of altruism for which we have a sell-worked-out Darwinian rationale.” This theory is summarized as “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”[95] He is, of course, referring to selfish organisms here, not to selfish genes (that presumably lack backs to be scratched), although the selfish genes are causing (at least in a causally closed universe) all the selfish scratching.

Edward O. Wilson, who founded the discipline of sociobiology, agrees that science can explain the source of morality, but uses much more ink than Dawkins to argue that only cultural evolution can free us from the consequences of our selfish genes. In On Human Nature Wilson argues that moral precepts in society are “chosen by intuition based on emotion” and, because these precepts “are primarily biological in origin” they are “likely to do no more than reinforce the primitive social arrangements. Such a morality is unconsciously shaped to give new rationalizations for the consecration of the group, the proselytizing role of altruism, and the defense of territory.” Nonetheless, Wilson asserts, “to the extent that principles are chosen by knowledge and reason remote from biology, they can at least in theory be non-Darwinian.”[96]

This leads him to ask: “Can the cultural evolution of higher ethical values gain a direction and momentum of its own and completely replace genetic evolution?” He answers, “I think not. The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior—like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it—is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function.”[97]

In Consilience, however, Wilson clarifies “the nature of the genetic leash and the role of culture….Certain cultural norms also survive and reproduce better than competing norms, causing culture to evolve in a track parallel to and usually much faster than genetic evolution. The quicker the pace of cultural evolution, the looser the connection between genes and culture, although the connection is never completely broken. Culture allows a rapid adjustment to changes in the environment through finely tuned adaptations invented and transmitted without correspondingly precise genetic prescription. In this respect human beings differ fundamentally from all other animal species.” The “undeniable truth,” he says, “is that each society creates culture and is created by it.”[98]

Thus, “In gene-culture coevolution as now conceived by biologists and social scientists, causal events ripple out from the genes to the cells to tissues and thence to brain and behavior. By interaction with the physical environment and preexisting culture, they bias further evolution of the culture. But this sequence—composing what the genes do to culture by way of epigenesis—is only half the circle. The other half is what culture does to the genes. The question posed by the second half of the coevolutionary circle is how culture helps to select the mutating and recombining genes that underlie human nature.”[99] Wilson agrees with Dennett that we are determined by our biological nature, yet free because of our culture.

For Wilson, the new discipline of sociobiology—“or Darwinian anthropology, or evolutionary psychology, or whatever more politically acceptable term one chooses to call it”—offers an explanation for human nature. Its “primary evolutionary principles” may be reduced, he says, to “basic categories” including kin selection, parental investment, mating strategy, status, territorial expansion and defense, and contractual agreement. The category of kin selection, he argues, “is especially important in the origin of altruistic behavior.” Like Dawkins, however, his notion of altruism is selfish. “All mammals, including humans, form societies based on a conjunction of selfish interests….by extending kinshiplike ties to others through long-term contracts.”[100]

A similar argument is made for reciprocal altruism, the behavior in which an organism helps a non-relative because it is likely that the non-relative will reciprocate. Carl N. Degler, however, resists “this form of so-called altruistic behavior. First of all, it is no more selfless than kin selection; it explains apparently selfless behavior by identifying expectations of a return in the future….The second point is that though there is no obvious biological mechanism fostering the behavior (the individuals are not related, as they are in kin selection), Trivers’s assumption is that the behavior has been selected for in the course of evolution because it advanced reproductive success.”[101] Degler uses the qualifying word “so-called” to rally forces behind his charge that both (so-called) kin altruism and reciprocal altruism express a selfish meaning which contradicts the traditional definition of altruism as “unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others.”[102]

With his “prosocial” dagger, Hinde blocks the “selfish” sword wielded so vigorously by Dawkins. “For group living to be possible, prosociality must be more in evidence than selfish assertiveness, but how that has come about has posed an evolutionary problem, because it might seem that selfish individuals would be more likely to flourish and leave offspring than prosocial ones. However, evolutionary theory accounts readily for prosociality to kin and to others seen as kin. Beyond that, modeling techniques have shown that natural selection could, under certain conditions, act in such a way that prosociality to unrelated others, coupled with reciprocity, could evolve.”[103]

Like Edward O. Wilson, Hinde attempts “to integrate the biological with psychological and social-science approaches to morality.” He also agrees with Wilson that human characteristics “depend on both genes and experience in the physical, social, and cultural environment,” and that “a biological orientation suggests that there are basic commonalities in moral precepts which are derived from commonalities in aspects of human nature.” Specifically, Hinde says, this means that “while the tendency of human beings to look after their own interests is widely recognized, the evidence indicates that natural selection has operated in such a way that it is restrained by equally potent propensities to behave cooperatively and to show prosocial behavior….Prosocial propensities have evolved because they bring biological advantages to individuals living in groups.”[104]

Unlike Wilson, however, Hinde does not think we are tethered by a genetic leash. Nor does Hinde believe, as Dawkins does, that we are simply robot vehicles for our selfish genes. “We hear a great deal about selfish assertiveness,” Hinde writes, obviously tired of hearing about it. “That all individuals are liable to display selfish and assertive behavior is clear, but it is equally the case that all individuals are capable of displaying unselfish, prosocial behavior which may be disadvantageous to themselves at least in the short-term—some individuals, of course, more than others. By and large, our selfishness is held in check by more positive propensities, by the prosocial aspects of our nature.”[105]

The common belief in “selfish genes,” Degler says, means “biologically oriented social scientists are faced with a contradiction when they try to find liberal and humane values emerging out of evolution and natural selection.” Yet, research on child development offers evidence of empathy that seems to have biological roots. Psychologist Jerome Kagan affirms that “beneath the extraordinary variety in surface behavior and consciously articulated ideals, there is a set of emotional states that form the bases for a limited number of universal moral categories that transcend time and locality….[Before a child is three] we can count on the appearance of empathy and an appreciation of right and wrong…Thus, there are both biological as well as cultural influences on the growth of morality.” Empathy for others and moral standards “are part of a child’s development,” he says, “because they are necessary for the socialization of aggression and destructive behavior.”[106]

This view of socialization through evolution goes back to Darwin, who suggests in The Descent of Man that “parental and filial affections, which apparently lie at the basis of the social affections” have been “to a large extent gained through natural selection,” and that “the moral sense is fundamentally identical with the social instincts.” In the case of “the lower animals,” he argues, “it would be absurd to speak of these instincts as having been developed from selfishness, or for the happiness of the community. They have, however, certainly been developed for the general good of the community.” These “social instincts” will have given humans, Darwin concludes, “some feeling of sympathy” for others.[107]

Amidst the battle, Midgley and James Q. Wilson drink deeply from Darwin’s writings to renew their strength. Midgley observes that Darwin used “ideas from Aristotle, Hume and Kant” to suggest that “the relation of the natural social motives to morality” may be “much like the relation of natural curiosity to mathematics and science, or the relation of natural wonder and admiration to art, or that of natural amusability to jokes. These natural motives do not of themselves create the arts and institutions that channel them. But they provide a certain appropriate motivational force that is necessary to create these channels, and they also determine, sometimes in surprising ways, the direction which that force will take.” This suggestion by Darwin, she says, has “until quite recently, received little attention because versions of the noisy egoist myth were widely accepted as the only possible ‘Darwinist’ approach to ethics.”[108]

Darwin, of course, did not know about genes, and so, unlike sociobiologists today and many moral philosophers as well, did not feel compelled to explain the social instincts of all animals (including humans), and also the sympathy of humans that evolved from these instincts, as descending in some fashion from “selfish genes.” Midgley, however, finds Darwin’s explanation of an altruism that extends beyond kin more convincing than the alternative accounts of either Dawkins or Edward O. Wilson. “Now the development of sociability,” she writes, “proceeds in any case largely by this extension to other adults of behavior first developed between parents and young—grooming, mouth contact, embracing, protective and submissive gestures, giving food. In fact, wider sociability in its original essence simply is the power of adults to treat one another, mutually, as honorary parents and children. It is enriched later with other patterns largely drawn from the interactions between parents and infants: hence the enormous importance of play as a source of social sophistication. But quasi-parental interactions come first. They work well because they are adapted to soothe, to conciliate, to forge a bond. Once forged, why should this bond not carry its usual consequence of protectiveness?”[109]

Midgley points to evidence among non-human social animals of “non-reflective” ways of resolving the conflicts between motives: “For instance, creatures which do a good deal of ritual fighting have certain innate attitudes which tend to fit their clashes into a dominance framework that limits the scope of aggression. And in migratory creatures—as Darwin noticed—the drive to migrate overwhelms all other motives when its season arrives.” But beings “who reflect much on their own and each others’ lives, as we do,” have greater capacity for memory and “therefore need to arbitrate these conflicts somehow in a way that makes it possible to see their lives as reasonably coherent and continuous.” This may explain why “a distinctively human element certainly does emerge in the way conflicts are normally handled.”[110]

Darwin illustrated this evolutionary development “by noting the difference between the human reflective predicament and the situation of parent swallows, which can without hesitation join the migrating flock, deserting the nestlings that they have been devotedly feeding and leaving them to die. As he points out, someone who was blessed or cursed with a much longer memory and a more active imagination could not do this without agonizing conflict, which would surely be expressed in behavior—for instance, in a tendency to interrupt the migration by sometimes turning back. This sort of vacillation would make serious trouble. If it was not eliminated, the creatures would need to learn somehow to understand their motives better, prioritizing and controlling them. This would involve moral thinking.”[111] Therefore, Midgley says, Darwin thought it “exceedingly likely that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well-developed, or anything like as well-developed, as in man.” Not genes, she concludes, but the power of thought—“if it once makes visible the conflicts of motive that all animals have, must generate morality.”[112]

What principles, Midgley asks, would thought use to resolve conflicts between motives? “Darwin notices a most interesting difference between the two kinds of motive that are often involved on this kind of occasion. An impulse which is violent but temporary, such as migration or fury or panic fear, opposes a habitual feeling which is much weaker at any one time, but is stronger in that it is far more persistent and lies deeper in the character. This second feeling is chronic rather than acute. It is less isolated; it is more thoroughly connected to other characteristic motives. Darwin thought that, although the sudden, violent motives must often prevail, reflection, when it did intervene, would tend to favor rules that would protect the milder but more persistent and pervasive ones. Violating these would lead to much longer and more distressing remorse later on, because they resonate with so many other prevalent motives. And these mild but persistent motives would tend to be those that created and maintained social bonds.” Midgley suggests this led Darwin to conclude that intelligent beings would produce rules that protect “chronic social affections” against “the acute but transient motives which often oppose them….Thus, he said, ‘the social instincts—the prime principle of man’s moral constitution—with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the Golden Rule…[which] lies at the foundation of morality.’”[113]

James Q. Wilson also is critical of the claim that a Darwinian explanation of selfless behavior has to somehow derive morality from selfish genes. He agrees that “the moral sense” identified by Darwin must have had adaptive value, for “if it did not, natural selection would have worked against people who had such useless traits as sympathy, self-control, or a desire for fairness and in favor of those with the opposite tendencies.” Yet, he believes “contemporary biologists sometimes give too narrow an account of this evolutionary process, because they attempt to link selfish genes directly to unselfish behavior without explaining the intervening psychological mechanism….[W]hat evolution has selected for over countless millennia is not simply a desire to reproduce one’s genes in the next generation, or even to ensure that similar genes among one’s kin get reproduced, but a particular psychological orientation that has as one of its effects a preference for kin but extends to nonkin as well.”[114]

Like Midgley, James Q. Wilson accepts Darwin’s account of moral evolution due to social instincts and growing intelligence. He notes that Darwin identified four steps in this process: “First, ‘social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows…and to perform certain services for them.’ Second, with the emergence of the higher mental faculties, ‘images of all past actions and motives {and, we might add, the imaginings of future actions and possibilities} would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual.’ Third, after the power of language has been acquired, the wishes of every member, and especially the opinion each has of the other, can be clearly expressed. Finally, action in accordance with the opinion of others, the recollection of past actions, and the apprehension of future possibilities would quickly become habitual most of the time for most people, albeit not all of the time for any person and none of the time for some.”[115]

James Q. Wilson also attacks some evolutionary biologists (I wonder who?) for describing evolution as selecting for behavior, when in fact it “only selects for mechanisms that produce a behavior or predispose an animal to it. Failing to ask what psychological mechanism produces moral behavior makes it impossible to understand such behavior.” A focus only on how “reproductive success and inclusive fitness” evolve into moral behavior leads to “heated debates as to whether or under what circumstances altruism or reciprocity make evolutionary sense—that is, how these behaviors might or might not spread in a population.” What is overlooked in such debates is “the desire for attachment or affiliation,” which is the psychological “mechanism underlying human conduct.” This “desire is evident in the instinctively prosocial behavior of the newborn infant and in the instinctively caring response that parents make to that behavior.”[116]

Wilson points to research showing that a child’s moral sense emerges “before the child has acquired much in the way of language” as evidence of this social instinct, which suggests that “the acquisition of language, rather than a necessary precursor of moral action, is itself a manifestation of the natural sociability of mankind.” He grants that culture affects both the substance and development of ethics, but argues that morality is rooted in human nature. “If mankind were not by nature social, if morality had to be written on a blank slate wholly by means of instruction, then it would not emerge until well after language had been acquired so that concepts could be understood, and by that time it would probably be too late.” Darwin, Wilson reminds us, was the first to argue that our morality evolved from our social instincts.[117]

Boylan’s emphasis in Basic Ethics on the argument by Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson describing what is often identified as “group selection” also may be traced back to Darwin, who believed that “in competition between groups those with the more courageous members would often prevail.” Evolutionary biologists take opposing sides over this claim, but some defend the Sober and Wilson position that even though “natural selection can act within a group to favor selfish individuals over others, it can also act between groups to favor groups of altruists over others. Group selection occurs in those circumstances where selection between groups is stronger than selection within groups.”[118] Harman isn’t sure about this, but he does list the argument as the first of the five alternative explanations he identifies for human sociality.

Arnhart goes further. (Might we say, “boldly goes”?) A Darwinian “view of ethics would teach that human beings are moved by self-love; yet, as social animals, they are also moved, as an extension of their self-love, to love those attached to them by various social bonds.” The shift in language from “selfish” to “self-love” allows Arnhart to reject the odious metaphor wielded so effectively by some by some sociobiologists in the battle over which view of Darwin evolution would prevail. Moreover, the sword of “self-love” is also effective in defending against those believing in “selfless creatures who act for the benefit of others with no compensating benefit for themselves.” Not only, Arnhart says, “is self-love opposed to selflessness, it is also opposed to selfishness understood as the myopic disregard for one’s social needs.” Furthermore, Arnhart asserts, if Darwin is right about “the natural moral sense, we can predict that the natural desire of some to exploit others will be checked by the natural desire of their victims to resist exploitation.”[119]

At long last, amidst this seeming interminable struggle, we consider whether or not ethics can be reduced to biology. By aggressively claiming it can, Edward O. Wilson says he simply means that all intellectuals should embrace the “goal of turning as much philosophy as possible into science.” This would involve taking an “empiricist view” with “its emphasis on objective knowledge. Because the success of an ethical code depends on how wisely it interprets the moral sentiments, those who frame it should know how the brain works, and how the mind develops.” In short, the empiricist argument “is that by exploring the biological roots of moral behavior, and explaining their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wiser and more enduring ethical consensus than has gone before.”[120]

The response from moral philosophers, as I indicated earlier, has been largely to ignore this assault in print (while condemning privately among colleagues), but there are exceptions. Among the moral philosophers taking seriously the implications of Darwinian natural selection, Midgley was one of the first to offer a thoughtful response. Subsequently, I suggest, Arnhart and James Q. Wilson have provided revised versions of the natural law tradition that take evolution into account. A number of scientists, including Haslam, Hinde, and Kauffman, have also taken up Wilson’s quest for consilience, but in ways that make more sense to me (and presumably makes less sense to Wilson). In contrast, Kwame Anthony Appiah opines that the use of Darwinian arguments to justify social inequalities makes it “reasonable to regard evolutionary hypotheses with skepticism until they are tested against evidence from anthropology and history about the full range of human variability.”[121]

In contrast, Midgley praises Wilson for raising the “naturalistic” question concerning ethics. “All moral doctrines,” she readily admits, “all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.” The main responsibility of moral philosophy, she suggests, “is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from the different sides of our nature. Here I believe that we can be helped by the insights the evolutionary context provides, alongside many other sources of insight.”[122]

Describing human nature, however, from the perspective of any scientific discipline, does not answer ethical questions. “Philosophy and biology are not in competition,” Midgley says, despite what Edward O. Wilson claims, for “they are different aspects of one inquiry….What we need is to attend more, in moral argument, to the biological facts. But this does not make philosophy unnecessary; it just makes it harder….Concepts like nature, duty, freedom, motive, and creativity need analyzing and cleaning up. Doing this is plainly no part of neurology. This is not to say that neurologists cannot contribute to it….But if they contribute, it is philosophy that they are doing.”[123] As math requires mathematical thought, Midgley says, and not simply an explanation of brain function, ethics requires being able to “follow an ethical argument,” to “state the standards involved,” and to “relate those standards to other forms of thought” in order to “say something about the place of ethics in life.”[124]

Fatigue has long since dampened the ardor of most combatants and the patience of every reader, but fortunately Blackburn has negotiated a truce by suggesting “three confusions” concerning the use of biological arguments about altruism in moral philosophy. The first involves confusing our sense of who we are with an explanation of how we came to be as we are. A theory of reciprocal altruism that explains helping another as a selfish behavior does not explain why anyone would act out of a general concern for the good of others, which is the human behavior to which altruism refers. Blackburn acknowledges that there are instances “of seeming altruism disguising hope for future benefits,” but there are also cases “in which it is not like this….The driver gives the penniless hitch-hiker a lift; the diner tips the waiter he knows he will never see again; they each do it when there are no bystanders to watch the action.”[125] To argue that these common acts are not genuinely altruistic, because evolution only explains kin and reciprocal altruism, is to be confused.

A second related confusion is to think that genuine altruism is impossible, because we lack an evolutionary explanation for it. This assumes that natural selection can and must explain every aspect of our lives. Darwin did not believe this, and such a claim is impossible to prove scientifically. Moreover, it neglects the way we understand and explain ourselves all the time.

A third confusion involves attributing a personal trait to genes and then claiming that the way genes are proves how persons are. Blackburn says: “The most notorious example of this mistake is in The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. Here the fact that genes replicate and have a different chance of replicating in different environments is presented metaphorically in terms of their being ‘selfish’ and indulging a kind of ruthless competition to beat out other genes. It is then inferred that the human animal must itself be selfish, since somehow this is the only appropriate psychology for the vehicle in which these little monsters are carried.” Blackburn notes that “Dawkins has since repudiated this idea, but it maintains a life of its own.”[126]

These confusions dominate Boylan’s discussion of altruism in Basic Ethics as part of his chapter entitled “Are People Good or Bad?” The chapter begins with the sentence: “The question of whether people are, by nature, good or bad depends upon various understandings of genetics and of the nature of human beings, as such.” Psychological egoists and some sociobiologists are identified as arguing that “humans are, by nature, bad.” The example given with respect to sociobiologists is that what “appears to be altruistic behavior is really an instance of the selfish gene strategy.” Then, Boylan notes, “some sociobiologists argue that there may be an evolutionary advantage to being open to altruism.”[127] (Why is it always “some sociobiologists?) Ethics is, in effect, reduced to deciding what theory in sociobiology is correct, as though only science can explain moral philosophy. I agree with Mary Warnock, who dares to appeal to our common sense: “We should not be blinded, or cowed, by the belief that there is one and only one kind of explanation for behavior, the causal.”[128]

I have tried to show that scientists are not in complete agreement about drawing inferences for ethics from the theory and evidence for Darwinian natural selection. Moral philosophers also disagree about the relevance of evolutionary theory for ethical discourse. In science and philosophy, therefore, the clash continues over teleology, naturalism, determinism, and altruism, and we should not expect any quick end to the many differences among us. From those who write textbooks for ethics, however, we should expect a fair summary of the issues.

Concerning the use of Darwinian natural selection in ethics, I suggest that the following statement by Peter Singer might at least point us toward a truce. “What are the ethical implications of a scientific explanation of ethics? To answer this it may help to see the sociobiological explanation as a rival to an anthropological explanation, and not as a rival to philosophical theories about what we ought to do. The mistake made by sociobiologists who think that their explanations of ethics can tell us what we ought to do parallels that of anthropologists who thought that the diversity of morals between societies implies that people ought to follow the moral code of their own society. Explanations of what ethics is, whether anthropological or sociobiological, cannot tell me what I ought to do, because I am not bound to follow the conventions of my society, or to foster the survival of my genes.”[129]

I leave the final word here to Darwin, who believed “that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts.” A person acting “for the good of others,” he wrote, “will received the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth.” Nonetheless, “his reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost guide or conscience.”[130]

Notes

[1] Henry Haslam, The Moral Mind, 4.

[2] Ronald Munson, Intervention and Reflection: Basic Issues in Medical Ethics, 8th edition, 768-769.

[3] James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 4th edition, 56. The 2010 6th edition, which was published after the death of James Rachels and edited by Stuart Rachels, has exactly the same wording on page 56.

[4] Jacques P. Thiroux and Keith W. Krasemann, Ethics: Theory and Practice, 10th edition, 106.

[5] Michael Boylan, Basic Ethics, 2nd edition, 49, 51. In the original the words “selfish gene strategy” is in bold type.

[6] I admit that I ignored evolution in writing with Harlan Stelmach, Doing Ethics in a Diverse World. Chapter 2 of Doing Environmental Ethics includes a discussion of Darwinian natural selection.

[7] “Today the theory of evolution plays a surprisingly small role in ethics, and this is all the more extraordinary when we consider how little impact it appears to have had in much of contemporary environmental ethics.” Lisa H. Sideris, Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection, 1.

[8] Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, 5.

[9] Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate, 18-19.

[10] Ernst Mayr writes: “there is no evidence whatsoever to support any belief in cosmic teleology.” What Evolution Is, 275, quoted in Craig A. Boyd, A Shared Morality: A Narrative Defense of Natural Law Ethics, 86.

[11] Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion, 78, 85.

[12] Ibid., 76.

[13] Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, 3, 5.

[14] Paul Ricoeur agrees with Wright in this regard. Ricoeur tries “to interpret Gould’s resistance to the idea of progress in the following way: it is because we are here, as human beings, posing the question of the meaning of morality, that we can read the spectacle offered by the diversity of living things backwards, as it were—going back from our own time to the beginnings of life. We thus choose, from the profusion of lines of descent, those lines that, serially arranged, point toward the human….Along the way, as Gould remarks, we quietly forget that bacteria continue to constitute the most stable, numerous, and indestructible population on earth. We forget the immense multitude of fishes….What then does Gould do? He forgets our forgetting—forgets the looking back that retains only that which led, in a random way to be sure, but nonetheless a progressive way, to man. What meaning can a world have for us that is not only without a purpose but without progressive evolution? It signifies the ruin of the very idea of descent, in the sense of progressively ‘coming from’.” Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?, 181-182.

[15] Ibid., 275-276, 315.

[16] Quoted in Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 139-140.

[17] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 360-361.

[18] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 243-244. “Since the term ‘teleology’ is commonly associated with cosmic purposiveness, some biologists prefer the term ‘teleonomy’ to designate the goal-directed character of living beings.” Ibid., 245-246.

[19] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature, 4.

[20] Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate, 58.

[21] Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, 73, 145, 108.

[22] Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, 136-137.

[23] Nomology is the “science of physical and logical laws.” Online at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nomological.

[24] Keith Ward, The Big Questions in Science and Religion, 201.

[25] John R. Searle, Consciousness and Language, 89.

[26] Ibid., 115, 138-139, 141.

[27] Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 12.

[28] Ibid., 170, 173.

[29] James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. 1, 262.

[30] Holmes Rolston III, Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History, 367.

[31] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 240. He identifies the source of the quote on Aristotle as Joe Sachs Aristotle’s “Physics”: A Guided Study, 247.

[32] Craig A. Boyd, A Shared Morality: A Narrative Defense of Natural Law Ethics, 31, 184-185.

[33] Barbara MacKinnon, Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues, fifth edition, 99.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Joseph R. DesJardins, Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy, fourth edition, 28. Ian Barbour agrees: “evolutionary biology does not either establish or discredit ethical principles.”

[36] Ibid., 29.

[37] Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, 71-72.

[38] By focusing on the good of a group, Darwin argued, “the reproach is removed of laying the foundation of the noblest part of our nature in the base principle of selfishness.” Quoted in Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinianism in American Social Thought, 9-10.

[39] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 79-80, 167. In support of this statement, he cites Michael T. McGuire, “Moralistic Aggression, Processing Mechanism, and the Brain: The biological Foundations of the Sense of Justice.” In Robert D. Masters and Margaret Gruter, eds., The Sense of justice: Biological Foundations of Law and Roger D. Masters, The Nature of Politics.

[40] I also refer to de Waal’s research in Doing Environmental Ethics, 7.

[41] Ibid., 80.

[42] Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?, 191-192. Ricoeur continues: “Looking at “the conditions that Darwin lists—sympathy, memory, feeling, habit, and above all language—one might say that we start off from these predispositions but that, first, we go back to them in order then to trace the path of descent. Thus one might say, following Darwin, that the golden rule has its origin in moral evolution, which takes over from biological evolution.” Yet, “this rule had first to be formulated, following the example of humanity’s greatest sages.” Therefore, Ricoeur concludes: “Apart from our moral questioning, however, nature does not move in any direction.”

[43] Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, 272, 280, 281. In a footnote Midgley clarifies that: “Aristotle regarded matter as potency—the power to become some particular thing—not as a general neutral stuff (Metaphysics, 8.7).”

[44] Ian Barbour, Ethics in an Age of Technology, vol. 2, 30.

[45] Richard Joyce argues: “Moore’s naturalistic fallacy has little to do with the injunction against deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’; rather, it is the claim that one cannot define an indefinable thing, and so should not attempt to.” The Evolution of Morality, 146-151.

[46] Ibid., 177. Paul Riceour seems to agree with Han Jonas, who claims the affirmation of life unites the is and the ought. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?, 228.

[47] Ibid., xxii, 166.

[48] Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate, 126-127.

[49] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 59, 69-70.

[50] Ibid., 78, 81. In support of this last assertion he cites the work of Antonio R. Damasio and Robert D. Masters and Margaret Gruter, eds., The Sense of justice.

[51] Labile means “continually undergoing chemical, physical, or biological change or breakdown; readily open to change.” Online at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lability.

[52] Robert A. Hinde, Why Good Is Good, 184-185.

[53] Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 12, 263, 87.

[54] Quoted in Anna L. Peterson, Being Human: Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World, 72.

[55] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 146-147.

[56] Ibid., 155.

[57] Holmes Rolston III, “Values in Nature and the Nature of Value,” in Andrew Light and Holmes III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 145.

[58] Carol Kaesuk Yoon, “Loyal to Its Roots,” The New York Times (Jun. 10, 2008).

[59] Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics, 219.

[60] Ibid., 232.

[61] James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. 2, 295. In a footnote Gustafson suggests “that much of the discussion… [concerning what is and what ought to be focuses] on a problem of logic more than on a problem of morality. The question was whether one can logically derive language in the imperative mood…from statements in the indicative mood….Facts do not yield value without remainder; the is does not yield an ought without remainder. Nor can the is, or the ‘ought to be,’ be completely derived only from the ought. The relations are always reciprocal.”

[62] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 65-66.

[63] Robert A. Hinde, Why Good Is Good, 183, 192.

[64] Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, 286, 344.

[65] Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality.

[66] Simon Blackburn, Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics, 114.

[67] Jacques P. Thiroux and Keith W. Krasemann, Ethics: Theory and Practice, 106.

[68] Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate, 44, 163.

[69] Quoted in Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 12.

[70] Henry Haslam, The Moral Mind, 4.

[71] Gabriel Dover, Dear Mr Darwin: Letters on the Evolution of life and Human Nature, quoted in Haslam, The Moral Mind, 33.

[72] Henry Haslam, The Moral Mind, 35.

[73] Ibid.

[74] Ibid., 36.

[75] Immaculada de Melo-Martín , Taking Biology Seriously: What Biology Can and Cannot Tell Us About Moral and Public Policy Issues, 19, 32. There are not enough genes in the human genome to specify every neuron connection in the brain much less determine every behavior of a human being. “The human brain is estimated to contain about 10¹² neurons and roughly 10¹⁵ synapses, but human chromosomes contain about 10⁵ genes. Even if these estimates are off by one or two orders of magnitude, one can see that the instructions for wiring together the brain must be quite general in character. There is simply not enough information in the genetic code to specify in advance every synaptic connection, let alone the finer details of neuron geometry.” Timothy Goldsmith, The Biological Roots of Human Nature, 85.

[76] Robert A. Hinde, Why Good Is Good, 175, 176.

[77] Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, 8.

[78] Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, 348. “The basic principle is this: genetic signals play a large role in the initial structuring of the brain. The ultimate shape of the brain, however, is the outcome of an ongoing active process that occurs where lived experience meets both the inner and the outer environment.” Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, 117.

[79] Ibid., 349.

[80] Jacques P. Thiroux and Keith W. Krasemann, Ethics: Theory and Practice, 106.

[81] Simon Blackburn, Being Good, 45.

[82] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 83-84.

[83] Quoted in Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 85.

[84] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 85-86. Arnhart cites the work of Antonio R. Damasio and several others.

[85] Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003).

[86] Ibid., 93, 166, 251.

[87] Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, xi.

[88] Ibid., 4.

[89] “In the process of self-sustaining being, the relationship of the organism to its own material substance is of a twofold nature: dependent on the availability of this substance, the organism is nonetheless independent of matter’s particular identity. Its own functional identity does not coincide with the substantial identity of its material components, which nevertheless constitute it completely at any given moment. In a word, the organic form stands in a dialectical relationship of needful freedom to matter.” Han Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 66.

[90] Ibid., 174-176.

[91] Michael Boylan, Basic Ethics, 51.

[92] Gilbert Harman, Exploring Values and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy, 207. Harman identifies Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior,as supporting the first explanation, R. B. Brandt Brandt, “The Psychology of Benevolence and its Implications for Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 73:429-53 (1976) as supporting the second explanation, and R. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation as supporting the fourth explanation.

[93] Richard Dawkins, in Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate, 5.

[94] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 215.

[95] Ibid., 216. The phrase “kin altruism” is not italicized in the original.

[96] Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, 167.

[97] Ibid. Steven Rose is critical of this leash metaphor, because “genes and environments are dialectically interdependent throughout any individual’s lifeline.” Lifelines, 133.

[98] Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, 128-131. Anthropologist Derek Freeman seems to share this view. See Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 347.

[99] Ibid., 165.

[100] Ibid., 168-171

[101] Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 284.

[102] Online at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/altruism. The second meaning given is what sociobiologists call kin altruism, namely “behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species.” Soon, we may anticipate, there will be a third meaning for “reciprocal altruism.”

[103] Robert A. Hinde, Why Good Is Good, 180-181.

[104] Ibid., x-xi, 14.

[105] Ibid., 15, 18. Ricoeur agrees with this naturalistic view: “the violence inhibitor operates together with the various factors of sympathy in such a way that one cannot bear the sight of violence without trying to stop it. This component of predispositions is part of what I would call the naturalistic element in ethics….I am, by my very biological nature, by the very fact I am a living being, disposed to display not only cruelty, but also sympathy, toward others.” Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?, 218

[106] Quoted in Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 325.

[107] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 80-81, 97-98, 103. “The term, general good, may be defined as the means by which the greatest possible number of individuals can be reared in full vigor and health, with all their faculties perfect, under the conditions to which they are exposed. As the social instincts both of man and the lower animals have no doubt been developed by the same steps, it would be advisable, if found practicable, to use the same definition in both cases, and to take as the test of morality, the general good or welfare of the community, rather than the general happiness; but this definition would perhaps require some limitation on account of political ethics.”

[108] Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate, 136.

[109] Quoted in Anna L. Peterson, Being Human: Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World, 164.

[110] Ibid., 138-139.

[111] Ibid., 139-140.

[112] Ibid., 140.

[113] Ibid.

[114] James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense, 23.

[115] Ibid., 71.

[116] Ibid., 126-127.

[117] Ibid., 130.

[118] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 76-77. Jean-Pierre Changeux supports this view says that anthropologist Christopher Boehm does as well. Jean-Pierre Changeus and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?, 189.

[119] Ibid., 160.

[120] Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, 240.

[121] Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics, 123-124.

[122] Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, 168-169.

[123] Ibid, 174.

[124] Ibid.

[125] Simon Blackburn, Being Good, 38-40.

[126] Ibid., 42-43.

[127] Michael Boylan, Basic Ethics, 48, 51.

[128] Mary Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics, 163.

[129] Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle, 81.

[130] From Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 94-95, quoted in Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, 378.