Customer Reviews

The Evolution of Morality (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

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"Morality", that sense of doing good, or at least avoiding harm, to others is one of humanity's treasured phrases. It is one of the characteristics that supposedly sets us apart from the other animals. We use the values imparted to it in judging others, as we are judged in turn. However, it remains an enigmatic term, carrying a host of definitions. And that's not counting the exceptions. Richard Joyce, for all his assertive title, isn't claiming to have the final word on morality. Instead, he's launching a project with areas of study that should be investigated further. Only one thing he insists on - as a product of evolution by natural selection, human beings will find the origins of that valued concept in our biological heritage.

Joyce's treatise is tightly organised. Given he addresses this complex idea in just over two hundred pages, discipline with words is a must. There are but six chapters in which to deal with questions plaguing our species since at least the invention of writing. In that short stack, he ties anthropology, sociology, evolutionary psychology and other fields together in a very neat package. Even such a short presentation doesn't force him to be terse. The material is clearly presented and sprinklings of wit keep it from bogging the reader down. However, the proposals are carefully, if succinctly, offered and the reader's attention must not flag.

Since "morality" hinges on the interactions between humans [other animals, whatever their behaviour traits, are deemed "amoral"] the key in Joyce's analysis is "reciprocity". Reciprocity hinges on a host of factors, from the genetic proximity of relatives to what kind of reputation one has - even across a large group. Game theory has been employed to demonstrate the variations reciprocity can achieve and the lengths to which it might go. The other aspect of interaction is language. For Joyce, setting moral standards and assessing behaviour against these can only be effective when the norms are understood. It's not possible to derive moral values from actions alone.

The expression of moral statements and the expectation that these will be respected is a significant aspect of maintaining human communities. The exchange of views within a group and the acceptance of certain behaviour patterns strengthens the identity of the community. As values were tested, individuals could discern who among the group could be trusted, particularly in times of difficulties. Those accepting the norms are more likely to gain status and, hence, reproductive success. These conditions lead to reinforcement of the values under consideration, making a moral sense an innate human characteristic. Not only is the application of moral values universal, but these values are projected beyond the small group to more extended communities with seamless ease. Joyce makes no attempt to define when, or even where, this process began. It was sufficiently distant in time to have made a sense of moral values part of the baggage our species carried out of Africa.

Having concluded that there's sufficient evidence to warrant declaring the morality is a evolved trait, Joyce asks "So what?" in a "philosophical tone of voice". This "tone" is applied to a number of philosophers who have addressed the issue of morality as a result of evolutionary development. He examines "The Naturalistic Fallacy" that has been attributed to George Moore early in the 20th Century. The claim imputed to Moore, that "ought" cannot be derived from "is", is misdirected, says Joyce. Several scholars, such as Robert Richards, William Casebeer and Daniel Dennett are reviewed on this and other issues - what, for example, is "virtue" and does it determine what is "ethical"? From this, Joyce moves to a discussion of which moral standards we should value. He is careful to caution readers not to feel they should derive specific moral beliefs from evolution. There's a massive leap from evolution giving us a moral sense to which elements we choose to apply it to. The capacity for moral judgement doesn't provide a prescription for specific behaviours.

Although Joyce is hardly the first philosopher to consider our evolutionary roots for ethics and morality, the succinct approach and clear writing make this an excellent starting point for someone new to the concept. Avoiding arcane propositions and pedantic language, the author provides a clear pointer for future study. No reader should feel intimidated by the prospect of taking up this book. We need more such work and workers dealing with defining what makes a human being. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

This book puts forth an argument that I think will have to be dealt with for a long time to come. It essentially takes what we know about Natural Selection and asks what this tells us about the reliability of our moral beliefs. The answer is not very flattering for our moral beliefs.

Yes more work will need to be done in this area. The author does not claim to close the case but is more of the inclination that he is opening the case. So the book is not exhaustive of every possible approach one might take when dealing with this issue. However, when Joyce does go down a line of thought, he does so with clarity. Chapter 5 dealing with those who think evolution actually vindicates our moral beliefs is, alone, worth the price of the book. The author makes short work of sorting out the ambiguities that cloud the thinking here. In doing this, he not only points out the critical flaws in much of what has been previously written on this topic, but he informs the reader how to spot many of the ambiguities that repeatedly come up in this discourse.

Moral philosophers tend to take the content of morality as given, perhaps by intuition or our cultural heritage, and attempt to derive moral truth from a sparse set of assumptions, such a utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill), virtue theory (Aristotle), or synthetic a priori deontological notions (Kant). Other philosophers attempt to derive valid moral rules themselves on the basis of a neo-Platonic foray into the juggling of abstract universals (Rawls, Nozick, Singer, Dworkin). Perhaps I betray my position as a behavioral scientist by believing that morals are things that people have, like noses and tendencies to procrastinate, and should be studied scientifically rather than philosophically. Happily, I am not alone, however, as Richard Joyce takes the same position in his book, The Evolution of Morality.

Joyce recites the extensive body of evidence showing that there is a universal human morality observed in virtually all societies ever studied, including the thousand or so primitive hunter-gather societies that exist in the contemporary world. Of course, there are also strong contrasts in some moral principles across societies, but these tend to be confined to a few delicate areas, including gender relations and political philosophy, and they can doubtless be explained by level of economic development and political integration. But, if this is the case, it is unlikely that "ethical theory" can stand as a bastion of philosophizing. Rather, ethical theory is the study of the structure and evolution of human morality. This is the "moral skepticism" that Joyce embraces, and it is well taken.

The problem with traditional moral philosophy is that it has not recognized that morality is an evolved trait of our species, and had we evolved differently, we would have radically different morality. Therefore, morality cannot be derived from abstract, ahistorical axioms that would hold for any intelligent, social creature. Darwin understood this clearly when he wrote that if we had evolved from bee-like ancestors (quote in Joyce, p. 229), "unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters." Similarly, political philosophy would be much different in a race of intelligent termites, or even of chimpanzees, than of humans.

It is safe to say humans are the only species with a moral sense, although we have bred our domestic pets to appear to conform to our morality. Why has this occurred? Joyce suggests that in a complex society with many subtle norms of behavior and multi-dimensional relations among individuals, a moral sense is individually fitness-enhancing. The amoral sociopath, who behaves morally only when this suits his purpose, should in theory do better than the moral person, who is willing to sacrifice personally in order to uphold moral rules. But, humans tend to be "present-oriented", overvaluing immediate pleasures and undervaluing long-term gains. A moral sense helps us be reasonable prosocial and prudential concerning our long-term interests, because it substitutes present pleasures and pains for future ones. For instance, I brush my teeth, and am courteous to my boss, because I would feel bad if I did otherwise, not because I am reckoning some trade-off between present and future well-being. As Hamlet says, "Conscience doth make cowards of us all," except the coward, who obeys societies rules, lives to have more offspring, while the hero is remembered only in books.

I'm probably not the target audience for this book. It is certainly not a popularization of the concepts it discusses with a rigourous logical scrupulousness that for me became a tedious qualifying of almost every statement. It felt to me like I was reading "I'm saying x, which is not to say that y can't be true, or even that x has to be true, but just that x is possible, and the person who says z I think is wrong because z can't be true..." It seemed that early in the book a claim was made that the act of moralizing rather than the content of morality was going to be focused on, yet sometimes criticisms of other thinkers were based on the premise that their concept of moralizing could support falsehoods. Meanwhile the author's own ideas were sometimes asked for indulgence not because they were provably true, but because they could be true. That said, I think for someone who wants to engage in an obsessive-compulsive sifting of language regarding the evolution of morality, this book for the price is an excellent value.

In this book, Richard Joyce basically makes the case that evolution may well have produced in us a sense of morality that vindicates error theory (in that we feel like our moral sentiments say something true about the world, but are actually subjective judgments that don't reflect any objective truth at all). His argument comes in three parts: The first part of the book is concerned with showing that evolution could have created the propensity toward moral thinking and that doing so could have aided in individuals' and groups' fitness. Second, he talks about what this means, rejecting the "naturalistic" view that moral judgments reflect facts about the universe, and arguing for the "error theory" view that while moral judgments seem to reflect facts about the world, they do not.

The first part of the book treads lightly because, in the end, we can only speculate about how, in fact, evolution favored moral thinking. Joyce discusses several theories - kin altruism, group selection, direct and indirect reciprocal altruism. While Joyce seems to prefer the idea that direct reciprocal altruism led to indirect reciprocal altruism and that this produced our tendency for moral thought, he remains ultimately agnostic. More evidence needs to come in before we know, in fact, how evolution created morality.

A notable part of this section is Joyce's clarification of what morality actually is. He rejects both strong cognitivism and non-cognitivism, taking a middle position. Morality is less than just reasoned reflection (cognitivism) but more than just emotional sentiments (non-cognitivism). Morality, to Joyce, involves both sentiment and thought (and he suggests that it requires linguistic ability as well). We have sentiments, but morality is more than just saying "I don't feel like murdering her." It is "I think it would be wrong to murder her and therefore, I don't want to do it." Joyce suggests that evolution must have done more than just create feelings to refrain from or engage in certain behaviors; to introduce MORALITY, it had to produce the second of these.

Why would it have done that? As long as we assume that social life where all follow a certain moral code, we can recognize that fostering tendencies toward judging things to be objectively wrong maintain group fitness better than just having feelings that one wants to refrain from/engage in certain things. That is to say, it is more likely that we will refrain from stealing if we think that stealing is somehow objectively wrong than just have feelings that make not stealing feel good.

By way of the book's second section, Joyce first criticizes several attempts to adduce moral naturalism from evolutionary theory. Most of these revolve around Joyce's argument that simply saying "x is an evolved trait" is nowhere close to saying "x is a good trait to have." Joyce's favorite example is the sweet tooth, which evolved when sugars were scarce and evolutionary fitness was enhanced by the urge to grab what one could when one could. Joyce also cautions that while one CAN derive descriptive "oughts" from "is's" (Geese fly north at x time, therefore they ought to fly there soon,") there are no good arguments that one can derive moral "oughts" from "is's."

Lastly, Joyce argues that recognition of morality's evolved history actually vindicates a view that moral judgments are no more than traits that evolved because they were useful to our ancestors. As far as we can tell, there is no natural property that moral terms correlate with (Moore's naturalistic fallacy) or are in themselves. But if that is true, why do moral judgments FEEL like they express something true about the universe? Joyce's answer, outlined a few paragraphs above, is that this was the best way for them to evolve to be most effective. Redness, for an analogy, doesn't exist in the object, but is a property of how the light-wave hits the eye and how our brain processes the transaction. But when we see redness, we see it in the object BECAUSE SEEING THIS WAY IS EFFICIENT AND USEFUL. In the same way, it is quite plausible and moral judgments are the same way: they evolved to feel like they correlate to "moral facts" in the universe when, in reality, they do this because this "illusion" was useful to our ancestors.

The only quip I have with this book is that it really leaves the next obvious question unadressed: is morality still a useful thing to have? In fairness, Joyce goes into this in his The Myth of Morality (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy) with an answer I don't find horribly convincing. I simply think there should have been a concluding chapter that asks what is to me an obvious question: even if morality is a byproduct of our evolutionary history, and we evolved an "error theory" type of moral thinking, can morality be justified even if there exist no transcendent moral "rights" and "wrongs." There has been much interesting writing, particularly by contractarians like Jan Narveson and David Gauthier, that show ways that morality can be justified even if relativism is the true position.

Be that as it may, this book is well written, well argued, and while readers may not be convinced on every point (several points, in fact, Joyce wisely and deliberately remains agnostic on), it is a really good read. A good counterpoint to the works (like Harris's new book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values purporting to show that since morality has an evolutionary history, naturalism is justified.

In this book, Joyce sets out on an extremely ambitious mission: To show that morality as we know it is worthless because it is only a side-effect of our evolutionary history.

He clearly knows his facts about evolution, and the book is an engaging and thought-provoking read; but the overall argument rests upon an extremely silly premise, namely: "If we do X because we evolved to do X, then we must be wrong in doing X." By the same reasoning, not only morality, but sex, science, and even basic cognitive processes like vision and logic must be false.

Yes, we evolved to be moral---this is because morality is in fact a true reflection of the state of the universe, and our evolution adapted us to that fact.