ABSTRACT
Sociobiology and Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Fitness vs. Goodness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Moral Arguments and Their Premises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Grammar and Moral Universals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
The idea that there is a biological basis for morality has acquired a bad odor, arising largely out of the controversy that began with the 1975 publication of E. O. Wilson’s book
Sociobiology
(Caplan, 1978; Segerstråle, 2000). Although the ostensible topic of that book was the general biological principles that govern the evolution of social behavior in animals, its real focus was Wilson’s wish to find a way of grounding moral judgments in statements about natural selection. The book’s moralistic keynote is sounded in its opening sentences:
Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is wrong even in the strict sense intended. The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our
consciousness with all the emotions — hate, love, guilt, fear, and others — that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers . . . at all depths. (Wilson, 1975:3)
Wilson returned to this theme in the book’s final chapter, in which he attempted to bring the theory of group selection home to the study of human behavior:
Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicised. . . . Only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the [moral] canons be deciphered. (Wilson, 1975:563)
Wilson predicted that the sociobiological investigation of morality would be complicated. Divergent selection pressures, he asserted, will have instilled different moral intuitions — what he called “the activity of the emotive centers” — in the brains of different human groups. “Some of the activity,” wrote Wilson, “is likely to be outdated, a relic of adjustment to the most primitive form of tribal organization . . . directed toward such Pleistocene exigencies as hunting and gathering and intertribal warfare.” Other emotive-center activity “may prove to be
in statu nascendi
, constituting new and quickly changing adaptations to agrarian and urban life” (Wilson, 1975:563, 575). Because the evolutionary interests of men differ from those of women, and those of children, adolescents, and parents differ from each other, we can expect natural selection to yield different moral intuitions in different sex and age groups. Likewise, because patterns of differential reproductive fitness in expanding populations will be different from those in static or shrinking populations, different nations and ethnic groups “will tend to diverge genetically . . . in ethical behaviour.” It follows, in Wilson’s view, that “no single set of moral standards can be applied to all human populations, let alone all sex-age classes within each population” (1975:563-564). A truly scientific morality will thus enjoin us to treat children differently from adults, men differently from women, and Moldavians differently from Masai.
