Sharon Street is the author of a 2006 paper that made quite a splash when it arrived: "A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value". In the paper, she argues that since evolutionary pressures have had a massive influence on our ordinary moral judgments, and since there is no plausible selectionist story whereby we evolved moral responses in response to moral truths or facts, that Darwinian theory undermines the existence of those very facts.
Street, a very smart philosopher, is much more careful than the usual evolutionary psychologist. While the latter will standardly rush headlong into a wild orgy of speculation and projection, Street wisely acknowledges that her proposal is necessarily speculative and that it requires several key assumptions which might be contested. In particular, she is careful to note that her argument requires a kind of loose, pre-established harmony between our base, 'animal' evaluative instincts and our full-blooded moral judgments:
Street's tone is admirably cautious, here, but her idea is not: what sounds like a modestly plausible axiom is in fact an enormously audacious claim made with no supporting evidence. We need to stand back and think about the gap that is being bridged, here. We have instincts, perhaps based around such things as sex, food, survival and sociality, and these instincts are supposed to have "loosely corresponding" counterparts in the form of the mature, full-fledged evaluative judgments we make as adults. Scientifically speaking, there is a need for a deep and complex story that links these two developmental stages together, one story for individual development and one for cultural development. These stories, told by developmental psychologists, psychoanalysts, cultural historians or other specialists (take your pick), will tell us how instinctual drives interact with a wide array of other factors in order to produce mature human beings as we know them.
For Street, it is as though this gap doesn't need to be filled: we can just assume that our drives will show up, basically unadulterated, in our robust moral judgments. Counterexamples to this are legion, but the most obvious one will do: for if anything is a Darwinian instinct, the sex drive is. While we must be careful not to say that the sex drive has a determinate object or activity at which it aims, it's clear that natural selection breeds a powerful erotic drive into all higher mammals so that they can spread those fabulous genes around. So far, so good. Yet, when we look at our actual lives, lived in our actual cultures, do we find the widespread moral conviction that reproductive sexual intercourse is a valuable thing?
We most certainly do not: we find the opposite. We look around and we realize that over half the world's population thinks that reproductive sex performed by persons who have not exchanged rings and been blessed by a priest is a moral sin. We find the sex drive accompanied, in large numbers of people, by a persistent and debilitating feelings of guilt and shame that inhibit the free expression of the drive. We find most persons desperately trying to prevent conception via the use of various technologies. Finally, we find, in most societies, an extremely elaborate set of rituals and behaviours that are expected of two people before it is acceptable, right, or good for them to have sex.
Really, to enumerate the ways that the positive instinct for sex does not show up in common morality would take a book's worth of information. What Freud showed, following Nietzsche, is that human culture can take a drive and invert it, twist it back on itself in ways that create unavoidable suffering for the human being in question. That's morality.
Yet, this is what all evolutionary theories of morality need to ignore: the possibility that our instincts and our social morality might diverge, even come into direct conflict. Without this questionable premise, the entire project of explaining morality in terms of natural selection falters (and, I might add, a dozens of highly-paid academic positions become worthless). Yet, it was this very premise that Nietzsche mocked when he noted that in these accounts "the Darwinian beast and the ultramodern unassuming moral milksop who 'no longer bites' politely link hands." A wild-eyed, aggressive, pre-linguistic ape and a pale, sheltered, guilt-ridden modern moralist: why on earth would we ever think that those two creatures could be alike?
Street, a very smart philosopher, is much more careful than the usual evolutionary psychologist. While the latter will standardly rush headlong into a wild orgy of speculation and projection, Street wisely acknowledges that her proposal is necessarily speculative and that it requires several key assumptions which might be contested. In particular, she is careful to note that her argument requires a kind of loose, pre-established harmony between our base, 'animal' evaluative instincts and our full-blooded moral judgments:
The most plausible picture is that natural selection has had a tremendous direct influence on what I have called our “more basic evaluative tendencies,” and that these basic evaluative tendencies, in their turn, have had a major influence on the evaluative judgments we affirm. By this latter claim I do not mean that we automatically or inevitably accept the full-fledged evaluative judgments that line up in content with our basic evaluative tendencies...My point here is instead the simple and plausible one that had the general content of our basic evaluative tendencies been very different, then the general content of our full-fledged evaluative judgments would also have been very different, and in loosely corresponding ways.
Street's tone is admirably cautious, here, but her idea is not: what sounds like a modestly plausible axiom is in fact an enormously audacious claim made with no supporting evidence. We need to stand back and think about the gap that is being bridged, here. We have instincts, perhaps based around such things as sex, food, survival and sociality, and these instincts are supposed to have "loosely corresponding" counterparts in the form of the mature, full-fledged evaluative judgments we make as adults. Scientifically speaking, there is a need for a deep and complex story that links these two developmental stages together, one story for individual development and one for cultural development. These stories, told by developmental psychologists, psychoanalysts, cultural historians or other specialists (take your pick), will tell us how instinctual drives interact with a wide array of other factors in order to produce mature human beings as we know them.
For Street, it is as though this gap doesn't need to be filled: we can just assume that our drives will show up, basically unadulterated, in our robust moral judgments. Counterexamples to this are legion, but the most obvious one will do: for if anything is a Darwinian instinct, the sex drive is. While we must be careful not to say that the sex drive has a determinate object or activity at which it aims, it's clear that natural selection breeds a powerful erotic drive into all higher mammals so that they can spread those fabulous genes around. So far, so good. Yet, when we look at our actual lives, lived in our actual cultures, do we find the widespread moral conviction that reproductive sexual intercourse is a valuable thing?
We most certainly do not: we find the opposite. We look around and we realize that over half the world's population thinks that reproductive sex performed by persons who have not exchanged rings and been blessed by a priest is a moral sin. We find the sex drive accompanied, in large numbers of people, by a persistent and debilitating feelings of guilt and shame that inhibit the free expression of the drive. We find most persons desperately trying to prevent conception via the use of various technologies. Finally, we find, in most societies, an extremely elaborate set of rituals and behaviours that are expected of two people before it is acceptable, right, or good for them to have sex.
Really, to enumerate the ways that the positive instinct for sex does not show up in common morality would take a book's worth of information. What Freud showed, following Nietzsche, is that human culture can take a drive and invert it, twist it back on itself in ways that create unavoidable suffering for the human being in question. That's morality.
Yet, this is what all evolutionary theories of morality need to ignore: the possibility that our instincts and our social morality might diverge, even come into direct conflict. Without this questionable premise, the entire project of explaining morality in terms of natural selection falters (and, I might add, a dozens of highly-paid academic positions become worthless). Yet, it was this very premise that Nietzsche mocked when he noted that in these accounts "the Darwinian beast and the ultramodern unassuming moral milksop who 'no longer bites' politely link hands." A wild-eyed, aggressive, pre-linguistic ape and a pale, sheltered, guilt-ridden modern moralist: why on earth would we ever think that those two creatures could be alike?
5 comments:
I wonder if some evolutionary psychologists might not be able to accommodate your concern. Be they cultural, the drives that account for our moral instincts remain likely to be cast into an evolutionary picture. Not evolution stricto sensu, to be sure, but that does not undermine the broader claim that our moral instincts were, in a way, selected for (at the socio-cultural level) rather than reflectively endorsed as tracking some mind-independent truth. I take it Jesse Prinz would argue roughly in that way. At any rate, the likelihood of Street's assumption does not affect her general argument against realism. On the contrary, the alternative you suggest would seem to make it all stronger, if different, insofar as I don't see how better would primitive cultural drives fare with respect to tracking mind-independent moral truths.
Hi Nicolas,
I don't think this is right. Street's argument requires a kind of rough "match" between our mature judgments and our instinctual drives. If there is no such match, her argument fails, logically speaking, because biological evolution does not have the kind of indirect influence over our mature judgments that she says it does.
Now, you're right that a cultural and psychological history might undermine our mature moral judgments in an analogous way (indeed, Nietzsche seems to have thought something like this). However, this will not rely on a simplistic link betwen modern persons and proto-humans.
Finally, and this is really important: we have no theory of cultural selection. Prinz can repeat "cultural selection" over and over again, as a mantra, but this does not mean that the historical stories in question will take a Darwinian form. If I were a betting man, I'd guess that the true history of our moral attitudes will not be subsumable under a single explanatory principle at all: it will be messy, ever-changing, lacking stable patterns, perhaps even "one damn thing after another".
"Yet, this is what all evolutionary theories of morality need to ignore: the possibility that our instincts and our social morality might diverge, even come into direct conflict. Without this questionable premise, the entire project of explaining morality in terms of natural selection falters"
This is just not so. Evolution can be and almost certainly is responsible for much more than instincts.
I find it incredibly naive to say that because cultural treatment of the sex-drive is diverse that such treatment is not the product of evolution. Evolution is about many things, one of which is competitive advantage. So not only do we find, for instance in Catholicism, that reproductive sexual intercourse is a valuable thing, indeed we observe the recognition that reproduction is the very purpose of sexual intercourse.
Reproduction is about much more than sexual intercourse, however -- for what good it is to reproduce unless your progeny thrive and survive? And therein lies the explanation for diverse attitudes towards sex -- are any of them geared against survival of the group?
Now, I wouldn't argue for a second that cultural mores are dictated by genes, or answerable only to instincts. But cultures as a whole are as subject to the evolutionary system as anything else. Success and survival are the bottom lines.
Anonymous,
But cultures as a whole are as subject to the evolutionary system as anything else. Success and survival are the bottom lines.
You might want to brush up on your evolutionary theory. As it turns out, natural selection requires more than success and survival. In particular, it requires self-replicating units of selection that are causally distinct from selective pressures. No-one knows what these might be in the case of culture: groups of people don't make one-to-one copies of themselves like genes do, neither do moral values, and these cultural items are not causally distinct from selective pressures (i.e. in the case of culture, they are the selective pressures.)
Some people take this to mean that we should try to find a better or more comprehensive theory. Others, like yourself, are comfortable with just sitting back and making dogmatic, ideological assertions about how one mode of explanation will somehow account for basically everything about humanity.
I mean, enjoy that, but it's getting us nowhere.
You'll notice I referred to the evolutionary system, and not "natural selection".
I think you conflate many things in your post. While I can agree with your point that instincts aren't harmonious with moral judgments I disagree completely with the conclusion this observation leads you to, there is almost certainly a connection between the two.
I imagine the connection between instincts and moral values operates more at the level of an instinctual disposition for children to receive moral values from their caregivers. That other instincts run contrary to values imparted is neither here nor there, as a matter of fact, human nature contains significant internal inconsistencies. It could be argued that this is one of the advantages moral values have over crude instincts in determining action.
It really is all about survival, though, not necessarily at the individual level, but if moral values fail to bring about winning outcomes, and especially if they directly bring out failing outcomes, they will become extinct.
Maybe we are talking at cross-purposes here. I feel like it is you who has the overly simplistic conception of evolution. Having not read Street, I agree with your criticism vis-a-vis our drives showing up basically unadulterated in robust moral judgments. I just think it needs to be taken into consideration that drives develop and change over the course of a human's lifespan (along with a number of other considerations).
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