Evolutionary Ethics in The Moral Landscape
Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2011 9:37 am
Sam Harris makes some rather surprising comments about the relation between evolution and morality. On page 14, he says our modern concerns about meaning and morality have flown the perch built by evolution. On page 48 he takes a swipe at Edward O Wilson, the sociobiologist, for linking morality and reproduction.
I recently read and reviewed Wilson’s book Anthill, and felt it provided a far more profound moral sense than I detected in The Moral Landscape. For example, the parable of the mutant ant nest that kills all its food sources and then dies itself is a lesson for global humanity.
My impression is that, like with other leading new atheists, a strong element of bombast creeps into Harris’s discussion of evolution and ethics. He seems to take a simplistic view of what constitutes evolutionary fitness, approving Stephen Pinker’s strange statement to the effect that male promiscuity is the fittest approach, with his description on page 13 of sperm bank contributions as ‘conforming to the dictates of evolution’. Such bombastic rhetoric lacks nuance. For example, it might be a more evolutionarily stable strategy for men to ensure a small number of their children do well than to indiscriminately father as many as possible and abandon the mothers. This ESS could lead our genes to give men a moral bias towards family values.
It reminds me of the problem of bacteria, that we might expect the most virulent to be the fittest, whereas in fact these ones burn up their hosts too fast and die out. Promiscuity has dangers such as sexually transmitted infections and delinquency, which could well act in an evolutionarily behavioural way to encourage faithfulness.
My view is that Harris is on to an essential point with his argument that values should be based on facts, but he is nowhere near sufficiently cogent in explaining this big idea. He should be harnessing evolutionary logic to his case, arguing for intentional evolution towards a more sustainable society, but instead he indulges in gestures based on what look like an inadequate understanding of evolutionary philosophy and ethics. One example is his sloppy claim that the statements ‘cruelty is bad’ and ‘water contains hydrogen and oxygen’ are equally true. An evolutionary ethic should see that at times cruelty can be good, as when lions kill the cubs of rivals. There are analogies in human life where a lack of competition leads to stagnation, even though competition is inherently cruel at times.
Here at Booktalk we have had good discussion on sociobiologist authors Robert Wright and Franz de Waal, and of course on the closely related writings of Richard Dawkins. It therefore is a very discussable aspect of The Moral Landscape that despite saying he wants to base values on facts, Harris rejects the notion of evolutionary ethics.
The endorsement of Dennett’s swipe at Wilson regarding morality and reproduction has a whiff of Harris positioning himself politically, expressing his sentimental attachments of like and dislike. This would be okay if he did not express such absolutist bombast. It seems Harris wants to define well-being as conceptually distinct from reproductive success. This definition may have its attractions, but it also could lead a people to decide to fail as a society but have a good time doing so. It leaves open a short term hedonic definition of wellbeing that belittles sacrificial duty for the good of the future aimed at long term flourishing.
Contrary to Harris’s implication that evolution is so passé, it can be argued that human evolution has indeed moved beyond a purely genetic basis into a memetic framework in which intentional decisions about culture, technology and politics will determine the survival and flourishing of our planet. We can see that despite the complexity, these memetic decisions are driven by natural selection and cumulative adaptation just as much as the slower processes of genetics are. Morality therefore becomes the effort to shape the memetic process.
At the end of the day, Harris wants to say that New York liberal values are absolute and universal, that wellbeing equates to personal fulfillment. A rigorous evolutionary framework can be inconvenient for this politically correct world view, so he ditches the relevance of evolution to morality. So much for basing his values on facts.
I recently read and reviewed Wilson’s book Anthill, and felt it provided a far more profound moral sense than I detected in The Moral Landscape. For example, the parable of the mutant ant nest that kills all its food sources and then dies itself is a lesson for global humanity.
My impression is that, like with other leading new atheists, a strong element of bombast creeps into Harris’s discussion of evolution and ethics. He seems to take a simplistic view of what constitutes evolutionary fitness, approving Stephen Pinker’s strange statement to the effect that male promiscuity is the fittest approach, with his description on page 13 of sperm bank contributions as ‘conforming to the dictates of evolution’. Such bombastic rhetoric lacks nuance. For example, it might be a more evolutionarily stable strategy for men to ensure a small number of their children do well than to indiscriminately father as many as possible and abandon the mothers. This ESS could lead our genes to give men a moral bias towards family values.
It reminds me of the problem of bacteria, that we might expect the most virulent to be the fittest, whereas in fact these ones burn up their hosts too fast and die out. Promiscuity has dangers such as sexually transmitted infections and delinquency, which could well act in an evolutionarily behavioural way to encourage faithfulness.
My view is that Harris is on to an essential point with his argument that values should be based on facts, but he is nowhere near sufficiently cogent in explaining this big idea. He should be harnessing evolutionary logic to his case, arguing for intentional evolution towards a more sustainable society, but instead he indulges in gestures based on what look like an inadequate understanding of evolutionary philosophy and ethics. One example is his sloppy claim that the statements ‘cruelty is bad’ and ‘water contains hydrogen and oxygen’ are equally true. An evolutionary ethic should see that at times cruelty can be good, as when lions kill the cubs of rivals. There are analogies in human life where a lack of competition leads to stagnation, even though competition is inherently cruel at times.
Here at Booktalk we have had good discussion on sociobiologist authors Robert Wright and Franz de Waal, and of course on the closely related writings of Richard Dawkins. It therefore is a very discussable aspect of The Moral Landscape that despite saying he wants to base values on facts, Harris rejects the notion of evolutionary ethics.
The endorsement of Dennett’s swipe at Wilson regarding morality and reproduction has a whiff of Harris positioning himself politically, expressing his sentimental attachments of like and dislike. This would be okay if he did not express such absolutist bombast. It seems Harris wants to define well-being as conceptually distinct from reproductive success. This definition may have its attractions, but it also could lead a people to decide to fail as a society but have a good time doing so. It leaves open a short term hedonic definition of wellbeing that belittles sacrificial duty for the good of the future aimed at long term flourishing.
Contrary to Harris’s implication that evolution is so passé, it can be argued that human evolution has indeed moved beyond a purely genetic basis into a memetic framework in which intentional decisions about culture, technology and politics will determine the survival and flourishing of our planet. We can see that despite the complexity, these memetic decisions are driven by natural selection and cumulative adaptation just as much as the slower processes of genetics are. Morality therefore becomes the effort to shape the memetic process.
At the end of the day, Harris wants to say that New York liberal values are absolute and universal, that wellbeing equates to personal fulfillment. A rigorous evolutionary framework can be inconvenient for this politically correct world view, so he ditches the relevance of evolution to morality. So much for basing his values on facts.