Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

454 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
E Pluribits Unum? 455
came to be created, and how it brought with it something altogether new on the
face of the Earth: morality. It would be a story taking us from a time in which
there clearly was no right and wrong, just amoral competition, to a time in
which there manifestly was right and wrong (in some parts of the biosphere)
via a process that gradually introduced the "essential" features of an ethical
perspective. Since the relevant period was prehistoric, and since he had no
fossil record to consult, his story would have to be a rational reconstruction, a
Just So Story of sorts (to commit a further anachronism). Once upon a time, he
said, there was no morality at all. There was life; there were human beings,
and they even had language, so they had memes (to commit a third
anachronism ). We can presume that they had words— and hence memes—for
good and bad, but not ethical good and bad. "The notions of Right and Wrong,
Justice and Injustice have there no place." So, although they distinguished a
good spear from a bad spear, a good supper from a bad supper, a good hunter
(an expert killer of supper ) from a bad hunter (who scared away the prey),
they had no concept of a good or just person, a moral person, or a good act, a
moral act—or their contraries, villains and vices. They could appreciate that
some people were more dangerous than others, or better fighters, or more
desirable mates, but their perspective went no farther than that. They had no
concept of right or wrong because "They are Qualities, that relate to men in
Society, not in Solitude." Hobbes called this epoch in our prehistory "the state
of nature," because it resembled in its most important features the plight of all
the other animals in the wild, to this day. In the state of nature, "there is no
place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; ... no Arts; no Letters,
no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent
death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." And
then, one fine day, a mutation happened to arise. One day, when yet another
conflict arose, just like all the others that had come before it, something new
happened to happen. Instead of persisting in the myopically selfish policies of
mutual defection and distrust that had reigned heretofore, these particular
lucky competitors hit upon a new idea: cooperation for mutual benefit. They
formed a "social contract." Whereas before there had been families, or herds,
or tribes, this was the birth of a different kind of group, a society. This was the
birth of civilization. And the rest, as one says, is history.
How Hobbes would have admired Lynn Margulis' story of the eukaryotic
revolution, and the creation, thereby, of multicellular life! Whereas before
there had been nothing but boring prokaryotes, drifting through their nasty,
brutish, short lives, now there could be multicellular organisms, which,
thanks to a division of labor among a gang of specialist cells, could engage in
Industry (oxygen-fired metabolism, in particular) and Arts (long-range
perception and locomotion, and protective coloration, and so forth). And,
in due course, their descendants created multicellular societies of a very
peculiar sort, known (until recently) as Men, capable of creating Letters (or
representations), which they fell to exchanging promiscuously; this made
possible a second revolution.
How Hobbes would have admired Richard Dawkins' story of the birth of
memes, and the creation thereby of persons, who were not mere survival
vehicles for their genes! These tales, composed long after his, narrate major
steps in evolution that antedate the step he decided to describe: the step from
persons without morality to citizens. He saw this, correctly, as a major step
in the history of life on this planet, and he set out to tell the tale, as best he
could, of the conditions under which this step could be taken and, once
taken, evolutionarily enforced (to use one more anachronism). Though it was
not a saltation but a small step, it had momentous consequences, for it was
the birth of a hopeful monster indeed.
It would be a mistake to read Hobbes as a would-be historian who was
simply speculating irresponsibly. He surely knew that there was no hope of
finding the birthplace of civilization with the tools of history (or archeology—a
discipline not yet invented ), but that was not his point. No doubt the
actual prehistoric sequence of events was more muddled, and distributed,
with elements of quasi-society (of the sort we see among herds of ungulates
and packs of predators), quasi language (of the sort we see among alarmcalling
birds and monkeys, and even among foraging bees ), and perhaps
even elements of quasi-morality (of the sort reputedly evidenced by
monkeys, 1 as well as solicitous whales and dolphins). Hobbes' rational reconstruction
was a huge oversimplification, a model intended to illustrate the
essentials while ignoring the grubby and unknowable details. And, without
any doubt, it was too simple even in its own terms. Today, in the wake of
hundreds of investigations into the nooks and crannies of game theory,
Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments, and the like, we know that Hobbes was
altogether too sanguine (to use a word from his vocabulary) about the
conditions under which a social contract would be evolutionarily enforceable.
But he was the pioneer explorer of this phenomenon.
Following in his footsteps, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and various English
thinkers, includingjohn Locke, offered their own rational reconstructions of
the birth of society. More intricate "contractarian" Just So Stories have been
exploited in recent years. The most famous, and most sophisticated, is John
Rawls' Theory of Justice (1971), but there are others. They all agree in seeing
morality to be, in one way or another, an emergent product of a major
innovation in perspective that has been achieved by just one species, Homo
sapiens, taking advantage of its unique extra medium of information
1. Wechkin ct al. 1964, Masserman et al. 1964; for discussion, see Rachels 1991.