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

468 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
... according to Chomsky, it is plausible to see our ethical faculty as analogous
to our language faculty; we acquire ethical knowledge with very
little explicit instruction, without great intellectual labour, and the end
result is remarkably uniform given the variety of ethical input we receive.
The environment serves merely to trigger and specialise an innate schematism....
On the Chomskyan model, both science and ethics are natural
products of contingent human psychology, constrained by its specific constitutive
principles; but ethics looks to have a securer basis in our cognitive
architecture. There is an element of luck to our possession of scientific
knowledge that is absent in the case of our ethical knowledge. [McGinn
1993, p. 30.]
By contrasting our presumed innate sense of ethical knowledge with our
merely "lucky" capacity to engage in science, McGinn and Chomsky suggest
that there are reasons to be discovered for our possession of the former. If
there were a morality module, we would certainly want to know what it was,
how it evolved—and, most important of all, why. But, once again, if we try to
peer inside, McGinn tries to close the door on our fingers, decrying as
"scientism" the attempt to provide answers to our scientific questions about
the source of this marvelous perspective we and no other creatures have.
From what can "ought" be derived? The most compelling answer is this:
ethics must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature—on a
sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being
might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no
fallacy. No one could seriously deny that ethics is responsive to such facts
about human nature. We may just disagree about where to look for the most
telling facts about human nature—in novels, in religious texts, in psychological
experiments, in biological or anthropological investigations. The
fallacy is not naturalism but, rather, any simple-minded attempt to rush from
facts to values. In other words, the fallacy is greedy reductionism of values
to facts, rather than reductionism considered more circumspectly, as the
attempt to unify our world-view so that our ethical principles don't clash
irrationally with the way the world is.
Most of the debates about the naturalistic fallacy are better interpreted as
disagreements analogous to the skyhooks-versus-cranes debates in evolutionary
theory. For instance, B. F. Skinner, in my estimation the worldchampion
greedy reductionist of all time, wrote an ethical treatise of his
own, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). In it, he "committed the naturalistic
fallacy" on every scale, from the minute to the megalomaniacal. "To
make a value judgment by calling something good or bad is to classify it in
terms of its reinforcing effects" ( Skinner 1971, p. 105). Let's see: that would
mean that heroin is good, apparently, and taking care of elderly parents is
bad? Is this objection just nitpicking a careless definition? The reinforcing
Some Varieties of Greedy Ethical Reductionism 469
effect of heroin, Skinner assures us when he notices the problem (p. 110), is
anomalous." Hardly a convincing defense against the charge of greedy
reductionism. He goes on and on in the book about how scientific his
"design for a culture" is, and how optimally suited it is for... for what? What
is his characterization of the summum bonum?.
Our culture has produced the science and technology it needs to save
itself- It has the wealth needed for effective action. It has, to a considerable
extent, a concern for its own future. But if it continues to take freedom and
dignity, rather than its own survival, as its principal value, then it is possible
that some other culture will make a greater contribution in the
future. [Skinner 1971, p. 181]
I hope you want to join me in retorting: So what? Even if Skinner were right
(and surely he isn't) that a behaviorist regime is our best chance of preserving
our culture into the future, I hope it is clear to you that Skinner may well
have been mistaken when he deemed "survival of the culture" to be the
highest goal any of us could ever imagine wanting to further. In chapter 11,
we briefly considered how mad it would be to put survival of one's own
genes ahead of everything else. Is survival of one's own culture a clearly
saner item to put on the pedestal above everything else? Would it justify
mass murder, for instance, or betraying all your friends? We meme-users can
see other possibilities—beyond our genes, and beyond even the welfare of
the groups (and cultures) to which we currently belong. Unlike our somaticline
cells, we can conceive of more complicated raisons d'etre.
What is wrong with Skinner is not that he tried to base ethics on scientific
facts about human nature, but that his attempt was so simplistic! I suppose
pigeons might indeed fare as well as they ever could want in a Skinnerian
Utopia, but we are really much more complicated than pigeons. The same
defect can be seen in the attempt at ethics by another Harvard professor, E.
O. Wilson, one of the world's great entomologists and the coiner of the term
"sociobiology" (1975). In his ethical treatise, On Human Nature (1978),
Wilson (pp. 196, 198) faces the problem of identifying the sum-mum bonum
or "cardinal value," and comes up with two coequals: "In the beginning the
new ethicists will want to ponder the cardinal value of the
survival of human genes in the form of a common pool over generations....
I believe that a correct application of evolutionary theory also favors diversity
in the gene pool as a cardinal value." Then (p. 199) he adds a third,
universal human rights, but suggests that it must be demythologized. A
"rational ant" would find the ideal of human rights "biologically unsound and
the very concept of individual freedom intrinsically evil."
we will accede to universal rights because power is too fluid in advanced
technological societies to circumvent this mammalian imperative; the long-