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

476 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
In the next section, we will look more closely at what sociobiology is and
is not, what it could and could not be, but before we leave the topic of greedy
ethical reductionism, we should stop to consider an ancient species of this illfavored
meme with many subvarieties: religion. If you wanted to give a clear
example of the naturalistic fallacy, you could hardly improve on the practice
of trying to justify an ethical precept, an "ought," by citing as your "is": the
Bible says so. To this, as to Skinner and Wilson, we must say. So what? Why
should the facts—even if they are all facts—recounted in the Bible (or any
other holy text, I hasten to add) be supposed to provide any more satisfactory
justification for an ethical principle than the facts cited by Darwin in Origin
of Species? Now, if you believe that the Bible (or some other holy text) is
literally the word of God, and that human beings are put here on Earth by
God in order to do God's bidding, so that the Bible is a sort of user's manual
for God's tools, then you do indeed have grounds for believing that the ethical
precepts found in the Bible have a special warrant that no other writings
could have. If, on the other hand, you believe that the Bible, like Homer's
Odyssey, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Melville's Moby Dick, is really a
nonmiraculous product of human culture, issuing from some one or more
human authors, then you will grant it no authority beyond tradition and
whatever its arguments generate by their own cogency. This, it should be
obvious, is the unchallenged view of philosophers who work in ethics today,
so uncontroversial that, if you ever tried to refute a claim in the contemporary
ethics literature by pointing out that the Bible said otherwise, you would be
met with surprised stares of disbelief. "That's just the naturalistic fallacy!" the
ethicists might say. "You can't derive ought' from that sort of 'is'!" (So do not
expect the philosophers to come to your defense if you claim that religion is a
source of ethical wisdom that is superior in any way to science.)
Does that mean that religious texts are worthless as guides to ethics? Of
course not. They are magnificent sources of insight into human nature, and
into the possibilities of ethical codes. Just as we should not be surprised to
discover that ancient folk medicine has a great deal to teach modern hightech
medicine, we should not be surprised if we find that these great religious
texts hold versions of the very best ethical systems any human culture will
ever devise. But, like folk medicine, we should test it all carefully, and take
nothing whatever on faith. (Or do you think it is wise to pop those "holy"
mushrooms in your mouth just because some millennias-old tradition
declares they help you see the future?) The view I am expressing is what is
often called "secular humanism." If secular humanism is your bo-
breeding. I am not endorsing this claim, just pointing out that it must be dealt with if an
evolutionary account is to be given of how and why Hutterite communities have the
features they do.
Some Varieties of Greedy Ethical Reductionism 477
bogeyperson you shouldn't concentrate all your energy on attacking sociobiologists
or behaviorists or academic philosophers, for they are not a fraction
of a percent of the influential thinkers who quietly and firmly believe that
ethics is not to be settled, but at best guided, by religious doctrines. This is,
indeed, the reigning assumption of the U.S. Congress and the courts; citing
the Constitution has more standing than citing the Bible, and so it should.
Secular humanism often gets its bad name from self-styled secular humanists
who are themselves greedy reductionists of one sort or another,
impatient with the complexities of ancient traditions, disrespectful of the
genuine wonders to be savored in the rich cultural heritage of others. If they
think that all ethical questions can be boiled down to one definition or a few
simple definitions (if it's bad for the environment, it's bad; if it's bad for Art,
it's bad; if it's bad for business, it's bad), then they are no better ethicists than
Herbert Spencer and the Social Darwinists. But when we make the quite
appropriate counterclaim that life is more complicated, we must be careful
not to turn that into an obstruction of inquiry rather than a plea for more
careful inquiry. Otherwise, we put ourselves right back on the forlorn
pendulum.
What, then, would a more careful inquiry look like? The task facing us is
still the task that faced Hobbes and Nietzsche: somehow we have to have
evolved into beings that can have a conscience, as Nietzsche says (1885,
epigram 98), that kisses us while it hurts us. A vivid way of posing the
question is to imagine becoming an artificial selector of altruistic people.
like a breeder of domestic cattle, pigeons, or dogs, you could closely observe
your herd, noting in a ledger which were naughty and which nice, and, by
meddling in various ways, arranging for the nice ones to have more children.
In due course, you ought to be able to evolve a population of nice people—
supposing that a tendency to niceness could be represented somehow in the
genome. We should not think of this as selection for an "ethics Module" that
is designed just for giving right answers to ethical questions. Any modules
or gadgets might have, singly or in coalition, the effect (or by-product or
bonus) of favoring the altruistic choices at decision time. After all, the
loyalty of dogs to human beings is apparently just such an outcome of
unconscious selection by our forebears. God could conceivably have done
this for us, but suppose we want to eliminate the Middleman and explain the
evolution of ethics by natural selection, not artificial selection. Might there
be some blind, unforesightful forces, some set of natural circumstances, that
could accomplish the same thing?
Not in one fell swoop, so far as anybody can see, but there are devious
gradual routes by which we might have bootstrapped ourselves into genuine
morality by a series of smallish changes. We may begin with "parental
investment" (Trivers 1972). It is uncontroversial that mutations that yield
creatures who invest more energy and time in caring for their young can,