Darwin's Dangerous Idea (91 page)

but not always, an important fact that has been noted by the economist Thomas Schelling (1960), the philosopher Derek Parfit (1984), and others, in The Darwinian Veil of Ignorance in action! But it is not enough, all by itself, their discussions of the conditions under which it would be rational for a to ensure group solidarity, since human beings, even those who have lived rational agent to render himself (temporarily ) irrational. (For instance, you their entire lives in a Hutterite community, are not ballistic intentional may want to render yourself a poor target for extortion: if you can somehow systems, but guided intentional systems, and guidance has to be provided on convince the world that you are impervious to reason, the world will not try a daily basis. Wilson and Sober quote Ehrenpreis, one of the early leaders of to make you offers you can't refuse.)

the sect: "Again and again we see that man with his present nature finds it There are circumstances—extreme circumstances, as Wilson and Sober very hard to practice true community." They go on to provide further note—when we may reasonably curtail free thinking, but the Hutterites have quotations in which Ehrenpreis emphasizes just how explicit and energetic to discourage free thinking all the time. They have to discourage reading the practices of the Hutterites have to be to counteract this all-too-human whatever books you want, and listening to whomever you want. It is only by tendency. These declarations make it clear that one way or another, Hutterite the most careful control of the communication channels that such a pristine social organization is the effect of cultural practices quite vigorously arrayed state can be preserved. That is why the organismic solution is a nonsolution
against
the very features of human nature Wilson and Sober wish to deny or to the problems of human society. The Hutterites are thus themselves a downplay: selfishness and openness to reasoning. If group thinking were curious example of greedy reductionism, not because they are individually really as much a part of human nature as Wilson and Sober would like to greedy—they are apparently just the opposite—but because their solution to believe, Hutterite parents and elders wouldn't have to say a thing. ( Compare the problem of ethics is so drastically oversimplified. They are, however, an this to a case in which there truly is a genetic predisposition in our species: even better example of the power of memes to infect a group of mutual how often have you heard parents cajoling their children to eat more communicators in such a way that the whole group turns its efforts to sweets?)

ensuring the proliferation of
those memes
at whatever cost to themselves.5

Wilson and Sober are right to present the Hutterite ideals as the essence of an organismic organization, but the big difference is that for people— unlike the cells in our bodies, or the bees in a colony—there is always the option of opting out. And that, I would think, is the last thing we want to destroy in our 6. According to Wilson and Sober, the Hutterites have "the highest birth rate of any social engineering. The Hutterites disagree, apparently, and so, I gather, do known human society," but it would be a mistake to read this as the triumph of Alexander's reproductive selfishness. It would be a tactical mistake, for one thing: however the hosts of many non-Western memes.5 Do you
like
the idea of turning many Hutterites there are or have been, there have been many, many more Catholic ourselves and our children into slaves to the
summutn bonum
of our groups?

monks and nuns, whose life histories would be manifestly hard to explain as instances of That is the direction in which the Hutterites have always been headed, and, individuals striving, as always, for the reproductive championship. More tellingly, if the by Wilson and Sober's account, they achieve impressive success, but only at point of the Hutterites example
is group
reproductive prowess, birth rate is relevant only as the cost of prohibiting the free exchange of ideas and discouraging thinking it bears on group birth rate, and we have almost nothing to compare that rate with, since few if any other human groups, so far as I know, behave that way. Perhaps the Hutterites for oneself (which is to be distinguished from being selfish ). Any stubborn have such a high individual birth rate because so many of their children leave or are

freethinker is brought before the congre-

expelled and have to be replaced to keep the communities going. We might consider the truly Machiavellian prospect that this is just what the selfish genes wanted all along!

They found a meme—the Hutterite complex—that served their purposes, and formed a 5. "To us in Asia, an individual is an ant. To you, he's a child of God. It is an amazing cabal: the spartan Hutterite communities are really just breeding pens which are kept quite concept." ( Lee Khan Yew, Senior Minister of Singapore, in response to the outcry over unattractive so that many of the young will leave, making room for more the sentence of flogging of Michael Fay for vandalism,
Boston Globe,
April 29,1994, p. 8.) 476 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

Some Varieties of Greedy Ethical Reductionism 477

In the next section, we will look more closely at what sociobiology is and bogeyperson you shouldn't concentrate all your energy on attacking sociobi-is not, what it could and could not be, but before we leave the topic of greedy ologists
or behaviorists or academic philosophers, for they are not a fraction ethical reductionism, we should stop to consider an ancient species of this ill-of a percent of the influential thinkers who quietly and firmly believe that favored meme with many subvarieties: religion. If you wanted to give a clear ethics is not to be
settled,
but at best guided, by religious doctrines. This is, example of the naturalistic fallacy, you could hardly improve on the practice indeed, the reigning assumption of the U.S. Congress and the courts; citing of trying to justify an ethical precept, an "ought," by citing as your "is": the the Constitution has more standing than citing the Bible, and so it should.

Bible says so. To this, as to Skinner and Wilson, we must say. So what? Why Secular humanism often gets its bad name from self-styled secular hu-should the facts—even if they are all facts—recounted in the Bible (or any manists who are themselves greedy reductionists of one sort or another, other holy text, I hasten to add) be supposed to provide any more satisfactory impatient with the complexities of ancient traditions, disrespectful of the justification for an ethical principle than the facts cited by Darwin in
Origin
genuine wonders to be savored in the rich cultural heritage of others. If they
of Species?
Now, if you believe that the Bible (or some other holy text) is think that all ethical questions can be boiled down to one definition or a few
literally
the word of God, and that human beings are put here on Earth by simple definitions (if it's bad for the environment, it's bad; if it's bad for Art, God in order to do God's bidding, so that the Bible is a sort of user's manual it's bad; if it's bad for business, it's bad), then they are no better ethicists than for God's tools, then you do indeed have grounds for believing that the ethical Herbert Spencer and the Social Darwinists. But when we make the quite precepts found in the Bible have a special warrant that no other writings appropriate counterclaim that life is more complicated, we must be careful could have. If, on the other hand, you believe that the Bible, like Homer's not to turn that into an obstruction of inquiry rather than a plea for more
Odyssey,
Milton's
Paradise Lost,
and Melville's
Moby Dick,
is really a careful inquiry. Otherwise, we put ourselves right back on the forlorn nonmiraculous product of human culture, issuing from some one or more pendulum.

What, then, would a more careful inquiry look like? The task facing us is human authors, then you will grant it no authority beyond tradition and still the task that faced Hobbes and Nietzsche:
somehow
we have to have whatever its arguments generate by their own cogency. This, it should be evolved into beings that can have a conscience, as Nietzsche says (1885, obvious, is the unchallenged view of philosophers who work in ethics today, epigram 98), that kisses us while it hurts us. A vivid way of posing the so uncontroversial that, if you ever tried to refute a claim in the contemporary question is to imagine becoming an
artificial
selector of altruistic people.

ethics literature by pointing out that the Bible said otherwise, you would be like a breeder of domestic cattle, pigeons, or dogs, you could closely observe met with surprised stares of disbelief. "That's just the naturalistic fallacy!" the your herd, noting in a ledger which were naughty and which nice, and, by ethicists might say. "You can't derive ought' from
that
sort of 'is'!" (So do not meddling in various ways, arranging for the nice ones to have more children.

expect the philosophers to come to your defense if you claim that religion is a In due course, you ought to be able to evolve a population of nice people—

source of ethical wisdom that is superior in any way to science.) supposing that a tendency to niceness could be represented somehow in the Does that mean that religious texts are worthless as guides to ethics? Of genome. We should not think of this as selection for an "ethics Module" that course not. They are magnificent sources of insight into human nature, and is designed just
for
giving right answers to ethical questions. Any modules into the possibilities of ethical codes. Just as we should not be surprised to or gadgets might have, singly or in coalition, the effect (or by-product or discover that ancient folk medicine has a great deal to teach modern high-bonus) of favoring the altruistic choices at decision time. After all, the tech medicine, we should not be surprised if we find that these great religious loyalty of dogs to human beings is apparently just such an outcome of texts hold versions of the very best ethical systems any human culture will unconscious selection by our forebears. God could conceivably have done ever devise. But, like folk medicine, we should test it all carefully, and take this for us, but suppose we want to eliminate the Middleman and explain the nothing whatever on faith. (Or do you think it is wise to pop those "holy"

evolution of ethics by
natural
selection, not
artificial
selection. Might there mushrooms in your mouth just because some millennias-old tradition be some blind, unforesightful forces, some set of natural circumstances, that declares they help you see the future?) The view I am expressing is what is could accomplish the same thing?

often called "secular humanism." If secular humanism is your bo-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 genu-breeding. I am not endorsing this claim, just pointing out that it must be dealt with if an ine morality by a series of smallish changes. We may begin with "parental evolutionary account is to be given of how and why Hutterite communities have the investment" (Trivers 1972). It is uncontroversial that mutations that yield features they do.

creatures who invest more energy and time in caring for their young can, 478 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

Some Varieties of Greedy Ethical Reductionism
479

under many but not all circumstances, evolve. ( Remember that only some species engage in parental investment. This is not an option for species in is subtle but not malicious; Williams turns that observation inside out: which the young hatch after the parents have died, and the reasons why there Mother Nature is heartless—even vicious—but boundlessly stupid. And as should be these fundamentally different parental policies have been well so often before, Nietzsche finds the point and gives it his special touch: investigated.7 ) Now, once parental investment in their own offspring is

"According to nature" you want to
live?
O you noble Stoics, what decep-secured for a species, how do we expand the circle (Singer 1981)? It is just tive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond mea-as uncontroversial, thanks to Hamilton's pioneering work (1964) on "kin sure indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, selection" and "inclusive fitness," that the same considerations that favor without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same sacrifices for one's offspring also favor, to a mathematically precise degree, rime- imagine indifference itself as a power—how
could
you live according sacrifices for one's more distant relatives: offspring aiding parents, siblings to this indifference! [Nietzsche 1885, p. 15]

helping each other, aunts helping nephews, and so forth. But, again, it is important to remember that the conditions under which such aid is evolu-Beyond inclusive fitness comes "reciprocal altruism" (Trivers 1971), in tionarily enforceable are not only not universal but relatively rare.

which nonrelated or distantly related organisms—they needn't even be of the As George Williams (1988) notes, not only is cannibalism (eating con-same species—can form mutually beneficial arrangements of
quid pro quo,
specifics, even close relatives) common, but in many species sibling-cide the first step towards human promise-keeping. It is commonly "objected"

(we won't call it murder, since they know not what they do ) is almost the that reciprocal altruism is ill-named, since it isn't
really
altruism at all, just rule, not the exception. (For instance, when two or more eagle chicks are enlightened self-interest of one form or another: you scratch my back and I'll born in a single nest, the first to hatch is very likely to kill its younger scratch yours—quite literally, in the case of the grooming arrangements that siblings if it can, by pushing the eggs out of the nest, or even pushing the are a favorite simple example. This "objection" misses the point that we have hatchlings out.) When a lion acquires a new lioness who is still nursing cubs to pass by small steps to the real McCoy, and reciprocal altruism, ignoble (or from an earlier mating, the first order of business is to kill those cubs, so that just a-noble) as it may be, is a useful stepping-stone on the progression. It the lioness will more quickly come into estrus. Chimpanzees have been requires advanced cognitive abilities—a rather specific memory capable of known to engage in mortal combat against their own kind, and langur-reidentifying one's debtors and creditors, and the capacity to spot a cheat, for monkey males often kill the infants of other males to gain reproductive instance.