Darwin's Dangerous Idea (98 page)

not having achieved its end unless it has the effect of changing the "operating If so, is that itself a lamentable feature, or something we finite beings system"—not merely the "data" (the contents of belief or acceptance) of the could not conceivably do without? Consider a traditional bench-test which agents it addresses. For it to succeed in such a special task, it will have to most systems of ethics can pass with aplomb: solving the problem of what address its target audiences with pinpoint accuracy.

you should do if you are walking along, minding your own business, and you There might, then, be several different
Moral First Aid Manuals,
each hear a cry for help from a drowning man. That is the easy problem, a effective for a different type of audience. This opens up a disagreeable conveniently delimited, already
well-framed
local decision. The hard prob-prospect to philosophers, for two reasons. First, it suggests, contrary to their lem is: how do we get there from here? How can
we justifiably
find a route austere academic tastes, that there is reason to pay more attention to rhetoric from our actual predicament to that relatively happy and straightforwardly and other only partly or impurely rational means of persuasion; the ideally decidable predicament? Our prior problem, it seems, is that every day, while rational
audience
to whom the ethicist may presume to address his trying desperately to mind our own business, we hear a thousand cries for help, complete with volumes of information on how we might oblige. How on Earth could anyone prioritize that cacophony? Not by any systematic 9. Robert Axelrod has pointed out to me that what Hofstadter calls "Wolf's Dilemma" is process of considering all things, weighing expected utilities, and
attempting formally identical to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Parable of the Stag Hunt, in the
Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men
(1755). For further discusto maximize. Nor by any systematic generation and testing of Kantian sion of anticipations and difficulties, see Dennett 1988b.

maxims—there are too many to consider.

510 REDESIGNING MORALITY

Yet we do get there from here. Few of us are paralyzed by such indecision for long stretches of times. By and large, we must solve this decision problem by permitting an utterly "indefensible" set of defaults to shield our attention from all but our current projects. Disruptions of those defaults can only occur
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

by a process that is bound to be helter-skelter heuristics, with arbitrary and unexamined conversation-stoppers bearing most of the weight.

The Future of an Idea

That arena of competition encourages escalations, of course. With our strictly limited capacity for attention, the problem faced by others who want us to consider their favorite consideration is essentially a problem of advertising—of attracting the attention of the well-intentioned. This competition between memes is the same problem whether we view it in the wide-scale arena of politics or in the close-up arena of personal deliberation. The role of the traditional formulae of ethical discussion as directors of attention, or shapers of habits of moral imagination, as meta-memes
par excellence,
is thus a subject deserving further scrutiny.

1. IN PRAISE OF BIODIVERSITY

God is in the details.

CHAPTER 17:
Ethical decision-making, examined from the perspective of
Darwin's dangerous idea, holds out scant hope of our ever discovering
a

—LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE,
1959

formula or an algorithm for doing right. But that is not an occasion for
How long did it take Johann Sebastian Bach to create the
St. Matthew
despair; we have the mind-tools we need to design and redesign ourselves,
Passion?
An early version was performed in 1727 or 1729, but the version
ever searching for better solutions to the problems we create for ourselves
we listen to today dates from ten years later, and incorporates many revi-and others.

sions. How long did it take to create Johann Sebastian Bach? He had the benefit of forty-two years of living when the first version was heard, and CHAPTER 18:
We come to the end of this leg of our journey through Design
more than half a century when the later version was completed. How long
Space, and take stock of what we have discovered and consider where we
did it take to create the Christianity without which the
St. Matthew Passion
might go from here.

would have been literally inconceivable by Bach or anyone else? Roughly two millennia. How long did it take to create the social and cultural context in which Christianity could be born? Somewhere between a hundred millennia and three million years—depending on when we decide to date the birth of human culture. And how long did it take to create
Homo sapiens?

Between three and four billion years, roughly the same length of time it took to create daisies and snail darters, blue whales and spotted owls. Billions of years of
irreplaceable
design work.

We correctly intuit a kinship between the finest productions of art and science and the glories of the biosphere. William Paley was right about one thing: our need to explain how it can be that the universe contains many wonderful designed things. Darwin's dangerous idea is that they
all
exist as fruits of a single tree, the Tree of Life, and the processes that have produced each and every one of them are, at bottom, the same. The genius exhibited by Mother Nature can be disassembled into many acts of micro-genius—

myopic or blind, purposeless but capable of the most minimal sort of recognition of a good (a better) thing. The genius of Bach can likewise be 512 THE FUTURE OF AN IDEA

In Praise of Biodiversity
513

disassembled into many acts of micro-genius, tiny mechanical transitions worse; otherwise, destroying that hard-won product of design is worse. Why between brain states, generating and testing, discarding and revising, and is it much worse to kill a condor than to kill a cow? (I take it that, no matter testing again. Then, is Bach's brain like the proverbial monkeys at the type-how bad you think it is to kill a cow, we agree that it is much worse to kill a writers? No, because instead of generating a Vast number of alternatives, condor—because the loss to our actual store of design would be so much Bach's brain generated only a Vanishingly small subset of all the possibilities.

greater if the condors went extinct.) Why is it worse to kill a cow than to kill His genius can be measured, if you want to measure genius, in the excellence a clam? Why is it worse to kill a redwood tree than to kill an equal amount of his particular subset of generated candidates. How did he come to be able (by mass) of algae? Why do we rush to make high-fidelity copies of motion to speed so efficiently through Design Space, never even considering the Vast pictures, musical recordings, scores, books? Leonardo da Vinci's
Last Supper
neighboring regions of hopeless designs? (If you want to explore
that
is sadly decaying on a wall in Milan, in spite of (and sometimes because of) territory, just sit down at a piano and try, for half an hour, to compose a good the efforts over the centuries to preserve it. Why would it be just as bad—

new melody.) His brain was exquisitely designed as a heuristic program for maybe worse—to destroy all the old photographs of what it looked like thirty composing music, and the credit for that design must be shared; he was lucky years ago as to destroy some portion of its "original" fabric today?

in his genes ( he did come from a famously musical family ), and he was lucky These questions don't have obvious and uncontroversial answers, so the to be born in a cultural milieu that filled his brain with the existing musical Design Space perspective certainly doesn't explain everything about value, memes of the time. And no doubt he was lucky at many other moments in his but at least it lets us see what happens when we try to unify our sense of life to be the beneficiary of one serendipitous convergence or another. Out of value in a single perspective. On the one hand, it helps to explain our all this massive contingency came a unique cruise vehicle for exploring a intuition that uniqueness or individuality is "intrinsically" valuable. On the portion of Design Space that no other vehicle could explore. No matter how other hand, it lets us confirm all the incommensurabilities that people talk many centuries or millennia of musical exploration lie ahead of us, we will about. Which is worth more, a human life or the
Mona Lisa?
There are many never succeed in laying down tracks that make much of a mark in the Vast who would give their lives to save the painting from destruction, and many reaches of Design Space. Bach is precious not because he had within his who would sacrifice
somebody else's life
for it, if push came to shove. (Are brain a magic pearl of genius-stuff, a skyhook, but because he was, or the guards in the Louvre armed? What steps would they take if necessary?) Is contained, an utterly idiosyncratic structure of cranes, made of cranes, made saving the spotted owl worth the abridgment of opportunities in the of cranes, made of cranes.

thousands of human lives affected? (Once again, retrospective effects loom Like Bach, the creation of the rest of the Tree of Life differs from the large: if someone has invested his life chances in becoming a logger, and monkeys at the typewriters in having explored only a Vanishing subset of the now we take away the opportunity to be a logger, we devalue his investment Vast possibilities. Efficiencies of exploration have been created again and overnight, just as surely as—more surely, in fact, than—if we converted his again, and they are the cranes that have sped up the lifting over the eons. Our life savings into worthless junk bonds.)

technology now permits us to accelerate our explorations in every part of At what "point" does a human life begin or end? The Darwinian perspec-Design Space (not just gene-splicing, but computer-aided design of every tive lets us see with unmistakable clarity why there is no hope at all of imaginable thing, for instance, including this book, which I could never have
discovering
a telltale mark, a saltation in life's processes, that "counts." We written without word-processing and electronic mail), but we will never need to draw lines; we need definitions of life and death for many important escape our finitude—or, more precisely, our tether to actuality. The Library moral purposes. The layers of pearly dogma that build up in defense around of Babel is finite but Vast, and we will never explore all its marvels, for at these fundamentally arbitrary attempts are familiar, and in never-ending need every point we must build, crane-like, on the bases we have constructed to of repair. We should abandon the fantasy that either science or religion can date.

uncover some well-hidden fact that tells us exactly where to draw these Alert to the omnipresent risk of greedy reductionism, we might consider lines. There is no "natural" way to mark the birth of a human "soul," any how much of what we value is explicable in terms of its designedness. A more than there is a "natural" way to mark the birth of a species. And, little intuition-pumping: which is worse, destroying somebody's project—

contrary to what many traditions insist, I think we all do share the intuition even if it's a model of die Eiffel Tower made out of thousands of popsicle that there are gradations of value in the ending of human lives. Most human sticks—or destroying their supply of popsicle sticks? It all depends on the embryos end in spontaneous abortion—fortunately, since these are mostly goal of the project; if the person just enjoys designing and redesigning, terata, hopeless monsters whose lives are all but impossible. Is this a terri-building and rebuilding, then destroying the supply of popsicle sticks is 514 THE FUTURE OF AN IDEA

In Praise of Biodiversity
515

ble evil? Are the mothers whose bodies abort these embryos guilty of in-Santayana was a Catholic atheist, if you can imagine such a thing. According voluntary manslaughter? Of course not. Which is worse, taking "heroic"

to Bertrand Russell (1945, p. 811), William James once denounced Santay-measures to keep alive a severely deformed infant, or taking the equally ana's ideas as "the perfection of rottenness," and one can see why some

"heroic" (if unsung) step of seeing to it that such an infant dies as quickly people would be offended by his brand of aestheticism: a deep appreciation and painlessly as possible? I do not suggest that Darwinian thinking gives us for all the formulae, ceremonies, and trappings of his religious heritage, but answers to such questions; I do suggest that Darwinian thinking helps us see lacking the faith. Santayana's position was aptly caricatured: "There is no why the traditional hope of solving these problems (finding a moral algo-God and Mary is His Mother." But how many of us are caught in that very rithm) is forlorn. We must cast off the myths that make these old-fashioned dilemma, loving the heritage, firmly convinced of its value, yet unable to solutions seem inevitable. We need to grow up, in other words.

sustain any conviction at all in its truth? We are faced with a difficult choice.

Among the precious artifacts worth preserving are whole cultures them-Because we value it, we are eager to preserve it in a rather precarious and selves. There are still several thousand distinct languages spoken daily on

"denatured" state—in churches and cathedrals and synagogues, built to house our planet, but the number is dropping fast (Diamond 1992, Hale et al.

huge congregations of the devout, and now on the way to being cultural 1992). When a language goes extinct, this is the same kind of loss as the museums. There is really not that much difference between the roles of the extinction of a species, and when the culture that was carried by that Beefeaters who stand picturesque guard at the Tower of London, and the language dies, this is an even greater loss. But here, once again, we face Cardinals who march in their magnificent costumes and meet to elect the incommensurabilities and no easy answers.