Myth: Human morality is a product of reason, a consequence of civilization.
Through the lens of 20th century sociology, human beings are seen as inherently selfish – guided by self-interest, not group-interest. The patriarchal religions, of course, reinforce this idea, preaching that children are born “evil”, and must have that evil replaced with divine purpose.
It is, in fact, the moral frames that human society implements which settle the question: our moral systems demonstrate our affinity for the group, our respect for others, and our valuation of those things we hold in common.
Until very recently in history, religion postured as the sole source of human morality. Even today, many religious people cling to the claim that without God, humans cannot manage to behave in morally sound ways. Human morality emanates from a divine source, they claim, and without that divinity, we are nothing more than depraved animals.
The Enlightenment did much to dispel such notions (though the Greeks, and Socrates in particular, were way out front). Moral behavior and moral decision-making came to be seen as coming from within humankind, rather than from above; but even so, this human-sourced morality was framed as a rational process – a product of reason that arrived with the dawn of civilization. But that turns out not to be the case.
The Evolution of Morality
We’ve arrived at a critical fork in the road: if we are inherently self-oriented, rather than group-oriented, then our morality can be seen as a created thing, an innovation designed to curb our selfishness and allow us to live together without killing each other; if, on the other hand, we are inherently group-oriented, then our morality is likewise innate, something that has been with us all along, not a product of reason or civilization.
Put another way, we have a crucial question to answer: was morality invented, or did it evolve?
If it evolved, then it supports our thesis that humankind has had that Roddenberry spark for hundreds of millennia.
In his book A Natural History of Human Morality, Michael Tomasello compares the various theories of the evolution of morality, then produces one of his own. In doing so, he addresses a long-standing problem in the study of moral evolution: some researchers have looked into it in the context of small human tribes; others have sought to understand it in the broader context of the early city-states. Tomasello’s own work sought to produce a theory that encompassed both.
In doing so, he notes that “early humans evolved a new moral psychology for face-to-face dyadic engagement in collaborative contexts. There is much evidence that dyadic interactions have unique qualities involving such things as eye contact, voice direction, and postural adjustments during communication, such that some anthropologists have posited a human ‘interaction engine’, geared for face-to-face dyadic interactions, as the explanation for virtually all forms of uniquely human sociality.
“Moreover, a number of the most basic forms of human social interaction are fundamentally dyadic, for example, friendship, romantic love, and conversation,” he continued, “and the evolved emotions associated with these dyadic relationships are qualitatively distinct from anything associated with group interactions.”
In other words, human moral psychology began not for the betterment of human groups, but the betterment of individual relationships – second-person engagement.
As for the emergence of large groups, Tomasello specifies a necessary consequence of second-person engagement – group-minded morality, wherein personal moral behaviors evolved into cultural group markers, reflecting the group’s time-and-place context.
Taking into account the work done previously on the problem, he notes that there are three paradigms: evolutionary ethics; moral psychology; and gene-culture co-evolution.
Evolutionary ethics
Tomasello reviews the concept of evolutionary ethics, which focuses on reciprocity as the core of moral evolution: if humans behave such that a benevolent act inspires one in return, then the group has a greater chance of survival. He cites Richard Alexander’s The Biology of Moral Systems as a showcase of this idea, adding that primatologist Frans de Waal embellished it with the critical importance of empathy (in both humans and lower primates).
He further cites Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, whose 1998 work Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior suggests that persistent patterns of sympathetic behavior and mutual helpfulness initiated a group selection process, empowering human groups that presented those patterns.
He also cites Christopher Boehm13, who suggested that as early humans transitions from ape-like dominance-based organization to more egalitarian models, the importance of selection by reputation was established: if an individual behaved in a consistently moral manner, practicing reciprocity and empathy and helpfulness, then these things would become known about him, even to those who did not know him well. Moreover, Boehm suggested that coalitions would form to both reward moral behavior and punish transgression (cheating, bullying), making reputation a key personal concern, reinforcing the overall moral frame of the group. Finally, wrote Tomasello, Boehm had added that the internalization of selection by reputation had led to the development of moral conscience – the sense of guilt humans experience when they know they’ve transgressed against others in some way, even if their transgression has gone undetected.
And then there’s Nicolas Baumard, J.B. Andre and Dan Sperber,14 who underscored that selection by reputation resulted in moral authenticity: “The most cost-effective way of securing a good moral reputation may well consist in being a genuinely moral person.”
Moral psychology
Evolutionary ethics offers some really good stuff, per Tomasello, but it is ultimately insufficient: there was too much it didn’t adequately account for – aspects of moral psychology including joint commitments and promises, the creation and enforcement of social norms, and self-regulation of responsibility, obligation and guilt.
“Our view is thus that the main limitation of these various accounts in evolutionary ethics is that they do not appreciate sufficiently the way that human morality depends on the sense of “we” and self-other equivalence as individuals interact socially with cooperative motives and attitudes on the proximate psychological level.”
Tomasello writes that interdependence is more powerful than the combination of reciprocity and sympathy in defining human moral behavior. This speaks to more specific biological features of humans with evolutionary impact given moral behaviors, specifically the neurophysiology of intuitive impulses, especially in the domain of harm.
There is a near-universal set of such intuitions, he points out, referencing the famous Trolley Problem15 and the fact that responses to the problem are generally the same the world over, across cultures. Human beings, in general, have the same emotional responses to thoughts of harm to self or others. Tomasello references the work of John Mikhail16, which suggests that a key feature of these universal responses is “judgment of blame when someone intentionally harms someone else, but absolution when the intentional act that causes harm was aimed at something good (and there were no viable alternatives available).”
We’ve lifted moral behavior and decision-making out of the realm of reason, then, and into the realm of emotion and intuition. Tomasello at this point defers to psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the pacesetter in moral psychology, who has stated plainly his belief that explicit reasoning about moral issues amounts to rationalization, which “justifies the already-made intuitive judgment. Its function is to persuade others that this judgment is the best one and so they should support it in any kind of dispute.” Actual moral decisions are “innate predispositions that lead to quick, intuitive moral judgments, often laden with emotion.”
Haidt’s work includes the proposal that human moral judgments, emotionally impulsive in their nature, rely on five “pillars” - authority vs. subversion; care vs. harm; loyalty vs. betrayal; fairness vs. cheating; and purity vs. disgust. Tomasello notes that Haidt’s research has demonstrated that the diversity in moral judgments that present in any population can be accounted for by where individuals sit on the spectrum of each pillar.
Haidt’s model plugs into evolution as group selection, with each individual’s moral adaptation tied to the quality of the group-minded moral frame at work; the higher the level of moral thought and behavior of individuals, the more successful the group, setting up a feedback loop that improves group-mindedness over time.
Gene-culture co-evolution
If moral impulses are emotional and intuitive in nature, and if the moral judgments of individuals set up and perpetuate group-minded moral norms and expectations, then human cultures must be accounted for, according to Tomasello. What is the role of culture in shaping those moral norms and expectations? They clearly differ significantly across cultures, both today and throughout recorded history. It is safe to assume the same was true in prehistory.
Tomasello then cites Joan Miller17, who has proposed that individuals tend not to think of themselves as morally autonomous, but “as operating in subordination to natural law and objective obligation as set forth in the various practices and doctrines of their culture.”
He proposes that theoretical human group selection manifests in the real world as cultural group selection, that “once cultures began evolving, different cultural groups could compete with one another, such that those with the most cooperative individuals would very likely do best. There
Page Breakwere thus selection pressures within each cultural group for imitation and conformity, especially of successful individuals... humans thus have evolved, in a process of gene-culture co-evolution, both cooperative tendencies and ‘tribal instincts’ for living and functioning effectively in cultural groups.”
Even so, Tomasello notes that this co-evolution can only explain recent human evolution, as human beings have only been creating cultures of the sort described above for the past 10,000 years or so; it cannot account for the origins of social institutions themselves: “These species-universal skills and motivations would have needed to be in place before such processes of cultural evolution could have gotten started... cultural group selection is thus clearly an important part of the overall story, but only, we would claim, at the very end.”
Even though the origins of human morality are not yet fully accounted for in the ideas articulated above, Tomasello has answered our original question: did we invent moral reasoning in the context of civilization, or is it built into us?
The nomenclature of contemporary psychology includes Type I and Type II references to cognitive processes: Type I cognition is intuitive and immediate, and often emotional; Type II cognition is the opposite – explicit reasoning achieved over time. Tomasello’s account clearly places moral behavior and decision-making within Type I.
Put another way, moral impulses reside deeper in the human brain than our centers of reasoning; they are emotional, rather than intellectual, in nature. We have carried them within us, not for thousands of years, but for hundreds of thousands.
Tomasello’s focus on interdependence takes us beyond that original question, however; it provides a framework for understanding how the concept of morality evolved.
Having pointed out the inadequacies of reciprocity as an explanation of human moral psychology, Tomasello’s exploration of interdependence as an extension of moral psychology that is in harmony with Mikhail and Haidt and Miller, as well as the idea of gene-culture co-evolution, provides an account of how it fills in the blank the latter leaves unanswered: granting that morality evolved, rather than an artifact of reason, how did it precede human culture?
If paleolithic humans were not just mutually dependent, but perpetually conscious of that interdependence, Tomasello argues, then reciprocity and empathy and helpfulness begin to transcend mere barter, becoming genuine caring about others and their well-being; giving to others and helping them as a matter of course makes social life less transactional, and more about mutual investment in a shared future.
Moreover, he continues, interdependence is the core of shared intentionality – mutual goals and common behavioral patterns, which led to the evolution of new cognitive skills, such as cooperative communication, leading in turn to thinking morally, applying cognitive structure to facilitate both second-person engagement dyadics and group-minded norms. Put another way, Tomasello demonstrates that interdependence as a theoretical component of moral psychology explains how we came to be conscious of morality, hundreds of centuries before the invention of culture.
Reality: Human morality is innate, and has resided within us since long before the dawn of civilization.
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