Meat-eating is natural! insists the carnivore. (And so fine, they may decide to whisper.) Across the room, the vegans howl back, Carnivory is unnatural! (And so decidedly not to be done, the implication dangles in the air.) In another room, we can find certain revanchists and progressives making similar claims for the naturalness of homosexuality. “Birds do it, bees (I assume) do it, etc.” In other niches we might find partisans of the paleolithic diet and (in a neglected and cobweb-strewn closet) the bootlicker moans that it is only natural (and so, hush, right) that he is crushed by fitter, more economical men.
Appeals to the naturalness of this or the other have a long pedigree and make regular appearances in arguments among the laity. They have a decidedly smaller role in the academy. This is not mere snobbery, but reflects serious problems with appeals to nature. On the one hand, it is not always clear what is meant by calling something natural. What in the world is a natural flavor? In one sense, everything that it exists is natural, it is part of nature. Often we mean natural to exclude the human sphere. In a more restricted sense, the natural is what is typical or normal in nature. Once we have settled on a meaning, and whichever meaning we have settled on, there is a second, decisive, question: what in the world does the naturalness of meat-eating, say, have to do with its morality?
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
Alexander Pope concludes his “Essay On Man” with these lines, which represent the strongest identification of the natural and the good. But there is a third term concealed in this equation: God. For the believer, what is natural is good precisely because nature is the providential creation of a perfectly good being. Of course, it may seem to us that there is quite a lot of natural evil, but then we are limited beings and also once thought that this was a good way to style one’s hair.
Providential theories of nature, though, have been out competed by naturalistic explanations. In particular, given some story of how the complexity and organization of organisms could, without the least external guidance, evolve over eons, an overseeing creator falls off as some vestigial organ. It is furthermore much harder to maintain that nature itself is good not only with providence excised but natural evil placed in the driver seat of biological history — nature red in tooth and claw and all that. And yet — and yet — evolutionary theory has not put a stop to imputations of moral importance on the natural, but has merely changed its character.
In the language of Herbert Spencer, for instance, evolution more or less takes the place of providence. Nature has a slowly unfolding plan, progressing from lower unevolved creatures, amoeba and slime, towards the higher creatures, mankind. Nature thereby directs us on our proper place in the world and shows us what we ought to be working towards. In what we would now think of as Social Darwinism, what nature asks of us is merely compliance in the working out of evolution: the strong are to survive, the weak perish. But in fact the broader position was taken up by more tender-minded types, including socialists like Kropotkin, who understood evolutionary history as tending, in its elevated expressions, towards ever-greater cooperation and peace. As Henry Sidgwick noted in “The Theory of Evolution in Its Application to Practice” (1876) this diversity should raise a degree of skepticism about the whole enterprise.
More the niggling doubts, this teleological conception of evolution merits a quick dismissal on grounds of not merely going beyond but departing from the science of evolution. This is a point that G. E. Moore, following his teacher Sidgwick, pressed against Spencer in his Principia Ethica (1903): it is, as far as Darwin’s theory is concerned, a complete accident that evolution produced humans. Had the environment been different, colder, say, less hospitable to the expenses of a complex nervous systems, we would never have arisen. What survives has nothing to do with what is good: natural selection is a simple, mindless mechanism. Compounding these stories’ scientific inadequacies is their philosophic shakiness. Granting what is false, that there is some direction to evolution’s wanderings through the desert, why should we consider its endpoint good? The answer must, it seems, come from beyond biology itself, and indeed here, as Moore points out, Spencer turns in to a standard-issue utilitarian, one who thinks we ought to promote pleasure and minimize pain. Evolution is good because it will bring us pleasure and alleviate our pains. Man eats better than a lion and fears less than an antelope. Happy coincidence! But here all of Spencer’s moral philosophy departs not a whit from that of Bentham and Mill, while mentions of evolution merely hang out, as attractive and superfluous as a good head of hair.
The intersection of evolution and ethics which has stuck it out and reproduced, then, does not look to evolution to show us how we ought to act but rather aims at an evolutionary explanation of our moral psychology. How did our moral behavior, altruism and punishment, our moral sentiments and judgment arose? Darwin attempted an answer of such a question in The Descent of Man, thinking of the question in large part as a problem for his theory. After all, you might initially expect that pure selfishness would be the best evolutionary strategy: the bully out competes the nice guy by bashing his head in, knicking his lunch money and girlfriend. Darwin thought a combination of sexual selection (girls, despite the saying, don’t generally go for bad boys) and the survival advantage of a cooperative group could grant enough of an evolutionary edge to kindness and fellow-feeling to account for their existence.
Such a theory, suitably refined and saved from its Victorian sexual morality, is good as far as it goes. But it does not obviously go particularly far. Our capacity to engage in mathematical reasoning has evolved. Whatever a house cat batting a ball of yarn is doing, it is not knot theory. But an account of this psychological evolution has no place in a journal of mathematics. To take another example, suppose an evolutionary psychologist were to demonstrate that we had in fact evolved a “God-shaped hole” in our brains, that religious belief played some essential role in our genetic history. It would be only the unscrupulous theologian who’d dare claim this as any sort of proof one way or the other vis a vis God’s existence. Why should ethics differ?
We will take up that question in this essay’s sequel. As a brief bit of meta-blogging, I intend to start writing more about the history of ideas. This is one area I have some small degree of qualification to write about.