Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame

343 Pages·2012·2.88 MB·English

by  Christopher Boehm

MORAL
ORIGINS
ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER BOEHM
Hierarchy in the Forest
Blood Revenge
Montenegrin Social Organization and Values
MORAL
ORIGINS

THE EVOLUTION OF VIRTUE, ALTRUISM, AND SHAME
CHRISTOPHER BOEHM
BASIC BOOKS
A MEMBER OF THE PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP
NEW YORK
Copyright © 2012 by Christopher Boehm
Published by Basic Books,
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Designed by Linda Mark
Text set in 11 point Giovanni by the Perseus Books Group Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data
Boehm, Christopher.
Moral origins : the evolution of virtue, altruism,
and shame / Christopher Boehm.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-02919-8 (e-book) 1. Ethics, Evolutionary. 2. Virtue. 3. Altruism. 4. Shame. I. Title.
BJ1311.B645 2012
155.7--dc23
2011048896
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to
the memory of Donald T. Campbell
CONTENTS
ONE Darwin’s Inner Voice
TWO Living the Virtuous Life
THREE Of Altruism and Free Riders
FOUR Knowing Our Immediate Predecessors
FIVE Resurrecting Some Venerable Ancestors
SIX A Natural Garden of Eden
SEVEN The Positive Side of Social Selection
EIGHT Learning Morals Across the Generations
NINE Work of the Moral Majority
TEN Pleistocene Ups, Downs, and Crashes
ELEVEN Testing the Selection-by-Reputation Hypothesis
TWELVE The Evolution of Morals
EPILOGUE Humanity’s Moral Future
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
DARWIN’S INNER VOICE
1
A NATURAL-BORN HERESY
Queen Victoria’s England provided a most comfortable environment for
Christians who loved to take their Bibles literally. Nature was perfect because in
just seven days God had made nature perfect. Oceans and fish, predators and
prey, all fit together like hands in gloves. And this perfectly tuned natural world
was forever fixed and static because Jehovah’s unlimited powers had made it
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that way.
Not only that, but the Old Testament’s Adam and Eve were real, if uniquely
special people whose divine Maker had created them quite recently. A
methodical churchman had actually done the biblical math and concluded that
just under six thousand years had elapsed since God had made Eve from Adam’s
rib, installed this first pair of humans in His idyllic Garden of Eden, and then left
them to their fate. In terms of evolutionary time, this meant that the origin of
fallible human choice and our sinful sense of shame—together, these gave us a
conscience—had taken place only yesterday or perhaps the day before. However,
in the twenty-second year of the devout queen’s reign all of this was about to
change—and for many there would be no turning back.
In 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species shook cultured reading
2
publics in Great Britain and elsewhere like an irreverent clap of thunder. The
initial Darwinian lightning bolt did not strike directly against the sacred moral
origins story of Eve, Adam, and the persuasive serpent who seemed to
undermine the good works of an otherwise omnipotent Jehovah. Rather, this new
scientific thesis introduced to the physical world of animals and plants a theory
of gradual but ever-changing transformations that were wholly naturalistic. As a
result, the beautiful fit of species to their environments was no longer the work
of God; indeed, the banal process of natural selection operated very much as
livestock breeders did when with short-term practical objectives they changed
the hereditary destinies of the animals they domesticated.
These breeders did their work in a deliberate fashion. They permitted more
favorably endowed individuals to flourish, while denying less useful or less
aesthetically pleasing individuals the opportunity to reproduce. Robert Darwin, a
doctor and a country gentleman, was one of these animal breeders. His
thoughtful son—who as a young man seemed to be headed for the ministry—
knew that individuals of a domesticated species varied along many dimensions.
Cattle varied in their productivity in giving milk; dogs, in their natural
tendencies to point and fetch, their degree of docility, and the color of their
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coats. It was only after years of sailing around the world as a professional
naturalist that the young Charles Darwin became aware that nondomesticated
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species were just as variable as their domesticated brethren.
Darwin’s official job had been to collect museum samples and to describe in
minute detail the species of plants and animals on different continents, and all
this hard work led, as we know, to a major theory. In his mind, such hereditary
variation was something that a natural type of selection could act upon
spontaneously: the individuals who were more fit to deal with their
environments could reproduce, multiply, and flourish, while those who weren’t,
couldn’t. This singular insight was to change the Western world’s notions about
nature and even its larger view of the universe.
This brings us to a profound difference between natural selection and the
selection practiced by animal breeders. For Darwin, changeable natural
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environments were doing the mechanical work of triage, and unlike either a
practical livestock breeder or a purposeful God Almighty, these environments
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had no intentions whatsoever. They were acting as blind arbiters, rather than as
deliberate agents who knew what they were doing, and this meant that the
perfection of nature was just one big accident. The specter loomed of a scary
world, devoid of any ultimate Purpose, that suddenly lacked a protective,
omniscient, and omnipotent God whose comforting role it was to help those who
faithfully prayed for His assistance.
After the passage of a century and a half, it’s remarkable for any major
theory not to be superseded, or at least vastly modified. However, in its basics
this blind, mechanical theory of natural selection is still going strong in the
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world of science. If we add “genes” to what Darwin thought of rather