Posted on 11/28/2001 8:21:55 PM PST by Phaedrus
Darwin and the Descent of Morality
by Benjamin Wiker
Copyright (c) 2001 First Things 117 (November 2001): 10-13.
An important part of the current controversy over the theoretical status of evolutionary theory concerns its moral implications. Does evolutionary theory undermine traditional morality, or does it support it? Does it suggest that infanticide is natural (as Steven Pinker asserts) or is it a bulwark against liberal relativism (as Francis Fukuyama argues)? Does it rest on a universe devoid of good and evil (as Richard Dawkins has bluntly stated) or can it be used to provide a new foundation for natural law reasoning (as Larry Arnhart contends)?
The obvious place to go in the debate is to the source. Darwin himself considered morality of whatever stripe to be a byproduct of evolution, one more effect of natural selection working upon the raw material of variations in the individual. Nature did not “intend” to create any particular type of morality, any more than nature intended to create one certain length of finch beak. Nor does nature “judge” any particular type of morality as long as it does not violate the principle of natural selection. That, as we shall see, allows for such moral leeway that it creates insuperable problems for conservatives who might solicit Darwin’s help in their cause.
We find Darwin’s account of morality in his Descent of Man, a work published after his more famous Origin of Species. As should be no surprise, the arguments of the Origin provided the theoretical foundations for his natural history of morality in the Descent.
True to his naturalist bent, Darwin’s natural history of morality (or more properly, moralities) assumed evolution to be true and sought to explain how the existing moral varieties could have evolved in the same way that natural selection had brought about the great variety of existing species.
For Darwin the “moral faculties of man” were not original and inherent, but evolved from “social qualities” acquired “through natural selection, aided by inherited habit.” Just as life came from the nonliving, so also the moral came from the nonmoral.
From the beginning, then, Darwin rejected the Christian natural law argument, according to which human beings are moral by nature. Instead, he followed the pattern of the modern natural right reasoning of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which assumed that human beings were naturally asocial and amoral, and only became social and moral historically. That is why Darwin called his account a natural history of morality.
For Darwin, in order to become moral we first had to become social. “In order that primeval men, or the ape-like progenitors of man, should have become social,” Darwin reasoned, “they must have acquired the same instinctive feelings which impel other animals to live in a body.” As with all animal instincts, the “social instincts” of man were the result of variations bringing some benefit for survival.
What we call “conscience” was also the result of natural selection. Darwin described it as a “feeling of dissatisfaction which invariably results . . . from any unsatisfied instinct.” Since the “ever-enduring social instincts” were more primitive and hence stronger than instincts developed later, the social instincts were the sources of our feelings of unease when some action of ours violated them. Such feelings of unease, Darwin explained, we now call “conscience.”
It might seem that Darwin’s arguments for human sociability and the moral conscience could be marshaled to support a conservative moral position. Yet mere “sociality,” even with a conscience grounded in evolutionary imperatives, does not at all mean that nature has created a definite moral standard, such as natural law. Quite the reverse. At bottom, everything is variable. As Darwin writes:
If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless the bee, or any other social animal, would in our supposed case gain, as it appears to me, some feeling of right and wrong, or a conscience. . . . In this case an inward monitor would tell the animal that it would have been better to have followed one impulse rather than the other. The one course ought to have been followed: the one would have been right and the other wrong.
The same variability holds as well within the natural history of human moralities as they actually evolved. So, for example, the “murder of infants has prevailed on the largest scale throughout the world, and has met with no reproach.” Indeed, “infanticide, especially of females, has been thought to be good for the tribe, or at least not injurious.” As for suicide, in “former times” it was “not generally considered as a crime, but rather from the courage displayed as an honorable act. . . . For the loss to a nation of a single individual is not felt.” Neither did infanticide or suicide cause the “feeling of dissatisfaction which invariably results . . . from any unsatisfied instinct.” Monogamy, too, Darwin informed the reader, was a fairly recent evolutionary phenomenon.
Yet Darwin balked at embracing the relativism he created, and insisted on ranking evolved moral traits. The unhappy result, however, was his espousal of views we would today call racist, and his justification of a program of eugenics. Ranking evolved moral traits meant ranking the races accordingly. Thus Darwin cheerfully asserted that the “western nations of Europe immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of civilization.” As a member of the favored race, Darwin embraced a typically nineteenth-century view of moral progress. “Looking to future generations,” he wrote, “there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance . . . [so that] virtue will be triumphant.”
But the engine of evolution, even moral evolution, is natural selection. Therefore, Darwin believed that the evolution of morality would require the extermination of “less fit” races and individuals—a process that could be helped along by artificial selection, or eugenics. This unsavory conclusion was derived directly from the principles of evolution. We see in animals that, “in regard to mental qualities, their transmission is manifest in our dogs, horses, and other domestic animals. Besides special tastes and habits, general intelligence, courage, bad and good temper, etc., are certainly transmitted. With man we see similar facts.” Since different races, like different breeds of dogs or horses, develop different capacities, it followed that distinct gradations in moral capacities would be found among human races.
Whereas St. Thomas’ natural law account began from the assumption that all human beings belonged to the same species (and were therefore all subject to the same moral demands), Darwin tried to determine whether human races should be considered distinct species. In the end, he was unsure whether to rank the races “as species or sub-species” but finally asserted that “the latter term appears the most appropriate.”
Whether races are species or sub-species, it is easy to see how such reasoning allowed Darwin to rank the races on an evolutionary scale. Because natural selection must be the cause of the existence of different races, Darwin argued that the various races would necessarily have varying intellectual and moral capacities. So that, for example, the “American aborigines, Negroes, and Europeans differ as much from each other in mind as any three races that can be named.” As we have seen, the Europeans came out on top.
Darwin argued further that the different races created by natural selection were necessarily and beneficially locked in the severest struggle for survival. As he put it in the Origin, "It is the most closely allied forms . . . which, from having nearly the same structure, constitution, and habits, generally come into the severest competition with each other; consequently, each new variety of species, during the progress of its formation, will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred, and tend to exterminate them."
This argument translated directly to his assessment of the evolutionary history of human races, and the necessary and beneficial extinction of the less favored races.
"The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope . . . the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla."
The European race will inevitably emerge as the distinct species "human being," and all the transitional forms—such as the gorilla, the Negro, and so on—will be extinct. Furthermore, natural selection functions not only between races, but also among individuals within races. Here, oddly enough, Darwin maintained that savage man has an advantage over civilized man. In savage man, the intellectual and moral qualities are not as developed, but such lack actually works to weed out the unfit: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.”
Unfortunately, the very development of human compassion which serves to mark the Europeans as more civilized also works against the principle of survival of the fittest.
"We civilized men . . . do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. . . . Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
What could be done to prevent the European race from devolving under the influence of the weak and the sick? Let the principles of natural selection be applied without obstruction. “Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence,” Darwin reminded the reader, “and if he is to advance still higher he must remain subject to a severe struggle.” Turning to the wisdom of animal breeders, Darwin proclaimed that “there should be open competition for all men; and the most able should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding best and rearing the largest number of offspring.” The worst, of course, should not be allowed to breed at all.
How forcefully ought this program to be carried out? Darwin was vague, but ended with the remark: “All do good service who aid toward this end.” What may we gather from Darwin’s evolutionary account of morality? To begin with, Darwin rightly understood that bare sociality allowed for a startling variety of moralities. In contrast to the very determinate list of requisite virtues, definite commands, and established ends in the traditional natural law account, evolution brings forth many different modes of group survival. Just as male lions, when taking over a pride, kill the young that were fathered by the ousted dominant male, so also human societies have flourished quite well with the murder of rivals to regal authority. And just as many female animals will let the runt of the litter die by refusing it nourishment, so also many human societies have survived for hundreds of years by exposing their unwanted and deformed babies. Merely having “social instincts” includes so much that it excludes almost nothing considered morally reprehensible.
Although many today would shudder at Darwin’s racism, we must concede that Darwin’s conclusions were correctly drawn from his evolutionary principles. If evolution is true, and the races themselves are the result of the struggle to survive, then how could intellectual and moral qualities not be diversely acquired by different races?
As for the survival of the fittest, contemporary liberals have attempted to separate Darwin from Social Darwinism, but Darwin’s own words advocating severe struggle show us quite clearly that he was the first Social Darwinist. Conservatives (who are often early modern liberals in outlook and temperament) sometimes look fondly at the purifying effects of “severe struggle,” substituting economic for natural battle. Such fondness is not rooted in the natural law of Aquinas, but, as Leo Strauss argued, in the modern natural right theory of John Locke (as filtered through Adam Smith). But modern natural right theory has led to the world according to Pinker and Dawkins.
Larry Arnhart, in particular, seems to have blurred this fundamental distinction, for he quotes Aquinas (“Conservatives, Darwin & Design: An Exchange,” FT, November 2000) as saying that “natural right [emphasis added] is that which nature has taught all animals,” when Thomas actually said that “those things are said to belong to the natural law [lex naturalis] which nature has taught to all animals.” In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas does not mean to say that natural law is shared by all animals including human beings—the natural law, as the “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature,” pertains only to human beings (I-II, 91.2)—but that natural law includes natural inclinations shared by other animals, “such as sexual intercourse, education of offspring, and so forth.” But for Darwin, we don’t just share some aspects of our nature with animals. We are ultimately indistinguishable from other animals, and therefore subject to th e very same laws of evolution.
The effort of Arnhart and others to affirm the premises of evolution, and to affirm at the same time a morality grounded in natural law, inevitably fails. Natural law doctrine only makes sense in a universe governed by a benevolent Creator. Nor will it do to affirm both Darwinian evolution and a vague theism, for the engine of such evolution is, on principle, incompatible with any design or direction from above—and that includes moral design and direction. The Darwinism of Pinker and Dawkins, one must conclude, is much more coherent than that of Fukuyama and Arnhart.
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Ooooo! You're mean. But seriously I'm glad to see that someone else is thinking this is old, bad science. I thought for a second there that I had slipped into a frightening parallel universe where Bill Clinton was elected to his 3rd term as president. (Heeheehee... I'm back to silly again.)
It's old, but it was useful science in its day. It provded a valuable test for the Standard Model in its day. You can't have good science without providing challenging tests. It is just that some days you just have to give up, because your challenge just isn't valid anymore.
Check out that link by Bill Keel. It's a couple of years old, but it provides a good junior astrophysics level examination of the problem, and what both theories have predicted.
Stultis, you have a better sense of Darwin's view on this, I suspect.
The argument about whether morality is "written on your heart" or exists in a realm outside of man is one that takes place both for those who accept evolution and those who don't.
ROTFLMBO!!!!!!! Priceless!!
19 posted on 11/28/01 11:37 PM Pacific by sola gracia
fossil-fantasy thumpers...dreamers(cheat-liars)!
You're speaking into a mirror, my friend.
My own take on the recent Cydonia images
Unlike "big bang", the case for Mars having been an inhabited planet is based upon real evidence.
There is something fundamental "in the gut" that tells me I have no "right", that I "shall not", take my own life. It is felt thing but it is also knowledge. Yet I am not traditionally Christian so it cannot be ascribed to that source. And to attribute it to "emanations" of my physical being seems even more farfetched. It's "in here", not "out there". Can science as it is presently construed deal with this? I think not. Does this make it any the less real? I think not. Do I trust it? I do.
Junior, the foregoing is so fraught with presumptions that I hardly know where to start, so I won't. I will simply point out that lies can be exposed without any understanding as to why they are told. And I do not use the word "lie" lightly. For example, it was known for decades among biologists that Haeckel's embryo drawings were fraudulent, yet they were faithfully reproduced as fact and as support for evolution in our public school textbooks. The scientific establishment had to know this, yet they allowed the lie to continue to be told. Why? I have my thoughts but the important fact is that a Big Lie was knowingly perpetuated.
Its as if I flipped 2 coins and got heads and declared that it proved that I can make coins always land with the same side up.
Just an observation, but has anyone else noticed that there don't seem to be any biologists on FR. I work with lots of these critters and they do seem to steer to the left. But there's got to be a few conservative biologists somewhere.
I certainly think so. Emotions and language were at one time considered transcendant. We know a little more now.
There aren't many of them. But there seem to be quite a few armchair experts who happily fill in.
Do we? Or do we only think we do? Emotions, values, meaning -- science can't cope so it ignores and denies. Science weilds a useful methodology generating useful knowledge but it is hardly transcendant. It is incapable of addressing the most important issues. We should not attempt to make it do work it cannot do.
A large number of gaps. This is perhaps the aspect that is easiest to explain, since for stratigraphic reasons alone there must always be gaps. In fact, no current evolutionary model predicts or requires a complete fossil record, and no one expects that the fossil record will ever be even close to complete. As a rule of thumb, however, creationists think the gaps show fundamental biological discontinuities, while evolutionary biologists think they are the inevitable result of chance fossilizations, chance discoveries, and immigration events.
In other words, the evolutionists make this stuff up as they go along. They use alot of fancy words to pretend they have real evidence, when it all comes down their own opinions.
Let us see what another branch of science has to say about evolution
Now that the black box of vision has been opened, it is no longer enough for an evolutionary explanation of that power to consider only the anatomical structures of whole eyes, as Darwin did in the nineteenth century (and as popularizers of evolution continue to do today). Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannto be papered over with rhetoric. Darwins metaphorical hops from butte to butte are now revealed in many cases to be huge leaps between tailored machines-distances that would require a helicopter to cross in one trip
Thus biochemistry offers a Lilliputian challenge to Darwin.Anatomy is, quite simply, irrevant to the question of whether evolution could take place on the molecular level. So is the fossil record. It no longer matters whether there are huge gaps in the fossil record or whether the record is as continuous as that of U.S. Presidents. And if there are gaps, it does not matter whether they be explained plausibly. The fossil record has nothing to tell us about whether the interactions of 11-cis-retinal with rhodopsin, transducin, and phosphodiesterase could have developed step-by-step
...The resulting realization that life was designed by an intelligence is a shock to us in the 20th century who have gotten use to thinking of life as a result of simple natural laws (Darwins Black Box, The biochemical challange to evolution, by Michael J. Behe, pp 22,252)
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools (Rom.1:22)
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge (Job.38:2)
Indeed. And how can there be a First Cause without an Earlier Cause, ad infinitum?
Hello Phaedrus! Of course the operating word in the foregoing sentence is “assumed.” But what bizarre effects seem to flow from this assumption. We are asked to believe that conscience is merely a “a feeling of dissatisfaction which invariably results … from any unsatisfied instinct.” Thus we have an assertion flowing from an assumption, and pointing us to yet another term that needs to be clarified, in order to make sense of the definition – that is, instinct. Which Darwin claims (another assertion floating on thin air) man possesses, right along with all the other animals. In this case, the “instinct” for life in the herd has caused man to “evolve” this thing called conscience. Instinct itself, and the moral systems that flow from it, are rooted in social experience. On Darwin’s view, a “good conscience” is merely a by-product of conforming oneself to “herd opinion,” so to speak. If the herd doesn’t think it’s wrong to kill children, then it’s perfectly o.k.
This is not a “moral theory.” It is a denial of normative standards of right and wrong – it is a theory of amorality, hitched to the star of a theory of progressive “evolutionary fitness” which itself has no ethical meaning, because no where to be found in Darwin’s system is any standard of “fitness” or “unfitness” beyond mere survival and (on Dawkins’ view) the ability to replicate our genes in our descendants. (Which I gather is Dawkins’ view of immortality.)
Truly we cannot say there is objective “good” or “bad” in the world, if morality consists merely in personal conformity to popular opinion. Conscience, in the way the Christian West has always understood it, is an “inner voice” that speaks to the need to order our personal existence in accordance with Truth, Goodness, and Justice (which are divine, not human laws). On Darwin’s take, this view of conscience is an absurd and useless vestige of a “barbaric” and superstitious part. If that were so, it ought to have fully “selected out” of the species by now. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Darwin has replaced it with “an inward monitor [that tells] the animal that it would have been better to have followed one impulse rather than the other. The one course ought to have been followed: the one would have been right and the other wrong.” Thus is mankind reduced to the moral status of a paramecium, and good and bad to successful or unsuccessful choices.
But then Darwin seems to involve himself in a logical difficulty: Though man has been levelled to the moral stature of the least creature, at the same time – within the species – there are various grades of men. Darwin simply asserts that some men are more fit than others. And that it’s perfectly o.k. to eliminate (extirpate, destroy) those who are less fit. Again, there is no objective standard of fitness given – other than Darwin himself: He is the measure. I honestly cannot see any difference between his view and Hitler’s. (But then Hitler got this view from Darwin.)
Darwin piles up the fallacies because, IMHO, his initial premise was false: He assumed his theory of evolution to be true. That was the initial mistake that leads to such self-contradictory, bizarre results. But the writer of the Descent and the Origin is the self-same person; so Darwin’s moral theories are condemned to the same pattern of reasoning, the same fate as his theory of Nature.
It looks to me that Darwin has done everything he possibly can to “explain Nature” without reference to God, who has been deliberately banished from his system. Indeed, Nature is the “new God”: It is wisdom, and progress, and the self-sufficient source of all life. Nature is the ultimate principle.
And while that might be good enough to account for the paramecium, it hardly seems sufficient to account for man. God is needed, in order to explain the true nature of man in the fullness of his existential experience.
It will be fairly objected at this point, that I am substituting “God” for Darwin’s “Nature,” and thus I’m doing the same thing he did: I made an assumption about a proper initial premise, and let my analysis flow from that.
The big difference, it seems to me, is this: My initial premise does not result in inconsistent and contradictory results. It actually secures a firm basis for morality, one that is not subject to the whim of popular opinion. And it recognizes the essential dignity of the human person – one who cannot be destroyed with impunity because some more powerful person or group thinks he is unfit.
Personally, I think that Darwin started out thinking about genetics; but couldn’t rest until he could push problems at this level into the comprehensive, abstract doctrine of macroevolution. Once he got there, he had to re-explain everything about natural life in terms of that doctrine. Any question that could not be resolved in those terms was presumed to be not a proper question at all. Anything that could not be explained in macroevolutionary terms – with its assertion of the sub-doctrine of Progress (without standards or morality – which to me is self-contradictory) is presumed not to exist.
All I can say is, the burning urge to “get rid of” God – to explain the universe as an automaton executing a program that Nature wrote – entails a tremendous amount of self-deception, antirationality, and illusion. But it certainly appears to be roaring along as a “going concern” in the popular mind these days. Mankind has paid a heavy price for all this; and in all probability will continue to do so just so long as social (and evolutionary) Darwinism continue to enjoy what today passes for “intellectual respectability.”
Thanks for a great post, Phaedrus. All my very best – bb.
And while that might be good enough to account for the paramecium, it hardly seems sufficient to account for man. God is needed, in order to explain the true nature of man in the fullness of his existential experience.
No, no, no. There was no "banishment" of God. Every scientist (not just Darwin) does his science by studying natural phenomena -- what else can a scientist do? Darwin was merely being scientific, in seeking to find a natural explanation for the proliferation of species. He proposed a mechanism (natural selection) and suggested that all living things were related. Nothing found since his time has disproved his theory. Indeed, DNA evidence has largely confirmed it (I'm not a molecular biologist, but everything I've read -- ignoring unscientific sources such as the Institute for Creation Research -- is consistent with what I've just written).
As for a scientific explanation of man's mind and consciousness, as everyone knows, we don't have that yet. Our current state of incomplete knowledge proves nothing about the necessity for a divine explanation. It does, however, leave an opening for such an explanation. That's very far from showing the "need" for a supernatural explanation. (There is often an emotional need for the supernatural, but that's not proof of actual necessity.) To me, our current ignorance shows the need for further research. It may be that God is behind the whole ball-o-wax, but if there were proof of this, we would all know it, and there would be no need for faith.
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