Evolutionary Biology,‘Enlightened’ Anthropological Narratives,and Social Morality: A View from Christian Ethics

Reconceiving the Problem: Enlightening Self-interest, Not Selfishness

What is the problem that we’re trying to solve? It appears to be that evolution proceeds by way of a competition for survival, in which nature prefers the fittest. This implies that living beings are moved first and last by one thing only: the desire for the preservation of oneself or one’s genes. If the basic nature of living things is thus, then how can we get from such fundamental selfishness to social morality?

The answer proposed by recourse to game theory is that, under the social condition of sustained relationships, enlightened self-interest can make cooperation rational—that is, it can make it rational to bear a cost in benefiting another in the reasonable expectation of reciprocity. It can even make forgiveness rational, insofar as it can pay an individual not to punish a non-cooperator or ‘defector’, in order to build a reputation for cooperative intent, to elicit trust, and to achieve cooperation over time. The solution to the problem, then, is the discovery that selfishness is the mother of altruism via the ‘mechanisms’ of direct reciprocity and indirect reciprocity, whose ‘engine’ is fuelled by the ‘money’ of reputation (to use Martin Nowak’s non-biological metaphors). ¹

Here are some critical reflections on the problem as conceived and the solution as proposed. First, cooperation is, as such, amoral. I can’t tell whether it’s good or bad, right or wrong, until I know whether it’s being performed by responsible agents and to what ends or purposes. The fact that ants cooperate doesn’t tell us anything at all about ethics; and the fact that Nazis cooperate is nothing to celebrate.

Second, I think that the problem is wrongly conceived as how to derive altruism from selfishness. ‘Selfishness’ connotes something immoral; but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with having an interest in self-preservation. It wasn’t only Thomas Hobbes who affirmed such an interest. Thomas Aquinas did, too. And indeed, so did Jesus, who counselled that it profits a man better to lose the world rather than his soul (Matt. 16.26). Altruism as icily disinterested other-regard was the invention of Auguste Comte, not of biblical tradition or even, according to John Hare, Immanuel Kant. According to the Bible, and according to Aquinas, if not according to rhetorically hyperbolic forms of Lutheranism, ² love for other people is intrinsic to self-fulfilment. So rather than conceive the problem as how to get from a selfish interest in self-preservation to altruism, I suggest that we should think of it instead as that of tracking the evolutionary emergence of a more diversified, richer (and in that sense ‘enlightened’) conception of self-interest, and so the emergence of human beings who are capable of such conception.

Third, altruism that is really an ‘enlightened’—that is, shrewder—form of selfishness is not altruism.

Fourth, I defer to the authority of evolutionary biologists, when they tell me that the behaviour of some living beings—and indeed their cooperation—is driven (I shall not say ‘motivated’) by an interest in genetic reproduction. But I beg to differ when they proceed to reduce the behaviour of living human beings to this. Thus J. B. S. Haldane tells me that ‘I will jump into the river to save two brothers, eight cousins, but not a stranger’; and he attributes this preference for kin to genetic relatedness. ³ I am not persuaded, and I will not be persuaded until it has been shown me that the cause of such a choice is the overriding insistence of genes for reproduction, rather than felt obligations of gratitude and love. From what I have been told, an adopted son, faced with the choice of saving either his biological father or his socially functional father, is most likely to choose the latter. Genes may be monomaniacal, and some beings may be in their thrall; human beings are, generally, not. So we need to avoid the genetic fallacy in a double sense; in general, things do not reduce to their genesis—they are more than the sum of their original parts; and in particular, human motivation does not reduce to the blind reproductive drive of genes.

What Game Theory Does, and Doesn’t, Tell Us

Game theory tells us what motivates certain human beings under certain conditions. What are the conditions? They are the conditions of a prisoner, who is a convicted criminal, for whose conscience the issue of desert doesn’t arise, who feels no sense of overriding obligation to his partner in crime, whose only interest is in minimising the penalty he must suffer, and who will cooperate toward that end, if prudence requires it. Game theory tells us how such human beings would deliberate, if they were optimally rational. ⁴

The question that this account of game theory obviously raises is how widely applicable it is. How often do the conditions that it assumes obtain? How much human interaction is conducted between persons, who are separated not only by a veil of ignorance but by a gulf of mistrust? If one takes Hobbes’s state of nature for an accurate account of how things really, basically are, then one would suppose that the situation, assumptions and behaviour of the prisoners in the dilemma apply universally, once the artificial appearances of civilisation and morality have been stripped away. However, Hobbes’s account has long provoked strong contradiction, not least from the relentlessly reasonable moral philosopher and Anglican bishop, Joseph Butler. Enlightened by Christian tradition, Butler argued that Hobbes’s description of the human condition is empirically false, and that we are in fact motivated fundamentally by two principles, not just one—by benevolence as well as self-interest. ⁵ To be fair, Hobbes was thinking and writing during a civil war, and of all kinds of war that is the most devastating of trust. Even so, not even England’s internecine bloodbath lived down to Hobbes’s state of nature. Ties, not only of kinship but of friendship, persisted through it. And behaviour even in the midst of battle was sometimes governed, not by the impulse for self-preservation or the triumph of one’s group, but by strongly felt obligations of care toward the enemy. Toward the end of the battle of Edgehill, for example, my own local Oxford hero, Lucius Carey, was to be found interposing himself between his own victorious royalist comrades on the one hand, and a sorry group of surrendered parliamentarians on the other, in order to stop the former from slaughtering the latter. ⁶ Hobbes was wrong and Butler was right: human beings are not always and primarily motivated by self-interest. Or better, Aquinas was right: human self-interest reaches way beyond mere physical self-preservation and group loyalty to a wider range of values and goods (for example, justice), as powerful in appeal as they are intangible in nature.

It is not at all clear to me, therefore, how much we can learn from game theory about the evolution of morality. Certainly, it tells us how we would all behave, if we found ourselves in a Prisoners’ Dilemma, or in closely analogous situations, and if we lacked both conscience and social ties. It might also tell us how we would behave in war, but even then, there’s plenty of historical-empirical data to give us reason to suppose that for the most part we’d be motivated more by love for our comrades than for our own preservation, and that sometimes our dealings with the enemy would be characterised by respect and sympathy as well as caution. Whether game theory can guide us in trying to foster cooperation in societies like our own that are highly mobile and urbanised, and somewhat deracinated and culturally diverse, I doubt. ⁷ For sure, cooperation between newly met strangers might well be cautiously prudent and simply instrumental. But its end needn’t be about avoiding pain and death or making oneself safer and fatter. It could be about cleaning the neighbourhood of litter, or redeeming it from summer riots, or showing solidarity with an Asian father whose son has fallen victim to a hit-and-run murder. ⁸ And sometimes strangers meet with smiles and curiosity and benefit of doubt, so that instrumental cooperation quickly becomes intrinsic friendship. It is true, of course, that sustained relationship fosters mutual responsibility and trust for a variety of reasons, including the opportunity for punishment, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. But that’s an insight that game theory has imported from human social experience; it’s not one that the theory itself has originated.

What Can Natural Science Tell Us about Morality?

As I understand it, evolutionary biology tracks genetic and physiological mutations, which have the effect of bettering a living being’s chances of survival in a certain environment. It seems, then, that nature is disposed to cause things to better their chances of physical survival. Why it should be so disposed, and why it should desire such an end at all, is a curious mystery, since non-divinised, non-capitalised nature is, strictly speaking, incapable of desire and intention.

But, putting that metaphysical question aside, let us ask a moral one instead: What can evolutionary biology tell us about morality? Not, I think, a lot. Insofar as it treats beings that are determined to try and survive, before and above all else, it treats pre-moral reality. Only when beings become capable of caring about several interests or values or goods, of reasoning how best to serve them all, and of responsibility for choosing the best service—only then do moral questions arise. So if natural science is to contribute to our understanding of the evolution of morality, it should track animal behaviour that is not fundamentally driven by the imperatives of genetic reproduction or physical survival. It should track the evolution of self-interest to the point where it becomes bound up with that of others, and even where the self’s interest in physical survival and reproduction is entirely sacrificed for others. Of course, it’s possible that some self-sacrificial selves are still merely the slaves of their genes. But human selves are evidently not. Monks, scholars, and even scientists will risk their health and renounce reproduction for the sake of non-material goods such as knowledge of the truth about the world and about God; and martyrs will sacrifice themselves, jeopardise their kin, and even defy their national group in the name of justice—as did Jesus, to name but one. Human selves flourish in serving a range of goods; and there may well be subhuman animals that adumbrate this expansion and diversification of self-interest. Therefore, it would serve the promotion among us of a generously humane morality, rather than a shrewdly selfish one, if natural science—be it biology or zoology or anthropology—could liberate itself from the ideological authority of Hobbes and track the evolutionary expansion and enlightenment of self-interest.

What Might Religion Have to Do with It?

The attraction of trying to root social responsibility and morality in evolutionary biology is, I suppose, the prospect of securing an incontrovertible ground, which all members of a culturally plural, post-traditional and ‘secular’ society can endorse. After all, the authority of science, like the authority of the medieval Popes, is beyond dispute. Except that it wasn’t, and it isn’t. Even scientists squabble about the data and their interpretation. And when natural science is invoked to justify human conduct, more often than not the tail is wagging the dog. For example, was it really the case that the German High Command in 1914 was first convinced of Darwinism and only then inferred that international relations are basically about the survival of the fittest, that war is natural, and that the sooner it came the better it would be? ⁹ Or was it not rather that Germany, already intent on expansion and domination, found in Social Darwinism a convenient justification for ruthless Realpolitik? The application of natural science to human affairs is certainly not uncontroversial and it is often more ideologically driven than it seems.

But if natural science cannot ground our moral consensus and generate social responsibility, then what can? That is a very big question, in answer to which I shall offer three brief thoughts. The first is that we are not what we say we are. For a generation we—that is, the university-educated, levers-of-power-pulling children of the 60s—have been saying that religious tradition is moribund and that we are now ‘secular’ or post-religious. That may be an accurate expression of an elite’s desire, but it is not a true description of social fact. According to the latest (2010) British Social Attitudes survey, 67 per cent of respondents described themselves as more or less ‘religious’; ¹⁰ and in a BBC poll in 2009 those agreeing that ‘religion has an important role to play in public life’ amounted to 62 per cent, a figure that rose to 77 per cent among 18–24 year olds. ¹¹ Britain is not predominantly post-religious.

Second, Jürgen Habermas, the eminent (and atheist) German public intellectual, admitted to Le Monde newspaper some years ago that religious traditions ‘have the distinction of a superior capacity for articulating our [liberal, humanist] moral sensibility’. ¹² And in the course of my remarks so far I have, in effect, substantiated Habermas’s assertion by arguing that Christian theologians such as Butler and Aquinas give a far more empirically accurate account of the springs of human motivation than Hobbes. It seems, then, that there is more life left in Christian ethical tradition than we are wont to suppose. It has (at least relative to Hobbes) a greater power to make our moral selves intelligible to us. For sure, that ethical power might be accidental to the attendant theology, and it might be detachable from it (as Habermas assumes). But if that were so, it would be puzzling that the traditions better able to articulate our moral sensibility should just happen to be religious.

Third and finally, the kind of religious, Christian ethic that I have been commending here is one that operates basically in terms, not of divine commands, but of human goods. Here God comes on stage, first of all, not as a commander, whose authority is necessary to give moral norms obligatory force. Rather, he first appears as the postulated creator of a cosmos that is evidently disposed to evolve beings capable of weeping over the exquisite beauty of Shostakovich’s second piano concerto, or of going without food and water in the pursuit of some useless truth about the mysteries of sub-atomic physics, or of exposing themselves to torture and death (and their kin to abandonment and persecution) for the sake of invisibilia such as justice, dignity and humanity. For sure, such phenomena do not prove that evolution is motivated by a super-personal intelligence that intends beings capable of flourishing by investing themselves in such things, but the phenomena would not be so intractably odd, if it were true.