Abstract
Critics of evolutionary approaches to ethics inevitably raise the specter of reductionism. Scruton’s (2014) critique of evolutionary explanations of altruism provides a representative example. Operationalizing altruism in the way of evolutionary theory as behavior of an organism that benefits another organism at a cost to itself implies, writes Scruton, that there is no essential difference between “the soldier ant that marches into the flames that threaten the anthill” and “the officer who throws himself onto the live grenade that threatens his platoon” (p. 55). In each case, the “ethical” behavior of altruistic sacrifice is reduced to a bundle of instinctual impulses that have been shaped by a long history of evolutionary adaptation.
This groundbreaking volume by Blaine Fowers offers a much more nuanced treatment of evolutionary ethics than is represented in the traditional views and their critiques. On Fowers’ account, our evolutionary history as a species has bestowed upon us, not fixed bundles of instincts but, rather, a set of fundamental ethical questions that “are grounded in, but not reducible to, our biological nature” (p. 13). As Fowers points out, causally determined instinctual behavior that lacks agency forestalls any possibility for ethical action. Moreover, ethical issues such as altruism are not usefully construed in terms of a discrepancy between self-interest and the interests of others, as in the context of our evolved nature as “ultrasocial” beings, the two types of interest are generally inseparable.
Fowers’ main goal in this volume, by his own admission a highly ambitious one, is to integrate Aristotle’s natural ethics with modern evolutionary science. This is offered as an alternative both to traditional philosophical approaches to ethics, which tend to lack a sound, evidence-based understanding of human nature, and to extant versions of evolutionary ethics, which often suffer from an impoverished understanding of ethics. This volume is unique in its effort to bring together a richly articulated philosophical theory of ethics with the best that modern evolutionary science has to offer.
Aristotle’s ethical theory is characterized as eudaimonic, insofar as it is based on conditions for living the good life rather than on a prescriptive framework for right action. Eudaimonia, commonly translated as “human flourishing,” is said to be constituted by the successful pursuit of authentic human goods, which are many, various, and occasionally conflicting. Following Aristotle, Fowers distinguishes between constitutive goods, which are of value in themselves, and instrumental goods, which are valuable only with reference to other goods. He also differentiates shared goods that are available only in communal activities from individual goods that are attainable individually. The eudaimonic life is one that puts a priority on constitutive and shared goods and that seeks the right sort of balance among all the various goods to which humans naturally aspire. Ethical issues inevitably arise in the conduct of this form of life, such that “being ethically minded is an irreducible characteristic of what it is to be a human being” (p. 318). Aristotle saw a deep connection between the goods that make human life worth living and our fundamental human nature, which Fowers considers to be best illuminated by modern evolutionary science—“the only robust, comprehensive, and thoroughly tested account” (p. 31) available.
It is therefore Fowers’ central thesis that a proper understanding of human ethics must rest upon a well-grounded knowledge of our evolved biological nature. The aspects of human nature that are most central to ethics comprise our evolved sociality, so the core chapters of the volume are devoted to seven basic domains of human sociality: attachment, identity formation, imitation, cooperation, social norms, intergroup relations, and social status and hierarchy. These chapters are richly informed by the latest research in evolutionary biology; neuroscience; developmental, social, and comparative psychology; and anthropology. Although the level of detail is often challenging and occasionally runs the risk of losing the ethical forest for the factual trees, these discussions nonetheless make a compelling case for the complexity and multi-faceted nature of evolutionary processes and their implications for an understanding of ethics. This book will challenge the preconceptions of anyone who views evolutionary explanations as necessarily reductionistic, deterministic, and individualistic, as pointed out earlier; moreover, it convincingly undermines the view that there is any fundamental contradiction between the conceptions of humans as biologically evolved beings and as reflective, self-interpreting ones.
Fowers’ ethical perspective stands in sharp contrast to traditional formulations of ethics in terms of prescriptive rules. Aristotelian eudaimonic ethics, by virtue of its inherent complexity, contextual embeddedness, and dependence on practical wisdom, cannot be finally and explicitly formulated. Hence, “it is vital for us to abandon the futile and distortive attempts to fashion highly abstract, final, and oversimplified ethical systems that have characterized moral philosophy and moral psychology” (p. 328), which meshes nicely with recent critiques of ethics codes in psychology (Walsh, 2015). Fowers also takes issue with other evolutionary formulations of ethics. A recurring theme in the volume concerns the limitations of evolutionary instrumentalism as a form of explanation. As Fowers acknowledges, evolutionary thinking is inherently instrumental insofar as it subordinates all goods to that of adaptive fitness. This would seem to leave little room for truly constitutive goods, although it is Fowers’ contention that our human capacity to appreciate such goods arose from a “thoroughly instrumental process of evolution” (p. 334).
Yet, the Aristotelian and evolutionary viewpoints may not be as seamlessly brought together as Fowers proposes. Aristotle’s naturalism made no principled distinctions between the natural and the human sciences or between the worlds of primary and secondary qualities. Modern evolutionary biology, in contrast, is heir to a much more circumscribed vision of naturalism based on mechanistic explanations and instrumental reason, which has been the way of the natural sciences since the 17th century. Even if one accepts Fowers’ thesis of the ontological emergence of the human world of constitutive goods and ends-in-themselves from the biological mechanisms of evolution, there nonetheless remains a substantial epistemological gap between the two as forms of understanding. The main value of this book is to open up the kind of dialogue that could help eventually to bridge this gap.