Virtue Signaling

by Geoffrey Miller

  Romantic Virtues and Moral Virtues

  This sexual selection model may appear bizarre at first to moral philosophers and moral psychologists. From Saint Augustine through Sigmund Freud, sexuality has been viewed as morality’s nemesis. When Western thought was gripped by the traditional dichotomies of body vs. spirit, lust vs. virtue, and sinners vs. saints, it was hard to imagine that moral virtues might arise through mate choice. Even within evolutionary theories of morality, moral capacities are usually seen as efficient tactics to increase individual or group survival prospects, rather than as costly, conspicuous signals to increase individual reproductive prospects.

  To overcome these intellectual biases, it may help to take a step back and think about the role of moral virtues in real human mate choice. Apart from physical appearance and social status, which traits most excite our romantic impulses? People often fall in love based on positive assessments of each other’s generosity, kindness, honesty, courage, social sensitivity, political idealism, intellectual integrity, empathy to children, respectfulness to parents, or loyalty to friends. The most romantic personal traits are often those that have been considered praise-worthy moral virtues by the world’s most influential philosophical and religious traditions from ancient Greece, Israel, Arabia, India, China, and Japan. These loveable virtues include not only the traditional prosocial virtues of European Christendom (such as faith, hope, charity, love, kindness, fairness, equality, humility, and conscience), but also Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘pagan virtues,’ such as leadership, bravery, strength, skill, health, fertility, beauty, tolerance, joy, humor, and grace.

  Courtship as a Moral Obstacle Course

  Moral virtues are, among other things, personal traits that we are proud to display during courtship. Indeed, courtship in most cultures can be viewed as a moral obstacle course – a ritualized test of diverse moral virtues, such as kindness in gift-giving, conscientiousness in keeping promises, empathy in listening, and sexual self-control. For courtship to be reliable, valid, and discriminating as a moral test, it must lead to a perceivable range of moral failures (such as broken promises, revealed prejudices, irritabilities, infidelities, impatient sexual pressures) that reflect an underlying population distribution of moral traits.

  In archetypal romance stories across cultures, both characters fall in love, enjoy bliss, get lazy, make some moral errors, have a moral crisis, recognize their moral failures, resolve to improve their moral character, magnanimously forgive each other, and live happily ever after. It is not romantic for characters to make and forgive purely perceptual failures (such as failures of depth perception or color constancy) or purely cognitive failures (such as base-rate neglect or hindsight bias). If neither individual in a sexual relationship cares about projecting moral virtues (as in relations between prostitutes and clients, or masters and slaves), then the relationship is considered superficial and unloving.

  Subjectively, romantic emotions seem to amplify the perceived variance in moral character across potential lovers. When we fall in love, new lovers seemed morally exemplary; when they make moral errors, they seem morally treacherous; when they make amends, they seem morally redeemed; when they divorce us, they seem morally repulsive. Borderline personality disorder (the tendency to view intimate partners in unstable, dichotomized ways, as alternately extremely good or extremely evil) is just an exaggerated form of the normal human tendency to alternately over-value and under-value our lovers’ virtues. Of course, such emotions may not increase the objective accuracy of moral information (in the sense of more accurate perceptual discrimination of moral traits across individuals), but they may increase the salience of such information – its accessibility to other brain systems for attention, memory, decision-making, language, and motor behavior.

  Conversely, moral vices are character flaws that we would be embarrassed to reveal to potential mates. These sexually embarrassing vices include not just obviously anti-social behaviors (killing, raping, lying, cheating), but also victimless addictions (sloth, gluttony, greed, envy, pride, drinking, smoking, drug-taking, gambling, masturbating), failures of pro-social magnanimity (under-tipping waiters, ignoring starving children, fleeing combat), and acts of symbolic meanness (kicking toys, burning books, spitting on tombs).

  This may sound like an odd grab-bag of crimes, sins, foibles, and insanities from most traditional viewpoints (evolutionary altruism theories, law, religion, psychiatry). However, from a virtue ethics viewpoint, and from the sexual signaling viewpoint of this article, these moral vices have an important common denominator: they lead potential mates to hold our moral character in lower esteem, so they are less likely to breed with us. Also, the leading causes of divorce across cultures (infidelity, abuse, addiction, unemployment) are almost all seen as serious moral failures.

  To moral philosophers, the sexual costs of moral vice may seem tangential to human moral evolution. Yet to evolutionary biologists, a direct connection between moral vice and impaired reproductive success should be highly suggestive.

  Courtship Generosity

  The moral virtues most readily explained by sexual selection are those most conspicuously manifest in sexual courtship and relationships, and consistently valued in mate choice across cultures. Courtship generosity is the most obvious example, with clear parallels to ‘courtship feeding’ by animals, in which ‘nuptial gifts’ are given by males to females as good-genes indicators and good-parent investments. Human courtship generosity would include altruism, kindness, and sympathy to the sexual partner, to his or her children from previous relationships (one’s step-children), and to his or her family members (one’s in-laws). Since this sort of courtship generosity is directed at non-relatives and is not expected to be reciprocated, it is hard to explain through kin selection or reciprocal altruism, and it qualifies as evolutionary altruism by traditional definitions.

  Courtship generosity may even include much of the paternal effort that is usually assumed to arise through kin selection (where ‘kin’ include ‘offspring’), since most divorced fathers reduce their paternal investment as soon as they are cut off from sexual access to mothers. Thus, what looks like simple paternal investment in one’s offspring may turn out to be better described as ongoing courtship generosity by males to maintain sexual access to the mothers of those offspring. Under ancestral small-group conditions, it may have been perfectly clear which males cut off aid to their children after breaking up with their mothers. Such males may have been considered immoral and selfish, and may have suffered reputational and reproductive costs as a result. However, depending on the exact social context and social norms, those moral costs may have been lower than the net fitness costs of continued paternal investment without sexual access to the mother. Here, as with all complex psychological adaptations, recognition of such situational contingencies is not hand-waving; it can lead to precise testable predictions about the social, cultural, and economic conditions under which males will continue paternal investment following relationship termination.

  Moral and Quasi-Moral Traits in Individual Differences Psychology

  Some of the best-studied individual differences dimensions in psychology have moral or quasi-moral status when they are assessed in social and sexual interaction. These include personality traits, mental health traits, and intelligence. These heritable dimensions of individual variation are morally valenced, and their morally praise-worthy extremes increase sexual attractiveness. These traits are inter-related not because they share some abstract set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but because, in the real world, they tend to be disrupted by the same kinds of pleiotropic genetic mutations, developmental errors, and neuropsychological abnormalities.

  Personality Traits

  Current research on personality traits is dominated by the ‘Big Five’ model, which identifies five key personality traits that can be reliably measured, that validly predict diverse behaviors, that are stable across the life-span, and that replicate across cultures. These
traits can be remembered with the acronym ‘OCEAN:’ openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Of these, conscientiousness and agreeableness are most strongly sought in long-term mates, and best predict good partner traits and good parent traits, so are most likely to have been shaped as moral virtues by sexual selection.

  Conscientiousness implies fulfilling promises, respecting commitments, and resisting bad habits. It subsumes individual differences in industriousness, self-control, responsibility, and several other virtues. It predicts emotional maturity, romantic lovability in relationships, and not killing people by driving safely. It also predicts pro-social civic and organizational engagement, and honesty, integrity, dependability, trustworthiness, and reliability at work. Further, conscientiousness positively predicts virtually every health-related behavior that increases longevity, including eating a healthy diet, exercising, and avoiding tobacco, excessive alcohol, addictive drugs, risky sexual behavior, risky driving, and suicide. Conscientiousness is also closely related to the capacity for willpower, self-control, and delay of gratification, which are key virtues across many socio-sexual domains. Prefrontal brain damage, as in the famous case of Phineas Gage, tends to reduce conscientiousness and disinhibits impulsive anti-social behavior, so it reduces both moral virtue and long-term sexual attractiveness.

  Agreeableness implies warmth, kindness, sympathy, and non-aggressiveness; it predicts benevolence and respect for moral traditions, the quality and peacefulness of social relationships, and success in jobs requiring teamwork and social interaction. Gentle, agreeable behavior fits the ‘tend-and-befriend’ response to stress that is favored by female social primates. Individuals who score low on agreeableness tend have more personality disorders. They also tend to be aggressive, arrogant, conceited, domineering, narcissistic, and lacking in empathy – usually considered moral vices. Since agreeableness increases satisfaction and stability in sexual relationships, as in other social relationships, it is probably valued especially as a good parent and good partner indicator.

  The other three of the Big Five traits – openness, extraversion, and neuroticism – are more morally ambiguous, and tend to result in assortative mating through preferences for self-similarity. For example, high openness (interest in novel experiences, aesthetics, and culture) predicts the moral virtues of emotional sensitivity, social tolerance, political liberalism, and support for universalist values – the sort that would be supported by Kant’s categorical imperative. On the other hand, low openness predicts the moral virtues of temperance, chastity, stoicism, community solidarity, pride in one’s people and traditions, and clarity of gender role (manliness or femininity) – which academics tend to label vices (‘right-wing authoritarianism,’ racism, sexism). The strong assortative mating for political and religious attitudes reflecting each point along the openness dimension suggests that sexual selection may have amplified variance in openness, but is unlikely to have pushed it consistently in either direction.

  Are personality traits such as conscientiousness and agreeableness really relevant to the evolution of morality? Moral philosophers have lately rediscovered the old social psychology critiques of personality psychology, as in the ‘person vs. situation’ debate, and work on the ‘fundamental attribution error.’ Social psychology’s concern was that apparently stable personality traits may not really exist, but may be projections of a biased social-attribution system. Citing this literature, some researchers argued that virtue ethics cannot succeed because social psychology shows there are no stable personality traits that could correspond to virtues. Unfortunately, virtue ethicists have not usually responded to these critiques on empirical grounds, by citing the well-established reliability, validity, stability, and heritability of personality traits, which have been established across cultures and even across species.

  Mental Health Traits

  All major mental illnesses tend to increase perceived selfishness, and to decrease perceived moral virtue, sexual attractiveness, and social status. This seems especially true for the most common and severe psychopathologies, such as depression, schizophrenia, and psychopathy. Many personality disorders, such as paranoid, narcissistic, and borderline disorders, also predict anti-social behavior. Signs of mental illness typically lead to social and sexual rejection by others – i.e., to stigmatization through negative social attributions. Serious mental illness almost always reduces reproductive success by reducing sexual attractiveness. Indeed, as I’ve argued in our Mating Intelligence book, many mental disorders can be viewed as catastrophic failures of ‘mating intelligence’ – of the cognitive and motivational systems that allow normal individuals to display moral virtues, verbal creativity, and social savvy in courtship.

  Severe mental disorders disrupt moral virtues, but they disrupt almost everything else too – education, employment, relationships, hygiene. Do less severe, more common mental disorders – such as personality disorders – have especially harmful effects on sexually-preferred moral virtues? Many of them seem to, and have highly sex-skewed prevalence rates that suggest some involvement of sexual selection in their evolutionary etiology. Asperger syndrome (a milder, much more common version of autism) is a highly male-biased condition characterized by serious deficits in social empathy and communication that result in pervasive, consistent problems in attracting, retaining, and understanding sexual partners. Narcissistic personality disorder – extreme arrogance, grandiosity, self-involvement, and showing off – reflects obsessive over-investment in conspicuous, public fitness-displays to attract multiple short-term mates. Antisocial personality disorder (psychopathy) – a pervasive, highly male-biased pattern of callous, exploitative, impulsive, violent, and promiscuous behavior – can be construed as over-reliance on deceptive, coercive, and short-term mating tactics. Borderline personality disorder – a highly female-biased pattern of promiscuity, relationship instability, drug and alcohol abuse, risky driving, and impulsive behavior – is associated with many vices.

  All of these personality disorders seriously reduce long-term mating success, relationship satisfaction, and marital stability, and they have fairly high prevalence rates in the general population. Thus, the study of mental disorders and their effects on intimate relationships is highly relevant to understanding moral virtues and vices, and their possible origins through mate choice.

  Intelligence

  Intelligence (in the sense of general cognitive ability or the g factor, as measured by IQ tests) is a morally valenced concept. This is why it has been so controversial throughout a century of psychometrics, ever since the ground-breaking work by Charles Spearman in 1904. It is well-established that intelligence predicts objective performance and learning ability across all important life-domains that show reliable individual differences. Based on thousands of psychometric studies, almost all reputable intelligence researchers agree that the best single measure of intelligence is the ‘g factor’ (a dimension of general cognitive ability), which can be statistically extracted from any reasonably diverse battery of reliable cognitive tests given to any reasonably large sample of people.

  Less well-appreciated is that higher intelligence predicts many behaviors that we consider morally virtuous, such as being emotionally sensitive to the needs of others, working conscientiously, staying healthy through exercise and diet, and staying happily married. Intelligence also predicts many forms of social, economic, and aesthetic success that are sexually attractive and morally valenced, including creativity, artistic virtuosity, and achieving social status and wealth through individual merit. These moral correlates of intelligence may be one reason why intelligence is so attractive when both men and women consider potential long-term partners. Conversely, lower intelligence predicts many behaviors considered morally wrong, such as murder, rape, assault, alcoholism, drug addiction, absenteeism, child abuse and neglect, passing along sexually-transmissible infections, and causing fatal traffic accidents.

  Many lines of resea
rch, from longitudinal studies to multivariate genetic studies, suggest that intelligence is not just correlated with these diverse traits and behaviors, but that in each case, intelligence is either causally primary, or intelligence and the other trait are driven by an underlying dimension of genetic quality.

  One might object that intelligence is not really a ‘moral virtue;’ it just happens to predict a wide range of specific moral behaviors. Yet, what is a ‘moral virtue,’ if not an individual-differences dimension that predicts a wide range of specific moral behaviors? Moral virtues are socially attributed traits that carry predictive information about morally relevant behaviors. If kindness is a moral virtue because it predicts specific pro-social behaviors, and is valued as such, then intelligence must also be a moral virtue – besides being an academic, economic, and epistemological virtue.

  Another reason for accepting the quasi-moral status of intelligence is the recent convergence between virtue ethics and ‘virtue epistemology’ – the study of cognitive and intellectual virtues. Traditional epistemology tried to evaluate the truth of particular conceptual systems through consistency and coherence criteria. By contrast, for the virtue epistemologist, true beliefs arise from acts of intellectual virtue – acts typical of intelligent, rational, cognitively complex agents who show impartiality, epistemic responsibility, and intellectual courage. For example, Aristotle named intuition, wisdom, prudence, and science as intellectual virtues. In virtue epistemology as in virtue ethics, the favored level of description is the whole individual as a cognitive/moral agent, not the isolated belief or moral act. This naturally leads to an emphasis on individual differences in epistemological virtue – differences that intelligence researchers have already succeeded in measuring with unparalleled reliability and validity for over a century. Thus, intelligence is a sexually attractive, quasi-moral trait at the intersection of virtue epistemology and virtue ethics.