By the eighteenth century, however, particularly within the intellectual and cultural movement known as the Enlightenment, a number of philosophers challenged the very premise of Euthyphro’s Dilemma—most notably the atheist Scottish philosopher David Hume—by taking God out of the moral equation altogether. Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, and others, while not appropriately classified as atheists (rather, deism was a common belief among many Enlightenment intellectuals, in which God created the world and then stepped aside to allow matters to run their course), attempted to ground moral principles in natural law—a sort of deification of nature to make ethics transcendent of mere human convention. We see this in one of the founding statements of the United States of America: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Even if the creator (small c) is nature, rights are still unalienable—society or people cannot take them away, simply because society or people did not create them.
An additional problem arises in Euthyphro’s Dilemma, and that is if God is linked to moral principles—indeed, many argue that He must be in order to create a meaningful ethical system—then does that mean every moral statement of right and wrong ever made is infused with divine inspiration? What about moral principles espoused by Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Tomás de Torquemada? Did their questionable ethics derive from on high as well? Or, alternatively, did their “right” moral actions arise from a correct understanding of God’s will and their “wrong” moral actions from a corruption in their understanding of the divine process? And what about the morality of nonbelievers, atheists, and agnostics? Did their moral sentiments arise simply from the surrounding religious culture, whereas believers’ principles came from God? Problems of consistency in Euthyphro’s Dilemma are legion.
There is a simple way around the dilemma: leave God out of the discussion altogether and adopt the methodological naturalism of science, in which all effects have natural causes subject to scientific analysis. The supposition is that the moral sense in humans and moral principles in human cultures are the result of laws of nature, forces of culture, and contingencies of history. I am not interested here in placing a value judgment on whether God exists or not, because it is not relevant to a scientific approach. Believers need not feel alienated, however, since if there is a God, it is acceptable to believe that He created and utilized the laws of nature, forces of culture, and contingencies of history to generate within humans a moral sense, and within human cultures moral principles. Thankfully for the future of our species—and perhaps all species—science can illuminate an answer, or at least many testable answers that can be confirmed or rejected based on the evidence.
Yet even in a strictly scientific explanation of morality we encounter an apparent dilemma. If morals have a natural instead of a supernatural origin, then there apparently can be no transcendent being or force to objectify them with absolute standards. If there are no absolute standards, then morality must be relative. Harvard evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson presented the dilemma this way: “Either ethical precepts, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience or else they are human inventions.” On the one side, says Wilson, are the transcendentalists, “who think that moral guidelines exist outside the human mind.” On the other side are the empiricists, “who think them contrivances of the mind.” Wilson is an empiricist: “I believe in the independence of moral values, whether from God or not, and I believe that moral values come from human beings alone, whether or not God exists.” For Wilson, there is no debate on the table with greater import. “The choice between transcendentalism and empiricism will be the coming century’s version of the struggle for men’s souls. Moral reasoning will either remain centered in idioms of theology and philosophy, where it is now, or shift toward science-based material analysis. Where it settles will depend on which world view is correct, or at least which is more widely perceived to be correct.”5 But must we accept either-or (either transcendentalism or empiricism)? Can’t we have both-and (both transcendentalism and empiricism)? I would like to propose a both-and consilience of transcendentalism and empiricism.
Ennobling Evolutionary Ethics: A Moral Dilemma Resolved
In virtually every dialogue I have about religion and science, I am inevitably challenged to explain how any ethical system not rooted in divine inspiration can be anything but relative, and thus meaningless. Without transcendence, believers argue, moral acts and principles can have no firm foundation on which to stand.
My thesis is that morality exists outside the human mind in the sense of being not just a trait of individual humans, but a human trait; that is, a human universal. Think about it this way: evolution created moral sentiments and concomitant behaviors over hundreds of thousands of years, so that today even though we agree that humans created morality and ethics (and thus we are empiricists), it is not us who created the moral sentiments and behaviors, it was our Paleolithic ancestors who did so in those long-gone millennia. We simply inherit them, fine-tune and tweak them according to our cultural preferences, and apply them within our unique historical circumstances. In this sense, moral sentiments and behaviors exist beyond us, as products of an impersonal force called evolution. In the same way that evolution transcends culture, morality and ethics transcend culture, because the latter are direct products of the former. Given this presupposition it seems reasonable to be both a transcendentalist and an empiricist, or what I call a transcendent empiricist. Transcendent empiricism avoids supernaturalism as an explanation of morality, and yet grounds morality on something other than the pure relativism of culturally determined ethics. It has the added advantage of being a testable hypothesis in the same manner that any evolutionary trait might be subject to the scrutiny of empirical science.
An Exegesis of Why and How We Are Moral
If, perforce, I had to explain the why and the how of morality—that is, the origins of morality and how we can be good without God—in five minutes, the following exegesis encapsulates the theory presented in this book.6
1. Moral Naturalism. This is a secular and scientific approach to the study of morality. As such, whether there is a God or not is irrelevant to the theory because in science our approach is a naturalistic one—all effects have natural causes subject to scientific analysis. Since I am a nontheist, my assumption is that the moral sense in humans and moral principles in human cultures are the result of laws of nature, forces of culture, and the unique pathways of history; theists who embrace the findings of science may assume that God created and utilized the laws of nature and forces of culture to generate within humans a moral sense and within human cultures moral principles.
2. An Evolved Moral Sense. Moral sentiments in humans and moral principles in human groups evolved primarily through the force of natural selection operating on individuals and secondarily through the force of group selection operating on populations. The moral sense (the psychological feeling of doing “good” in the form of positive emotions such as righteousness and pride) evolved out of behaviors that were selected for because they were good either for the individual or for the group; an immoral sense (the psychological feeling of doing “bad” in the form of negative emotions such as guilt and shame) evolved out of behaviors that were selected for because they were bad either for the individual or for the group. While cultures may differ on what behaviors are defined as good or bad, the moral sense of feeling good or feeling bad about behavior X (whatever X may be) is an evolved human universal.
3. An Evolved Moral Society. Humans evolved as a social primate species with an ascending hierarchy of needs from self-survival of the individual (basic biological needs), to the extension of the individual through the family (the selfish gene), to a sense of bonding with the extended family (driven by kin selection of helping those most related to us), to the reciprocal altruism of t
he community (direct and obvious payback for good behaviors), to indirect altruism of society (doing good without direct payback), to species altruism and bioaltruism as awareness of our membership of the species and biosphere continues to develop. The most basic human needs and moral feelings are largely under biological control, whereas the more social and cultural human needs and moral feelings are largely under cultural control.
4. The Nature of Moral Nature. Humans are, by nature, moral and immoral, good and evil, altruistic and selfish, cooperative and competitive, peaceful and bellicose, virtuous and nonvirtuous. Such moral traits vary within individuals as well as within and between groups. Some people and populations are more or less moral and immoral than other people and populations, but all people have the potential for all moral traits. Most people most of the time in most circumstances are good and do the right thing for themselves and for others. But some people some of the time in some circumstances are bad and do the wrong thing for themselves and for others. The codification of moral principles out of the psychology of the moral traits evolved as a form of social control to ensure the survival of individuals within groups and the survival of human groups themselves. Religion was the first social institution to canonize moral principles, but morality need not be the exclusive domain of religion.
5. Provisional Morality. Moral principles, derived from the moral sense, are not absolute, where they apply to all people in all cultures under all circumstances all of the time. Neither are moral principles relative, entirely determined by circumstance, culture, and history. Moral principles are provisionally true—that is, they apply to most people in most cultures in most circumstances most of the time.
6. Provisional Right and Wrong. In provisional morality we can discern the difference between right and wrong through three principles: the ask-first principle, the happiness principle, and the liberty principle. The ask-first principle states: to find out whether an action is right or wrong, ask first. The happiness principle states: it is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else’s happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else’s unhappiness . The liberty principle states: it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty. To implement social change, the moderation principle states: when innocent people die, extremism in the defense of anything is no virtue, and moderation in the protection of everything is no vice.
7. Provisional Justice. Although we are all subject to laws of nature and forces of culture and history that shape our thoughts and behaviors, we are free moral agents responsible for our actions because none of us can ever know the near-infinite causal net that determines our individual lives. Good things and bad things happen to both good and bad people. There is no absolute and ultimate judge to mete out rewards and punishments at some future date beyond human existence. But since moral principles are provisionally true for most people most of the time in most circumstances, there is individual culpability and social justice within human communities that produce feelings of righteousness and guilt, and administer rewards and punishments such that there is at least provisional justice in the here and now.
8. Ennobling Evolutionary Ethics. As an evolved mechanism of human psychology, the moral sense transcends individuals and groups and belongs to the species. Moral principles exist outside of us and are products of the impersonal forces of evolution, history, and culture.
Free Rider: Facing the Judge
In a review of How We Believe that appeared in the Washington Post, Michael Novak made this observation about my confidence in science and the freedom I found through a scientific worldview: “Science is a method for gaining important forms of knowledge; scientism is the reduction of all forms of knowing to scientific method. Shermer certainly comes perilously close to the latter. Still, he tries valiantly to maintain a sense of the sublime, the sacred, even the mystical, as in describing his exchange of eternal love with his soul mate over lit candles inside Chartres Cathedral, or standing ‘beneath a canopy of galaxies, atop a pillar of reworked stone, or inside a transept of holy light,’ when ‘my unencumbered soul was free to love without constraint’ and was ‘emancipated from the bonds of restricting tradition, and unyoked from the rules written for another time in another place and for another people.’” Novak’s denouement is as thought provoking as it is poetic: “The beauty of being Shermer is that he faces no Judge, undeceivable, transcendent of nature, and within him as well as beyond him; and stands in no long pilgrim community, struggling down the ages, falling, rising, and throwing cathedrals like Chartres up against the sky cathedrals. He is a free rider.”7
Indeed, I am a free rider, but only in the freedom from one set of cultural traditions usually gathered under the umbrella of religion. But, like everyone else, I face judges that are in their own ways transcendent and powerful: family and friends, colleagues and peers, mentors and teachers, and society at large. My judges may be lowercased and occasionally deceivable, but they are transcendent of me as an individual, even if they are not transcendent of nature; as such, together, we all stand in a long pilgrim community struggling down the evolutionary and historical ages trying to live and love and learn to temper our temptations and do the right thing. I may be free from God, but the god of nature holds me to her temple of judgment no less than her other creations. I stand before my maker and judge not in some distant and future ethereal world, but in the reality of this world, a world inhabited not by spiritual and supernatural ephemera, but by real people whose lives are directly affected by my actions, and whose actions directly affect my life.
Throughout this book I attempt to peel back the inner layers covering our core of being to reveal a complexity of human motives—selfish and selfless, cooperative and competitive, virtue and vice, good and evil, moral and immoral. Along the way I attempt to show how these motives came into being as a product of both our evolutionary heritage and cultural history, and how we can construct a moral system that is neither dogmatically absolute nor irrationally relative—a provisional morality for an age of science that provides empirical evidence and a rational basis for belief. Such a system of morality suggests a more universal and tolerant ethic, an ethic that will ensure the well-being and survival of all members of the species, and of all species.
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WHY WE ARE MORAL: THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF MORALITY
Who are we? The answer to this question is not only one of the tasks but the task of science.
Erwin Schrödinger, Science and Humanism, 1951
In an episode of the classic television comedy series The Honeymooners, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney’s characters—the boisterously bellicose Ralph Kramden and the benignly bumbling Ed Norton—engage in one of their archetypal over-the-top arguments, this time over a universal problem found in all primate species: food sharing and its anticipated consequent reciprocity. The conflict arises when the two families decide they are going to save on rent by sharing an apartment, which then involves dining together. Alice has just served dinner.
RALPH: When she put two potatoes on the table, one big one and one small one, you immediately took the big one without asking what I wanted.
NORTON: What would you have done?
RALPH: I would have taken the small one, of course.
NORTON: You would?
RALPH: Yes, I would!
NORTON: So, what are you complaining about? You got the little one!
In its essence this comedic routine symbolizes an enormous source of tension in human relations that led to the evolution of what was almost certainly the first moral principle—the Golden Rule. In 1690 the English political philosopher John Locke, in his classic work Essay Concerning Human Understanding, inquired about whether this “unshaken rule of morality, and foundation of all social virtue, ‘that one should do as he would be done unto,’ be proposed to one who never heard of it before, but yet is
of capacity to understand its meaning, might he not without any absurdity ask a reason why?” Certainly, but as I shall argue, no such individual would find the Golden Rule surprising in any way because at its base lies the foundation of most human interactions and exchanges and it can be found in countless texts throughout recorded history and from around the world—a testimony to its universality. Table 1 presents just a few of its manifestations in chronological order (B.C.E. and C.E. are Before Common Era and Common Era).
TABLE 1
The Historical and Universal Expression of the Golden Rule
Lev. 19:18, c. 1000 B.C.E.: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Confucius, The Doctrine of the Mean, 13, c. 500 B.C.E.: “What you do not want others to do to you, do not do to others.”
Isocrates, c. 375 B.C.E.: “Do not do to others what would anger you if done to you by others.”
Tob. 4:15, c. 180 B.C.E.: “What thou thyself hatest, do to no man.”
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, c. 150 B.C.E.: “The question was once put to Aristotle how we ought to behave to our friends; and his answer was, ‘As we should wish them to behave to us.’”
Science of Good and Evil Page 3