Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

  As we have seen, humans have a host of moral and immoral passions, including being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, nasty and nice. It is natural and normal to try to increase our own happiness by whatever means available, even if that means being selfish, competitive, and nasty. Fortunately, evolution created both sets of passions, so that we also seek to increase our own happiness by being selfless, cooperative, and nice. The happiness principle states that 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. My colleague, social scientist and moral philosopher Jay Stuart Snelson, expressed this sentiment well in his “win-win principle”: “Always seek gain through the gain of others, and never seek gain through the forced or fraudulent loss of others.”2

  This is not always easy to do. There is a tension in the human condition between these competing motives, and as often as not the darker side of our humanity emerges. The moral animal struggles with the immoral animal within. Whether the moral or immoral animal wins in any given situation depends on a host of circumstances and conditions. Since we have within us both moral and immoral sentiments, and we have the capacity to think rationally and override our baser instincts, and we have the freedom to choose to do so, the core of morality is choosing to do the right thing by acting morally and applying the happiness principle.

  So, for any given moral question, one may begin by asking the moral receiver how he or she would respond, then ask yourself if the action in question will likely lead to greater or lesser levels of happiness for yourself and the moral receiver. These two moral principles dovetail, because the moral receiver is, presumably, seeking greater levels of happiness; thus, by asking first what you should do, you will also receive feedback on how the moral receiver’s happiness will be affected by your actions.

  The Liberty Principle: Social and Political Right and Wrong

  In addition to asking the moral receiver how he or she might respond to a moral action and considering how that action might lead to your own and the moral receiver’s happiness or unhappiness, there is an even higher moral level toward which we can strive: the freedom and autonomy of yourself and the moral receiver, or what we shall simply refer to here as liberty. Liberty is the freedom to pursue happiness and the autonomy to make decisions and act on them in order to achieve that happiness. The liberty principle states that 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. The liberty principle is grounded in history and anchored in modern enlightenment values.

  In prehistoric bands and tribes, liberty was limited to the actions and interactions of individuals within their families, extended families, and tiny communities. Liberty as a political concept was nonexistent, because there was no politics. Society was mostly a loose confederation of individuals—families and extended families—within a slightly larger community. The primary purpose of these communities was to resolve conflicts within the band or tribe, to secure food and natural resources, and to protect against other bands and tribes. As bands and tribes coalesced into chiefdoms and states, and populations grew from hundreds to thousands and tens of thousands, political organizations were needed because the informal methods of conflict resolution that worked so well in smaller populations broke down among the much larger populations, and the small skirmishes between bands and tribes grew into much larger and costlier wars between chiefdoms and states.

  Because chiefdoms and states require revenue to support a bureaucratic infrastructure and bureaucracies are not designed to be revenue-generating organizations, the individual members of the chiefdom or state must relinquish some percentage of their productive labor. Today this is done through taxes, duties, levies, tolls, excises, and various other financial assessments. Where there is no money, or a limited supply of cash flow, the barter system may be employed, such as in feudalism, where peasants gave over a portion of their agricultural products to the land-owning lord, and/or a fraction of their time to military service in defense of the castle, manor, or realm. Here, and elsewhere, some freedom and autonomy is exchanged for security and resources, and this may lead to an increase in overall liberty and the general good of the chiefdom or state. It is at this point—roughly 3,000 to 5,000 years ago when bands and tribes evolved into chiefdoms and states—that the concept of civil and political liberty was born. Here we can turn to the Bio-Cultural Evolutionary Pyramid, figure 6, to see where and how that transition was made. It is at the bio-cultural transitional boundary between the community and the society, where social status and recognition lead to social justice and security, and where the drive of reciprocal altruism gives rise to indirect and blind altruism, that liberty emerges. This is the birth of liberty, the principle that when individual members of the community exchange freedom and autonomy for resources and security, in the long run their overall liberty increases. For example, exchanging a portion of my earnings for food that someone else produces allows me the freedom to pursue nonfood-producing activities. Ideally, the exchange of some freedom and autonomy for resources and security leads to other forms of freedom and autonomy. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

  For many millennia the concept of liberty for all members of the state lay dormant, suppressed by the selfish and competitive drives of the political and religious leaders who held the reins of power. Even the occasional enlightened societies that set up quasi-representative bodies to protect the interests of the citizens at large restricted liberty to a narrow class of land-owning or power-wielding males. Only in the last couple of centuries have we witnessed the worldwide spread of liberty as a concept that applies to all peoples everywhere, regardless of their rank or social and political status in the power hierarchy. Liberty has yet to achieve worldwide status, particularly among those states dominated by theocracies that encourage intolerance and dictate that only some people deserve liberty, but the overall trend since the early modern period has been to grant greater liberty for more people. Although there are still setbacks, and periodically violations of liberties disrupt the overall historical flow from less to more liberty for all, the general trajectory of increasing liberty for all humans continues.

  The Moderation Principle: Extremism Is No Virtue, Moderation Is No Vice

  On July 16, 1964, in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater gave voice to one of the most memorable one-liners in the history of politicking: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” For most human endeavors, however, Goldwater is wrong. Extremism is almost always a vice that generates countless unintended consequences. Extremism too often leads to violence, terrorism, and even war. From 9/11 to the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, and from the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City to the blowing up of abortion clinics, the principles of happiness and liberty are violated in the most ultimate fashion.

  The opposite of extremism is moderation. The moderation principle states that when innocent people die, extremism in the defense of anything is no virtue, and moderation in the protection of everything is no vice. The moral principles behind the moderation principle are happiness and liberty. If you are killing people in the name of anything, you are seeking happiness and liberty at the ultimate expense of someone else’s happiness and liberty.

  Provisional Ethics Put to the Test

  Real-world problems are the true test of any theory of morality. Other than for intellectual recreation, what good is an ethical theory without moral application? In the remainder of this chapter we shall examine how provisional ethics and a science of morality—particularly the ask first principle, the happiness principle, and the liberty principle—might be applied to a number of such ethical issues, including truth telling and lying, adultery, pornography, abortion, cloning and genetic engineering, and animal rights.


  Provisional Morality and Truth Telling and Lying

  We begin with a relatively easy moral issue: truth telling and lying. We all agree that truth telling is vital for trust in human relations, so in a binary system of morality, truth telling is right and lying is wrong. Life, however, like nature, is never this simple. It turns out that all of us lie every day, but most of the lies are so-called little white lies, where we might exaggerate our accomplishments, or they might be lies of omission, where information is omitted to spare someone’s feelings. Such lies are usually amoral. Fuzzy logic better represents life—and lies—than does binary logic. In the case of truth telling and lying, fuzzy provisional ethics allows us to nuance our thinking on such moral issues.

  Little white lies, for example, since they are commonplace and mostly harmless, might be ranked a .1 or a .2 lie. Lies of omission might perhaps be catalogued as .3 or .4 lies. Lies of commission—intentionally providing false information—might be classified as .5 or .6 lies. Big lies—lies in the range from .7 to .9—are getting much more serious, and thus can be seen as more immoral than little white lies.

  When in doubt as to whether a lie is moral, immoral, or amoral, you can ask yourself how the moral receiver might feel if he or she found out you lied, and whether the moral receiver’s happiness and liberty increased or decreased as a result of the lie you told. When telling a lie, most of us, most of the time, do so to increase our own happiness or liberty, or to avoid anticipated unhappiness or loss of liberty if someone else knows the truth. Thus, the moral thing to do is to never tell a lie if it leads to someone else’s unhappiness or loss of liberty. Of course, there are circumstances when telling the truth might lead to someone else’s unhappiness or loss of liberty. For example, if an abusive husband inquires whether you are harboring his fearful wife, it would be immoral for you to answer in the affirmative if you are, because the truth might lead to the abuse or death of the wife. Here we must be cautious since it would be easy to rationalize a lie when, in fact, telling the truth is usually the right thing to do.

  Provisional Morality and Adultery

  There is a lighthearted biblical story told by ministers and rabbis about Moses and the Ten Commandments. In this revisionist spin, the great prophet descends from the mountaintop with the divinely chiseled tablets, announcing to his people, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that God kept the number of commandments down to a manageable ten. The bad news is that God left in the one about adultery.”

  Well, what if He had not left that commandment in? Would that remove adultery from the list of immoral acts? Would it make it amoral, or even moral? Divine Command Theory, a narrower version of theistic ethics, implies that it would. For Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, if the monotheistic God of Abraham does not decree an act immoral, the implication is that it is not, at least as far as the Bible goes (all three religions have a long and honorable tradition of biblical commentary and moral discourse in which the sages of each generation have produced extrabiblical works on all matters moral). As to whether there is a God or not, however, we need to go beyond divine command as our guide. Eighteenth-century theistic German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz explained it this way: “In saying, therefore, that things are not good according to any standard of goodness, but simply by the will of God, it seems to me that one destroys, without realizing it, all the love of God and all his glory; for why praise him for what he has done, if he would be equally praiseworthy in doing the contrary?”3

  Religions and societies have long struggled to regulate human sexual behavior, one of the strongest of all the passions. In some cases, it has been outlawed, even in modern America. In Rolling Hills, California, for example, Section 9 of the municipal code, on “immoral conduct,” specifically states that “any person occupying, using or being present in any bed, room, automobile, structure or public place with a person of the opposite sex, to whom he or she is not married, for the purpose of having sexual intercourse with such person” is guilty of a crime punishable by up to three months in jail.4 Such laws sound arcane to us today, but many states once had them on the books because marriage is considered a contract, the violation of which leads to third-party damages. But since most states have moved to no-fault divorce laws, adultery as a cause of divorce fell into disuse, along with the antiadultery laws. (In April 2003, for example, the city council of Rolling Hills voted to repeal the antiadultery statute.) Although adultery may retain its status as a sin, its designation as a crime has proved ineffective as a behavioral curb. If two consenting adults wish to engage in unsanctioned sexual behavior, there is little church or state can do to stop them. Behavioral restraint needs to come from within.

  Here, again, we can look to evolutionary theory for a deeper understanding of why we do what we do unto others. In provisional ethics, adultery is provisionally immoral because of the disruption it causes to the natural mating condition of our species. We evolved as pair-bonded primates for whom monogamy, or at least serial monogamy (a sequence of monogamous marriages), is the norm. Adultery is a violation of a monogamous relationship and, as we shall see, there is copious scientific data (and loads of anecdotal examples) showing how destructive adulterous behavior is to a monogamous relationship. In fact, one of the reasons that serial monogamy (and not just monogamy) best describes the mating behavior of our species is that adultery typically destroys a relationship, forcing couples to split up and start over with someone new. Thus, in contrasting provisional ethics with theistic ethics, adultery is immoral because of its destructive consequences no matter what God or the patriarchs said about it. And evolutionary theory provides a deeper reason for adultery’s immoral nature that is transcendent because it belongs to the species. If there is a God, and if He does condemn adultery as an immoral act, it is because evolution made it immoral.

  According to evolutionary psychologist David Buss, sexual betrayals are primarily a biologically driven phenomenon (although they may be accentuated or attenuated by culture), encoded over eons of Paleolithic cuckolding. Buss argues that there are differences between men and women in this tendency and that these differences cut across cultures, and thus are primarily driven by our genes. He cites a study by Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield in which college students were approached by an attractive member of the opposite sex who asked one of three questions:

  1. “Would you go out on a date with me tonight?”

  2. “Would you go back to my apartment with me tonight?”

  3. “Would you sleep with me tonight?

  The results were revealing, to say the least. For women, 50 percent agreed to the date, 6 percent agreed to return to the apartment, and none agreed to have sex. By contrast, for men, 50 percent agreed to the date, 69 percent agreed to the apartment, and 75 percent agreed to the sex. Yet, even with such a basic and simple drive as sex, Buss admits that genes are only part of the story: “Desires represent only one set of causes of actual mating behavior. Individuals cannot always make decisions that correspond precisely to their desires—people can’t always get what they want. Mates possessing all of the desired qualities are scarce and often unavailable. Competition is keen for the limited supply of desirable mates; members of the same sex constrain access. Parents can wield influence. And members of the opposite sex exert preferences that further restrict access.”5

  As for the act of adultery itself, its evolutionary benefits are obvious. For the male, depositing one’s genes in more places increases the probability of this form of genetic immortality. For the female, it is a chance to trade up for better genes and higher social status. Its evolutionary hazards, however, are equally obvious. For the male, revenge by the adulterous woman’s husband can be extremely dangerous—a significant percentage of homicides involve love triangles. And while getting caught by one’s own wife is not likely to result in death, it can result in loss of contact with children, loss of family and security, and risk of sexual retaliation, thus decreasing the odds of one’s mate bearing one’s ow
n offspring. For the female, being discovered by the adulterous man’s wife involves little physical risk, but getting caught by one’s own husband can and often does lead to extreme physical abuse and occasionally even death.

  Beyond the evolutionary implications, there are the sociocultural problems, such as the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, family and extended-family rejection, social ostracization from one’s community, and the like. It would be difficult to justify adultery as a moral act from either an evolutionary perspective or a cultural one, for either the individual or society. Extreme exceptions come to mind, of course, such as a woman whose husband is in a long-term coma and she finds solace through intimacy with another man. But such “lifeboat” cases are so rare as to fall outside the purview of provisional ethics. And one occasionally hears about “open marriages” in which both partners allegedly agree to tolerate extramarital affairs, but such arrangements appear to be desired more by one partner than the other and typically end in divorce when one partner becomes attached to and falls in love with the paramour.