Group selection, and all it implies about our true nature, has been an extremely controversial idea among evolutionists, reflecting the fact that the theory of evolution itself is still evolving. Early theories of group selection assumed the possibility that, in the beginning, there had been cohesive groups of altruistic individuals (mammals that emitted warning behaviors, birds that would signal food to the flock, primates who were generous, and so forth) for group selection to favor in the first place. This poorly explained assumption—aggregations of altruists from the clear blue sky—was irritating to many scholars, who bestowed on it the damning label of weak science.
In 1966, George C. Williams of the University of Chicago published a now-classic text entitled Adaptation and Natural Selection, in which he argued that although group selection was theoretically possible, it was unlikely to occur in nature. Williams wrote that neither the group nor the individual was the fundamental unit of natural selection, maintaining that the true unit of selection was the gene itself. For creatures that reproduce sexually, as opposed to organisms that generate clones, the gene is the only unit that self-replicates exactly (more or less) through time. Children are not exact copies of their parents, but genes are fairly precise replicas of themselves. And so, Williams insisted, the gene must be the only unit that natural selection can efficiently use. In other words, “survival of the fittest” meant survival of the fittest genes (or rather, the information coded in them), not necessarily the survival of the fittest individual animals or groups. For Williams, individuals and groups were there only to serve as temporary environments for genetic information.
And ten years later, in 1976, in a still-popular book called The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins extended Williams's gene-centered theory and biologist W. D. Hamilton's notion of kin selection, which paradoxically reexplains the evolution of unselfish behaviors at the level of the individual by invoking the idea of “selfishness” at the level of the gene. This is a rather strange notion, and deserves some explanation.
Kin selection means that pieces of the individual's genetic blueprint (the only biological aspect of the individual that stands a chance of being “immortal,” so to speak) will fare better if the individual guards not only his own survival and reproduction odds but also those of other individuals who share some of his genetic makeup. If he behaves generously and protectively toward his blood relatives, their enhanced survival and reproduction rate will increase the numbers of his own genes in future generations, since his relatives and he have many genes in common.
Of course, the expression “selfish gene” is not intended to imply that DNA is a thinking, feeling thing with its own desires. Dawkins uses “selfish gene” as a metaphor. He means that the characteristics of a species are determined by genes that cause individuals to think, feel, and behave in ways that maximize the existence of those same genes in the gene pool, regardless of the effects of those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors on the individuals themselves. For example, if my brain allows me to form emotional attachments, and I feel so warmly toward my cousins that I share my fruit with all of them, my individual life may be shortened, but on average, the odds that my genes will continue in the population have actually been multiplied, because my genes are shared in part by each of my cousins. And the genes that I have donated to the gene pool by lengthening the lives of my cousins may well include the genes that cause me to feel emotional attachments.
In other words, the genes for emotional attachment are “selfish” in the sense that they exist to enhance their own proliferation, and they do this without regard to the well-being or even the continued existence of the individual creature. As in the famous quotation by Samuel Butler, “A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg.”
According to many evolutionists, because we share the greatest percentage of our genetic complement with our parents, our siblings, and our children, kin selection accounts for the fact that we tend to be more selfless toward our parents, siblings, and children than toward more distant relatives and strangers. Furthermore, kin selection explains why we nurture and protect our children despite the fact that doing so lessens our own energies and our individual survival resources. From this vantage point, conscience is the genetically programmed mechanism that makes sure we do not ignore the extra little packages of our genetic material that just happen to be walking around on feet other than ours.
As for our genetically designed sense of conscience toward the aforementioned distant relatives and strangers—gene-centered evolutionists propose that their version of natural selection would have favored genes that resulted in “reciprocal altruism,” or non-zero-sum (win-win) behaviors such as the division of labor, friend seeking, cooperation, and the avoidance of conflict. These behaviors would be mediated by emotions such as gratitude, compassion, and conscience, and so emotions such as these would have had an advantage where the natural selection of genes was concerned.
But in a revival of the idea of group selection, other evolutionary theorists, among them David Sloan Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould, have implored both the biological and the behavioral sciences to consider that evolution may in fact have taken place on more levels than just the gene-centered one. Naturalist Gould reexamines the evidence from paleontology and maintains that natural selection operates on multiple levels, from the gene to the individual to the group, and even—or especially—the species. In addition, he makes the case that forces operating in a much less incremental fashion than natural selection, and far more rapidly than time immemorial—events that include global or near-global catastrophes—have significantly affected the course of evolution and may do so again.
The various levels of natural selection are likely at odds with one another, particularly with respect to altruistic behaviors and emotions such as conscience. At the level of the gene and also at the level of the group, conscience is adaptive, and natural selection would favor it. But at the level of the individual creature, the absence of conscience may sometimes be even more adaptive for survival. In this way, nature would constantly be fostering conscience in most of us, while, at a different level, continually supporting a smaller percentage of individuals who thrive without the neurobiological underpinnings of emotional attachment and conscience.
As evolutionist David Sloan Wilson has said, “There are compelling intellectual and practical reasons to distinguish between behaviors that succeed by contributing to group-level organization and behaviors that succeed by disrupting group-level organization. That is what the words ‘selfish' and ‘unselfish,' ‘moral' and ‘immoral' are all about in everyday language.” What Wilson describes in this way is the same bewildering and all-too-familiar dichotomy: the majority, who think and feel in terms of minimizing conflict, sharing when necessary, and living out their lives with the people they love, and the minority, who prosper from conflict, and for whom life is no more and no less than a constant competition for dominance.
So we find that even on the most reductionistic biological level, the struggle between good and evil is more ancient than humankind. However, the contest is likely to reach its conclusion with us, and its ultimate resolution will depend on the ways we meet the towering challenges humankind has brought into the world, among them the problem of sociopathy. In ways we are just beginning to understand, natural selection has favored a certain amount of altruism in the human population and has helped to shape a human species endowed with the capacity to love and bond together in positive intention by the still small voice of conscience. At least 96 percent of us are fundamentally thus. What we will end up doing with the species survival problems created by the other 4 percent is, at present, unknowable.
Heinz's Dilemma
Turning now from evolutionary psychology to developmental psychology, we come to the interesting question of how conscience develops in human children. Does conscience flower naturally in children's minds as their other mental abilities increase, or do children acquire and adjust their moral sense as they experience
life, from lessons taught by family, society, and culture?
Conscience as an emotion has not been studied in this way, but we can learn much from what is known about its intellectual partner, moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is the thought process that attends conscience and helps it decide what to do. If we try, we can express our moral reasoning in words, concepts, and principles.
Joe was engaged in moral reasoning as he drove along in his Audi, along with his tormented conscience, and tried to figure out whether he should go to an important meeting at work or return home to feed his dog, Reebok. Conscience, as we know, was Joe's intervening sense of obligation based in his emotional attachment to his dog. Moral reasoning was the process by which he determined just what that obligation consisted of, and how to accomplish it. (Exactly how hungry will the dog be? Could he die of thirst? Which is more important, the meeting or Reebok? What is the right thing to do?)
Where does it come from, this nearly universal ability to ask moral and ethical questions of ourselves, about everything from whether or not to feed the dog to whether or not to launch a nuclear missile?
The systematic study of moral reasoning began in the 1930s with Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. In one of his most influential works, The Moral Judgment of the Child, Piaget analyzed children's perspectives on authority, lying, stealing, and the concept of justice. He began by recording detailed observations of how children at different ages conceived of rules and played games, and of how they interpreted moral dilemmas. Piaget's approach was “structural,” meaning that he believed human beings developed psychologically and philosophically in a progressive fashion, each cognitive-developmental step building on the previous one, and that the course of this development proceeded in the same order for all children.
Piaget described two general stages of moral development. The first stage is the “morality of constraint,” or “moral realism,” in which children obey rules because rules are regarded as inalterable. At this black-and-white stage of reasoning, young children believe that a particular deed is either absolutely right or absolutely wrong and that people will inevitably be punished for wrong behavior that is discovered, an expectation Piaget called “imminent justice.” The second Piagetian stage is the “morality of cooperation,” or “reciprocity.” At this stage, children view rules as relative and subject to alteration under certain circumstances, and their concept of justice gives consideration to people's intentions. Older children can “decenter” their point of view (make it less egocentric), and moral rules are understood as important to the functioning of society, rather than only as ways to avoid individual bad outcomes.
Continuing in the Piagetian tradition, and influenced also by the work of the American philosopher John Dewey, psychologist and educator Lawrence Kohlberg began his work on moral judgment in the late 1960s, at Harvard University's Center for Moral Education. Kohlberg's ambition was to discover whether or not there truly were universal stages of moral development.
Kohlberg's theory is based on interviews with boys, ages six to sixteen, in the United States, Taiwan, Mexico, Turkey, and the Yucatán. During these interviews, the children listened to ten stories, each involving a moral dilemma of some kind. The best known of these stories, a little vignette composed nearly forty years ago, is strikingly evocative of the current controversy surrounding pharmaceutical corporations and the cost of prescription medications. It is Heinz's dilemma, which, in paraphrase, is this:
Heinz's wife is dying from a rare form of cancer. According to the doctors, there is one drug that could save her, a radium compound that a druggist in Heinz's town has recently discovered. The ingredients for the drug are expensive to begin with, and the druggist is charging ten times what it costs him to make the medicine. The druggist pays two hundred dollars for the radium and charges his customers two thousand dollars for a small dose. Heinz goes to everyone he can think of and asks to borrow money. Still, he ends up with only about one thousand dollars. Heinz explains to the druggist that his wife will die without the drug, and asks him to sell the medicine at a cheaper price or to take payment later. But the druggist replies, “No, I discovered the drug, and I'm going to make money from it.” Heinz becomes desperate. He breaks into the druggist's store and steals the drug for his wife.
Should Heinz have done that?
Kohlberg was primarily interested not in the children's yes or no answers to “Should Heinz have done that?” but in the reasoning behind their responses, which he recorded. Based on his many interviews, he proposed that children follow a universal course from self-interest to principled behavior that can be described by a three-level scheme of moral development. The three levels of moral development require increasingly complex and abstract thought patterns, each level displacing the previous one as the child matures cognitively.
According to Kohlberg's theory of moral development, seven- to ten-year-old children reason on the “preconventional level,” at which they defer to adult authority and obey rules based only on expectations of punishment and reward. Kohlberg considered that the preconventional reasoning of young children was essentially “premoral.” The most typical “premoral” response to Heinz's dilemma would be, “No, Heinz shouldn't have done that, because now he'll be punished.”
Beginning at about age ten, children move to the “conventional level” of moral reasoning (conventional in the societal sense), when their behavior is guided by the opinions of other people and a desire to conform. At this level, obeying authority becomes a value in itself, without reference either to immediate rewards and punishments or to higher principles. Kohlberg believed that by the time a child was thirteen, most moral questions were answered on the conventional level. The conventional reasoning about Heinz's theft would be, “No, he shouldn't have stolen the drug. Stealing is against the law. Everyone knows that.”
Sometime during adolescence, according to Kohlberg, a few people develop beyond the conventional level to the third and highest level, which he called “postconventional morality.” This third level requires the individual to formulate abstract moral principles and to act on them to satisfy his own conscience, rather than to gain the approval of others. At the postconventional level, moral reasoning transcends the concrete rules of society, rules that the individual now understands are often in conflict with one another anyway. His reasoning is informed instead by fluid, abstract concepts such as freedom, dignity, justice, and respect for life. Where Heinz is concerned, a person reasoning at the postconventional level might well insist that human life was more valuable than money, and that the sanctity of life was a moral law that superseded society's rules about stealing. (“Yes, it's a difficult problem, but it's understandable that Heinz would steal the lifesaving drug that the druggist was withholding for reasons of money.”)
Kohlberg believed that most people never completely achieved postconventional moral reasoning, even in adulthood, because when he interviewed older boys and young men in his studies, he found that fewer than 10 percent of them offered clear level-three responses. As a footnote here, I would mention that this view of Kohlberg's, if right, might help to explain the passing strange fact that moral outrage from the public is relatively limited when it comes to the aforementioned wealthy pharmaceutical companies. Perhaps most of us, Americans especially, are inclined to accept the druggist's proprietary claim, “I discovered the drug, and I'm going to make money from it.” Honoring ownership above all other features of a situation is a part of conventional moral reasoning—or it is at least among men raised in North America.
Enter Gender and Culture
What factor does Kohlberg's system of moral development leave out, even at its highest level? Answer: Heinz's relationship with his spouse, which is appreciably more personal, and perhaps more compelling, than even the most evolved understanding of the general sanctity of life.
And what, most likely, is the major flaw in Kohlberg's overall research design? It is that when he originally asked his moral questions, he asked
them only of boys. Kohlberg, a brilliant social scientist, somehow managed to overlook half the human race.
This oversight was addressed in 1982, in a groundbreaking book by Carol Gilligan, entitled In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. A student of Kohlberg's, Gilligan too was interested in advancing a universal stage theory of moral development, but she strongly disagreed with the limited content of the moral levels Kohlberg had proposed. Kohlberg, she said, had produced a model of moral reasoning that was based on an “ethic of justice,” a preoccupation with “the rules,” be they concrete or abstract. Gilligan believed that Kohlberg had derived only an “ethic of justice” because he had interviewed only males, and that if women were interviewed, a very different system of ideals would emerge. She interviewed women who were making momentous decisions in their lives and discovered that these women were thinking about the caring thing to do, rather than pondering “the rules.” Women, decided Gilligan, reasoned morally according to an “ethic of care,” rather than a male “ethic of justice.” She theorized that this was so because girls identify with their mothers and tend to have experiences within the family that emphasize interpersonal responsiveness.
Gilligan argued eloquently that neither vantage point was superior to the other, but that the two ethics simply informed two different voices. Men spoke of attachment to societal and personal rules, and women spoke of attachment to people. Women's moral development, Gilligan said, was based not solely on changes in cognitive capability but also on maturational changes in the way the self and the social environment were perceived.
The Sociopath Next Door Page 18