Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  Genes for aggression would have been affected as well. In 1988, in analyzing capital punishment among nonliterate humans of various types, political anthropologist Keith Otterbein returned to Trivers’s original insight about moralistic aggression against cheaters to suggest that, over time, capital punishment could also have modified human gene pools to make our species less aggressive because the more aggressive types would have had their reproductive success curtailed.82 Since then, Richard Wrangham has discussed autodomestication in our species, partly in the context of group punishment’s having made our overall genetic nature less violently aggressive, and partly in the context of skeletal changes that go with the reduction of aggressive traits.83 Wrangham’s major interest in capital punishment as a social agency of gene selection parallels my own, and our views have been mutually reinforcing.

  In 1999, in Hierarchy in the Forest, I considered the social selection effects of antihierarchical humans ganging up against their more forceful and willful superiors not only in this “curtailment of aggressivity” context, but also in a context that brought me to the present hypothesis about conscience evolution and moral origins. Here’s what I said, little imagining that I’d be writing a book on the subject: “With the reduced reproductive success of extreme upstart types, natural selection seems likely to have changed our political dispositions considerably. . . . This could have taken place through debilitation of aggressive responses, strengthening of inhibitory controls, or both.”84

  It’s the second effect that we’re focusing on in this chapter, for strengthening of inhibitory self-control amounts to conscience evolution, and it describes a key aspect of moral origins. We may never be able to guess about what form a protoconscience took at the point when more efficient types of self-control were beginning to develop. However, I have at least suggested that the social scene in which this evolutionary development took place can be plausibly reconstructed on the basis of what we can suggest about Ancestral Pan’s behavior and what we know about today’s foragers and the problems they continue to face in keeping their social predators under control.

  If we look back to Ancestral Pan, the only very likely type of decisive “social control” we’ve been able to reconstruct is rebellious coalitionary attacks that could have, on rather rare occasions, resulted in wounding, exile, or death. If we look to today’s foragers, it’s usually when the entire band’s social or economic welfare is threatened by an unrestrained deviant that moralistic social control by the entire band becomes decisive and coordinated, as well as severe and sometimes lethal. Today, this social selection continues to do two things as far as our gene pool is concerned. One is to reduce innate dispositions to bully or cheat. The other is to keep our conscience in place as a means of self-inhibiting antisocial deviance that can easily get us in trouble.

  MORAL ORIGINS THEORIES, SCIENCE TO MYTH

  Later archaic humans with their assumed protoconsciences might strike us as nonmoral chimpanzees or bonobos strike us today. On the other hand, if we could observe them intensively, or subject them to experiments, we might sense that they had at least acquired some rudimentary feelings of “right and wrong” concerning the rules their groups subscribed to. We may never know. However, once earlier humans began to strongly internalize group values so that they were beginning to be guided by an internalized sense of right and wrong, I think we might perceive them as moral beings—particularly if we could listen to them talking about one another and if a judgmental tone of voice was used. And when they began to experience what we know as shame feelings and began to blush with shame, there would have been no question about their moral status.

  Having a conscience is obviously of enormous importance to human social life, yet scientists seldom try to explain its origins. A sophisticated but limited theory is that of a pair of German psychologists named Eckart and Renate Voland,85 who make the interesting suggestion that a conscience evolved as a moralistic means for parents to get their innately self-interested children to pay back some of the investment made in parenting them. Obviously, this “parent-offspring conflict” thrust is far narrower than the social-selection-based hypothesis I’ve just proposed, which looks to how a conscience functions in human social life as a whole and how it might be “designed” to be adaptive. My hypothesis also is historical and considers our ecological past in connecting conscience evolution with changes in how humans exploited their natural environments. There are many other ahistorical approaches to explaining “moral origins” that likewise seem to stop short of seeing how moral behavior could fit into a more general evolutionary framework, and they will be considered in Chapter 12.

  And then, of course, there are theology and myth. Here, some contradictions I sensed as a young boy going to Sunday school86 will briefly color the discussion. Both the Old Testament and the Koran portray an idyllic Middle Eastern Garden of Eden with abundant food and with no environmental dangers—aside from a manipulative serpent that comes and goes as it pleases and that, though certainly depicted as a most evil entity, may partly endear itself to some as a believer in free will and the quest for knowledge. Perhaps we should also add a vindictive Jehovah to this environmental dangers list, for it appears that this Supreme Being believed in entrapment. I say this because Adam and Eve could have looked forward to a potential eternity bathed in shameless innocence, with the race they’d founded living free of both social competition and moral compunctions—had Jehovah not set his trap. He baited it with attractively knowledgeable fruit, and human curiosity, urged on by a fearlessly free-lancing serpent, made Eve and Adam walk right in and put an end to what might have been (a somewhat boring) Paradise.

  The scientific Garden of Eden that I discovered much later in life was quite different. It was anthropologically situated in the African Pleistocene, which provided some great opportunities in life but also some potentially very dangerous climatic instabilities, frequent hunger and hardships, real poisonous serpents, including hyperaggressive black mambas, and hungry big cats prowling around at night. But the writers of the Old Testament certainly got it right when they implicitly likened their original pair of humans to morally innocent animals, emphasizing that their fall led to moralistic worries about sexual modesty and many other things. The biblical story may be pure allegory, but it’s worth noting that the theme of human-animal differences, combined with moral origins, appears widely in the mythologies of nonliterate people. In such purely oral traditions, the question of how humans acquired a shameful sense of right and wrong is addressed so frequently that I would have to number the instances in the thousands, and these stories can be colorfully different—yet strikingly similar.

  When I was a graduate student, I spent a summer conducting field investigations with a research team on the Navajo Reservation, and one of the things we investigated was Ichaa, or “Moth Sickness,” a type of mental illness that in Navajo belief befell young people who committed incest. There was a myth, relevant to the work I was doing, that I still remember very well. It was collected originally in the 1930s from a traditional Navajo by an anthropologically gifted Franciscan missionary named Father Berard Haile,87 and the informant had been raised by the hunting and gathering generation of Navajos who raided widely in the Southwest before their defeat and incarceration in the 1860s.

  It seems that for Navajos the earlier forms of humanity were like insects, and therefore they were able to breed closely with one another in the absence of any incest rules. One of their clans even had an insect name—the Moth Clan—and very happily these earlier “humans” were able to marry within the family, where love is always the strongest. According to the Mothway myth, after actual humans arrived, they naïvely decided to abandon their custom of not allowing brothers and sisters to marry, planning instead to follow the example of their Moth Clan predecessors. These early people gathered at a high place on the top of a mesa and married all their children to each other, while others went down to the base of the cliff to prepare a huge bonfire aroun
d which all the happy brother-sister couples would dance the night away. But suddenly, like moths, the young people were inexorably attracted to the fire at the base of the cliff, and en masse they rushed over the edge, fell into the fire, and burned to death. The moral of the story: if you behave incestuously like a moth, you’re breaking a rule of nature and immanent punishment will follow. It was thus that the earlier Navajo people first met with crime and punishment.

  The beauty of a fable, be it a Moslem or Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden story or the Navajos’ Mothway myth, lies in the storyteller’s using just a few poignant events to explain something as profound and complicated as human moral origins. The basis for believing these stories is “faith,” pure and simple. The beauty of a scientific story, such as the one I’m in the process of telling here, lies in the fact that the evidence is designed to be weighed and the theories are designed to be challenged and, where needed, modified. In making my case, I appeal not to faith but to anthropological data and insights, to the far-reaching logic of natural selection theory, to what we presently know about brain functions, to findings from primatology and archaeology, and to all the other modern knowledge we have at our disposal.

  WHAT, EXACTLY, IS THIS CONSCIENCE WE’VE ACQUIRED?

  Broadly, a conscience provides us with a social mirror. By continually glancing at it, we can keep track of shameful pitfalls that threaten our reputational status or proudly and virtuously chart our personal progress as group members in good standing. But more than intellectual self-knowledge is at stake, for as a practical matter we’re continually trying to cope with our own powerful, well-evolved “appetites,” which so often are likely to land us in trouble with our groups. These run all the way from dominance tendencies to material greed and sexuality, and expressing them antisocially can create serious practical problems in everyday life.

  Minimally, both the prefrontal cortex and the paralimbic system are involved in the emotional reactions88 that contribute to personal social strategizing and self-control. And when the effects of group punishment began to improve our capacities in these areas, it was individual differences in the relevant brain functions that punitive social selection was able to work on in terms of underlying genes. Of course, with this social type of selection, as with natural selection more generally, it was basically variation in the phenotype that selection processes acted upon directly.

  Ultimately, the social preferences of groups were able to affect gene pools profoundly, and once we began to blush with shame, this surely meant that the evolution of conscientious self-control was well under way. The final result was a full-blown, sophisticated modern conscience, which helps us to make subtle decisions that involve balancing selfish interests in food, power, sex, or whatever against the need to maintain a decent personal moral reputation in society and to feel socially valuable as a person. The cognitive beauty of having such a conscience is that it directly facilitates making useful social decisions and avoiding negative social consequences. Its emotional beauty comes from the fact that we in effect bond with the values and rules of our groups, which means we can internalize our group’s mores, judge ourselves as well as others, and, hopefully, end up with self-respect.

  LIVING WITH OUR CONSCIENCES

  In the 1800s, Darwin knew in general that moral capacities were the product of our brains, but today we’re beginning to put some of the specific pieces together. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has demonstrated that our initial moralistic reactions can be based heavily on emotions, perhaps even more so than upon intellectual understandings.89 As I’ve defined the matter, our consciences afford us the capacity to look back into the social past or forward into the social future, weigh the consequences of our actions with feeling, and adjust our behavior accordingly.

  This same modern conscience goes beyond automatic self-inhibition and social strategizing, for some of us use language to literally talk to ourselves as we try to define, and if we can to resolve, the thorny moral dilemmas we sometimes face. In a sense our inner life is oriented to choosing lessers of two evils, and this capacity has been tested academically using MRI scanning at the level of the hypotheticals mentioned earlier. Some rather nasty favorites of philosophers include a burning house from which you (an adult subject) may rescue, say, either your mother or your sister but not both, or a situation in which you can stop a runaway trolley car and save five lives but only if you push the fat guy off the bridge and arrest the trolley’s progress by deliberately making him die.90 As we’ll see, Inuit-speakers in the Arctic do something quite similar with their children in real, everyday life.

  Much more likely moral dilemmas, which many Americans actually face as children or as young adults, include whether to engage in the underaged or otherwise illegal use of a “substance,” whether to shoplift, or when driving whether to “stretch” a red light when doing so will “safely” save some precious time. Later in life, with half of our marriages experiencing adultery, the moral dilemma can be whether to stray and hurt the one we love. And then there’s the matter of fudging an income tax return, which for many isn’t much of a dilemma at all, morally speaking, because “the government” is conveniently defined as an alien predator. Such dilemmas abound all around us, and it’s our consciences that guide us in resolving them. But even if we do manage to resist a particular temptation, the dilemma may still be there in the form of a strong psychological ambivalence that is not fully resolved.

  It’s through the conscience that such dilemmas are identified as problematic, and it’s the conscience that mediates such ambivalences. Individuals can be highly variable in how they cope with these and other, more serious moral dilemmas, for some of us tend to be impulsive initially, with our consciences becoming active afterward in a damage-control mode, whereas others remain perpetually tempted but holding back. And then at the extremes are those who have internalized their group’s cultural prohibitions so well that they are barely tempted, and of course they contrast sharply with the unrestrained psychopaths at the other end of the spectrum, the weakly conscienced people who were discussed in Chapter 2.

  There also are “immoralists” who seem to take delight in breaking rules just to be breaking them, and in some modern nations this last reaction seems to be incorporated into youth cultures. We also have full-blown, rule-based alternative criminal cultures, with gangs (and, unfortunately, prisons) as their special breeding grounds. On the other hand, we also have monastic cultures in which individuals take oaths to live in a morally superior way and perhaps, like Thomas Aquinas, find their consciences being overworked because their naturally based ambivalences are so strong and their moral standards are so high.

  I shall not try to suggest how all of these complex reactions evolved, but it’s apparent that we’ve moved well beyond the rather straightforward, mainly fear-based modes of self-restraint found in the African great apes, including even apes raised by highly moralistic humans. Morality involves this special kind of self-consciousness we call a conscience, which enables us to think about several important things at the same time. One is the rules we’ve internalized, and another is our immediate desires. And then there are our larger social objectives in life, such as gaining a good moral reputation and avoiding a bad one. A conscience is the mediator of all this, and it’s well evolved to do so.

  We may tend to think of our consciences mainly as psychological agencies of moralistic self-control, as Darwin did, but I’ve suggested that we may define the evolutionary conscience as having functions that are much broader. An opportunistic, “Alexandrian” conscience enables us to predict the social reactions of our peers and to calculate what we can get away with socially and still keep up a decent moral reputation.91 It also allows us to decide that a particular transgression is just plain worth it—even assuming that public discovery is likely. And it lets saintly types like the Mother Teresas of this world strategize their behavior so as to maximize their reputations and perhaps gain thereby, even though often enough their main motive
s may be altruistic.

  The optimal evolutionary conscience, then, is not a perfect and complete instrument of rule internalization that makes self-inhibition automatic and might work very nicely in an anthill. Among humans things are quite different because individuals who take society’s rules too literally, and therefore are too inhibited to behave with some moral flexibility, will usually find themselves at a competitive disadvantage with respect to relative fitness. Rather, a fitness-optimizing conscience is one that permits some bending of lesser rules for personal advantage, even as it recognizes which rules should never be bent because doing so will bring dire personal results. This is an argument from adaptive design. But it also fits quite nicely with what can be learned ethnographically about LPA hunter-gatherers and with what we can learn in a Cartesian manner by peering into our own evolved psyches.

  MORAL ORIGINS

  We now have a hypothesis about how moral origins began, for in all probability gaining a self-regulating conscience was the first milepost in human moral evolution. Basically, we’ve moved from a wolflike or apelike “might is right,” fear-based social order to one also based on internalizing rules and worrying about personal reputations. This was enough to make us unique in the animal kingdom, but the real clincher was blushing with shame—a mystery of natural selection that no scholar has begun to explain to date. In terms of evolutionary priority, it seems to me that the internalization of rules and values probably came first, as one basic function of the evolutionary conscience, and that blushing somehow became associated with these self-control functions afterward. But this is sheer speculation. If someday the genes involved with socially triggered facial flushing and other moral reactions can be identified, a more specific theory might be offered and a chronological hypothesis might even be possible.