Korsgaard, Christine M. 2010. Reflections on the evolution of morality. Amherst Lecture in Philosophy. The Department of Philosophy at Amherst College.  Published Version & Permanent link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:5141952

PART ONE before Elena's comment

ABSTRACT: In recent years a number of biologists, anthropologists, and animal scientists have tried to explain the biological evolution of morality, and claim to have found the rudiments of morality in the altruistic or cooperative behavior of our nearest nonhuman relatives. In this paper, I argue that there is one feature of morality to which these accounts do not pay adequate attention: normative self-government, the capacity to be motivated to do something by the thought that you ought to do it. This is a feature of the form of moral motivation rather than merely of its content, one that I believe we do not share with nonrational animals. Unlike his more recent followers, Darwin, drawing on the sentimentalist tradition in moral philosophy, did try to explain how this capacity evolved. I explain Darwin’s account and the way it drew on sentimentalist philosophy, and argue that such accounts are unsatisfactory. Drawing on the more radical accounts of the evolution of morality found in thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud, I speculate that moral motivation may have originated with the internalization of the dominance instincts, and sketch the beginnings of the path that the development of reason in both its theoretical and practical employments might have followed.

This abstract begins where I began my journey into questions that lead me deep into the thicket that is called moral philosophy. One of many similar thickets like art, polity, performance, sociality etc.

“the capacity to be motivated to do something by the thought that you ought to do it.”

Why we should is all about why we ought, or, why do we ought? A good six years at least before I got there.

This 'thought that you ought' is prefaced by calling this motivation as ‘normative self-government’. And this is definitely a hole in the rationalist's position when it avoids 'ought' and 'should', for normative questions are generally to be avoided in a scientific inquiry, as they are regarded as unwise, but sadly, this seems to bleed out into avoided the question, the inquiry into, why we feel we ought to do…. stuff (or avoid… stuff).

Like by avoid inquiring into why we ought this or that, is the result of avoiding because we ought to avoid this or that. The normativity is inescapable, bracketing it is actually at the behest of it.

Also: ‘normative self-government’ ? Why isn’t the inverse described as normative goverment-self? Admittedly that is hard to think, normative governing-self perhaps, though the verbing loses the hard flavouring nouns provide here. Why is the norming framed as a intervention from outside, surely it is sucked in for some reason, gastrulated, invaginated, modelled…

Basically I suspect that the ‘self-government’ frame or point-of-view (is sucked in) to frame the complexity herein, among us, is a by-product of government as we know it today as latter-day saints of the world, i.e. of worlding the self, and ‘self-government’ may well assume that there is only selfing the world (superego-like as inward impositions, or suctions), or at least, presents a focus that obscures the worlding the self (projection/spits/shouts outwards as to how things should be). And the dance which oughts which way we should. Which way, as one or nonesuch, that each self allows itself to world, and which, the world thus produced in aggregation (sometimes called structure or systems) allows the self to live, among others doing the same.

I.E. this description of whatever it is, that we can label as normative —or indeed, un-regulated— self-government, exists before there were any governments to exist as examples and be used as analogies… for whatever this is…

So I regard worlding the self is a more neutral term. The world existed before governments did, at least as a crude extended phenotype of sociality, even before dominance hierarchies arose, and I feel we ought to use this analogy of proportions

[(world:self)::(self:world)]

more and more…

“This is a feature [normative self-government] of the form of moral  motivation rather than merely of its content, one that I believe we do not share with nonrational animals."

This belief is unnecessary, and perhaps distracting from more evolutionary possibilities (answers) which the taphonomy of worlding may help uncover. It is unnecessary because the taphonomy is incorrect.

Korsgaard says Darwin's sentimentalist explanations are unsatisfactory. Note this does not explain why we have sentiments. Nor does them explain away. I guess the sentimental are always annoying. Nibbling away at the edges. The rodents of love or something.

Ooh then a mention of Nietzsche and Freud in an evolutionary moment, before we leap into “internalized dominance” as the pathway of selection towards this ‘normative self-government’.

I suspect it has not been informed by recent and current writing by primatologists and paleontologists, in which, the social hierarchies of dominance in social primates, are exactly that which has been outsmarted by their proposed egalitarian revolution of the palaeolithic. In which those dominance hierarchies are undone, or at least improved upon while maintaining the prosocilaity that allows social learning, and problem solving across populations and down the generations.

And regardless of whatever sub-dom games narcissists wish to create to suit themselves (brown-nosing upwards and coercive control downwards) we are not baboons. (I have argued elsewhere that even the diagnostic pathology of narcissism being situated within a psychological framework makes it difficult to see the 'disease' of narcissism is better seen as a lack of perceptual ability to differentiate between the self and the world as an ongoing process. The narcissist is a throwback, a recidivists, or a parasite long suffered and co-evolved with.

My POV generally rests on the proposed egalitarian revolution of the paleolithic, and from this framework, it means that rationality which animals "do not have, and we do (it is believed) is not the result of “internalization of the dominance instincts” but their undoing during the great ages of the evolution of Homo species.

I’ll grant that the world may well begin in baboon-like umwelten, in which social hierarchies allow social learning to first develop, and yes, prosociality doesn’t mean ‘nice’, but perhaps rationality and a-rational "normative self-government" arises in the overcoming that base. Or it does not exist at all, except as an intersting idea of what should be, what we ought to do. Another outcome of worlding the self among others doing the selfsame thing, selfing the world.

Maybe I’ll read the rest of that paper another day.

This is just one of reactions, quick takes, or reviews of articles and books that talk about morality and evolution, and are listed at Reactions to papers/books on evolution~morality.

Part one crossposted on substack.com

PART TWO after Elena's comment

In reading the paper I am much more sympathetic to reading the paper than I was the abstract alone. I felt I ought now read the paper because of  Elena who actually went and read the paper and left a comment which, without any ill-intentional by Elena, (indeed it is prosocially energising), I felt a bit chided for not reading the whole article.
I was short on time, having house guest for the weekend, etc. etc.

Excuses are an effort of sorts to mitigated our choices, circumstance, and no doubt, pomp. As an effort they are neither virtues, nor sins. A grey zone of culpability and non-self government. On this weekend the grey zone had waxed, just as this weekend, the Easter in Autumn here in Tasmania, the grey zone wanes.

Of course, in the ebb one can still float as well as in the flow, but choices sometimes must.

The paper refreshed some readings of mine and taught me other rabbit holes not yet explored.

The following is what caught my eye:

So at this point it might look as if my own account needs as a supplement just the  sort of theory that the sentimentalists offered – we are aware of what goes on in our own minds, and in particular of the motivational forces at work upon us, but now something must motivate us to take control of those forces and redirect them in accordance with normative standards. But I have already argued that such an account cannot work. The trouble with this picture, I now believe, may be that it gets things the wrong way around.  We are not able to take control of our mental attitudes because we are aware of them. Rather, I will suggest, our awareness of our own mental attitudes is a product of our efforts to take control over what goes on in our minds.³⁶ [meika’s emphasis]

Korsgaard goes into an interesting discussion, a by-way of the guilt of Nietzsche & Freud. I am guessing as I take this note as I read through the article). Their guilt is a pain, but not so much a pain induced by labour, say, from the stiffness or soreness resulting from the effort of exercise, but not the pain of injury, in these cases self-injury, not self-play or self-extension. Histrionic personalities often perform (self the self) out of pain, nothing is their responsibility, even as they seek credit for pointing out another guilt (including themselves as both N & F point out). Both Nietzsche & Freud, despite their differences, are perhaps but monkeys jumping up and down in an adrenalin rush at the baboons they disapprove of. The cat-calm of McCrone (or the impartials of David Hume or of the Adam called Smith) is not to be found in their patients or parishoners, nor their nostrums. The Dionysian/Appollonian chap may think it a (self-)weakness.

Pathologies are helpful, but are not where we should end up in trying to work things out, nor perhaps are they where we begin. Illness are a review, if existentail, but we should not, I dare say, stay in the sick-room all the time. As usual for me I instead take notice of effort and labour, not pleasure and pain; those blinkers, those wards, those disjunctures in the continuum.

Freud and Nietzsche wrote of turning aggression against your own instincts, and punishing yourself for having them, but it seems to me that there is another possibility here, closely related to that but not quite the same.

Anyway I feel, after this by-way, that this is where I begin to depart from Korsgaard. This is prefigured by the same pivot when I went through the abstract, as we head into discussing

Nowadays, scientists believe that versions of the dominance hierarchy are pervasive among social animals.

I’ll just point out that this emphasis is not in error, but that it directly undermines Korsgaard view on the continuum, or rather, lack thereof, between animals and humans, involving ‘reason’. The fudge here is what we mean by human (Korsgaard does point out the weakness in shifting the goal posts to make human whatever we (re-)define as unique to our experience). But eventually timing does get in the way. This article is a decade and a half old at the time of writing, so it would be good for me to follow this up with some more recent work by Korsgaard. I will definitely try and remember to do this, house guests not withstanding. Recent paleontological and ancient-DNA discoveries have occurred inthe meantime.

The fudge hedges our ourness, but if it relies on dominance hierarchies, and if Frans de Waal is right about the continuum (if not the process) (de Waals work is spur for Korsgaard's article it would seem) then humanity as modernity, compared to baboon-like social dominance, goes way back to the dawn of Homo, perhaps further, and the timing here must consider hundreds of thousands of years and thus includes many Homo species. Indeed, the mere number of human species so far discovered then indicates that continuum is real, and evolution of ‘morality’ occurs over eons. The distinction is indeed a fudge. The egalitarian revolution of the palaeolithic is a big long slow thing.

But to take the good bit out of Korsgaard position (after where we differ) is that whatever the internalizations (guilt (self injury) as internalised from dominance hierarchies or effort as we both prefer to see it) it is possible that the internalization of mechanisms of dominance and social control that aided the crude prosociality of baboon-like umwelten, is important. But where I differ, is that this is not the pathway to the outcome that is morality (ought-focussed worlding) (as worlding is already there) but the key distinction is not ‘reason’ as an outcome of impartial facts-based considerations of (mis)judging moves in the (internalized) hierarchy but out of the overthrowing of that social dominance hierarchy. And this overthrow then provides "more better" prosociality, and thus better and redoubled social learning (both team problem solving and team maintance and provision of previously worked out solutions for future generations).

It is the depth of polity/culture/tradition/morality/language that makes us distinct, but not by a disjuncture in the continuum (a disjuncture which explains “us”) but by the recursive re-duplo-ing we call culture/tradition/society/… —i.e. its increased potential power to porously re-order the world (including dominance hierarchies which narcissist find so threatening and indicate that this process is neither complete nor cleanly efficient (no surprises there about evolution). It's not that no one still plays these games, but they are swamped by the fluidity the new prosociality allows. They are hangers-on, and in a sense showcase our success. We can even cope with the return of social dominance hierarchies every now and then, even in the microcosm of a narcissist's cult.

Social learning has many outcomes, both reason, war, and the failure to distil from our souls the monkey-adrenalin-based over-reactions of our more baboon-like ancestors (the un-original sin).

Whatever and when social dominance was internalised what makes us human is it that exteriority was undone. Korsgaard may indicate the pathway by which that was (un)done in the remainder of their article. Wherein they self the world in worlding the self among other doing the selfsame thing quite well.

Remember the inhibition is externalised too, not just internalized. Just how that is I leave for another day, I’ll just say that the ‘reflective distance’ is ignored by the narcissistic, even as they learn to exploit it in other ways, in the ‘out there’.

The second point is this: an essential part of overcoming the teleological worldview  of the animal is recognizing that things don’t exist in relation to me. The world does not  does not after all consist of my predators, my prey, my offspring, but of rather of beings  with an independent existence of their own, who happen to stand in those relationships to  me. Getting that fact firmly into view is essential to achieving a rational theoretical conception  of the world, a conception of a world that exists independently of me and my practical  interests. But it is also – intuitively speaking – essential to achieving the conception of the  world that we nowadays recognize as practically rational –that is to say, as moral.

Worlding the self is selfing the world. Human success is based in prosocially getting around the genetic bottleneck of individual sexual reproduction. This did not happen in a social dominance hierarchy but in its overthrow. It took a long time, there was no disjuncture in the continuum, even if such huge distances make it look distinct. It is the success of this egalitarian revision of the prior prosociality provided by social dominance (see taphonomy of worlding), that makes us what we are today, it allows us the effort to be so, the virtue that is its own reward, and even the sins that are their own punishment (a nod, an effort, towards acknowledging my own masturbatory self-injury at least, at last, if of no prosocial consequence at all).

Part two crossposted at substack.com.