Reaction: The Case against Evolutionary Ethics Today by Peter G Woolcock
Woolcock, Peter G. “The Case against Evolutionary Ethics Today.” Chap 11 in Biology and the Foundation of Ethics, 276–306. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press, 1999. https://www.academia.edu/35875522/The_Case_against_Evolutionary_Ethics_TodayUsually when I react to papers I like to remain behind my veil of ignorance (at all levels), partly because it is lazy, but also strangely in counter to that laziness, because I learn more, if more brutally, as I am not trained in philosophy.
In this case I have done that and then go on to do some background on the names involved.
Peter G. Woolcock was formerly Associate Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Education and Family Studies at the University of South Australia and recently Research Fellow at Flinders University of South Australia. He has published extensively on evolutionary ethics, especially the writings of Michael Ruse. He is currently working on a contractarian theory of moral obligation in response to the ideas of Derek Parfit, Thomas Nagel and T.M. Scanlon. (from academia.org )
So, in large measure this Chapter 11 is an omnibus of logical impasses in various approaches to evolutionary ethics that Woolcock has found wanting and related enough to give an introduction to with respect to evolution in a biology~ethics tome.
One example of my ignorance was the following notice and prediction based on it.
So 25 years ago, mostly before the full development of the ideas in the egalitarian revolution of the paleolithic. I expect a lot of minecrafting hacking away at altruism/individualism with a game theory tech-tree to the side.No game theory, as this is the work of a philosopher with the fortitude of logic in their method.
Instead of game-theory-ing we get a mention of the old-fashioned bête noir ‘sociobiology’, and its “Altruism guarantee” as this chapter calls it, breaking over red-in-tooth-and-claw individualism.
[See recent reaction for the originary quote on that subject by Ghiselin : “If the hypothesis of natural selection is both sufficient and true, it is impossible for a genuinely disinterested or altruistic behaviour pattern to evolve”. ]Woolcock then deals with writers attempting to address this issue of impossibility, and showing their attempts do not succeed, including:
Michael Ruse British-born Canadian philosopher of science who specialised in the philosophy of biology and worked on the relationship between science and religion, the creation–evolution controversy, and the demarcation problem within science.
…his emphasis on the fact that people tend to believe in the objectivity of morality has added an important element to what evolutionary ethicists need to explain, even though he thinks that this objectivity is ultimately delusory. Other evolutionary ethicists have taken up his emphasis on the objectivity of morality and have tried to show that evolutionary ethics does not need to treat it as an illusion. I will now look at two such cases - firstly, Robert Richards and, secondly, Rottschaefer and Martinsen.
Robert J. Richards author and the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago. He has written or edited seven books about the history of science.
Willian A. Rottschaefer & David Martinsen.
Woolcock says their work does not get where they think they get to.
The basic trap when getting potholed on Ghiselin’s impossibility is taking a legalistic view of the individual, i.e. remove social learning from the equation and make all logic work at the level of individual culpability. Woolcock admirably steps through the variations on offer and ends up using the word ‘socialisation’ to cover all that which I would grossly call the extended phenotype of the social learning and intergroup-competition world Homo species have created. ‘Socialisation’ being of the same era as ‘socio-biology.’
Thoughts I had as I was reading through this:
The trap here is that in talking about individuals we talk about them as criminals or sinners in how well they fit into logic or even just a logical notion of fitness, as if our analytical skills were some game which minecrafts evolution, and as intersubjective judges we hand down sentences of survival or death. Now logically this is all very well, but evolution does actually care about logic, even if it is logical to map its processes this way. The trap is that this tends to forget that populations are a variety of variations which natural selection works with, and which natural selection does not judge, even if the ability to discern or to judge arises in such processes and thus we feel it should include our logical legalistic approaches very strongly.
Not all deaths are failures. Not all judgements select.So just a word on ‘minecrafting’. I use it to imply that there is a logical or at least analytical style of arguing (slashing at trees or rocks to get raw materials) and then combining those acquired logical resources (fallacies & arguments) to build up derision or support for some position or other, and that these positions are all laid out within the pure forms of logic, or at least the game’s allowable solution space, which is a low-res palette of possibilities.
Often at some point back in the 80s or 90s we get a small irruption from a variety of economics called game theory, but it is still pretty much a lawyer-ly and not very statistical view. I.E. population are not regarded as a population of individuals who embodied variation, but as a population of individuals who play a game badly, i.e. don’t follow the rational rules to some degree. They are sinners who ignore logic. In this case the sin is altruism… which cannot be explained according to the rules set up to play minecraft of individualism (which legalistically ignores the statistical variation of a population of individuals, and how they group).
[See recent reaction for the originary quote on that subject by Ghiselin : “If the hypothesis of natural selection is both sufficient and true, it is impossible for a genuinely disinterested or altruistic behaviour pattern to evolve”. ]
The trap here is that in talking about individuals we talk about them as criminals or sinners and how well they fit in a logical notion of fitness, as if our analytical skill were some game which minecrafts evolution, and as intersubjective judges we hand down sentences of survival or death. Now logically this is all very well, but evolution does actually care about logic, even if it is logical to map its processes this way. The trap is that it tends to forget that populations are a variety of variations which natural selection works with, and which natural selection does not judge, even if the ability to discern or to judge arises in such processes and thus we feel it should include our logical legalistic approaches very strongly.
Not all deaths are failures.
Anyway, the chapter moves on from these issues to look at evolutionary theory is that it be part of a descriptive account of ethics. This would include a ‘reportive component’ (what is regarded as wrong/good) and ‘explanatory component’ why that is wrong/selected against.
At this stage Woolcock suggest some studies be done, as it should be testable. In saying this he seques with the logical tech-tree on offer, that such descriptions can thus become prescriptive as normative efforts. I.E. we begin to should on people.
At this point we go fully minecraftian analytic with:
“When we introduced the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive ethical theories, we noted that evolutionary theory seemed to explain how we came to have altruistic feelings but that this did not amount to explaining how humans came to have moral beliefs. Moral beliefs were more than mere feelings of friendship etc. So, what exactly, is it that makes a belief moral?”
Using ‘belief’ in this way is a pothole of epic proportions… I must really write up those notes on alignment for the taphonomy of worlding series….. can anything be salvaged?
The term ‘objective’ is often used instead of the term ‘categorical’ but I will reserve it to identify one reason why people think that moral terms are categorical, as we shall see later.
Pothole.
Why is it all a pothole? Because it doubles down on the legalistic style of minecrafting individually and now we are worried about moral endeavors as as a intentional state or culpability and judgment. We just shifting our whole preferred minecrafting game-play preferences into that which we are trying to explain. [We just worlded our preferences, but curiously in the name of the individual we are trying to explain as a moral creature, instead of an altruism guarantee we have a order/morality/logica/mincraftian guarantee. I.E. this is another shift not from descriptive to prescriptive so much but from legalism to imperialism of the individual]
People who adopt the moral point of view, then, would appear to be much more likely to be resistant to egoism than those who merely have an inclination or preference to be altruistic.
This resistance fails where (as in modern societies) it morally prescriptive to positively value the efforts of the institution of the individual. But social institutions like any worlding, even if grossly restricted to the social extended phenotype, is by definition excluded from discussion focussing on the individual in legalistic and culpability discussions as it is social, despite its celebration of the individual.
I.E. morality is more than altruism, and more than behaving well as it is a subset of worlding, indeed it (morality/religion/polities) are an outcome of the worlding urge.
The set-up between the individual and the good as defining morality is a massive fail. A pothole.
If humans with an innate tendency to the moral point of view were more reliably cooperative and altruistic than those genetically disposed to egoism or those with a mere innate disposition to behave altruistically towards their direct descendants, then, given the sociobiological story, their offspring will survive in greater numbers in the community, thereby eventually ensuring that most of the population had an innate disposition to adopt the moral point of view.
And definitely no idea of how inter-group competition for the hearts and mind of individuals would work as yet. (follow up to comments above on the egalitarian revolution of the paleolithic). The pothole traps thinkers by, at the very least, an inability to see or think through the differences between individuals, egotism and the social institution of the individual, where worlding is not available to be considered except in one of its derivative forms.
Not all evolutionary ethicists, however, think that ethical claims are objectively true in the same way that the 1996 oblate spheroidicity of the Earth is objectively true or that they need to have this kind of objective truth in order to provide The Altruism Guarantee. To illustrate this dispute I shall be looking at three different positions that have been adopted on this matter. As an example of a writer who rejects the objective truth of moral claims but who thinks The Altruism Guarantee survives nonetheless, I shall consider the work of Michael Ruse. As examples of those for whom the existence of The Altruism Guarantee depends on the objectivity of morals, I will look firstly at the work of Robert Richards and, secondly, at the work of William Rottschaefer and David Martinsen. I will show that each of these writers fails to establish their particular version of evolutionary ethics. In order to assist an understanding of my criticisms of their arguments, however, I will need to introduce the reader to a general account of the kinds of objections that, I believe, invalidate not only their proposals but all efforts at an evolutionary ethics. I will begin with the naturalistic fallacy.
I guess I have outlined above why in broad measure they cannot escape the pothole of their exquisite minecraftian corpses. But I will read the rest.
G.E. Moore [1903] thought that many writers committed the naturalistic fallacy because they implicitly identified some naturalistic property such as the survival of the human species with the property of what is morally good, or with the property of what ought [morally] to be done.
I can use that quote in my upcoming article on ‘alignment’ part of the worlding urge, thus part of the taphonomy of worlding (the world fossilises itself as it worlds).
BTW this fallacy is evidence of the worlding we do, it’s is part of our survival, but not the terms used are legalistic and a bit judge-y in observing this effort i.e. the guilty think they are innocent and cast the first stone at the (more) guilty or judge-y… LOL we are trapped but do we know we are trapped? Can one get untrapped by knowingone is trapped? I say possibly…. I.E. who is more judge-y those who judge normatively
/naturalistically but not knowing they judge or those who judge others for being unconsciously judge-y, but still say so from some court of discernment??
This is a meta-vicious circle of judgement about virtue.
An invagination of intentionality…. Is a new body possible composed here???
It may well be the case that evolutionary theory enables us to deduce a descriptive ‘ought’ from a descriptive ‘is’. By a descriptive ‘ought’ I mean those cases where an author mentions the word ‘ought’ in order to describe what some person or people think ought to be done, rather than where he or she uses the word to recommend a course of action. Let us suppose, for example, that it is a fact that societies which do not ban incest eventually destroy themselves through in-breeding.
eOoh, new thought, in-breding disrupts inter-group competition and so individuals in those shrinking groups would leave for better pastures, even if the individual is in-bred…..
I.e. this is in addition or in parallel to actual genetic problems,
I suggest, then, that, whenever an evolutionary theorist tells us that he or she has deduced an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, if we look closely, we will find either that a descriptive ‘ought’ has been deduced from a descriptive ‘is’ and therefore we have been provided with no normative advice or we will find that a normative ‘ought’ has putatively been deduced from a descriptive ‘is’ and therefore the naturalistic fallacy has been committed.
YES.
In the discussion of Robert Richards’ work we do finally get some population variety discussed, curiously more variation being bad for Richards position who raises the variation in the first place, and after that a curious call for Richards to put forward some human ‘relevant organ’ to underline his arguments, which to my eyes would just be empathy, and all the recent arguments in primatology and paleontology regarding inter-group competition for individuals exists to deal with sociopaths and psychopaths with their lack of empathy (not LOL)… as well as pointing out people don’t logically minecraft like logicians do (LOL).
Woolcock’s arguments then get bogged down in culpability issues again. Morality/wording existed before individual culpability was invented [see payback].
6. Rottschaefer and Martinsen.
Rottschaefer and Martinsen claim that human survival and reproduction [S/R] is an important normative value [1990, 163]. In defence of this claim, they take Ruse to task for his thesis that Darwinism shows the objectivity of ethics to be an illusion. We have already seen that what Ruse means by such a thesis is that there are, in fact, no acts we ought to do regardless of what we believe or want. There are no such things as categorical obligations, only hypothetical ones. Rottschaefer and Martinsen claim that human survival and reproduction [S/R] is an important normative value [1990, 163]. In defence of this claim, they take Ruse to task for his thesis that Darwinism shows the objectivity of ethics to be an illusion. We have already seen that what Ruse means by such a thesis is that there are, in fact, no acts we ought to do regardless of what we believe or want. There are no such things as categorical obligations, only hypothetical ones.
Rottschaefer and Martinsen want to argue, by contrast, that such things as ‘food, shelter, and companionship have objectively valuable properties’ [1990, 159] They suggest that these properties can be understood on an analogy with colour properties. Science has shown us that objects do not have the property of colour as such but rather have properties which cause us to see objects as coloured. Likewise, objects may not have moral properties as such but rather have properties which cause us to perceive these objects as valuable. Value, in effect, supervenes on these natural properties but is not identical with any of them in particular. As a result, normative properties like ‘goodness’ cannot be defined in terms of these natural properties, any more than ‘malleability’ can be defined in terms of a particular set of natural properties.
What Rottschaefer and Martinsen have offered us here, however, is a descriptive account of value.
As I argue elsewhere values are an effort, if so, their whole discussion misses the point, and Woolcock in dealing with that mess never quite gets us to wondering about why we bother at all.
Woolcock’s discussion at the end, after dealing with Ruse, Richards and Rottschafer & Martinsen, raises what we do in any case as we world along, and broadly calls this socialisation with individual individualnesses arising as occasion demands.
The socialization is not solely one of individuals gaming their way through life, minecrafting altruistically-egotistically, as the chapter focuses on, but also choosing their worlds among other selves doing the same, and that which encourages that competition to nurture and compare is worlding which allows outcomes like morality/relgion/art/polity. Groups carry that, but individuals make those groups, that is what we must explain, not altruism or egotism or individuals and game-theory potholes, at least not alone.
Other reactions to can be found at evolution~morality linkpost page.