Moral Feelings
I sympathize with David Hume’s understanding that morality comes from human feelings. Emotions (passions) seem to be fast acting brain calculations, whereas rationality (reason) seems to be slower brain calculations. When moral issues seem simple to us, our emotions will instantly answer the moral question. When moral issues become more complex, we must rely on our prefrontal cortex to perform a more intelligent analysis to help us come to a conclusion.
Reason is a Slave to Deeper Feelings
The human mind is like a battleground between the voice of reason (prefrontal cortex – the advanced rational self) and the voice of our passions (limbic system – the primitive animalistic self). I believe Hume was right in saying that reason is a slave to the passions, just as we have found that the prefrontal cortex exists to satisfy the limbic system – using our smarts to satisfy our basic needs. Hume helped highlight this distinction so that we can make it conscious. Once we know that we are a slave to our passions, we can be more aware of how our passions are guiding us. This awareness might help us see more clearly what the passions are doing and whether or not our passions are correct.
Reason Calculates Feelings
Hume also believed that some virtues were naturally innate, yet other virtues were more artificial (the gap between simple morality and complex morality). For example, fairness would be an innate virtue that even little children and animals understand the grave importance of. Yet, justice is a more complex virtue that requires political institutions and laws to bring into effect. The artificial virtue of justice rests upon the biological need for fairness. Perhaps the limbic system innately demands fairness, and then our rational prefrontal cortex tries to apply the moral principle of fairness across the vast breath of our society. The prefrontal cortex needs to make many rational calculations in order to apply fairness to many complex situations. But this moral demand for justice isn’t sourced in reason, but rather the passions.
Feelings Look to Reason for Guidance on How to Feel
When faced with a simple moral scenario, our feelings will naturally have an opinion on the best course of action. Yet, the more complex the moral dilemma, the harder it is for us to come to a moral conclusion. For example, when facing a moral trolley problem, depending on the variables in the trolley problem you will get different answers from people. What are people appealing to when they provide an answer to a moral dilemma? They are appealing to their feelings. What are their feelings? I would say that their moral feelings are an amalgamation of a variety of moral calculations built into their moral understanding of the world. The more complex the moral dilemma, the more synergy needed between the passions and reason.
Reason Can Produce Incorrect Moral Feelings
But the foundation of moral feelings can be wrong. For example, a culture of racial purity can make racial diversity feel morally wrong. Or a culture of sexual purity can make sexuality feel morally wrong. Or a culture of traditional gender roles can make progressive gender roles feel morally wrong. It seems like our brain can be morally imprinted upon by our culture, religion, or ideological environment.
Assumed Facts Inspire Moral Feelings
But I think the imprinting process isn’t as simple as being raised around ideas. Ideas need to be conveyed to us in the form of facts that resonate with our core values. For example, everyone naturally has a moral bias against “harm”. If from a young age one is told that certain races or religions are inherently evil and more criminal, one may feel that racial or religious diversity is morally wrong because it increases harm. Later on in life one may forget that this presumed “fact” is inspiring all of one’s conclusions about diversity. Yet, just as this presumed fact is flawed and misleading, consequently, all of one’s moral conclusions about diversity will be misguided.
Incorrect Understanding of Harm Inspires Incorrect Moral Feelings
Similarly, if you are raised to believe that homosexuality is a sin, and that all sin is inspired by the devil, and the devil delights in the destruction of mankind, then you will subconsciously or consciously connect homosexuality to the destruction of mankind. Your moral intuitions that naturally want to prevent harm to society will become commandeered by the false idea that homosexuality will harm society.
Gap Between Core Values and Moral Conclusions
What these two examples do is highlight the gap between innate moral values and second order moral principles. Avoidance of harm is the innate value that is being highjacked by incorrect beliefs about society. The belief that homosexuality causes harm interacts with the value to reduce harm and leads to a moral principle that homosexuality is wrong. This moral conclusion leads to a political conclusion that gay marriage should be illegal. Yet, the fundamental problem is one’s epistemology. They never looked for evidence when listening to someone pontificate on the dangers of homosexuality. Or they never looked for evidence in an unbiased way. Once laziness or bias corrupts the process of gaining knowledge, we will absorb incorrect information that will produce inaccurate beliefs about reality.
Epistemology is the Root of Moral Conclusions
My hierarchy of perspectives is ordered in a way that attempts to dig deeper into the psyche. The upper layers are more consciously available to us. The lower layers sometimes require some introspection to dig up. What this means is that we often forget the source of our opinions. Or brains are constantly collecting data, recognizing patterns in the data, and generating predictions from those patterns. Once we develop a prediction (opinion) we are often unconscious of the source of that opinion, since it was a large number of cognitive processes. But if the source of that prediction includes faulty data or biased data, the prediction will be wrong. So, in my opinion, fixing our epistemology is the most important aspect of getting a better worldview.
Evolution is the Root of Moral Values
So, it would seem that humans generally have a benevolent moral value system build into them, yet this value system can be hacked by different beliefs. Knowledge of the truth allows us to apply our moral value system correctly, while ignorance of the truth causes us to apply our moral value system incorrectly. But if we want to understand the root of morality, we need to still go deeper. Where do these innate values come from? The least innate values will come from our culture. The most innate values we have will come from our biology. Hence, our DNA is the source of our most innate moral codes. We know that our DNA comes from the process of evolution by natural selection. We know that the mutations are random, but the selection is not random. Therefore, we know that individuals might randomly have incorrect mutations in their moral codes (psychopaths), but the general tendency will be for most humans to have a viable moral code for evolutionary success. What this means is that game theory governs morality.
Only Good Game Theoretic Morality Survives
Each moral code is like a game strategy. Some people evolve bad moral codes which give them an unsuccessful game strategy (murder and die from revenge before reproducing). The unsustainable moral codes disappear, and the sustainable moral codes succeed. So, while a certain percentage of our society may include people with naturally bad moral codes, the majority of people will have functional moral codes that we can trust. This means a democratic style of morality can work.
Common Sense Morality Is Good Game Theory
Almost everyone has an innate moral code that tells them that murdering the innocent is wrong. This is a great moral code to help human tribes evolve successfully. Murder invites revenge. Revenge invites blood feuds. Blood feuds invite war. If a tribe is plagued by internecine bloody conflict, then they will grow at a slower pace as compared with other tribes. The tribes with less murder will grow faster and evolutionarily overwhelm the murderous tribes. So, it makes evolutionary sense that we all have this moral code in our DNA.
Culture Educates Morality
Human brains allow for a large degree of adaption. We can use our culture to augment our morality. So, if a certain thing, like witches, is defined as “evil”, righteous people can persuade themselves that murdering witches is morally good. The brain innately understands that great things deserve promotion, good things deserve protecting, and bad things deserve prevention, and evil things deserve destruction. But the brain needs a culture to educate it regarding which things are good and which things are bad, so it can understand which moral emotions need to be attached to which things.
Evolution is more Ancient than Religion
The evolution of homo sapiens goes back almost a million years. Homo erectus goes back two million years. Other types of humans go back three million years. Australopithecines go back five million years and hominins go back seven million years. What this means is that there is an incredible amount of evolutionary history behind our present innate moral codes. Sometimes religious thinkers like Jordan Peterson acts as if Christianity has invented something special by invoking the divinity of the individual. They think that Christian morality is somehow the only thing stopping us from all becoming murderous monsters. But I am very skeptical of this claim. Christianity is only 2000 years old. Jordan Peterson acts as if 2000 years is a large enough time to produce a new moral game theoretic strategy and vet it as being pragmatically “true”. From the perspective of evolution, 2000 years is not an impressive amount of time. I think that over millions of years, human type creatures have been naturally evolving a strategy of respecting the divinity (or importance) of the individual, because that is the only way you can cooperate without violence.
Religions are Second Order Adjustments to Game Theory
Each religion seems like a second order randomly generated cultural evolution that attempts to augment a population's game theoretic strategy. Values found universally across every religion would be signs of a deeper evolutionary value. Values that are contradicted across religions would be cultural adaptions and inventions. All religions seem to express the golden rule - "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Game theorists have already verified that the golden rule is a powerful strategy. Values like love, life, freedom, harm reduction, enlightenment, forgiveness, service, and heroism are common across religions mythologies. Many of these values have also been vetted by game theorists.
Culture Corrupts or Enhances Natural Morality
I don't think we need religion to tell us to respect our fellow man. I am biased to think that human culture is what suppresses this natural tendency to respect one’s fellow man. If a culture arises that claims that some men are better than other men, then trusting in this epistemology can lead one to have augmented beliefs about one’s neighbors, and hence lead to a class system that oppresses one’s neighbors. But I believe the natural tendency is to view people you come across with as equals.
Humans are Naturally Good, yet Corruptible
If my analysis is true, this means that evolution has already given us all of the values that we treasure, and it is our culture that either corrupts or magnifies those values. This is more of a Rousseauian seeming perspective, but I don’t deny the Hobbesian element of our natures either. For example, even though I believe that evolution naturally gives us our benevolent core values, a harsh environment can warp our implementation of our core values even more extremely than culture. If our natural tendency is to view others as equals, yet a harsh environment teaches you that the average person will abuse you, all humans will now psychologically become sources of harm – evil. So, the harsh environment redefines your surroundings and hence redefines your moral conclusions.
Our Best Evolutionary Strategy Is Cooperation
We are lucky that as a species, we are a cooperative one; so, our moral feelings are geared towards cooperation, which includes equality, justice, wellbeing, etc. These cooperative moral calculations are what make us evolutionarily successful and hence good. If cooperation made us less successful, evolution would program us to have disgust at the ideas of equality, justice, and fairness. We would naturally regard cooperation as evil if it sabotaged our collective evolutionary success. Morality is in connection to goals and the main goal that exists is "existence", hence evolution seems like the most logical source of good and evil. So, to the extent that people's true natures are consistent with our evolutionary strategy of cooperation, they embody the good when they fulfill that. To the extent that a person has evolved a predatory nature, they embody evil to the extent that they sabotage our evolutionary strategy.
Evolving Towards More Cooperation
Under this framework, moral progress would be an expansion of game theoretic strategy. Selfish behavior would be the lowest form of a strategy. Game theoretic strategies would then expand in scope from familial cooperation to tribal cooperation, to national cooperation, and eventually to universal cooperation. These different levels of moral enlightenment show an evolution towards less and less hypocritical moralities that apply our sentiments to a larger and larger scope. For example, it is hypocritical to say, “people in my tribe are valuable, but people in your tribe are not valuable”. We are hypocritical when we fail to give the same level of respect to all. These different levels of morality would give us different levels of evolutionary success. Evolution would be incentivized to wire our emotions to be happier with more cooperation (love, peace, trade), and sad when cooperation fails (hate, war, poor economy). These emotions would then give us the motivation to push for higher levels of cooperation. These emotions would ultimately be tied into objective facts about how the brain produces wellbeing.
Meta-ethical Theories
A philosopher friend of mine once delineated out four ways to categorize meta-ethical theories.
Materialism
Individualized existentialism
Societal structuralism
Transcendentalism
Integral Theory Quadrants
Evolutionary Morality at Multiple Levels
Evolution naturally operates at many levels; therefore, it would make sense for all four of these meta-ethical theories to have grounding in evolution. It would make sense for all four of them to be operating simultaneously within us. Each type of evolutionary pressure might code different moral imperatives within our psyches. Following the moral code in our psyche will increase our happiness and wellbeing. Defying the moral code in our psyche will lower our happiness and wellbeing.
Short-term vs Long-term Game Theoretic Strategies
Pain and disappointment seem to exist as negative reinforcement within our psyches. It gives us motivation to try to learn to not do that again. Perhaps if we allow ourselves to end up in a morally precarious situation, the situation might make us feel obligated to violate the moral code in our psyche. The guilt afterwards will punish us for allowing ourselves to end up in a morally precarious situation. This will give us the motivation to keep us out of harm’s way in the future so that our wellbeing can be maintained. Each violation of our internal code highlights the fact that our brain chose a short-term risky strategy instead of following the long-term moral strategy encoded in our psyches. Our brain doesn’t want us to do risky things repeatedly, so it punishes us for it, just like if we exercise in a risky way that harms our muscles or joints. When we are in a dangerous situation, our bodies are willing to activate adrenaline to increase our strength at the cost of our health, effectively sacrificing the future for short-term success. Similarly, if we enter a desperate moral situation, our psyches will probably revert to short-term dog-eat-dog risky morality, sacrificing long-term success for short-term success. But in both cases, we will probably pay for it later.
Competition-based Meta-ethics (Materialism)
Materialistic meta-ethical theories seem like they might have a bias to thinking about morality at the level of short-term advantage. Materialistic ethics often look for the most utility or the best consequence. These theories often are too short-sighted and fail to look at future consequences. In the short run, getting away with crime might be a beneficial strategy. But in the long run, a criminal will eventually be caught and punished, therefore becoming an inefficient strategy. If the ability to compete, or combat with other humans is the most important factor in natural selection, evolution will optimize for those traits. But I think we will find that individual competition is less and less important to natural selection as cooperation grows in scope across the world.
Class-based Meta-ethics (Individualized existentialism)
Individualized existentialism is a type of philosophy that recognizes that each individual has their own hopes, dreams, and passions that are unique to them. It recognizes that each person’s vision of what is good for them is valid. It encourages people to find their own meaning in life by pursuing what they love. This emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual lends itself to a class-based perspective on evolution. The operational definition of “class” here is the difference in category or type. I am not referring to economic or social class. I find it likely that DNA configurations naturally generate different types of individuals, analogous to archetypal personalities. For example, we understand the archetype of a “nerd”, because nerds seem to have been given a preset selection of traits by their DNA that motivate them towards intellectual pursuits. I find it very likely that the “nerd” class of humans is produced at a certain ratio, just like “blonde hair” is a trait that is produced at a certain ratio. Each human might have a certain ratio of “nerds” that they can give birth to.
There is a lot of variety among ant populations. I think that evolution recognizes that a diversity of ants helps the ant tribe (5 classes of worker ants, 2 classes of soldier ants, reproducing female queens, reproducing winged males, and even security guard phragmotic ants). Similarly, I think evolution recognizes that a variety of types of humans helps our human tribes. I think that both ant and human DNA specifies different ratios for reproducing units of the needed classes. As human tribes survive, the "ratio" of variety needed survives within their DNA. Different tribes may evolve different soldier to worker ratios for example. But over time, tribes with the most successful ratios will survive.
Aristotle recognized the fact that we are a social species over 2000 years ago in saying how it's not reasonable to not have a government since we need each other to survive. How does a social species exist? We need prosocial emotions. We need leaders. We need followers. We need the right balance of these emotions. What is the correct ratio of agreeable to disagreeable temperament for a tribe to succeed? What is the correct ratio of extroverts to introverts? We know that DNA operates on ratios, so I'm not sure why this doesn't seem highly plausible to you. Even homosexuality is argued to be an advantageous trait to have in a population given the right ratio.
We can see how evolution plays with the ratio of extroverted to introverted cockroaches. During times of plenty, extroverted cockroaches explore and find all the food for the tribe. During times of danger, all of the extroverted cockroaches are eaten by predators and only the introverted cockroaches who hide are the ones that survive and keep the population going. But the population of cockroaches doesn't suddenly become 100% introverted - the introverts that survive give birth to a correct ratio of extroverts to introverts, so the next generation has the right ratio.
Evolution cares about whatever level of abstraction affects survival and reproduction. If one on one combat is the main obstacle to survival and reproduction, the path of evolution will optimize for one-on-one combat. If population-level war is the main obstacle to survival and reproduction, then evolution will optimize for large scale murderous cooperation. Since, as a tribal species, tribal-level issues are the greatest threat to our survival, tribal traits are the key axis of optimization. Humans are probably less optimized for one-on-one combat in every generation since this is a less and less relevant aspect of our evolution.
But population-level combat isn't as simple as strength or strategy. Population-level combat needs ideological unity, communication tools, invention of weapons, but most important of all, resources. We need human resources and economic resources. So, societies that have population-level traits that support a robust economy will succeed better at population-level combat.
What does a robust economy require? It requires optimization of the diversity of classes built into the DNA of the tribe. It requires researchers (conscientious), inventors (creative), analysists (logical), media professionals (emotional), leaders (extroverts), followers (introverts), soldiers (physical strength), police (honor orientation), judges (justice orientation), medical workers (empathy/care orientation), etc., etc., etc. Many different roles align to different temperaments. I don't think society would be very healthy if it was completely lacking in any of these areas. I don't think medical workers who lake care and empathy are more successful for example. If one population has a bunch of unempathetic doctors, and another population has empathetic doctors, when population level combat arrives, the empathetic doctors might work harder and more successfully for their populations, for example. So, the ratio of empathy needed for a healthy society will be carried forward in the population that survived the war.
Tribe-based Meta-ethics (Societal structuralism)
Culture, religion, law, mythology, entertainment, and philosophy seem to be aspects of our tribal effort to produce tribe-level values. These tribe-level values transcend the values of each class of human. While a tribe may allow the hunter class and the farmer class to value different occupations, the tribe requires that both perform the rituals that the tribe deems sacred. There is a transcendent responsibility imposed on each of the individuals. To the extent that each individual desires the benefits afforded by tribe membership, they must submit to the rules of the tribe.
Cultural and religious evolution seem to be the efforts of each tribe in exploring the moral landscape and looking for the best rules for producing the most successful tribe. Each culture is exploring the moral landscape in an almost random fashion. One tribe may say that eating pork and committing suicide is bad. Another tribe believes that eating shellfish and working on Sunday is bad. To the extent that these rules are helpful to the success of the tribe, they will be passed down. To the extent that these rules are detrimental to the tribe, that tribe will slowly lose the game of evolution.
Under this meta-ethical framework, morals are merely the random selection of values that have been collectively agreed upon and passed down through time. It is a somewhat moral relativistic position that morality is just a social construction (structuralism). But this tribe-level morality might be more objective when we measure the utility of tribal rules against the game theoretic landscape of successful strategies. Rules that help a tribe “win” could be considered objectively moral, if “winning” can be defined as “good". The definition of “winning” would also be an important question. Winning could be considered a “winner take all” approach to evolution. But winning could also be considered maintaining a stable propagation of genes into the future. If winning is defined as stability, then aggressive moral strategies (one religion desiring to conquer the world) would be considered immoral since they pose risks to stability.
Cooperation-based Meta-ethics (Transcendentalism)
Transcendentalism is a type of theory that some rules, morals, facts, or ideas are true in an a priori, or default, fashion. This meta-ethical theory originated with Immanuel Kant when he determined that everyone has an ethical obligation to not be a moral hypocrite. Any law that you desire other people to follow must in turn be followed by you yourself. Theological theories of divine command theory might use transcendentalism to say that we all have a duty to obey God’s commands. Natural law moral realists might say that we have a transcendental duty to do that which is good according to nature. Transcendentalist approaches often appeal to the moral law written upon our hearts or intuitions. Evolutionarily, moral intuitions must be programmed into us by natural selection. These intuitive moral laws could be considered natural deontology.
Deontology is a type of morality that appeals to rules, duties, and responsibilities. Deontology is the nemesis of consequentialism. Where deontology values obedience to rules, even if that brings a bad consequence, consequentialism values optimizing for the best result, even if that means you need to break some rules along the way.
Just as materialistic meta-ethical theories have a bias for consequentialism, transcendental meta-ethical theories have a bias for deontology. The benefit of deontological theories is that they set up the world for a healthy pattern of behavior into the future. If every time there is a moral dilemma we break our moral rules, perhaps this can create a world where no one takes moral rules seriously. By stubbornly committing oneself to some set of moral rules, individuals help create a world where morality is taken seriously. This style of morality may have long-term benefits that justify the cost of moral decisions.
So “thou shalt not steal” and “thou shalt not kill” might be examples of deontological rules that are true based on their appeal to the transcendental nature of God himself and the natural truth of these rules.
It seems that humans have evolved certain universal moral intuitions across all cultures in all times. Oliver Scott Curry, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Oxford, began tackling the question of a lifetime – “which morals are human universals?” In his work that covered 60 societies, he concluded that the following seven moral principles were ubiquitous across cultures, and never completely contradicted by any one culture (Curry et al., 2019).
Help your family
Help your group
Return favors
Be brave
Defer to superiors
Divide resources fairly
Respect others’ property
It can be intuited that the purpose of universal human morals is to the benefit of the species. Bravery helps us conquer obstacles to human success. Family values help the success of the next generation. Group values help group success. Returning favors helps ensure positive-sum cooperation and economy between individuals. Fairness helps the success of the whole group. Respecting authority helps maintain order for a successful tribe. Respecting others property prevents unproductive violence and promotes systems of work over systems of crime.
As I see it, morality seems inclusive of each layer of evolutionary pressures. A successful game theoretic strategy must adapt to pressures at any level of analysis. To me, it appears necessary to combine all of these meta-ethical theories into one master ethical theory. The desire for parsimony (reducing a theory to one factor) is probably an enemy of accuracy when it comes to complex human behavior. Uniting factors, instead of excluding factors, seems to be the way to understand the entire project of morality. When united, it seems like the goal of morality is to achieve a successful game theoretic strategy.
References:
Curry, O.S., Mullins, D.A., & Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies. Current Anthropology Volume 60, Number 1. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/701478.
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