Tag Archives: Philosophy

Does Evolution Explain Morality? Part 1

In previous posts, we have built an understanding of seven aspects of morality that seem to be true.  Following those posts, we examined a popular ethical system in the early 20th century known as social Darwinism, and we found that it utterly fails to explain what we know of moral norms.  But social Darwinism is an easy target which most people disavow these days.  Ethicists who base their systems on Darwinian evolution dismiss social Darwinism as an unfortunate mistake that later evolutionary ethical systems have corrected.

So in this post and the following series of posts, we will examine two modern ethical systems that are both derived from Darwinian evolution.  These systems are more sophisticated than social Darwinism and attempt to avoid that system’s mistakes.

First up for analysis is optimistic humanism.  This system uses Darwinian evolution as an explanation for the source of morality, but it does not use evolution for the justification of adopting the moral life.  Optimistic humanism recognizes that just because the natural and unguided process of evolution produced moral feelings or instincts in mankind, it does not follow that human beings should therefore adopt the moral lifestyle, which would entail obeying all of the moral impulses that evolution “created.”  This view recognizes the “is/ought” fallacy and seeks to avoid it.  Just because moral feelings or impulses exist does not mean that we ought to obey them.

Optimistic humanists believe, according to philosopher J. P. Moreland, that “there is no reason why something rather than nothing exists, there is no purpose toward which the cosmos or human history is moving, humans are modified monkeys which have resulted from a blind process of chance mutations, and real, irreducible moral values do not exist.”

Why should a person be moral?  According to optimistic humanism, it is because leading a moral life will give you personal satisfaction.  Proponents of this view offer several ways of defining personal satisfaction.  Atheistic philosopher Kai Nielsen says that “there can be purposes in life even if there is no purpose to life.”   He speaks of each individual developing a life plan that may include career goals and social goals.  Meaning can be found in “things like love, friendship, caring, knowledge, self-respect, pleasure in life.”  

Humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz explains, “The humanist maintains as his first principle that life is worth living, at least that it can be found to have worth. . . . The universe is neutral, indifferent to man’s existential yearnings.  But we instinctively discover life, experience its throb, its excitement, its attraction.”

Nielsen seems to believe that there is a subjective choice to be made to live the moral life and that there is no rational reason that can be given for making this choice; it is simply a personal choice and that is all there is to it.   Once a person is in the moral framework, then the way that person determines right and wrong is to reflect on the world’s morality and build a coherent system.  In his words, you “start with considered judgments and then you try to get them into a coherent pattern with everything else you know, with the best theories of the function of morality in society, with the best theories we have about human nature.”

To summarize, optimistic humanism asserts that human beings can create or adopt their own values within their lives and adapt these values to their life plans and goals.  Moral values are not objectively real and are indeed only tools to be used by men as they see fit within a moral framework.  According to optimistic humanists, even though evolution is the source for our moral instincts, it does not provide the rational ground for why someone should act morally; but this does not mean that mankind cannot subjectively choose to live the moral life.  They agree that no reason can be given for why someone ought to choose the moral life, but all other ethical systems suffer from the same problem.

In the next post, we will analyze optimistic humanism and see whether it adequately explains our seven characteristics of morality.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

What Is Wrong With Social Darwinism? Part 2

Continuing from yesterday’s post on What Is Wrong With Social Darwinism?  Part 1:

Fourth, morality is characterized by an “oughtness” that weighs upon us before we act.  It is prescriptive, not descriptive.  Ethics derived from evolution, however, are only descriptive.   Ethicist Francis Beckwith offers the insight that evolutionary ethics only tells us “what behaviors in the past may have been conducive to the survival of the species and why I may have on occasion moral feelings to act consistently with those behaviors.”  Beckwith continues, “But evolution cannot tell me whether I ought to act on those feelings in the present and in the future.”  

If ethicists grant that feelings of morality stem from a natural process of evolution, they are still left with the question of why anyone should follow those feelings.  After all, people choose every day to act on some feelings and to suppress others.  Perhaps one could argue that humans possess moral instincts that are hard-wired and based upon evolution; these moral instincts force behavior.  This line of argument, however, does not adequately explain the evidence at hand.  C.S. Lewis elaborates:

Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger.  You will probably feel two desires – one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation).  But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away.  Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them.  You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you . . . to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard.

Fifth, morality is characterized by feelings of guilt and conscience.  Is there any robust support for conscience on a theory of evolutionary ethics?  It is perplexing to see exactly what that support would be.  If nature produced our moral instincts because they would ensure our survival, then why would it produce an opposing force that would pass negative judgment on those instincts?  It seems very odd that a non-material process would have developed feelings of guilt.  Feelings of guilt, like moral intuition, are only discovered through introspection, not by empirical methods using our five senses. 

I know that I have guilty feelings because I examine my conscious states and realize that I am experiencing the state of guilt.  Since there is no ontological status for anything like a mind or consciousness on the evolutionary (naturalistic) worldview, the evolutionist must explain feelings of guilt by purely physical means.  Philosopher J. P. Moreland points out that this simply will not work because the behavior or physical condition that results from a conscious state is not the same as the conscious state itself.  They are altogether different.

Sixth, morality is characterized by motive and intent.  The evolutionary explanation for morality only explains behaviors and actions taken by individuals in the struggle for survival.  As pre-humans evolved there were certain types of behavior that enabled their survival and there were certain types of behavior that hindered their survival.  If behavior A was beneficial, then those animals that acted out A would survive to reproduce more offspring and pass on the genetic traits that forced the animal to behave that way.  If behavior B caused an animal to die at an early age, before it could reproduce successfully, then its genetic traits would not be passed on. 

This explanation is interesting, but where do motive and intent enter the picture?  Motive and intent make morality quite a bit more complicated and evolution does not have the ontological tools to cope with them.  We’ve already seen that true mental states do not exist in a naturalistic world and it would appear that motive and intent are completely ad hoc and unnecessary on an evolutionary explanation of ethics.  Francis Beckwith summarizes that “since evolution, at best, can only describe what behaviors are conducive to the preservation of the species and does not address the role of motive and intent in evaluating those behaviors, evolution is an inadequate explanation for the existence of moral norms.”

In summary, social Darwinism, as an ethical system, fails to account for all seven aspects of morality that we know from our innate moral intuition.  It cannot account for the objectivity of moral norms or the immateriality of moral norms.  It fails to account for the facts that moral norms are a form of communication and that they are prescriptive, and not just descriptive.  Social Darwinism cannot explain why behaving badly affects our conscience, nor does it have the tools to deal with motive or intent.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

What Is Wrong With Social Darwinism? Part 1

As we saw in the previous post describing social Darwinism, it was a disastrous experiment for mankind in the twentieth century, but need it have been?  Certainly some dastardly individuals justified their tyrannical reigns with it, but we must take a sober look at the theory and evaluate its ability to explain the moral truths that were discussed earlier.

The ethics of social Darwinism are largely relativistic and subjective.  Any society could develop an ethical justification for its moral actions by claiming that their goal was the advancement of humankind.  This is a seemingly noble goal, but the definition of the “advancement of mankind” is hardly universal.  Under social Darwinism, each society ultimately chooses its own definition and then forges ahead with its own effectual policies. 

A totally relativistic system such as social Darwinism, however, runs afoul of our innate sense of moral right and wrong.  For example, we intuitively know that murdering innocent people is morally abhorrent.  We know that murdering millions of innocent people is especially horrendous.  Certainly a supporter of social Darwinism could argue that the goal of producing a superior race of humans justifies the means (murdering innocents) of reaching that goal.  This utilitarian view, however, does not escape the basic moral intuition that mass extermination of human life is morally wrong.  The end cannot possibly justify the means and so social Darwinism violates our intuitive knowledge of right and wrong.

Second, moral rules are non-physical entities, but strict adherents to social Darwinism believe mankind evolved by completely natural and material processes.  To a Darwinist there is only time, space, and matter, and therefore everything in the universe must be explained by those three things.  Since our moral intuition is not discovered by our five senses, but by self-reflection, then there must be an immaterial or “soulish” aspect to a human person.  Any ethical theory that denies the existence of non-physical objects seems to contradict our innate ability to know objective, moral truth. 

Third, moral norms are a form of communication between two intelligent agents.  Who are the two agents in social Darwinism?  The ultimate source of morality for the social Darwinist is a random, natural, and unguided process (i.e., Darwinian evolution).   In other words, the transmitter is not an intelligent agent and does not possess any sort of rational faculties.  Therefore, there is clearly no communication happening at all, so again the theory violates our moral common sense criteria.

Much more can be said about social Darwinism and we will continue this analysis in a future post!

What Do We Know About Morality? Part 3

According to ethicist Francis Beckwith there are at least seven aspects of morality that appear to be true, based on mankind’s common moral experience.  In the previous post, we discussed the first four.  In this post, we will discuss the final three.

The fifth aspect of morality is that when we break a clear moral rule, our conscience bothers us.  Francis Beckwith explains that “when we break a significant and clear moral rule, it is usually accompanied by feelings of painful guilt and sometimes shame, for we are cognizant of our moral failure and realize we deserve to be punished.  Only sociopaths succeed in overcoming their conscience completely.”

Sixth, morality is characterized not just by an action or outward behavior, but by motive.   If a young man were to shove an elderly woman to the ground, we could not judge the morality of his action without knowing his motive.  If he were shoving her in order to steal her money, then his act is clearly immoral.  However, if his motive was to save her life because she was about to step in front of a bus, then we would judge his act to be morally righteous.  Motive, then, is a necessary component of any ethical system.

There is a seventh element that must also be part of any moral calculus, and that is intent.  There is a well-known parable within the bioethics community where two men separately intend to kill a young boy to get his inheritance.  One man sneaks into the bathroom and drowns the boy while he is bathing.  In the case of the other man, he sneaks into the bathroom with the intent to kill the boy, but the boy had accidentally hit his head and drowned just before the second man arrived.   It should be apparent that even though the second man did not actually murder the boy, his intention to do so makes his act morally reprehensible.  We would not say that the second man did nothing wrong, because his intent to kill, although not acted upon, is still evil.  Intention, then, is the seventh necessary component of morality.

If you put the two previous posts on morality together with this one, we have made a case for the following: 

  1. moral norms can be objectively known
  2. moral norms are immaterial
  3. moral norms are a form of communication
  4. moral norms are prescriptive
  5. moral norms affect our conscience
  6. moral norms include motive
  7. moral norms include intent

Now, armed with this basic understanding of the nature of morality, we can now evaluate ethical systems by judging whether they adequately account for the seven aspects of morality.  If they do not, then we have good reason to reject those accounts of morality.

In future posts, we will indeed put to the test various ethical systems that derive from naturalism and Darwinian evolution.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

What Do We Know About Morality? Part 2

According to ethicist Francis Beckwith there are at least seven aspects of morality that appear to be true, based on mankind’s common moral experience.  

First, objective moral standards are known.  Any form of total moral skepticism (a view that would deny the concrete knowledge of any moral truth) cannot be true because this view would deny the obvious fact that we do indeed know some unambiguous moral truths.

Second, moral norms are not physical, but immaterial.  We do not know moral norms by using our five senses (see, hear, touch, taste, or smell) or by empirical science.  We know them by intuition, or moral common sense.  This fact counts strongly against any philosophical worldview of naturalism or materialism which denies the existence of all non-material entities.  The epistemology of naturalism (naturalism’s theory of how we know things) dictates that knowledge can only be gained through the five senses, so if we have indeed discovered knowledge (moral norms) without the use of the five senses, we have dealt a serious blow to naturalism.

Third, moral rules are a form of communication and communication can only exist between two minds.  Moral judgments are found in commands, imperatives, and descriptions.   It is nonsensical to think of communication from an irrational or unintelligent agent to an intelligent and rational agent.  Both the transmitter and receiver of communication must be rational, intelligent agents.

Fourth, there is an “oughtness” to morality.  Moral rules make claims on us before we ever act and we feel their force before we make a moral decision.  Morality is prescriptive, not descriptive; it does not tell us only the present state of affairs, but it also tells us how we ought to act in the future.   Philosopher Norman Geisler notes that “a purely descriptive ethic is no ethic at all.  Describing human behavior is sociology.  But prescribing human behavior is the province of morality.”

There are three more aspects of morality that appear to be true, and we will discuss them in the next post.  After we establish these seven aspects of morality, we will use them to evaluate systems of ethics derived from evolutionary theory.

Hang in there!

[quotation references can be provided on request]

What Do We Know About Morality? Part 1

First, when one reflects on morality, there are certain objective moral facts that seem to be obvious; these facts can be known by intuition.  According to ethicist Greg Koukl, “Philosophers call this kind of knowing a priori knowledge (literally, ‘from what is prior’), that which one knows prior to sense experience.”   There are clear-cut actions that we know are wrong, such as murder, the torture of babies for fun, and rape. 

The great apologist, C. S. Lewis, argued forcefully that all men are aware of basic moral facts and that these moral facts do not vary from civilization to civilization or from time to time.  To prove his point he asked the reader to think of a “country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all of the people who had been kindest to him.  You might as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.”  

Philosopher William Lane Craig has argued that people who can not see clear-cut cases of moral truth are morally handicapped and can be safely ignored when debating ethics.   Greg Koukl summarizes by claiming “all moral reasoning must start with foundational concepts that can only be known by intuition, which is why one doesn’t carry the burden of proof in clear-cut examples of moral truth.”

Clear-cut moral cases are then seen to be objectively true by intuition, by a priori knowledge.  A person may want to reject the existence of objective moral truth by arguing that people often vehemently disagree about particular difficult moral situations, and that this fact, therefore, demonstrates that morality cannot be objectively known.  Christian apologists Norman Geisler and Frank Turek respond to this argument by stating that “the fact that there are difficult problems in morality doesn’t disprove the existence of objective natural laws.  Scientists don’t deny that an objective world exists when they encounter a difficult problem in the natural world (i.e., when they have trouble knowing the answer).”  

In other words, the fact that there are disagreements over complex moral issues fails to prove that objective moral truth cannot be discerned by moral intuition.  The point to be understood is that there are straightforward instances of moral judgments – killing innocent humans is wrong, acting unselfishly is a virtue, and so on – that can be known by virtually all people.

Given the existence of objective moral laws, there are other attributes of morality that can be grasped upon further reflection.  According to ethicist Francis Beckwith there are at least seven aspects of morality that appear to be true, based on mankind’s common moral experience.  

We will review these seven aspects of morality in future posts, so stay tuned.

[quotation references can be provided on request]