This isn’t a book review so much as it is a quick recap with supporting excerpts – I largely endorse this book’s claims and wish merely to present them clearly so that I can refer to them in the future.
We see (proto-)morality in primates and other mammals
If the thought is that animals are mere “wantons”, lacking control over the impulses that nature has given them, we are on the wrong track. … [The bonobo] faces many expectations about his conduct, which others won’t hesitate to remind him of as soon as he scares an infant or tries to steal a female’s food. Even if he lacks notions of right and wrong that transcend his personal situation, his values are not altogether different from those underlying human morality. He, too, strives to fit in, obeys social rules, empathizes with others, amends broken relationship, and objects to unfair arrangements. We may not wish to call it morality, but his behavior isn’t free of prescriptions either.
Self-sacrifice
Amos placed himself right next to the opening, and a female, Daisy, gently took his head to groom the soft spot behind his ears. Then she started pushing large amounts of excelsior through the crack. This is a wood shaving that chimps love to build nests with. They arrange it all around them and sleep on it. After Daisy had given Amos the wood wool, we saw a male do the same. Since Amos was sitting with his back against the wall and not doing much with the excelsior, Daisy reached in several times to stuff it between his back and the wall. This was remarkable. Didn’t it suggest that Daisy realized that Amos must be uncomfortable and that he would be better off leaning against something soft, similar to the way we arrange pillows behind a patient in the hospital? Daisy probably extrapolated from how she feels leaning against excelsior, and indeed she is known among us as an “excelsior maniac” (instead of sharing the stuff, she normally hogs it). I am convinced that apes take the perspective of others, especially when it comes to friends in trouble.
Fairness
I am not convinced that morality needs to get its weight from above, though. Can’t it come from within? This would certainly work for compassion, but perhaps also for our sense of fairness. A few years ago, we demonstrated that primates will happily perform a task for cucumber slices until they see others getting grapes, which taste so much better. The cucumber eaters become agitated, throw down their veggies, and go on strike. A perfectly fine food has become unpalatable as a result of seeing a companion get something better. We labeled it inequity aversion, a topic since investigated in other animals, including dogs. A dog will repeatedly perform a trick without rewards, but refuse as soon as another dog gets pieces of sausage for the same trick.
Such findings have implications for human morality. According to most philosophers, we reason ourselves toward moral truths. Even if they don’t invoke God, they’re still proposing a top-down process in which we formulate the principles and then impose them on human conduct. But do moral deliberations really take place at such an elevated plane? Don’t they need to be anchored in who and what we are? Would it be realistic, for example, to urge people to be considerate of others if we didn’t already have a natural inclination to be so? Would it make sense to appeal to fairness and justice if we didn’t have powerful reactions to their absence?
Reconciliation and mediation
Other primates, of course, have none of these problems, but even they strive for a certain kind of society. In their behavior, we recognize the same values we pursue ourselves. For example, female chimpanzees have been seen to drag reluctant males toward each other to make up after a fight, while removing weapons from their hands. Moreover, high-ranking males regularly act as impartial arbiters to settle disputes in the community. I take these hints of community concern as a sign that the building blocks of morality are older than humanity, and that we don’t need God to explain how we got to where we are today.
Morality predates religion; we are moral because it is evolutionarily adaptive to be moral.
Fairness and justice are therefore best looked at as ancient capacities. They derive from the need to preserve harmony in the face of resource competition.
For those who believe that morality comes straight from God the creator, acceptance of evolution would open a moral abyss. Listen to the Reverend Al Sharpton debating the late atheist firebrand Christopher Hitchens: “If there is no order to the universe, and therefore some being, some force that ordered it, then who determines what is right or wrong? There is nothing immoral if there’s nothing in charge.” Similarly, I have heard people echo Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, exclaiming, “If there is no God, I am free to rape my neighbor!”
Perhaps it’s just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for a livable society, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before current religions arose, which occurred only a couple of millennia ago.
Our moral judgments about each other are instinctual. Although those judgments are mediated by culture, our concern about whether others we encounter are good people to build a society with does not stem from cultural conditioning.
…as soon as we see two people interact, even people we don’t know, we cannot help comparing their behavior with how we think humans ought to treat each other. If one slaps the other in the face, we immediately have an opinion: was it deserved, excessive, or cruel? Partly, this is because we ascribe intentions more easily to humans than to animals, but the main reason is that a human scene automatically activates community concern. Is this the sort of behavior, we ask ourselves, that we’d like to see around us, such as helpfulness and mutual support? Or does it undermine the common good, as does lying, stealing, or brutality? We are very conscious of the consequences, and have trouble staying neutral.
And there may have been more recent selection for morality
Chris Boehm, an American anthropologist who has worked with both humans and apes, has insightfully written about the way hunter-gatherer communities enforce the rules. He believes it may lead to active genetic selection similar to that of a breeder who picks animals on appearance and temperament. Some animals are allowed to reproduce, others aren’t. Not that hunter-gatherers explicitly think about human genetics, but by ostracizing or killing persons who violate too many rules, or breach one that’s too important, they do remove genes from the gene pool. Boehm describes how criminal bullies or dangerous deviants may be eliminated by a member of the community, who has been delegated by the rest to shoot an arrow through their heart. Applied systematically over millions of years, such morally justified executions must have reduced the number of hotheads, psychopaths, cheats, and rapists, along with the genes responsible for their behavior. There are still plenty of such people left, one might object, but this doesn’t deny the possibility that there has been selection against them.28 It is a fascinating thought that humanity may have taken moral evolution in its own hands, with the result that ever more members of our species are prepared to submit to the rules.
Religion arose in every human society; we might want to be careful about doing away with it
Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christianity. The increasingly secular northern Europeans, whose cultures I know firsthand, consider themselves largely Christian in outlook. Everything humans have accomplished anywhere—from architecture to music, from art to science—developed hand in hand with religion, never separately. It is impossible, therefore, to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.
…religion is too deeply ingrained for it to ever be eliminated, and that historical attempts to do so by force have brought nothing but misery. Perhaps it can be done slowly and gently instead, but that would require us to appreciate and value our religious heritage at least to some degree, even if we regard it as outdated. Perhaps religion is like a ship that has carried us across the ocean, having allowed us to develop huge societies with a well-functioning morality. Now that we are spotting land, some of us are ready to disembark. But who says the land is as firm as it looks?
The rights and obligations on the scale of the modern world
But even if there can be little doubt that morality evolved for within-group reasons, without much consideration for humanity at large, this is not necessarily how it needs to be. Nowadays, we desperately try to move beyond moral parochialism and apply what we have learned about a dignified human life to the wider world, including strangers, even enemies. That enemies have rights, too, is a novel notion: the Geneva convention on prisoners of war stems only from 1929. The more we expand morality’s reach, the more we need to rely on our intellect, because even though I believe that morality is firmly rooted in the emotions, biology has barely prepared us for rights and obligations on the scale of the modern world. We evolved as group animals, not global citizens. Nevertheless, we are well underway to reflect on these issues, such as universal human rights, and there is no reason to take the naturalized ethics advocated in this book as a prison from which we can’t escape. It offers an account of how we got to where we are, but we humans have a long history of building new structures on top of old foundations.