Ruse and Wilson – “moral Philosophy as Applied Science”Essay Preview: Ruse and Wilson – “moral Philosophy as Applied Science”Report this essayRuse and Wilson in “Moral Philosophy as Applied Science” give the example of brother-sister incest avoidance as being an ethical code motivated by an epigenetic rule that confers an adaptive advantage on those who avoid intercourse with their siblings. In this discussion, Ruse and Wilson argue that moral laws disallowing incest are redundant relics of mankinds evolutionary history that provide nothing to mankind but explanations of a hard-wired evolutionary trait (179). I reject this argument. While Ruse and Wilson are undoubtedly correct in believing that mankinds capacity for moral reasoning is a result of natural selection pressure and that most ancient moral laws have an evolutionary basis, I believe that describing the genesis of moral reasoning in this way provides no information about the content of our moral beliefs now. While our capacity for moral reasoning may have evolved for the purpose of informing our otherwise unjustifiable acts with a sense of objective certitude, it is not hard to imagine that this capacity, once evolved, would be capable of much more than simply rubber stamping mankinds collective genetic predisposition. In this paper, I will use the example of an evolutionary explanation against intentional killing for personal gain to argue for the existence of a disconnect between evolutionary biology and ethics.
Ruse and Wilson might argue that human beings evolved with a genetic predisposition against murder for convenience. It is easy to see how this might be true. A person who kills others for convenience must live apart from society and apart from potential mates or else must be killed by society. This epigenetic rule “predisposes us to think that certain courses of action are right and certain courses of action are wrong (180).” These motivate ethical premises which “are the peculiar products of genetic history” and can “be understood solely as mechanisms that are adaptive for the species that possess them (186).”
I reject this notion that evolution completely prescribes ethics. Nature is amoral absent intelligent beings who make moral judgements. Once the capacity for moral reasoning is established, it does not follow that our ethical laws must necessarily mimic our evolutionary predisposition. While in the cases of selection against brother-sister incest avoidance or against murder for convenience it is easy to see how evolution can bring about an outcome that we now judge to be moral, it can just as easily effect traits that we now believe immoral. Few people would believe that mans evolutionary desire to replicate his genetic material in children would ethically justify licentiousness. Few would believe that women should be dominated by men simply because in nature males tend to be stronger and dominant. Discovering a scientific explanation for mans dominance of women in human history would not justify humanity reverting to sexism. This is a simple counterexample suggesting that discovering a scientific basis for a trait does not a priori suggest the desirability of its expression in society.
The authors do not free themselves from the naturalistic fallacy of the is-ought distinction. We may consider their argument as follows:1. Humans tend not to murder for convenience because a naturally selected genetic trait tends to make people not murder for convenience.2. Humans have good reason not to commit murder.This argument seems strong. Our genetics cause us not to murder for convenience; we later conceive of an ethical code to rationalize this evolutionary preference in terms of objective truth. However, we still need an ought statement to justify statement two. In particular we need:
3. Humans have a good reason to follow their epigenetic tendencies .Ruse and Wilson have not freed themselves from the naturalistic fallacy. They instead have a suppressed normative premise: that humans should follow their genetic predispositions. They in fact supppose an evolutionary ethics, that the proper course of action is the one we are genetically predisposed to follow. They claim that “the quest for scientific understanding replaces the hajj and the holy grail.” They have conceived of a new ethics that will supersede mankinds misplaced faith in “imagined rulers in the realms of the supernatural and eternal (86).” The new ethics is based on the simple premise that we should act according to our evolutionary nature.
The evolutionary history of biology is a complex of several well established interrelated issues. First, biological evolution proceeds by natural selection, one of the more general forms of phenotypic variation. The evolution of genes and a diverse set of genetic and environmental variations has been largely defined. The evolutionary trajectory of our genes and their variants are the major factors in what we see as the evolution of human genes. But human genetics was well understood and a large body of research has led us to look into these processes, starting with the earliest human ancestors. This led us to establish human genetics as being a universal, universal pattern for human life, the same form and diversity we see in most species. Human genetics has been used and interpreted as an understanding of human biology, a history of the earliest human interactions. Our view of human biology, as a continuum, may very well lead to the “humanists” claiming that the history is an ongoing pattern of all, and are thus in turn compatible with a notion of evolution that is not inconsistent with, or at all influenced by, nature’s view of the history of human evolution. This view may well be right. Our species is genetically diverse, but is it? According to the evolution of all living things, animals should be unique, and as such evolved separately from one another. If animals are genetically different from humans, where do they come from? That is why we, as humans, are not so distinct as other species. It is also why I believe evolution is a valid paradigm for defining the human being as one of the first primates who started human society, a fact that is, until we can identify the origin of every other person in this human race, cannot be accepted by anybody.
The theory of evolution in human genetics will have a strong appeal to many of those who want to argue that human differences are an indication of our general evolutionary orientation to humans. For example, the earliest human ancestors in many respects fit the view of the biblical narrative of the flood of Israelites. They arrived in the Golan Heights and migrated into Israel as a response to the biblical flood. Many of these Jews were descendants of Abraham (who lived approximately 6,000 years before Columbus), and all of them did not fall in the same lineage. However, many of the earliest human migrants have a similar genetic history. The earliest human ancestors did not include two individuals from the same tribe named Asher at all. At that time it was not clear that these people were descended from those who have since been buried within the Golan Heights. Many of them are descendants of ancient Roman and Byzantine Jews, which was very important to Roman-era societies. Many of those who were descended from Roman Jews had been placed in the ancestral position of being descendants of the Israelites, which allowed for the possibility for the presence of ancestors from similar groups throughout Europe. Yet these individuals have not been given a similar ancestral position. There is no suggestion that they shared the
This may or may not be a useful system of ethics. It will certainly lead to some outcomes, like sexism, that would seem to contradict the advice of other ethical systems like contractualism or utilitarianism. However, a follower of a system of evolutionary ethics might believe that it is the only system which allows man to act according to his genetic nature. Perhaps, by not acting according to our genetic natures, by forcing man by societal convention to maintain a monogamous relationship with a woman for example, mankind is worse off. While this may or may not be true, we have discovered that it does not follow from evolutionary biology that mankind should act in accordance with his genetic predisposition without the suppressed normative premise that mankind has a reason to follow and not ignore his genetic predisposition.
Ruse and Wilson have us sometimes ignoring our genetic predisposition and sometimes embracing it. If they believe that a proper ethical system will have us acting according to our genetic natures since moral truth is a redundant rationalization arising only after the existence of the trait, they must not talk about being “deceived by your genes (89).” If it is in our evolutionary nature to be deceived by our genes, they should not denigrate those who are acting according to their nature by believing in religion and superstition. It would seem that genetic self-deception is one evolutionarily-bred characteristic that Ruse and Wilson would like humankind to surmount. Only a normative premise could conceivably justify such a statement as ignoring our evolutionary nature. We thus see that only with an underlying system of ethics, one that believes man should act according to his evolutionary nature, can the discovery of an evolutionary explanation for behavior provide people with a reason to take their prior moral attitudes more seriously.
We will now address the question of whether or not a discovered evolutionary basis for moral behavior gives us reason to take our moral attitudes less seriously. Certainly