Evoconservatism, Public Reason, and the Evolution of Morality.
Which Conditions for Reconciliation?
The idea that morality, in both its existence and its content, is related to the natural and social conditions under which humans have lived and evolved is far from new. Such a form of “moral naturalism” was for instance put forward by Hayek to account for people’s “atavist” dispositions and reluctance to accept the market order.[1] Similarly, in The Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper suggests that the very nature of the open society was going against the natural tendencies of humans whose ancestors have been living for millennia in small tribes.[2] This was however only of evolutionary accounts of morality. Since then, the literature has exploded, to such a point that this is very hard to keep track of it.[3] We now have a far more complex and detailed understanding than Hayek and Popper of the relationship between morality and evolution, especially with respect to the interplay between genetic and cultural evolution.
Though far from being dominant in the literature, the last two or three decades have seen the emergence of a peculiar view that intends to infer distinctive normative conclusions about the nature and limits of morality from the scientific knowledge regarding its evolutionary origins. Following Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell in their book The Evolution of Moral Progress,[4] I shall call this view “evoconservatism.” Evoconservatism is well-represented by academic figures like Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, Eric Posner, and Jack Goldsmith. There are several versions of evoconservatism but the basic idea is that the evolutionary nature of morality sets severe constraints on its content. In particular, attempts to make morality more “inclusive” by extending its authority beyond the circle of genetic and, eventually, cultural, relatives are doomed to failure because they go against the natural inclinations of humans inherited from their evolutionary history. More precisely, I would summarize the main tenets of evoconservatism as follows:
1) The evolutionary origins of morality correspond to a very specific environment – the “environment of evolutionary adaptation” (EEA) – that roughly corresponds to the environment in which humans were living 10000 years ago, i.e., small of weakly genetically related individuals competing for scarce resources.
2) Morality is a “technology” that has evolved in this context to solve coordination and cooperation failures.
3) The distinctive traits of human morality that have evolved have been selected according to their fitness value for individuals and, eventually, for groups of individuals.
4) Because of the characteristics of the EEA, the traits of human morality that have evolved have mostly led to “exclusivist” moralities, i.e., moral systems that are organized according to an inner/outer group distinction.
5) These traits are “hard-wired.”
6) As a result, inclusivist moralities are necessarily “artificially engineered” and are unsustainable over the long run. Attempts to implement social practices and institutions based on inclusivist moralities will fail and are likely to have adverse consequences.
As we go from tenet 1 to tenet 6, we slide from solid factual claims to more hazardous at least implicitly normative conjectures. Tenets 1 and 2 are widely accepted nowadays. Tenet 3 is already far more contentious, if only because the coevolution between genes and culture may favor the selection of phenotypic traits that are not fitness maximizing – the obvious example is the demography of wealthy countries which is largely driven by cultural factors. Tenets 4, 5, and 6 are doubtful. Buchanan and Powell convincingly argue that while the EEA may indeed have largely favored the evolution of traits favoring exclusive moralities, traits more friendly to inclusive moralities may have evolved thanks to different evolutionary mechanisms. The scientific state of the art suggests that humans have evolved a high level of cognitive plasticity thanks to which they can “switch” from one form of morality to another depending on environmental cues. It is true that human moralities have often been organized along the inner/outer group distinction as suggested by the large evidence of the pervasiveness of inter-group conflicts. But this is by no means an evolutionary necessity (tenet 5 is false). More inclusive moralities are also sustainable provided that the conditions are appropriate (tenet 6 is false).
The question is of course under which conditions inclusive moralities can be sustained. Buchanan and Powell mainly emphasize the ultimate role of economic conditions. They characterize inclusivist morality as a “luxury good.” The idea is that the kind of cultural innovations that favor inclusivist morality but also other forms of “moral progress” (e.g., better compliance to existing moral norms, better moral motivations) are more likely to happen and to disseminate if socioeconomic conditions are highly favorable. This is relatively intuitive. The harsher the socioeconomic conditions, the more people have difficulties finding the means to maintain a minimal level of well-being. This increases the competition for resources between individuals and between groups. In turn, this makes individuals’ environments less safe. There is evidence that more inclusive values that extend morality beyond family, clan, or kinship are more likely to take root in societies where individuals’ concerns for security are lessened. Inclusivist morality is a luxury good in the sense that individuals are inclined to endorse its constitutive values only when they feel safe and have their basic needs satisfied.
This framework helps to enlighten the current rise of populism and the role that fear plays in the resurgence in Western countries of group-based attitudes and values. As I argue in my previous post, fear is the fuel of populism and this fear is at least partially generated by worsening economic conditions. It is also relevant at a more general theoretical level. Inclusivity is a characteristic of many moral theories. This is obvious in the case of consequentialist theories, especially in the form they take in effective altruism and longtermism, as they have always been widely inclusive. Maybe less obviously, evolutionary considerations are also important for the defense of liberalism based on the idea of public reason.
The idea of public reason can go along with various degrees of inclusiveness. All theories of public reason agree however that for moral principles and rules to be justified, they must be based on reasons that all – in the relevant society – can accept or at least find intelligible. In particular, Gerald Gaus has defended in his last writings that this latter requirement of public reason is the one that is the most likely to permit a reconciliation between those whose views about the good life but also about justice radically differ. Whatever we can think about the value of this specific account of public reason (see here for a short discussion of its limits), its justificatory relevance entirely depends on the postulate that people are willing to reconcile based on reasons they eventually disagree with but that they nonetheless find intelligible. This willingness can be interpreted as an advanced form of moral progress, even if it is not inclusivity in the strict sense of Buchanan and Powell.[5] Moreover, it is clearly favorable to inclusivist morality, under the assumption that reasons are more likely to differ when people belong to different groups. However, reconciliation based on mutually intelligible public reasons is impossible if people are unwilling to depart from the more exclusivist stance that takes only one’s reasons as being justificatory.
Buchanan and Powell’s evolutionary account therefore suggests that the extreme pessimism of evoconservatives is not justified. But it also pinpoints that public justification is likely to proceed only under specific conditions, especially under favorable socioeconomic conditions. This is an important insight in the context of the current crisis of the institutions of liberal democracy.
[1] See for instance F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order (University of Chicago Press, 1978).
[2] Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 2011[1944]).
[3] I’m far from mastering the literature. My acquaintance with it is essentially tied to a few references, e.g., Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (University of Chicago Press, 1988).; Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2004).; Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton University Press, 2011).; Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (MIT Press, 2006).
[4] Allen E. Buchanan and Russell Powell, The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory (Oxford University Press, 2018).
[5] Though to be ready to accept one’s reasons as part of the public justificatory endeavor even if I disagree with them is, in some sense, a form of inclusivist morality.