Making Monkeys of us All

When I got back this afternoon, I had intended to post a few questions arising from Stuart's lecture. And then I saw "Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys?" freshly published in the NY Times.

In his essay, Peter Railton addresses exactly the issues that I thought most interesting as Stuart was speaking. He notes a couple of standard responses that Darwinian evolutionary theory prompts with regard to human morality, and shows that things are not quite so simple, neatly bringing out where I think Stuart went wrong in asserting that human altruism was either impossible or impossible to prove. And as is so often the case, definitions and how the terms are understood is crucial. Of course, Stuart's view as presented in the lecture was necessarily much simplified to fit into a short period, and further constrained by the need to be at least reasonably understandable by my level 2 listening and speaking students. Nonetheless, I do have a fundamental disagreement with Stuart's view, inclining more to the analysis of what's going on and what it means for human morality put forward by Railton. Although it is true that the scientific theory of evolution fully and completely explains the origin of all (and I do mean all) human morality, art, religion, spirituality, architecture, science and everything else, I do not think that that undermines the reality of those things. We can also explain why 2+2=4, but that does not affect the truth of the result. No more does the fact that we have a very solid biological theory explaining how we and all our creations came to be mean that those creations are less real. Love is still love even if we know what brain states cause it and what social interactions typically cause those brain states. And altruism is still real even if evolutionary theory fully explains how it came to exist amongst us, who inherited it from our primate ancestors, and who have since greatly improved on it.

But what do you think? Is altruism real? Is there anything more to morality than blind evolution mindlessly churning it out along with music, magic, myth and morality?

It was a happy coincidence that this particular article was published in today's Stone.

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References

Railton, P. (2010, July 18). Moral camouflage or moral monkeys? The New York Times. Retrieved July 19, 2010 from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/moral-camouflage-or-moral-monkeys/?emc=eta1