Post #12 - Evolutionary Ethics

Evolutionary psychology tries to incorporate the ideas of both philosophy and the natural sciences. It claims that human beings, through natural selection, have been instilled with a moral sense and the disposition to be good. This idea could prove that our morality is not the result of ‘divine revelation’ but an evolutionary phenomenon of intelligent human beings. This morality was a useful adaptation which put the holder at a selective advantage. This article proposes that one of the ethical classes should be called descriptive ethics. Descriptive ethics could outline ethical beliefs held by many people and why they are held. The example the article gave was the one about incest where most human cultures believe this is wrong. This belief is probably held by so many different cultures because of the consequences of incest like birth defects and mental illnesses. This belief could have been passed down because following it gave the people a better survival advantage. The standard that could be used to defend evolutionary psychology is: “Actions that increase the long-term capacity of survival in evolutionary terms are good and actions that decrease this capacity are bad.”

The article Whose Life Would You Save, by Carl Zimmer, is based on the ideas of Joshua Green. Green is a philosopher at Princeton who studies peoples’ brain activity while posing the question on who they would save or kill. He explains that when you are making moral judgments, it is not only your reasoning centers which are working but also you emotions. Greed explains that it is our emotions that trigger the instinctive response which are the products of millions of years of evolution. This article presents a couple morally challenging examples then asks why the action seems so right in one situation and so wrong in the other one. Green describes that the answer to this question is not found in the logic of moral judgment but in the role our emotions play in forming them. He also explained that killing someone with your bare hands was recognized to be immoral millions of years ago. This is the reason we don’t even have to think about most of the moral judgments because they are so ingrained in us that we answer automatically.

Green discovered that impersonal moral decisions were made in the logic center of the brain, in this way people could figure out the answer to questions evolution hasn’t ingrained into us. The personal moral question affected three different areas of the brain. The center that is used to understand what other people are thinking or feeling, the center which analyzes information about people based on how they move their lips, eyes and hands, and the third center that was stimulate is the one that deals with peoples strong emotions. Green believed that these regions are part of the neural network that produces the emotional instinct behind our moral choices. He proposes that when our emotional network says no but our reasoning center says yes, we get trapped in a moral struggle.

I found that article about Green to be very fascinating! I love Neuropsychology or Neuroethics or whatever people want to call it. I responded to the trolley story with yes I would flip the switch but no I wouldn’t push a fat person in front of it. It took me a while to come up with the second answer, not because I was having a moral struggle but because I was so amazed by the comparison. My brain doesn’t work like a philosopher’s; I can’t come up with all these great scenarios to present to people. I also enjoyed reading about the monkeys which were proven to understand fairness. I would rather take a grape over a cucumber but I don’t think I would throw it back at the researcher. The cucumber is better than nothing. My dad is very interested in evolutionary psychology, so I told him the monkey story. In return he told me about how monkeys have a leader and how they listen to this one person. This is a very abridged version of what he told me and I’m not sure I could do it justice. If the leader decides they are going to attack the neighboring monkeys and kill them, the monkeys will do it. We laughed about how similar we are to monkeys.