THE DIFFERENCE OF BEING HUMAN MORALITY

     

                        THE DIFFERENCE OF BEING HUMAN MORALITY

    

     In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, Charles Darwin wrote: “I fully … subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.” I raise the question of whether morality is biologically or culturally determined. The question of whether the moral sense is biologically determined may refer either to the capacity for ethics (i.e., the proclivity to judge human actions as either right or wrong) or to the moral norms accepted by human beings for guiding their actions. I propose that the capacity for ethics is a necessary attribute of human nature, whereas moral codes are products of cultural evolution. 

    Humans have a moral sense because their biological makeup determines the presence of three necessary conditions for ethical behaviour: 

(i) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one's own actions;

 (ii) the ability to make value judgments; and 

(iii) the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. Ethical behaviour came about in evolution not because it is adaptive in itself but as a necessary consequence of man's eminent intellectual abilities, which are an attribute directly promoted by natural selection. That is, morality evolved as an exaptation, not as an adaptation. Moral codes, however, are outcomes of cultural evolution, which accounts for the diversity of cultural norms among populations and for their evolution through time.

    Humans are animals and have evolved from ancestors that were not human. But our “bodily frame,” as well as the capacities that stem from it, show also that we are a unique kind of animal, a unique kind of ape, with distinctive features, of which the moral sense is one and, if we are to agree with Darwin, the most important one. As Steven Pinker has written, “Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings”. In this essay, I will examine morality as a consequential attribute among those that determine “the difference of being human.” At issue, of course, stands the evolutionary origin of morality

    Two conspicuous human anatomical traits are erect posture and a large brain. We are the only vertebrate species with a bipedal gait and erect posture; birds are bipedal, but their backbone stands horizontal rather than vertical (penguins are a trivial exception) and the bipedalism of kangaroos lacks erect posture and is drastically different from our own. Erect posture and bipedal gait entail other morphological changes in the backbone, hipbone, feet and others.

    Brain size in mammals is generally proportional to body size. Relative to body mass, humans have the largest brain. The chimpanzee brain has an approximate volume of 300 cm3; a gorilla is slightly larger. The human adult brain is more than three times larger, typically between 1,300 cm3 and 1,400 cm3. The brain is not only larger in humans than in apes but also much more complex. The cerebral cortex, where the higher cognitive functions are processed, is in humans proportionally much greater than the rest of the brain when compared with apes.

    Erect posture and large brain are not the only anatomical features that distinguish us from nonhuman primates, even if they may be the most obvious. Other notable anatomical differences include the reduction of the size of the jaws and teeth and the remodelling of the face; reduction of body hair and changes in the skin and skin glands; modification of the vocal tract and larynx, with important implications for spoken language; opposing thumbs that allow precise manipulation of objects; and cryptic ovulation, which may have been associated with the evolution of the nuclear family, consisting of one mother and one father with their children.

    Humans are notably different from the apes and all other animals in anatomy, but also and no less importantly in their functional capacities and behavior, both as individuals and socially. Most fundamental are the advanced intellectual faculties, which allow humans to categorize (see individual objects as members of general classes), think in the abstract and form images of realities that are not present (and, thus, anticipate future events and plan future actions), and reason. Other distinctive functional features are self-awareness and death awareness; symbolic (creative) language; tool making and technology; complex and extremely variable forms of cooperation and social organization; legal codes and political institutions; science, literature, and art; and ethics and religion.

    Humans live in groups that are socially organized, and so do other primates. But primate societies do not approach the complexity of the human social organization. A distinctive human social trait is culture, which may be understood here as the set of non–strictly biological human activities and creations. Culture in this sense includes social and political institutions, ways of doing things, religious and ethical traditions, language, common sense and scientific knowledge, art and literature, technology, and in general all of the creations of the human mind. Culture “is a pool of technological and social innovations that people accumulate to help them live their lives”. 

    The advent of culture has brought with it cultural evolution, a superorganic mode of evolution superimposed on the organic model, which has, in the last few millennia, become the dominant mode of human evolution. Cultural evolution has come about because of cultural change and inheritance, a distinctively human mode of achieving adaptation to the environment and transmitting it through the generations.

Moral Behavior

    I will define moral behaviour for the present purposes as the actions of a person who takes into account in a sympathetic way the impact the actions have on others. A similar definition is advanced, for example, by David Copp in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory: “[W]e can take a person's moral beliefs to be the beliefs she has about how to live her life when she takes into account in a sympathetic way the impact of her life and decisions on others.” Altruism may be defined in a similar way as, for example, “unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others”. Altruism, however, is usually taken to imply some cost to the altruist for the benefit of others, and this is the sense in which I will use “altruism” here. Moreover, “altruism” is often predicated on the behaviour of social insects and other animals, in which no intentionality is involved but rather comes about as a result of genetically determined behaviours. This is biological altruism, or altruism, in contrast to moral altruism, or altruism.

    I will use the term “ethical behaviour” as a synonym of “moral behaviour,” and “morality” and “ethics” as synonyms of each other, except when explicitly noted or contextually obvious that they are used with a somewhat different meaning. Some authors use “morality” or “virtue ethics” in a broader sense that would include good feelings in regard to others and exclude inappropriate thoughts or desires, such as entertaining sexual desires for somebody else's wife or wishes that something harmful would happen to others. So long as these thoughts or desires are not transformed into actions, they will not be included in my use of “morality.” Actions that may be thought to be evil or sinful in some moral systems, such as masturbation or eating pork, will not be included either in my use of “morality,” so long as the actions have no consequences for others.

Theories of Morality

    People have moral values; that is, they accept standards according to which their conduct is judged as either right or wrong, good or evil. The particular norms by which moral actions are judged vary to some extent from individual to individual and from culture to culture (although some norms, such as not to kill, not to steal, and to honour one's parents, are widespread and perhaps universal), but value judgments concerning human behaviour are passed in all cultures. This universality raises two related questions: whether the moral sense is part of human nature, one more dimension of our biological make-up; and whether ethical values may be products of biological evolution rather than being given by religious and other cultural traditions.

    When philosophers consider theories of morality they distinguish between metaethics, normative ethics, and practical ethics. Theories of metaethics seek to justify why we ought to do what we ought to do. They are the primary concern of philosophers, who favor different theories, such as “divine command” (God's commanding is what makes a particular kind of action moral); “moral realism” (there are moral facts; our moral judgments are made valid or not by the moral facts); “utilitarianism” (the moral value of an action is determined by the expected benefit to the largest number of people); “positivism” (there are no objective rational foundations for morality, but rather moral norms are determined by social agreement or, in the individual, by emotional decisions); “libertarianism” (moral values are measured by the extent to which they maximize personal freedom and limit the role of the state to the protection of individual freedoms); and several others.

    Normative ethics refers to the rules or laws that determine what we ought to do. Practical ethics considers the application of moral norms to particular situations, which often involve conflicting values: will abortion be justified to save the life of the mother?

    In practice, humans justify the set of moral norms they follow on several, not only one, metaethical doctrines. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Christian theologian whose authority is highly respected up to the present, says that some moral laws come from divine authority (worship only one God), others from natural law (do not kill, Do not commit adultery), and still others from civil authority (respect private property, pay taxes).

    Aristotle and other philosophers of classical Greece and Rome, as well as many other philosophers throughout the centuries, held that humans hold moral values by nature. A human is not only Homo sapiens but also Homo moralis. For the last 20 centuries, the foundations of morality were an important subject for Christian theologians, as in the case of Thomas Aquinas, but also for philosophers, such as, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Hume, Kant, and others familiar to Darwin, including notably William Paley (The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, 1785; and Harriet Martineau (Illustrations of Political Economy), 1832–1834