October 19th, 2007 Fred McVittie
In an debate at Georgetown Univeristy, Christopher Hitchens refutes the claim that morality requires religious underpinnings to provide a basis for its authority by pointing to the possible evolutionary advantages of moral and altruistic behaviour and interpersonal cooperation. This refutation and alternative explanation has also been made by Dawkins and others. Whilst this explanation may be valid, it is unnecessary for a justification or explanation of moral action and leans toward a naturalistic interpretation (c.f. Naturalist Fallacy), which itself contains dangers. Elsewhere in the same debate Hitchens makes the important point that consciousness is humankind’s greatest gift, and it is this consciousness which allows the rational thought and coherent understanding which he rightly applauds. The fact that we are capable of conscious thought, a faculty extended and rendered material through spoken language and written text, allows us uniquely as a species to formulate concepts, including moral concepts, which do not rely solely on primate instincts. Steven Pinker makes a related point in ‘How the Mind Works’ where he notes that, whilst his genes may be coded for reproduction, if he should choose not to have children then his genes can ‘jump in the lake’. This refusal to follow the genetic script is a feature of consciousness and not only allows decisions to be made about reproduction but also to make moral and ethical choices. A morality grounded only in the body of our primate ancestors and not our own 21st Century conscious bodies forces us to support moral ‘realities’ such as the ‘hate your enemies’ script which Hitchens cites and appears to concur with.
This discontinuity between the lauding of rational conscious thought on the one hand and an appeal to a naturalistic, non-conscious, genetic account of morality on the other is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it demonstrates an inconsistant approach to the treatment of complex human concepts, regarding conscious moral decisions as originating in the bronze-age body and equally complex conscious decisions, in logic for example, as a product of modern consciousness. Secondly, it denies the possibility of cultural moral development: that through education, learning, research, exchange, improved social conditions etc, we might work collectively to formulate codes of moral conduct that do not consign us to a life of primate politics and the naturalistic imperative of ‘hate your enemy’ and similar repulsive laws of nature. (Here I am reminded of the excellent talk by Andy Thompson at the AAI 2007 conference in Washington, D.C. in which he notes the phenomenon of the ‘lethal raid’ as a example of adaptive collective male violence, present in primates and in humans. The difference that makes a difference is that we have a choice whether to continue with this behaviour, and this choice is a consciously-made. Such a choice is an example of the conscious development of morality in spite of the genetic script, rather than as a consequence of it.)
As Pinker has pointed out elsewhere, whatever problems we face today, it is undeniable that from a moral perspective enormous strides have been taken in the last few centuries. Genocide, torture, and brutality have been part of the normal fabric of the human condition throughout most of history, and it is only recently that such things have caused any significant level of moral outrage. It is only just beyond the horizon of living memory that such sports as bear-baiting and cat-burning were completely normal, and today anyone engaged in these activities would suffer severe moral censure. We can only put these changes down to the operation of rational social processes engaged in by conscious agents, not by the functioning of any genetic script.
This is not to deny the calling of the voices from our primate past. We are all the children of violent, scared, painfully young ancestors, and this historical nature is undoubtedly imprinted in our genes. However, we do have the option to tell these genes also to jump in the lake, or at the very least to put them on hold until we really need them. I am reminded of the famous line from the film ‘The African Queen’ spoken by Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart. ‘Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in the world to rise above.’
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