Inductivist

In a recent post, I critiqued Richard Wrangham's theory of why humans are so much less violent than our cousins, the chimpanzees.  In The Goodness Paradox, he also attempts to explain why we have a strong moral sense.  It's strange for an animal designed to outcompete others through survival and greater reproductive success to care so much about abstract concepts of right and wrong.

He hypothesizes that human society changed fundamentally when men developed the language to coordinate control over other members of the group.  While apes sometimes gang up and beat or kill a single, obnoxious ape, they don't plan it out ahead of time.  Men gained a tremendous tool when they began to conspire as a group of five or six against one.  They could discuss the idea, plan a surprise attack, and kill the offender with little danger to themselves.  Sometimes the murder wasn't necessary: A rumor could be floated and the troublemaker might be convinced to change his ways.

Wrangham claims that men expanded their control to all members of the community so that everybody was were in fear of their ability to conduct a surprise attack against them.  Over evolutionary time, humans were selected for their ability to please the men who had this power over them.  Extremely selfish, exploitative people were weeded out.  A person who treated everyone well was unlikely to displease elders, so prosociality became a more and more common trait.  And while I didn't find Wrangham clear on this point, I think moral values gradually developed as a reflection of the prosocial personalities that were becoming common.

According to Wrangham, selection has been more successful at producing people oriented toward having a good reputation and appearing moral rather than creating humans of deep, genuine integrity and principle.  After all, we are still programmed to care about our own reproductive interests.

I would return to my earlier criticism: In 2019, some groups seem to have much higher rates of prosociality than others.  For example, a quick look at the Corruption Perceptions Index reveals that Denmark has very little public corruption compared to Somalia. How does Wrangham help us explain the enormous gulf between the two countries?  He doesn't.  He presents the image of all human groups across the globe being identical in terms of genes that contribute to cooperativeness.  I suppose he would say that evolutionary biology tells the story up until the day before yesterday, but now it's irrelevant: It's all sociology now.  Not credible. 

There is a tendency among people who take IQ seriously to believe that greater morality comes with intelligence.  While smarts enable a person to see more clearly long-term consequences of his actions and to understand moral systems more deeply, I'm skeptical that IQ is related to the emotional component of morality.  I suspect smart people are just as cold-blooded as the unintelligent.

Let's focus on one type of immorality: cheating on your spouse.  The General Social Survey asked adults, "Have you ever had sex with someone other than your husband or wife while you were married?"  Here are the answers by IQ level for whites and blacks (samples = 9,391 and 1,410):


Whites

















Blacks

















For both groups, the risk of infidelity rises with IQ.  Perhaps smarter people have a greater ability to attract partners.  Perhaps they have more social opportunities, or think they are better at fooling their partners. Whatever the case, this data makes bright people look like jerks. 

Few things have frustrated me more than the modern philosophical view that there is a gulf between facts and values. While hypotheses can be tested against the empirical world and rejected if not supported, there is no similar way to test claims about right and wrong. Morality only exists in our imaginations, we're told. I don't know about you, but that is completely unsatisfactory.

Only one man has offered a way out of this mess: Aristotle. According to him, your design dictates your morality. A knife is a good knife if it does well what it is intended to do -- cut stuff.

Aristotle used this approach to develop an ethics for man, which was further refined by Thomas Aquinas centuries later. But neither man, of course, knew the works of another genius, Charles Darwin, who figured out natural selection centuries later.

What is man's design, according to Darwin? Simple -- to propagate. To turn the world into copies of yourself.

It just so happens that this is roughly what Aristotle and Aquinas argued.

Three geniuses from three very different eras agree more or less about what you are.  So what is right for you?  To go forth and propagate.

One concern I have with legalizing behaviors that I view as immoral is that I suspect there is a reciprocal relationship between law and morality. Changing values lead to new laws, and new laws cause a change in values.

Using GSS data, I looked at the strength of the relationship between: 1) illegal drug use and favoring marijuana legalization, and 2) one's view on homosexual sex and favoring gay marriage. Eta-squared for the first relationship is .057 which indicates moderate strength. The gamma statistic for the second relationship is .79 which is very strong. Supporting a law, of course, does not logically require that one is in favor of the behavior in question, but sociologically the two seem to move in tandem.

I'm not a moral philosopher, but I can't resist a word concerning the first anonymous comments in the last post. (Thanks for your indulgence. The next post will return to our regularly scheduled un-PC data analysis.)

The model of God as a non-transcendent boss man who capriciously makes up moral rules is clearly incorrect. God is a transcendent being, outside space and time. He does not create morality. It is a necessary part of His essence, His nature. Objective goodness/morality that humans--even atheists--intuit (imperfectly) is in the nature of God.

Physical laws offer a nice analogy. The laws that compel matter and energy to behave in certain ways are in the nature of the universe. Similarly, the moral laws that obligate human behavior are in the nature of God.

Whites, N = 3,281

This graph (GSS data) shows trends in the answer to the question, "Do you agree or disagree: People who want children ought to get married." You can see the culture war is growing. Compared to the past two decades, there are more whites who strongly agree with the statement, but there are also more respondents who have no opinion or who strongly disagree.  There are now fewer white Americans who simply agree.

















Blacks, N = 477

With blacks, there are also fewer now who simply agree that people who want to be parents should marry, but the slack has been picked up by the strongly agree category. There is perhaps a little bit of a moral renewal going on here.  
 
How great it would be if our moralistic energy were directed toward bad family decisions instead of things like using an outdated name for black people. (I witnessed an elderly professor get busted recently for accidently using the word "colored").  Black folks themselves would benefit much more from being shamed for having kids out of wedlock than being timidly referred to as "African Americans." 
 
People need social punishment for socially destructive behavior. I know that if I divorced my wife today and walked away from four children, not a person I know would express a single word of disgust because nowadays everyone is so non-judgmental and so compassionate. American society has gotten to the point where it does nothing moralistic to shape our behavior except to throw us in jail when we have really crossed the line.  (Of course, it shames us mercilessly over contemporary concerns like gay marriage).      
 

Real reason to oppose gay marriage: People speculate why someone like me opposes gay marriage. I've been told it's religious bigotry, some irrational hatred of homosexuals, or I might even add Bradlaugh's comment over at Secular Right that we have an instinct against it.

In my case, all three are incorrect. I do have a natural yuck-reaction to gay sex, but myself, I wouldn't be against people getting married because they do gross stuff. As for hate, that is just silly. I don't instinctively have feelings about groups, but if I think about it, I have a mildly positive feeling about homosexuals.

Yes, my religion teaches that homosexual sex is wrong, and gay marriage is a slap in the face of every traditionally religious person in the country, but my orientation to social policy really is secular.

So, what's my real problem with it? It's one part of a much larger problem. In my view, the country made a huge mistake in the 1960s when it began to dismantle the traditional moral regime. You folks can tell me where I'm wrong, but America has functioned optimally when there was a consensus that: premarital sex is bad; promiscuity is bad; loose womanhood is bad; playboys are bad; pornography is bad; masturbation is bad; out-of-wedlock births are bad; single-parent families are bad; abortion is bad; divorce is bad; prostitution is bad--you get the point--and, finally, homosexual sex is bad.

Much of the country has rejected many of those values, and the division has been dismantling and discrediting the old system. Even if a kid is raised the old way, he can always say, but my buddies' parents don't believe that. What once was authoritative is now just one viewpoint, one lifestyle.

The reigning morality has become, choose for yourself the moral way. All too often, that means choose the selfish, short-sighted way. In my view, the result has been: more out-of-wedlock births; more divorce; more mother-only famlies; more men not civilized by marriage and fatherhood; more disappearing fathers; less child support; more welfare dependency; more poor kids; more crime; more STDs; more abortion; more girls who are pumped and dumped a hundred different times.

To the mention of girls who have many sex partners, let me add: more pornography; more strip clubs; more girls gone wild. Now, you might respond that freer female sexuality is not a problem. I simply cannot imagine a greater tragedy in my life--and I am not exaggerating here--than to, say, read about some girl at a party who had sex with a bunch of guys in front of everyone, and to learn that the girl was my daughter. It's painful to even contemplate it. I'd be tempted to find the guys responsible and go all Taxi Driver on their asses.

So, what does this have to do with gay marriage? Gay marriage is the further discrediting of a moral system that I argue is a constructive and rational system. The old way seems to be correlated with a thriving society, and to my mind social policy should aim to optimize societal success. Not only should we throw out gay marriage, we should work for a moral revival across the board.

In my view, the gut instinct which dumb people are more likely to rely on is sometimes right, while the analytical approach that smart folks have a habit of taking at times leads to mistakes. For example, the General Social Survey asked 901 Americans, "One of the bad effects of science is that it breaks down people's ideas of right and wrong."

The graph above shows that the percent agreeing with this statement tends to decline with increasing IQ, but I would argue that the statement is correct. Now, in terms of logic, science does not undermine morality: facts do not imply values. But the question is asking about cause and effect, not logic, and I think it is clear that science often works like an acid on established value systems.

The values of traditional religion, for example, do not have the status among the Western elites that they used to have, and this is due in part to the advance of science. I don't like to include cultural anthropology and sociology as sciences, but they share the epistemology of the hard sciences, and anyone who has taken even an introductory course in one of these subjects learns that values and norms are arbitrary. They are nothing more than social convention, and could easily be something else. These ideas come from the observed fact that cultures vary a lot.

Now, of course, you can argue that there is more to values than mere convention, but science will never argue that they are God-given, or that they have some transcendent, Platonic status. Science reduces values to a human level.

It looks like unintelligent people intuit this, while that understanding is drowned out in smarter folks as they deliberate over the question. Perhaps many smart people fail to appreciate the irrational nature of humans. Science doesn't corrode traditional ideas of right and wrong through logic: it does so through a psychological, irrational process.

For example, let's assume for a moment that heterosexual monogamy is right. Science has taught us that polygyny has been common among humans and is found among closely related species like gorillas. This knowledge might convince a person that monogamy is not right--it is just one way to organize human sexuality.

Logically, this makes no sense since the observed fact of polygyny does not imply that monogamy is either right, wrong, or neutral. Science doesn't deal in right or wrong, but it has an impact on our definitions of morality nevertheless. Smart people might not see this because they have these models of rational humans which are incorrect.

(It would be nice to see answers for people smarter than those shown in the graph. The people who are disagreeing with the statement in large numbers really aren't that smart, so it could be that they, by their answer, are simply saying that science is good because that's the respectable thing to say. And yeah, I might have just thrown out my earlier ideas. Get used to it: I do that all the time. I still like the idea of smart people using an incorrect model of rational humans, though.)