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Can Evolution Explain Ethics?


Charles Darwin thought that the universal human tendency to think in terms of moral rightness and wrongness, and our wide agreement on the immorality of acts like rape or genocide, could be explained by the evolution of the human species. Given the circumstances of survival and reproduction, he theorized, some behaviors are more adaptive than others; thus, any instinct that prompts adaptive behaviors is favored by natural selection. The flight instinct removes prey from the clutches of predators, increasing the chances that the pursued creature will live to reproduce. Social animals such as bees, wolves, and people come equipped with sets of social instincts that prompt cooperation with the hive, pack, or tribe. The success of the more cooperative group, whether it is competing with other tribes, hunting, or gathering, tends to promote the survival and reproduction of its individual members. To the extent that such cooperative and adaptive behavior is genetically fostered, he believed, it tends to be passed on to offspring: natural selection at work on the human psyche.

True, bees seem programmed automatically to act from purely social instincts, but any social animal also endowed with intellectual powers—like those at work in people—would be capable of reflection upon those instincts, too. The female wolf instinctually cares for her cubs without moral reflection because of the evolutionary advantage of such instinctual behavior. The human mother, however, is driven by a similar instinctual impulse that is bolstered by the sense that it would be wrong of her to abandon or neglect her babies: she has a conscience. For Darwin, what is called “conscience” is merely the product of social instincts plus a capacity for rational reflection. In his estimation, then, human morality is the product of natural selection shaping and honing human psychology—which is also influenced by individuals interacting with the circumstances of human culture over the eons.

All of this may explain why people have come to believe that there are such things as right and wrong acts, but it utterly fails to explain how there could actually be an objective difference between right and wrong. Indeed, the explanation undermines those beliefs, because given the supposed circumstances of evolution, humans would have believed them whether true or false. Darwin’s theory requires that our moral sense—and its dictates—evolved simply because the behavior it encourages is adaptive.

Whether the resulting moral beliefs are also true is beside the point. This has led some proponents of Darwin’s account to observe that ethics is “an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.” (Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson. “The Approach of Sociobiology.” Religion and the Natural Sciences. Wipf and Stock Publishers. 1993. p. 310.)

What is missing from Darwin’s theory is any reason for thinking that, in addition to being adaptive, human moral faculties aim at producing moral beliefs that are true as they would be were they designed for the purpose of establishing moral truth within the fiber of society. Without that background assumption, which is the sort afforded us in the Genesis creation account, we should all be moral nihilists. In short, when combined with an atheistic outlook, Darwin’s theory does not explain ethics; it explains it away.

by Mark Linville






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