A Mistake We Were Born to Make

Mitch Stokes begins Chapter 13 of his book, How to be an Atheist, with a quote from ethicist Peter Singer and evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser on the evidence for the evolution of morality:

[studies] provide empirical support for the idea that like other psychological faculties of the mind, including language and mathematics, we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong, interacting in interesting ways with the local culture. These intuitions reflect the outcome of millions of years in which our ancestors have lived as social animals, and are part of our common inheritance, as much as our opposable thumbs are.

Stokes summarizes the position: "The general picture is this: our moral beliefs have been fashioned over time to help us survive. 'Ethical' behavior tends to keep us alive long enough to produce the next generation."

But the question remains: Can evolution really explain our moral sense?

To atheists holding this position, everything people (or anything) does is for survival, even altruism. We are nice to other people - sometimes self-sacrificing our well-being for another - because that act will create a society or environment that is more likely to propagate the species. For example, by being altruistic to kin, we establish a close knit group - family - that serves as a positive environment to raise and protect children. So, even altruism is selfish.

Atheists argue that our sense of right and wrong has evolved to increase chances for the survival of the species. Therefore, morals do not come from outside of nature...not from God. Moral obligations are useful, and don't have to come from some authority; in other words, moral realism (objectivity) is not necessary. We may think that morals are independent of our minds - some objective standard we are tapping into from God - but that's not the case. Morals are just "common sense." As Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene writes:

...we are naturally inclined toward a mistaken belief in moral realism. The psychological tendencies that encourage this false belief serve an important biological purpose, and that explains why we should find moral realism so attractive even though it is false. Moral realism is, once again, a mistake we were born to make.

Evolution has been quite clever so far.

And, of course, if evolution has given us our moral sense, then that moral sense can change. We probably haven't arrived yet as a species, so our morals are also evolving. With time, then, do our moral beliefs improve? And if so what does that look like? If survival and propagation of the species are the trajectory, then one could argue that certain behaviors that we currently find untoward could aid survival: rape, aggression, xenophobia, and male promiscuity. More babies, be wary of strangers, destroy potential threats to survival. These are certainly natural inclinations, yet they now offend us. We choose to consider them wrong. As Stokes notes, since morality is up to us, however, we can choose to put rape and aggression on the immoral list. This is good news. But the bad news is that morality seems to be merely a matter of preference. We can choose our standards.

Finally, while the overarching goal of evolution is survival at any cost, "nothing in evolution says that you ought to value your own survival above all else." This sentiment is summarized by atheist Jerry Coyne:
"How can you derive meaning, purpose, or ethics from evolution? You can't. Evolution is simply a theory about the process and patterns of life's diversification, not a grand philosophical scheme about the meaning of life. It can't tell us what to do, or how we should behave."

OK. Maybe evolution cannot tell us what we ought to do, but naturalists have posited other ways that we can account for objective moral standards without God. That's next.