Our ancestors were for at least 100,000 years hunter-gatherers. In a tribe the key to survival was the cohesiveness of the tribe. Individuals did not matter as much as the group. Thus, when a person became a liability to the group they were cast out. Better to get rid of the liability than for the tribe to be weakened. Many American Indian tribes had that custom. When an old person could no longer do useful work, they voluntarily left the tribe, knowing that in days they would be dead, but the tribe would survive and be better off.

It can be demonstrated that tribal members learned that doing favors for one another elevated their status as good members of the tribe. Being more esteemed meant more security within the group.

Basically, the tribes were good examples of Communism. It was the community and its survival that was most important. The individual had a role to play, but other than the leaders, none were given more food, horses, lodging, etc. Things were shared for the common good.

The advent of agriculture changed all that. Members of villages grouped together for common defense, but it soon became apparent that some were more talented at farming and/or willing to work harder such that they could accumulate excess food to trade for other desired items. This was at odds with the tribal ways and was resented by some. However, as people accumulated more wealth they were able to pay strong young men for protection of both their crops and their persons. Generally during this period people were ruled by the “Golden Rule.” ie He who had the gold to hire the necessary muscle made the rules. Life for most people was relatively brutal and unfair.

Along came a rabbi named Jesus who taught that people should love one another an treat one another the way they wanted to be treated. (The new Goden Rule.) His message resonated and, though it started small, the message was accepted and spread quite widely in Europe.

In spite of that message, poverty and the old “Golden Rule” continued to be the order of most people’s lives.

However, beginning in about 1200 AD in the British Isles some amazing things happened. The Magna Carta, giving certain rights to individuals, was signed. Then came bloody struggles that resulted in the separation of church and state. After that came the industrial revolution, which started to lift many people out of grinding poverty. Then Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations.”

In the 6,000 years since agriculture became a dominant way of life, mankind has been trying to reconcile the customs of tribal life (which had 100,000 years to ingrain itself in our DNA) with the greater freedom and opportunities of being an individual who is free to rise as high as his wits and strength can take him.

Our laws are an amalgam of the morality taught by Jesus and the conflicts between the ambitions of individuals versus the needs of the state (the tribe).

We pay our taxes to the state primarily for protection from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

However, we also have laws to keep unbridled greed and avarice in check. In recent times our laws have started to regulate any number of things that have little to do with the peace and security of the individual, but rather to salve the feelings of inequality that have arisen for many (The old tribal instinct).

Thus the tribal instincts, which are essentially socialist/communist, are in tension with the ideas of both Jesus and Adam Smith. I anticipate that the tension and debate will continue until a majority of people see the argument for the free market place for individuals as being the one that produces wealth, health, and happiness for the largest number of people. In addition, Jesus message to love one another and take care of the sick, lame, and poor will continue to be honored by the devout and even the secularists. Some of that will be done by churches, some by the state.

Incomplete and simplistic, I know. But I’m just a simple guy.

The most fascinating animal study I ever read was conducted a few years ago. Monkeys were given tokens to buy food with. They were given one of two types of food, one a favorite and the other less favored. The monkeys who received the unfavored food for the same price seemed to know they were being cheated. Some even stopped accepting any food at all, stopped participating in the experiment. Which would seem to go against the mere ‘survival-as-highest-goal’ grain. Even animals have a concept of fair play.

I’m not sure I agree with your friend above on empathy, myself. Perhaps it has never been scientifically proven that animals have empathy, but any dog owner will tell you that dog will walk through fire to save a family member, in particularly the most vulnerable family members (children) and I don’t believe they do so just to keep their meal ticket (since there won’t be any meals if they don’t live to see ‘em).

Sorry for the long post, but there is another point that hasn’t been made and I think it should be. There are proven, direct health benefits for altruism. http://www2.nysun.com/opinion/why-giving-makes-you-happy/68700/

People who give are happier, happier people are healthier and live longer, more productive lives. For individuals and society overall, the benefits are pretty clear. Societies who ‘eat their own’ are toxic and don’t tend to last.

We experience examples on the micro-level all of the time. Think about the difference between sitting in traffic bumper to bumper with people honking, yelling, flipping the finger and going through a car-ride in the country for the same duration. At the end of the first trip (if you’re normal) your blood pressure is up, your day has started off badly and often just precipitates from there. After the country ride, you’re feeling refreshed and happy. Even though nothing different has happened to you physically, the mental impact is huge. Those type of experiences build on themselves and exhaust one physically (it’s why people quit lucrative jobs and need vacations). It’s called ‘quality of life’ but really, underneath it all it has a moral basis (or alternately, the ‘moral’ life has a physical, aka survival, basis).

Wolfwalker may be right, community behavior that becomes custom, and eventually public morality may have an evolutionary advantage – in fact, it probably does. But human evolution did not stop when tribes became cities, countries, civilization. In fact, you could argue that was when it really became exciting, since the opportunity for interaction with Others became so much greater.

A brilliant but reticent occasional reader of my acquaintance adds this via email:

I (was interested in the argument) for the evolutionary basis of morality. It’s been a while since I’ve read the sociobiology literature (started out doing optimal foraging theory in
hunter-gatherer studies–then I became a humanist), but he’s missing an important half of the argument:

-the half he is arguing about is based on notions of relatedness (all of it goes back to social behavior being related to the ability to reproduce/ensure your genetic representation for at least two generations–you are not successful as an individual until you are a grandparent–there’s actually a couple of sociobiologically inclined anthropologists who have argued that menopause in human women is an adaptive feature than ensures older women will put their nurturing time into their children’s children rather than more children of their own)…the line of logic is this, you are as related to your sibling’s children as your own children (you share 50% genetic heritage with
each)…therefore, it is in your genetic advantage to help your parents rear your siblings (who share 100% genetic ancestry with you) and to help raise your siblings’ children…under this kind of model, where you assume the smilodont is living in prides of female kin (like lions), then it is
beneficial genetically to ensure that your sister survives major injuries (by sharing food) because ultimately that will allow her to produce more off-spring that are related to you. If you want to apply this to humans, then homosexuality that directs the efforts of non-reproductive individuals towards the care of nieces/nephews becomes a genetic strategy (you could argue this with homosexuality being either behavioral or biological), and individuals who elect not to reproduce (like nuns/priests, for instance) but provide further nurturance of kin, can all be interpreted through this lens as being one kind of genetically beneficial adaptation.

So here’s the other side of the coin–immorality can be argued to be genetic as well==there is lots of research on so-called “cheaters” and “Cheater genes”…so what counts as cheaters, well, bizarre biological stuff, like male dragon flies who have developed (genitalia) that have scoop-like structures that allow them to clear out the previous dragon fly’s genetic contribution….or behavioral stuff like beta baboons who secretly form friendships with the lesser ranked mates of the alphas and have liaisons with them to give them off-spring in a hierarchy that would otherwise deny it…applied to humans. If selling out your country gives you the resources to have better supported children and ultimately more descendants, than this is an adaptive cheating of the system–polygyny becomes a normal biological adaptation favored by males under such a system (though because of the long childhood of human off-spring, number advantages are off-set by time requirements–a human mother can only care for so many children well without other help, and since human litter sizes are small, its important that each child survive–so sociobiologists will always argue that monogamy is a system that favors women’s reproductive success, and that in most resource circumstances, something in between is the best strategy for men and women.)

You could relate this to the Eugenics movement (which is, as you know, what happened with good old social Darwinism) and argue that… the undesirables should be stopped from breeding.

Ultimately, you can spin sociobiological theory out in any number of just so stories, but you can’t call it demonstrating the naturalness of morality anymore than you can use it to demonstrate the naturalness of immorality–its amoral.. particularly since the participants (like the dragonflies) may not have a sense of themselves let alone a sense of communitas or species. In fact, really, what sociobiologists are studying is sex drive–even human species have cultures that do not see a link between intercourse and pregnancy, so arguing that animals are making rational calculations about their genetic legacy is problematic… foraging theory is ultimately based on the notion that animals are trying to spend less time and energy finding food so they can have more time to pursue sex… You can see how the economics of the thing work.

There is an important difference between humans and everybody else in the animal kingdom… not only do we recognize death versus life in profound ways, but at this point, no one has been able to demonstrate that non-apes can feel empathy… and by extension, sympathy. We can imagine the pain of losing a child, imagine the horror of not being able to care for ourselves, of losing a limb, losing one’s mind, or sight or hearing, we can transport ourselves, through thought, into other places, times and minds. Sociopaths are often defined as those who cannot recognize or empathize with those around them, thus their ability to conduct heinous acts towards others. The genetic argument doesn’t fit empathy/sympathy unless you embrace it on a species wide level… and sociobiologists work on the level of the individual’s desire to procreate, not the species working as a cooperative (natural selection works at a population level, but not though conscious action–though again, we can slip down the eugenics slope–though all population biology demonstrates that the worst thing for any species is to narrow the gene pool rather than expand it)… yet we have examples everyday of humans making non reproductively advantageous decisions for themselves to help non-related persons…

Which I thought was a fun read.

“wise individuals”? WHICH wise individuals? Wise in what way? Who’s to say they are wise? I may consider my father to be the wisest person on the planet but someone else may look at him, see that the man never finished college, and dismiss him as a bumbling idiot. What criteria are we using to determine “wisdom”? And who gets to decide upon that criteria? And who gets to decide who gets to decide upon the criteria?

See where I’m going?

Lex ~ forgive me for possibly being dense but may I ask what the point of your post was? And by that, I don’t mean “why did you bother posting” but rather what, exactly, was the question?

Was it morality and how we, as humans, come to decide what is moral and what is immoral? Or was it whether eugenics has any kind of moral basis (and, then, WHO gets to decide whether it has moral basis?)? Or was it a discussion of the first amendment? Somewhere along the line, my brain tangled all three of these up.

Lex, you wrote: The best remedy for bad speech is more speech, not less.

Under most circumstances, I agree. However, there are a few ideas that I find so utterly obscene that even permitting them to be advocated publicly, by anyone, can cause far more damage than suppressing such speech ever could. I’ll readily agree that deciding which ideas are beyond the pale is the mother and father of all slippery slopes — but if the discussion is led by competent, wise individuals who know how to say “this far and no further,” then the risk is at least manageable.

Resources we dedicate towards the support of inherently unproductive members of society are resources that cannot be dedicated elsewhere, and they are furthermore resources with a negative return on investment – at least on any objective scale.

And yet, we still do it.

The decision to do so is inherently a moral one, and it cannot be justified on a scientific basis. We do so because it is the right thing to do.

Why is it the right thing to do? Who first decided that, and what reasoning did they use to support it? That first decider must have had some reason, after all. They didn’t have established morality to rely on yet.

I admit I’m coming at this argument from what will probably seem a peculiar-to-the-point-of nuts position: besides being an amateur historian, I’m also an amateur biologist, specialty evolutionary theory. I am firmly convinced that there is such a thing as morality, while at the same time I am firmly convinced the only morals that have any validity are the ones that have a basis in our evolutionary history. Moral systems that cooperate and correlate with our evolutionary background are valid; moral systems that don’t, aren’t. I think that if a moral idea or rule turns up multiple times in multiple cultures throughout history, then there’s got to be an evolution-based reason for that. A simple example of this is the treatment of the traitor-for-greed — the person, like John Walker, who betrays his Tribe for money. As far as I know, every culture in recorded history has condemned such behavior. Why? Because treason-for-greed is the worst possible attack on the Tribe.

From my knowledge of palaeontology I draw another factoid that’s relevant. The La Brea Tar Pits contain a huge collection of fossil bones, including thousands of bones from the top predator Smilodon, better known as the sabertooth tiger. There are Smilodon specimens in the Tar Pits collections with horrific injuries — agonizing injuries, crippling injuries, injuries that must have rendered the animal unable to walk, much less hunt. Yet these injuries are old and healed. How does a crippled predator live long enough to heal? Only one way: another animal must have been bringing it food. Caring for an injured fellow? No modern species shows that kind of social behavior except one: humans. Sabertooth cats were not self-aware, were not intelligent, had no moral sense. Yet here they are showing “moral” behavior.

I see only one conclusion. The behavior of caring for crippled, disabled, or sick fellows is not an outgrowth of human morality. If anything it’s the other way around: human morality is a conscious attempt to justify and explain what our subconscious instincts tell us to do. We are moral creatures because we evolved to be moral creatures — because moral behavior strengthens the Tribe.

Which conclusion, incidentally, is why I also reject the multiculturalists’ beliefs about moral relativism. If morality has an evolutionary basis, then there are reliable, objective moral absolutes. Any moral rule that supports those absolutes is objectively, scientifically right. And any moral rule which breaks those absolutes is objectively, scientifically wrong.