Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  Table III follows the (often overlapping) coding categories I use in my research to show, in descending order of frequency, some of the main types of punishable social predation mentioned for this same sample of ten LPA societies. Exploitation through dominant intimidation was statistically prominent, and it could be accomplished physically through murder or through administration of a beating, through the use of malicious sorcery, and through other forms of bullying. Exploitation through deception could be accomplished by failure to share and failure to cooperate, as well as by active thieving or lying or by deliberate cheating in several contexts. For a person disposed to social predation, a rich array of free-riding choices existed.

  However, for humans the biological theorist’s conception of intimidating or deceptive free riders automatically coming out way ahead of innately gullible and all but pathetically vulnerable altruists does not play out that way, for very often these opportunists can be readily identified by their altruistic peers and punished (with genetic consequences) in a truly wide variety of ways (see Table IV, next page). Thus, we must ask whether traits that make for seriously antisocial free riding—free riding that invites severe punishment—may often be far more costly to the would-be free riders than are the costs of being generous for the altruists they are genetically competing with. If so, for humans alone we have a possibly definitive solution for the genetic free-rider problem.

  Table IV shows coded data for the same ten forager groups with respect to the sanctions employed, and again some of the coding categories overlap. Some types of sanctioning are underreported, especially because there is indigenous reticence about using capital punishment, but also because ethnographic reporting by its nature is spotty. Thus, with further information the apparent central tendencies represented by these findings would be still more robust; most likely, the majority of these social measures are either very widespread or universal among LPA foragers, so the central tendencies are pronounced.

  All these sanctions contribute to punitive social selection, which takes place when entire groups develop strong negative preferences toward antisocial free riders—and act on these biases. The table shows that the system of punishment is quite flexible in its possibilities. Public opinion, facilitated by gossiping, always guides the band’s decision process, and fear of gossip all by itself serves as a preemptive social deterrent because most people are so sensitive about their reputations.

  TABLE IV METHODS OF SOCIAL SUPPRESSION*

  *The above figures are derived from the author’s hunter-gather database.

  Every one of the social control mechanisms seen in this table is mentioned in one superb ethnography by Asen Balikci,27 who lived with and wrote about the Netsilik of central Canada, and also relied upon earlier data, collected right at the time of contact, when people were not yet reticent about their indigenous practice of capital punishment. The majority of these social control types were mentioned for over half of the LPA societies sampled, and the most prominent were social distancing, ridicule and shaming, expulsion from the group, physical punishment, and capital punishment. Thus, we may reconstruct yesterday’s hunter-gatherers as being well equipped to identify free riders, suppress their behavior (as with Cephu), and, if these foragers couldn’t intimidate the free riders enough to keep them under reasonably good control, get rid of them.

  WHY DIDN’T GENETIC FREE RIDERS JUST GO AWAY?

  Obviously, severe social punishment can heavily damage the genetic interests of deviants who would controversially put their own personal prerogatives ahead of group interests. However, even after thousands of generations of such punishment, there obviously are still some rather strong innate tendencies to take free rides, as indicated so eloquently in Table III and also by the hunter-gatherer capital punishment statistics we examined at the end of Chapter 4. If group punishment has been so damaging to free riders for thousands of generations, we certainly must ask how the genes they carry have managed to persist so strongly in our human gene pools.

  The answer is unobvious but simple: to the extent that many potential free riders take note of such punishment, and use their consciences to restrain themselves and stay out of trouble, this keeps them alive and well because in effect they have been “defanged”— and therefore are not targets of social control even though by genetic metaphor their poison sacs remain intact.28 The implications for the selection of altruistic traits are profound, for if free riders usually don’t dare to express their predatory tendencies, their enormous competitive advantage over altruists largely goes away. And this means that as long as the altruists are being compensated by reputational benefits, the playing field can be close to level. Indeed, given that the more serious free riders may lose far more than they gain because of punishment, the field may be much better than leveled.

  If harshly punitive social selection effectively intimidates most would-be free riders, conscience functions also slow down these deviants because values and rules they have internalized enable them to anticipate shame and loss of reputation. For mathematical modelers this means that behaviorally little-expressed free-rider genes can remain statistically salient in human gene pools—at the same time that the genes of altruists can also remain numerous as long as the altruists are somehow being compensated. Williams’s well-respected models do not really account for this peculiarly human outcome.

  In future research on humans, I believe this phenotypic suppression of free-riding behavior is something that any theorist trying to resolve the paradox of altruism must reckon with. Of course, I realize that Williams’s elegant and aggressively promulgated models have captured many hearts and minds, and that there’s a beautiful logic in straightforwardly equating free-riding tendencies (genotype) with actual free-riding behavior (phenotype). But people in small bands are so good at discouraging free riders at the level of phenotype that some major rethinking is in order about what is likely to be taking place at the level of genotype.

  Social behaviors like capital punishment, banishment, ostracism, and avoidance as a partner in cooperation clearly have helped in significantly suppressing the frequencies of genes that favor predatory bullying or cheating, and over time this autodomestication surely has somewhat reduced and modified our innate potential for both types of predatory free riding.29 However, in terms of explaining altruism, I believe that the still more important effect has been to frighten potential free riders so much that they’ll desist from their depredations—even though their predatory inclinations are retained and passed on to offspring.

  Add this all up, and what we have is a system of social control that can drastically reduce the genetic fitness of more driven free riders whose consciences can’t keep these dangerous traits under control, but that allows the more “moderate,” would-be free riders to control themselves in matters that would otherwise bring punishment and still express their competitive tendencies in ways that are socially acceptable. It’s for this reason that free riders haven’t just gone away, and this is reflected strongly in the tables. In fact, egalitarian human bands predictably have a few individuals who are unusually disposed to actively bully or cheat others in their community and pay the price. This is true after thousands of generations of social selection.

  It was earlier types of social control that caused a conscience to evolve, and it’s an evolved conscience that makes individuals so adept at this important type of self-inhibition. Yet today a fair number of risk-taking hunter-gatherers find themselves being executed, banished, ostracized, or shamed because the temptations to take free rides continue. They hope they can get away with it, but often they’re punished. Much less conspicuous are the far greater number who hold back for fear of being sanctioned and therefore do no serious damage to the altruists in the group.

  I cannot use my ethnographies to demonstrate all of this statistically, for it’s very difficult to show why a behavior is absent or how prevalent it might be if it weren’t for fear of being sanctioned or pangs of conscience. But after Ce
phu was so thoroughly humiliated, any other band members sharing his free rider’s propensity to cheat in a net hunt surely would have been seriously deterred from actively expressing such predatory behavior, for fear of being discovered, confronted, shamed, and threatened with banishment by an extremely angry group. And the same obviously went for Cephu himself. Thus, even though his free-rider genes remained in the gene pool, at the level of phenotype Cephu’s free-riding behavior very likely was curtailed. And the ill-gotten meat was confiscated, so he was in no way a winner, while his sanctioners were repaid for their modest policing efforts by eating that same ill-gotten meat.

  OTHERWORLDLY SANCTIONING

  There’s one more means of free-rider suppression, which might even be seen as a special extension of the conscience. It comes in the form of supernatural sanctioning.30 For instance, foragers often have food taboos, which I suspect began to evolve long ago because they provided a dramatic way of warning inexperienced or careless group members against eating poisonous edibles. This is just a guess.

  Table V (next page) follows my coding categories in showing just those supernatural sanctions that pertain to social behavior, and they might be seen as an extension of the conscience because consciences provide people with a means of moralistic feedback that is totally private, rather than public. Likewise, imaginary supernatural entities can quietly track behavior and then privately judge and punish the offender, just as the conscience does.31

  As a deterrent, these agencies obviously can make people who believe in them less prone to commit murder, incest, or various other antisocial acts, especially in situations where the social group is less likely to learn of the crime. And in an earlier study that focused just on supernatural sanctioning and was based on a more sizable sample of eighteen LPA foraging societies, I discovered that such sanctions were often directed against precisely the types of deviance that were conducive to free riding. Here, in Table V, I have used just the same ten societies as were used in Tables II, III, and IV, and nine of them report moralistic supernatural sanctioning.

  In the previous, more detailed study, it was clear that supernatural sanctions often are involved with food taboos. In the area of morals, they help to suppress free riding. At the bullying end of the spectrum the suppressed behaviors include murder and sorcery, and at the devious end they include thieving, lying, cheating, and lazy shirking. Thus, imaginary “overseers,” as well as real and vigilant social groups, have been suppressing free-riding behavior in most (and possibly all) LPA-type groups ever since humans became culturally modern—and probably somewhat earlier, if we assume that these supernatural ways of thinking must have taken some time to evolve.

  TABLE V MORALISTIC SUPERNATURAL SANCTIONING*

  *This table was adapted from Boehm 2008b.

  IMPORTANCE FOR HUMAN SOCIAL BIOLOGY

  If we add up all the effects seen in Tables I through V, free riders are obviously a continuing problem. However, their suppression is multi-faceted and quite potent and begins initially with a conscience, which internalizes rules that favor cooperation and disfavor social predation. The conscience serves not only as an inhibitor, but also as an early warning system that helps to keep prudent individuals from being sanctioned. Such individuals gain a fearful anticipatory awareness that the band has a variety of effective and sometimes dangerous social tools with which to manipulate, punish, or kill those who transgress. Conscience also involves a recognition that people have moral reputations and that these reputations can have social consequences in everyday life. There’s also a fear of supernatural retribution that can come even if others do not discover an individual’s deviance. In addition, there are those constant positive ideological reminders that promote extrafamilial generosity. And finally it seems likely that many people behave themselves because they enjoy feeling positively about their own conduct.

  As long as those gifted with free-rider genes hold themselves in check, they can contribute to a cooperative economic system, play the role of being a good citizen, and still carry—and transmit to their offspring—an above-average complement of free-riding genes. I hope that ultimately these findings, based on relevant statistical patterns for appropriate types of contemporary hunter-gatherers, will make others less prone to take mathematical modeling at its face value, and therefore less liable to jump to what may amount to hasty negative conclusions about the ultimate limits of human generosity.

  I say this for the benefit of general readers who have encountered such doubts in various highly popular works, such as those of Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright, and Matt Ridley,32 all of which to some degree take the standard negative stance that was so strongly promulgated by early sociobiologists like Michael Ghiselin.33 But I also say this for the benefit of thousands of evolutionary scholars—be they biologists, psychologists, economists, or anthropologists—in hopes that increasingly they will be willing to look beyond the ever-popular kin selection, reciprocal-altruism, mutualism, and narrowly defined costly signaling paradigms in their consideration of human generosity.

  Our distinctively human means of free-rider suppression are so effective that as LPA hunter-gatherers we have succeeded in transforming our living groups from ancestral hierarchical societies, in which the bullying type of free riding can be rampant, to egalitarian groups in which an individual actively expresses such tendencies only at high personal risk. Indeed, egalitarianism can stay in place only with the vigilant and active suppression of bullies, who as free riders could otherwise openly take what they wanted from others who were less selfish or less powerful.34

  In this connection, I want to propose an evolutionary credo far more optimistic than sociobiologist Michael Ghiselin’s skeptical “Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed.”35 I do acknowledge that our human genetic nature is primarily egoistic, secondarily nepotistic, and only rather modestly likely to support acts of altruism, but the credo I favor would be “Scratch an altruist, and watch a vigilant and successful suppressor of free riders bleed. But watch out, for if you scratch him too hard, he and his group may retaliate and even kill you.”

  IS THERE A SECOND-ORDER FLY IN THE OINTMENT?

  Group punishment is a crucial part of this suppression-of-free-riding scenario, and especially in evolutionary economics some scholars have raised the specter of “second-order free riders”36 as a theoretical obstacle to groups being evolved to punish predatory deviants as I have shown human foragers in fact do today—and surely did yesterday.

  The insights have come from experiments in which subjects who make unusually greedy offers to others may be punished even though the punisher, in refusing their low offer, comes out behind and therefore is paying a cost to punish. The second-order free-rider problem arises when one person abstains from punishing in order to let others pay the costs, a behavior that in real life would gain this free rider a genetic advantage. These insights are derived from formal game theory experiments that are explored mainly with college students,37 but also at times out in the field with tribesmen and a few foragers,38 all of whom have the opportunity to give up money in order to punish others who seem unduly selfish.

  As these scholars define things, participation in group punishment itself is genetically altruistic because costs are paid to do so, which means that if free riders can hold back from punishment and thereby avoid investing the time and energy, and sometimes the risk, they can avoid paying costs that others are investing for the common good. This means that even as the group is punishing would-be aggressive free riders like malicious sorcerers or other bullies, or deceptive free riders like meat-cheaters, yet another type of free rider emerges: the one who stands aside to let others do the punishing—and thus cashes in on the rewards without paying any costs.39 In theory, this should result in the advance of the genes of these free-riding nonpunishers and the decline of the genes of cost-paying punishers—to the point that genetic dispositions to join in group punishment would seriously decline and free-rider suppression as I have just describ
ed it might, in theory, just fade away.

  However, if we move from mathematical models and experimental subjects to the kind of people who’ve evolved our genes for us, my database shows that everywhere hunter-gatherers do in fact readily punish their deviants—and that at any given time some individuals will be much more active than others in doing so and that some may refrain entirely. Furthermore, my colleague Polly Wiessner, who has been doing fieldwork with the LPA !Kung Bushmen for thirty years, has never seen or heard of punishment of those who fail to join with the group in sanctioning deviants. And so far in my survey of group punishment among fifty LPA hunter-gatherers (see Tables I and IV), the punishment of nonpunishers is never mentioned in the hundreds of ethnographies even though punishment does take place so regularly—and even though there are plenty of abstentions.

  My own opinion is that these abstentions need have no relation to free-rider genes. For instance, in dealing with the Mbuti Pygmy Cephu’s arrogant cheating, most members of the band actively shamed him, but members of the several households that were genealogically close to him were obviously staying to one side and appeared to be neutral.40 I believe that this simply involves social factors that apply to everyone, not just to those disposed to be free riders. By this I mean that it is quite predictable—and understandable by the rest of the group—that the close relatives or associates of a deviant may choose to stand back and let others deal with him harshly.

  Such abstention may give the appearance of classical free riding, then, but over the long run there’s no such genetic effect because the structure of social role expectations explains these abstentions—without any need for free-rider modeling. One day I abstain because it’s my brother who has been caught as a thief, but I don’t actively support him either. Another time I actively participate in group sanctioning because it’s not a close relative who is the deviant.