In addition to selection working below the level of the organism, we have come to understand (since the 1960s) that selection also works above the individual—at the level of the social group.28 Natural selection at the level of family or genetic community is called kin selection, and it is one of the driving engines of social evolution.29 Many social animals, besides ourselves, set aside their selfish urges to engage in altruistic behaviors (like social grooming, food sharing, protection, and task cooperation). Kin selection is a way to understand how seemingly “disadvantaging behavior” could have invisible but powerful genetic advantages.
Social insects, like ants or bees, are good examples of groups that flourish even when some individuals are disadvantaged (e.g., workers are sterile and have no way to pass on their genes directly, but their larger gene pool—the hive or colony—benefits from their many sacrifices). Or ground squirrels, for example, that call out alert chirps to warn their companions of an impending threat can save a clan of squirrels, but the chirp itself brings the predator’s attention to the chirper. How could altruistic behavior be selected for if natural selection only operated at the level of each individual? Chirping would be wiped out quickly, unless the family of related squirrels benefited substantially and lived on to procreate the virtually same gene pool (including the altruistic chirping trait). As Stephen Jay Gould puts it, “By benefitting relatives, altruistic acts preserve an altruist’s genes even if the altruist himself will not be the one to perpetuate them.”30 These cases are just the hard cases (extreme altruism) that prove the rule: kin will frequently compromise their own advantage in favor of their relatives.31
When biologists Paul Sherman and John Hoogland studied ground squirrel and prairie dog calling behaviors, they independently confirmed that warning calls become much more frequent and intense when kin are nearby.32 Animals will also engage in “rescue missions” against predators, if their own relatives have been captured or cornered. In short, preferential behaviors—stemming from biological favoritism—can be lifesaving behaviors. Attachments must be uniquely intense—etched in the mammal family experience—if they are to compete with an animal’s egocentric tendencies. Presumably blood nepotism evolved first, and this chemically based behavior developed into wider (non-blood) networks of social cohesion.33
Fig. 6. Ground squirrels and prairie dogs chirp warning signals to their clan when they perceive nearby danger. The squirrel’s warning cries are louder and more frequent if its direct family members are close by and under threat. Drawing by Stephen Asma.
The correlations of kin selection have been known for decades. The old joke is that I’ll throw myself on a hand grenade for two brothers or eight cousins—and population geneticists have actually worked out mathematical models of kin selection over time. But now, through affective neuroscience, we are beginning to understand the emotional or affective springs that trigger the behaviors associated with kin selection (at least for mammals). I don’t do a rational calculation when a hand grenade falls in the room, still less does a prairie dog do math to figure out if it should chirp more warnings when its siblings are nearby. The engines of nepotistic action are not rational but emotional or chemical.34
Rational or Emotional Motives
Your emotional brain, the limbic system, is a natural nepotist. Your rational neocortex, however, is much more principled. The idea that everyone deserves equal treatment, that everyone has equal claim upon resources, or that everyone has equal value as my kin are all foreign to the intrinsically hierarchical emotional brain. This is because our experience-based values (whether it is a valuable object, person, or idea) are originally encoded in the course of psychological development by feelings (e.g., chemically grounded oxytocin, opioid, or dopamine patterns).
The biological process of filial favoritism is a pattern or a happening—a mammalian tendency, not a principle. My own view is that many high principles take their start from lowly patterns or tendencies, but our smart neocortical rationalizations abstract these principles out of the more humble experiential patterns. By this process, an affective experience of bonding with my favorites can be inductively extrapolated into a rough-and-ready rule of action—a principle we might call loyalty. Now could this extrapolation continue up the social domains to generate a rule of general reciprocity? The Romans used to say, “Do ut des,” or “I give, so that you will give.” And then could this “I’ll scratch your back …” rule of thumb evolve further into a depersonalized egalitarian principle?35
The answers to these questions may be forthcoming in the future (as we blend neurophilosophy, social psychology, and anthropology), but one thing that’s clear from the biology of bias is this: we don’t come into the world as selfish Hobbesian mercenaries. Contrary to the usual pessimistic contract theory, we mammals don’t start out as self-serving egotistical individuals who then need to be socialized (through custom, reason, and law) to endure the compromises of tribal living.36 Rather, we start out in a sphere of emotional-chemical values—created by family care—in which feelings of altruistic bonding are preset before the individual ego even extricates itself.
Freud’s famous assumption Homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to other men) not only tries to posit the isolated aggressive interests of the early ego phase, but also the artificial nature of morality itself. Biologist Frans de Waal calls this the “veneer theory” because “it sees morality as a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding an otherwise selfish and brutish nature.”37 De Waal contrasts this veneer theory with the Darwinian view that morality is a “natural outgrowth of the social instincts, hence continuous with the sociality of other animals.” The story I’ve been telling about ancient emotional kin bonding dovetails with this Darwinian view that moral sentiments are early and foundational for both individual and species ethics.
Obviously, I think there is an ancient favoritism instinct, and it’s not the usual individualistic selfish instinct that veneer theorists might call “human nature.” It’s a tribal instinct that has altruism already built in (caring and being cared for are intrinsically, even intoxicatingly rewarding). But I do not wish to suggest that a favoritism instinct renders fairness as a mere figment. We are finding more and more that there is a fairness instinct as well.
Food sharing is quite normal between mammal mothers and offspring, but rare across other social relationships. Chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys, however, have been shown to engage in some reciprocal sharing between friends or allies. More interestingly, they also seem to have a keen sense of fairness—as it applies to the distribution of food. Primatologists Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan trained capuchin monkeys to perform a bartering task. Two capuchins, in adjacent cages, were trained to take a token from a trainer and then trade the token back for a piece of food. Each monkey could easily witness the barter of the other. The food reward for this barter was usually a slice of cucumber, which capuchins like to eat. But grapes are universally loved by capuchins as a delicacy. If one monkey bartered her token and received only a cucumber slice, but then watched as the other monkey received a grape for the same kind of token, the first monkey would become incensed—refusing to play on, throwing tokens back at the experimenter, protesting, and even punishing the lucky grape recipient.38
Having expectations about resource distributions and having aversion to inequity probably evolved in social animals that cooperate to secure food. Of course, detecting fairness and being fair are two different things, but at least some primates seem to have a natural ability for this rudimentary morality.
My suspicion, however, is that this kind of mammalian fairness is a latecomer on the evolutionary stage. Hierarchically arranged animal groups would distribute food on a different model than egalitarianism. Dominant animals get more, and subordinates get less—that is a kind of fairness that we recognized in chapter 1 as a kind of meritocracy notion of deserts. Presumably dominant animals do more to further the survival of the group. But even before this early social system of resource distri
bution, blood ties must have trumped most competing claims on resources. I suspect that true fairness developed in tandem with the cognitive advances of primate neocortical evolution.39
Confl icting Brain Systems
One tantalizing piece of evidence that suggests both the emotive foundation of ethics and the primacy of favoritism is the VMPC brain-scan study. The VMPC, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, regulates emotions (among other things) and works in intimate communication with the ancestral limbic system. Brain-scan technology is being mixed with old-school philosophy dilemmas to reveal some very interesting insights.
The classic trolley-car ethics experiment is well known to many. It’s a thought experiment that asks you to imagine yourself on a bridge overlooking a speeding trolley car that’s hurtling toward a group of five unaware pedestrians. The track splits in two directions, and you have the track-switching lever in front of you. You can, if you act in time, switch the trolley onto the other track, avoiding the deaths of the five pedestrians. But the alternate track has one pedestrian walking unawares, and he will certainly die if you do the switch. So, what do you do? Save the many and kill the one? Leave it to run its own course? These and countless other lifeboat scenarios and thought experiments are designed to reveal our ethical intuitions. Most people, it turns out, will try to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number. They’ll crunch the utilitarian calculus and throw the switch to save the five pedestrians.
The outcomes of the thought experiment change radically, however, when you replace the lone track-walker with your brother or sister, mother or father, or even best friend. The guy on the other track is not some abstract stranger, but one of your own favorite people. Now the utilitarian solution unravels quickly. Most people cannot overcome their biases in order to “do the right thing” (in the utilitarian sense).
Neuroscientists started scanning brain activity of subjects who were posed these ethical dilemmas, and definite patterns emerged. When a patient’s VMPC is normal, they almost always answer the ethical dilemmas in favor of their favorites, not in favor of the majority. Healthy emotional VMPC subjects are guided by their biases. But if the emotional VMPC is damaged, the subject becomes extremely utilitarian (hyper-rational) in their responses. Emotionally compromised subjects have no hesitation (at least in thought experiments) to sacrifice their own kin for the greater good. Citing studies in Neuron and Nature, William Saletan states that scanning technology reveals a correspondence between utilitarian ethics and the cognitive control systems of the brain. Whereas the older socio-emotional limbic brain, inherited from our mammal ancestors, seems to inform our more biased ethical judgments.40
Fig. 7. The limbic system of the brain is the nexus of our emotional life. It privileges our associations, codes our experience, with all manner of bias. (A) amygdala, (B) hypothalamus, (C) mammillary body, (D) hippocampus, (E) septum, (F) fornix, (G) cingulate gyrus, and (H) VMPC. Drawing by Stephen Asma.
Egalitarian fairness (especially the “disinterested” form) is more cognitive than emotional. It’s probably a late outgrowth of tribal reciprocity—which is itself an outgrowth of offspring bonding, and the evolution of kin altruism. Most animals are only “fair” inside their social groups, not outside them. So, Homo homini lupus may be a truer slogan than the pessimists think. The pessimistic interpretation—typified by Thomas Hobbes’s famous view of nature as a “war of all against all”—should be revised in light of real wolf nature. Wolves can be highly aggressive, but their fierceness is for those outside their pack, outside their tribe. Inside their hierarchic pack, they are loyal and semi-altruistic. Wolves (and we) are more tribal-centric than egocentric.
Does that mean we should be animals? No, of course not. We, unlike wolves, can reach beyond genetic programming, and in many cases we should. We can bond with almost any caregiver. Blood is not necessary. And fresh developmental experiences, fresh habits and behaviors, can route and reroute genetic expression (i.e., epigenetic pliability). The system has play and flexibility in it.
Biological favoritism starts as an automatic chemical bonding between parents and offspring, but as our mental sophistication grows, we begin to recognize the subjective feeling of favoritism (philosophers would call this the phenomenology of favoritism—how it feels to prefer and be preferred). Here I think we recognize many of the emotions that we associate with the moral life: sympathy, empathy, jealousy, love. And it is not enough to simply have emotional tendencies. They may be necessary, but they are not sufficient for a healthy ethics. Darwin points out that “sympathy, though gained as an instinct, is also much strengthened by exercise or habit.”41
Fig. 8. Wolves can be highly aggressive, but their fierceness is for those outside their pack—outside their tribe. Inside their hierarchic pack, they are loyal and less aggressive. They are not egalitarian in their social organization, but neither are they egocentrically selfish loners. Drawing by Stephen Asma.
Paleoanthropology provides evidence that our ancestors started hoarding together stone tools, food, and other resources at collective sites around 2 million years ago. Around 800,000 years ago, early humans began gathering around hearths, for many purposes, including safety from predators, sharing food, information, comfort, conserving resources, and warmth. Our big-brain explosion occurred around 500,000 years ago (followed by communication with symbols 250,000 years ago, longer childhood and adolescence 160,000 years ago, and plant and animal domestication 10,000 years ago).
A big brain and the development of human culture meant the expansion of small-scale blood ties to larger frames of bias (e.g., friendship). Marriage, or more accurately pair bonding, was just a subset of resource alliance, but it must have been one of the cultural innovations that enlarged the sphere of favoritism beyond blood. In the contemporary developed West, it may be hard to see the purpose of marriage as kin merging and expansion, but throughout the developing world these expedient origins are still obvious.42
Our big brains allow us great flexibility beyond blood, but our allegiance groups are still, at the core, “affective communities”—human clusters of shared emotional connection. This will prove to be decisive when I argue, in chapter 6, that our allegiance groups will always remain small.
Facts and Values
All this raises the vexed question of facts versus values. I have been explaining some emerging biochemical facts about human (and mammal) favoritism. Philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) famously said that we cannot derive an ought (a normative statement) from an is (a factual statement). Hume had a sophisticated view of the passions and may have agreed even with the idea that a limbic system can transform a perception (is) into a motivation (ought), but many subsequent philosophers have interpreted Hume’s logical is/ought split as a prohibition against ethical naturalism.43 I cannot share this skepticism about the is/ought problem. I stand with other ethical naturalists, like Aristotle and Darwin, who believed that facts about human biology are relevant for our normative ethical values. If you want to know what is good for human beings, Aristotle thought, you don’t study The Good (as Plato tried). Instead, you study human beings.
I’ll invoke Aristotle’s idea that humans, like other species, have a nature or a telos. This is usually misunderstood—partly because the medieval schoolmen “baptized” Aristotle’s biology and reinterpreted it in a cosmic teleology framework—but Aristotle just meant that each species had natural tendencies or powers or virtues (areté), and you could discern what those were by empirically investigating the animal’s life. Horses seem built to run, sloths seem built to crawl upside down, human hands built to grasp, fish fins to swim, and so on. Some of these teloi or natures are species-specific (e.g., all dogs have dichromatic vision—they see in shades of two colors, instead of our three) and some teloi apply to larger classes of animals (e.g., all mammals give birth to live young).
“Telos” in this sense should not be interpreted as purpose, because that is very misleading and suggests a Designer metaphysics. Instead, t
elos is a way of isolating unique natural abilities, tendencies, or predispositions. And—something Aristotle didn’t know—we now understand that such predispositions are genetically engraved (albeit with some significant plasticity) over evolutionary time.
My claim is that favoritism is natural for humans in the same way that breastfeeding is natural. Of course, we can always ask: Granted, we do factually show preferential favoritism, but should we do so? Maybe evolution has constructed us for breastfeeding, but we now wish to culturally break from this practice (because more nutritious options have been discovered, or some such reasoning). Maybe evolution has constructed us for preferential favoritism, but we now wish to break from nepotism and pursue saintly egalitarianism.
The twentieth century certainly saw some social engineering experiments that tried to break the natural biases of family. Mao Zedong in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia, for example, tried to force a radical egalitarianism, but it was a disaster. I suspect that we could try to teach ourselves to be egalitarian in all things (Mao and Pol Pot even tried to break down the nuclear family), but this would be like teaching ourselves to walk on our hands—it can be done perhaps, but why not use the powers that evolution has shaped? In this case, why not use the nepotistic affective sentiments themselves as a launching pad for ethical direction?
Obviously, I think that bonding, bias, and even loyalty are biological, but that is not why I think they should be respected as virtues. Favoritism is not good just because it is natural. I take it as obvious that filial love is intrinsically part of the good life (the happy life of actualized potential), and I don’t feel compelled to give arguments for such a self-evident truth. But I also hope to make the case that favoritism can segue into the wider public sphere and do much good there as well. The coming chapters of this book will endeavor to articulate a variety of arguments for why favoritism can be a legitimate good in the larger cosmopolitan ethic.
Against Fairness Page 5
