Do you believe in absolute good and evil? Is it as clear cut
as Harry Potter versus Voldemort, the Sith versus the Jedi? Is there no war at
all between good and evil; is there just this gray area where sometimes good
people do bad things? Are good and evil even things that have to exist? Can one
eliminate the other once and for all? What is evil? What is good?
Before addressing whether “good” and “evil” exist, it’s
necessary to first define what exactly these terms represent. In the most
general sense, “good” is anything that falls within the range of a society’s
moral code. “Bad,” or more strongly, “evil,” is anything that goes against it,
though the two terms quantify varying degrees of moral deviation. Good and evil
are thus defined in terms of a preexisting system of morality, one that can
differ dramatically from group to group. That ultimately begs the question (or
rather, questions): why, and how, do
groups establish a moral code? Why do different cultures’ morality systems
differ so vastly, yet retain a fundamental core that will, for instance, define
murder as an “evil” action irrespective of cultural differences?
The answer to that (or rather, those) lies in this simple
fact: humans are social creatures and evolved to operate within groups. The
first homo sapiens of 200,000 years
ago hunted in bands of roughly fifty to one hundred; we see this mirrored in
the societies of our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees, who operate
in groups of roughly fifty individuals and, incidentally, show signs of
possessing a moral code. The primary advantage of operating within these bands
of fifty is much easier access to food. A primate hunting for food alone is
going to have a tough time: he or she can only collect so much food, and even
then only the fruits and vegetables that he happens to notice in the African
underbrush, and only the game that he is able to capture and kill by himself. In
a marginal environment like the African savanna, that primate’s diet would be
abstemious at best; most likely he would not live long enough to reproduce. But
a group is different. It can divide up labor between persons, sending one group
out to hunt for game and another to gather fruit, increasing the chances that
somebody will come back with something
to eat, and then in a greater quantity than would be possible for an
individual. It is more equipped to deal with predator attacks and thus
dramatically increases the likelihood that its members will reach reproductive
age. As the goal of all life is, as Richard Dawkins put it, “to pass on one’s
genes,” the ability of groups to ensure that more members will reproduce became
so vital that the tendency to form social groups is now embedded within the
genes of every one of us. This is evidenced by the fact that peoples’ capacity
to form meaningful social bonds caps at around 100 people. Group operation is
simply in our design.
The reason I’m boring you with this superfluous mass of
information (by the way, congrats if you’ve made it this far) is to emphasize how
essential these groups are to the function of human society. Fundamentally, we
all seek to ensure that our group is stable and operating at maximum efficiency;
and this is precisely where morality comes on stage. Darwin “postulated that
moral men might not do any better than immoral men but that tribes of moral men
would certainly ‘have an immense advantage’ over fractious bands of pirates” (Individual versus Group in Natural Selection,
Scientific American, 2008.) Groups that value sharing, condemn killing, and
reward altruism will have improved group cohesion and conflict resolution as a
result, thereby maximizing the amount of resources the group members can acquire
as a body and promoting the security of the largest number of individuals. It’s
easy to see why, then, people are so ready to laud actions they consider to be
“good deeds” and censure that which they see as “evil.” What those judgments
amount to are measures of compliance to the moral code, which, at its root,
exists to promote the safety and efficiency of the social groups that we as
human beings build our lives upon. What this ultimately brings us to is the
conclusion that if judgments of good and evil stem only from the evolutionary
desire to promote group cohesion, then they are not really absolute, but
tailored to promote the wellbeing of the group and ensure that the largest
number of genes get passed on. Consider the American attitude toward soldiers, for example. In America, we
love our troops. By a wide margin, they are considered to be “good.” What we
might not realize is that their actions represent to us a kind of kin
selection, or the phenomenon in which an organism will sacrifice its own life
in order to ensure that the largest number of its relatives’ genes get passed
on. Whether the soldiers’ fighting on our behalf is actually “good” or not is
irrelevant. In light of the evolutionary interests of our “group,” it is good.
It ensures that the highest number of our genes will get passed on. “Good” is not an objective measure, but a
subjective one, serving only the interests of the group.
Some might point to the fact that actions like murder are
considered evil in nearly every society, even those that have never had contact
with one another, as evidence of the objectivity of morality; but when one
appreciates morality’s evolutionary function, he or she will recognize that in
man’s early environment, the killing of a group member would have hampered
unity and therefore hampered the strength of a coordinated group effort to find
food. Thus, in nearly every society that has ever existed, murder is considered
to be morally wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment