Does the above imply that we should not behave morally in our day to day interactions with other human beings?  Of course not!  There is no other plausible way to regulate those interactions so as to minimize conflict and maximize mutual benefit.  We are certainly not intelligent enough to accomplish the same thing in real time using our meager powers of reason.  Imagine the tedium of a conversation in which each party had to carefully reason about the potential outcome and impact of every word he spoke.  It is to the advantage of all, or at least most of us, that moral rules exist, and that their violation be punished or otherwise prevented.  It is, however, reasonable to insist that those rules conform to human nature, be as simple and efficient as possible, and not be motivated by the claims of any religion, whether spiritual or secular.

The same cosmic myopia exists today a fortiori in the dreams of colonizing other star systems. It is an expecially dangerous delusion if we see emigration into space as a solution to be taken when we have used up this planet.

and,

Another principle that I believe can be justified by scientific evidence so far is that nobody is going to emigrate from this planet, not ever.

In my humble opinion, Wilson is wrong about interstellar travel.  I hereby predict that we will colonize planets in other star systems.  Our survival depends on it, and our species has a strong inclination to survive.  I suspect his opinion is motivated less by a sober assessment of the technological possibility of interstellar travel than by ideological concerns about the environment.  For example,

Surely one moral precept we can agree on is to stop destroying our birthplace, the only home humanity will ever have.  The evidence for climate warming, with industrial pollution as the principle cause, is now overwhelming.

I suspect a certain rather irascible Czech physicist may take exception to that comment.  In any case, while I admit to having a personal preference that the planet not be destroyed, but I would certainly not presume to elevate such idiosyncratic whims to the level of a “moral precept.”  Here, like so many other modern thinkers who should know better, Wilson is treating moral precepts as objective things.  In this case, he is suggesting that not destroying the planet can be legitimized as a “good-in-itself” by virtue of everyone agreeing on it.  Otherwise, his comment becomes pointless.  He probably wouldn’t agree, because he writes elsewhere,

There is a principle to be learned by studying the biological origins of moral reasoning… If such greater understanding amounts to the “moral relativism so fervently despised by the doctrinally righteous, so be it.

I can certainly sympathize with Wilson’s aversion to the doctrinally righteous or, as I would call them, the pathologically pious.  However, virtually in the same breath, he falls back into the same old fallacy, writing,

It is that outside the clearest ethical precepts, such as the condemnation of slavery, child abuse, and genocide, which all will agree should be opposed everywhere without exception, there is a larger gray domain inherently difficult to navigate.

Here we have the familiar “50 billion flies can’t be wrong” justification of the legitimacy of moral precepts.  Wilson’s comment begs the question of what qualitative difference exists between “clear ethical precepts,” and all the rest that lie in the gray area.  If, as he asserts, the origins of moral reasoning are biological or, in a word, evolved, in what way is it at all reasonable to claim that condemnation of slavery, child abuse, and genocide can have an objective existence as ethical precepts at all?  Presumably, the thought that there even was such a thing as “genocide” never occurred to those of our forebears among whom the “biological origins of moral reasoning” evolved.   Wilson’s implicit acceptance of an objective morality is evident elsewhere in the book.  For example,

For scientific as well as for moral reasons, we should learn to promote human biological diversity for its own sake insted of using it to justify prejudice and conflict.

On what, exactly, are we to base the legitimacy of these “moral reasons”?  In what sense was the “promotion of human biological diversity” relevant to the australopithecines?  Wilson has some other comments on the origin of moral precepts that are bound to make the detractors of group selection see red, such as,

An unavoidable and perpetual war exists between honor, virtue, and duty, the products of group selection, on one side, and selfishness, cowardice, and hypocrisy, the products of individual selection, on the other side.

At the risk of committing lèse-majesté, I must admit that I find such sweeping generalizations somewhat over the top.  Turning to less controversial subjects, Wilson mentions the concept of a superorganism in several places, such as,

The queen and her offspring are often called superorganisms…

This circumstance lends credence to the view that the colony can be viewed as an individual organism or, more precisely, an individual superorganism.

and,

In this sense, I have argued, the primitive colony is a superorganism.

It would have been nice if Wilson had mentioned the great South African, Eugene Marais, who first proposed the idea of a superorganism in the context of his studies of termites, in the course of these discussions.  Readers of today will find some remarkably modern insights in books such as The Soul of the White Ant and The Soul of the Ape.  To say Marais was ahead of his time is an understatement.

In any case, I hope all the controversy Wilson’s latest is bound to inspire won’t have the unfortunate effect of toppling him from his exalted state as the “father of evolutionary psychology.”  The field has enough unpersons as it is.  Regardless, some rewriting of textbooks will likely be in order.  For example, in David Buss’ Evolutionary Psychology he refers to the “bulk of the theoretical tools” in Wilson’s Sociobiology as “inclusive fitness theory, parental investment theory, parent-offspring conflict theory, and reciprocal altuism theory.”  Might it not, perhaps, be best, to avoid “confusing” young undergraduates, to just let Wilson’s group selection faux pas pass in silence?  If not, and his head must indeed roll, I hereby nominate Charles Darwin as the new “father of evolutionary psychology.”  At least he will be a safe choice.

We suggest that the predisposition to form aggressive coalitions is so deep-seated within us that all humanity is compelled to live by two profoundly contradictory moral systems. We have the morals of the troop, expressed by “Thou shalt not kill,” and the morals of the aggressive male coalition, also explicitly spelled out in the Old Testament, “And when the Lord they God has delivered (a city) into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword… Whether we want to or not, we all distinguish between our ingroup and various outgroups.

This pretentious “suggestion,” of course, amounts to nothing more than a belated acceptance by the authors that writers who said the same thing decades ago were right after all. For example, from Sir Arthur Keith, writing in the 1930′s,

Human nature has a dual constitution; to hate as well as to love are parts of it; and conscience may enforce hate as a duty just as it enforces the duty of love. Conscience has a two-fold role in the soldier: it is his duty to save and protect his own people and equally his duty to destroy their enemies… Thus conscience serves both codes of group behavior; it gives sanction to practices of the code of enmity as well as the code of amity.

Somewhat later, Robert Ardrey wrote about the same behavioral traits a great deal more clearly, in a much pleasanter style, and with a much better grasp of their implications for the future of our species. He referred to them as the Amity/Enmity Complex, and devoted a chapter with that title to the subject in The Territorial Imperative. Of course, Ardrey was a mere playwright who, lacking the academic gravitas of such worthies as Potts and Hayden, “rose above his station” in insisting on such a palpably obvious aspect of our nature at a time when the orthodox in anthropology were still bedazzled by the Blank Slate. As readers of this blog are aware, his reward for such pretentiousness has been the gross distortion of his legacy and consignment to oblivion. And as for Keith, comically enough, the authors actually do mention him, but in a context that has nothing to do with his writings on ingroup/outgroup behavior. Apparently they were loath to be upstaged. But I digress.

Actually, one should cheer on reading a book like this. It represents the victory of an obvious truth over the quasi-religious dogmas posing as “science” that prevailed for decades in the behavioral sciences, according to which human nature was either nonexistent or insignificant. Alas, I could only sigh. It’s a bittersweet book for anyone who’s actually been paying attention to what’s been happening in the field now referred to as evolutionary psychology for the last 50 years. Fifteen years ago, Potts and Hayden would have been almost universally vilified as fascists and demons of the right for publishing such a book, just as Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz and E.O. Wilson were in their day. Now, instead of chanting “four legs good, two legs bad,” the academic sheep are chanting “four legs good, two legs better,” just like in Orwell’s Animal Farm. Ironically, Potts and Hayden belong to the very milieu of the academic left that would have been foremost in hurling down righteous anathemas on their heads 15 years ago. Apparently all unawares, they still live in the ideological box of that most obscurantist and dogmatic of ingroups. It’s delicious, really. They give a perfect description their own ingroup in the book without even realizing it.

Allow me to illustrate with a few quotations from the book. Of course, every good ingroup must have its outgroup or, in the vernacular, bad guys. For Potts and Hayden, these are the usual stock villains of the academic left; conservative Republicans, Israel, evangelical Christians, evil white people against pure and innocent Indians, etc. For example,

On May 26, 1637, during the war with the Pequot Indians in New England Connecticut Colony, a Puritan army commanded by John Mason surrounded a small wooden fort in which “six or seven hundred” Pequot Indians were sheltering. Mason ordered the wooden palisade surrounding the fort set on fire. Only seven Indians escaped alive.

This bit of “history,” in all likelihood unbeknownst to Professors Potts and Hayden, is such a vicious and outrageous lie that it’s worth addressing it at length. From a work entitled “History of the Indian Wars,” published in 1846 by Henry Trumble, who was anything but an inveterate hater of Indians, we read,

In June, 1634, they (the Pequots) treacherously murdered Capt. Stone and Capt. Norton, who had been long in the habit of visiting them occasionally to trade. In August, 1635, they inhumanly murdered a Mr. Weeks and his whole family, consisting of a wife and six children, and soon after murdered the wife and children of a Mr. Williams, residing near Hartford.

In spite of many such outrages, the colonists signed a treaty of peace with the Pequots. Trumbull continues,

Soon after the conclusion of peace with the Pequots, the English, to put their fair promises to the test, sent a small boat into the river, on the borders of which they resided, with the pretence of trade; but so great was the treachery of the natives, that, after succeeding by fair promises in enticing the crew of the boat on shore, they were inhumanly murdered… A few families were at this time settled at or near Weathersfield, Ct. the whole of whom were carried away captives. Two girls, daughters of Mr. Gibbons of Hartford, were in the most brutal manner put to death. After gashing their flesh with their knives, the Indians filled their wounds with hot embers, in the mean time mimicking their dying groans.

The colonists had no illusion about their fate if they were defeated by the Pequots. As it was they could hardly hunt or cultivate their fields and were in danger of starvation. If they suffered a serious defeat they and their families would likely be butchered. The “army” Potts and Hayden referred to consisted of less than 100 men, the entire effective fighting force of the Connecticut colony. It was accompanied by several hundred Indian allies who, at the moment of crisis, stayed in the rear and watched as noncombatants. It did not surround the Pequot palisade and coolly set it on fire, an act that would have been impossible with such a tiny band facing an effective force of several hundred Indian warriors inside. Here is how Trumbull describes the action:

When within a few rods of (the palisade), Capt. Mason sent for Uncas and Wequash (leaders of the Indian allies), desiring them in their Indian manner to harangue and prepare their men for combat. They replied, that their men were much afraid, and could not be prevailed on to advance any farther. “Go then,” said Capt. Mason, “and request them not to retire, but to surround the fort at any distance they please, and see what courage Englishmen can display!” They day was now dawning, and no time was to be lost. The fort was soon in view. The soldiers pressed forward, animated by the reflection that it was not for themselves alone that they were to fight, but for their parents, wives, children, and countrymen! As they approached the fort within a short distance, they were discovered by a Pequot sentinel, who roared out, Owanux! Owanux! (Englishmen, Englishmen.) The troops pressed on, and as the Indians were rallying, poured in upon them the contents of their muskets, and instantly hastened to the principal entrance to the fort, rushed in, sword in hand. An important moment, this; for, notwithstanding the blaze and thunder of the fire-arms, the Pequots made a powerful resistance. Sheltered by their wigwams, and rallied by their sachems and squaws, they defended themselves, and, in some instances, attacked the English with a resolution that would have done honor to the Romans. After a bloody and desperate conflict of near two hours, in which hundreds of the Indians were slain, and many of the English killed and wounded, victory still hung in suspense. In this critical state of the action, Capt. Mason had recourse to a successful expedient. Rushing into a wigwam within the fort, he seized a brand of fire, and in the mean time crying out to his men, “We must burn them!” communicated it to the mats with which the wigwams were covered, by which means the whole fort was soon wrapt in flames. As the fire increased, the English retired and formed a circle around the fort. The Mohegans and Narragansets, who remained idle spectators to the bloody carnage, mustered courage sufficient to form another circle in the rear of them. The enemy were now in a deplorable situation. Death inevitably was their portion. Sallying forth from their burning cells, they were shot or cut in pieces by the English; many, perceiving it impossible to escape the vigilance of the troops, threw themselves into the flames.

So much for Potts’ and Hayden’s tall tale about the “army” that coolly burned the inoffensive Indians in cold blood. The little band of 90 men knew that if they failed on that day, nothing would protect their wives and children from the Pequots who had demonstrated their ruthlessness on many previous occasions. If the authors or anyone else know of any source material disputing Trumbull’s account, I hereby challenge them to bring it forward.

Forgive me for going on at such length, but I get really tired of the “noble savage” schtick. Moving right along to Israel and the Republicans, we find them, too, consigned to the outer darkness reserved for outgroups, far from the enlightened halls of the wise, the good, and the just inhabited by the author’s academic ingroup:

We cannot remind ourselves too often of the ubiquitous nature of our Stone Age behaviors. On the same day in 2006, President Bush announced he would veto a Senate Bill loosening restrictions on stem cell research and permit the export of bombs to Israel to use it its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where collateral killing of civilians was certain. When I was a laboratory researcher, I needed a powerful microscope to even see a bunch of stem cells, and personally I would have been much less troubled by flushing stems cells down the sink than dropping a bomb on a house full of women and children. Yet our ingrained ability to dehumanize others is so strong, and our ability to “justify” war so facile, that intelligent and well-intentioned people spend more time worrying about embryos than children or adults – provided of course that those children and adults live somewhere else and are not part of out ingroup.

And so the good professors self-identify their own ingroup. I need hardly mention there’s another side to this story. Anyone worthy of the name of “scientist” should have been aware of the fact and mentioned it, whether they personally agree with it or not. Instead, Potts and Hayden are content to merely condemn their Republican and Israeli outgroups for “Stone Age behavior.” Here’s another example of “Stone Age behavior” that, coincidentally enough, once again relates to two other iconic “bad guys” of the ideological left, evangelical Christians and the military:

Michael Drosnin, who wrote The Bible Code, implying extraterrestrial forces embedded a secret code in the Bible only modern computers can unravel, was invited to brief “top military intelligence officials” in the Pentagon following 9/11. Whatever the original evolutionary benefit of blind faith in such patently ridiculous explanations of the world may have been, its application to modern international relations is clearly and wildly maladaptive.

This version of the Drosnin affair is more or less an urban myth, but it fits the narrative, so Potts and Hayden simply swallowed it, apparently without even bothering to do a little fact checking on Google. Apparently they found their version in the New York Times, which should have been an obvious tipoff as to its ideological provenance, but no doubt the Grey Lady is the soul of objectivity as far as the authors are concerned. The evangelical Christian outgroup comes in for a good deal more abuse, counter-intuitively, it would seem, as Muslims have been responsible for most of the deliberate religiously motivated mayhem against civilians. Remember, though, that we are in the realm of ideological narrative, not facts. For example, referring to the latest Gulf war,

Blair did not wear religion on his sleeve while in office, but Bush paraded his faith enthusiastically. His religious outlook resonated with many American fundamentalist Christians, whose contrived interpretations of the rambling Book of Revelation have sinister implications for war and violence. In one strain, a belief has emerged that the Temple of Solomon has to be rebuilt in Jerusalem in order for the Second Coming to take place – and that “keeping” Jerusalem Jewish is a necessary step on the way. Beyond being poor theology, this interpretation encourages foolish military action in order to hasten the coming of the end times, but still finds a receptive audience in the United States.

It struck me that this yarn about the sinister Christians lurking behind every bush in the United States had an unmistakable British ring to it, and, sure enough, Potts originally came from merry old England. If you’re interested in “comparative religion,” read Sex and War alongside Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, which is larded with lots of similar horror stories about the “American Taliban.” I think you’ll find the tone of the two books remarkably similar. As an American atheist, it seems to me our cousins from the old country have a marked tendency to lay it on a bit too thick when it comes to American Christian fundamentalism.

In short, what we have here is a chimera, a couple of professors who come from the same milieu from which the fiercest Blank Slaters used to emanate writing about ingroups and outgroups as if they were devoted disciples of Robert Ardrey, all ensconced in a thick, hoary crust of ante-deluvian leftist ideological shibboleths. One of the more interesting aspects of the book has to do with the relevance of its theme to moral behavior. Intellectually, the authors know, or at least pay lip service to the fact that there is no such thing as an objective, transcendental morality. For example,

Most people, however, still think of moral sentiments and religious convictions as transcendental things that come from outside of us, either reflecting some eternal truth, emanating from a supernatural power, or as instructions from a God who created us and who will reward or punish us according to how we restrain aggression or enhance empathy. History shows that this understanding of morality has not worked terribly well as a means to ending war. Our survival as a species will not depend on divine intervention but on understanding our Stone Age behaviors. Once we do that, controlling them should become an achievable goal.

And yet they simply cannot dispense with the cherished belief of all people who share the ideological box they dwell in that they represent the good, the true and the just, as opposed to members of the outgroups cited above who are slaves of the basest human behavioral predispositions. Of course, they cannot have a monopoly on truth and justice unless these things have an objective, transcendental existence of their own, so we have what Marx might have called a “contradiction.” As a result, a certain amount of doublethink is necessary. For example,

Before we look more closely at how we can rein in our warring impulses, we have first to understand the nature of what it is we are confronting. In English, we have one simple word that expresses it perfectly: evil.

In what sense does the term “evil” have any meaning if it has no objective existence? In fact the authors make it quite clear that, in their heart of hearts, they perceive morality as an objective thing-in-itself. It is not a product of evolution, but an entity having an independent existence of its own, often in conflict with evolution. For example,

…evolution is not only remorselessly amoral: it is also not nearly as efficient as we might like in pruning branches that come to bear toxic, destructive fruit.

Evolution doesn’t make morality obsolete, any more than being hungry excuses a violent mugging.

and,

Remember that evolution cares not a whit for morality, it has provided human males at the bottom of the social pile ample reason to risk everything, including violent death, rather than live a passive, sexless life without passing on their genes.

Such statements are complete gibberish, absent morality as a thing-in-itself. Evolution may not “care” about morality, but morality does not have any existence whatsoever other than as a subjective subset of the human behavioral repertoire which is itself a product of evolution. It has no independent existence other than as an evolved behavioral trait. When you say that evolution does not make morality obsolete, my dear professors, pray tell me what morality you are talking about.  Well, we can excuse this particular instance of doublethink.  After all, without virtuous indignation and a smug feeling of moral superiority, life would hold little joy for the average ideologue of the left.  Apparently the realization that they had just sawed off the limb that they and their moral superiority were sitting on was a bit much for Professors Potts and Hayden to bear.

In any case, the two find grounds for optimism. As they inform us,

Now we are finding ways to extend ingroup morality beyond national boundaries to embrace all humanity.

How, exactly, they plan to do that after roundly denouncing that vast bloc of humanity unfortunate enough to have landed in one of the familiar outgroups of the left is beyond me. Do they plan to invite them all to the University of California at Berkeley for a seminar on anger management? Perhaps they will be good enough to let us know in their next book.

No matter. We, too, can be optimistic, dear reader, for while Sex and War may be a tedious ideological tract, it is also one more data point confirming that we have finally landed safely on the far side of a paradigm shift. It and many other works of its kind emanating from the hoariest and most obscurantist caverns of academia serve as announcements that, yes, the Blank Slate really is stone, cold dead. We have finally gained acknowledgement that such a thing as human nature really does exist, and that is no small thing.

…we looked into cat eyes, the technique of giving humans cat eyes or of making their eyes more catlike. The reason is, cat eyes see nearly as well as human eyes during the day, but much better at night. We figured that if everyone had cat eyes, you wouldn’t need so much lighting, and so you could reduce global energy usage considerably. Maybe even by a shocking percentage.

I would certainly be interested in seeing a computational study demonstrating a reduction in global energy usage via genetically engineering cat-eyes “by a shocking percentage.”  Another of the professor’s great ideas is to leverage the wonders of modern genetics to create shorter humans, based on the assumption that they would have a smaller carbon footprint.  We are not informed whether the algorithm used to arrive at this conclusion took account of the possibility that short people might do even more damage to the environment by attempting to overcompensate for their parents dumb decision to produce a litter of runts.    They might, for example, have a marked tendency to buy much larger cars, eat large quantities of red meat to enhance their growth unless given especially large doses of nausea inducing drugs, or, as in the cases of Napoleon and Joseph Stalin, their tastes might run to things that are even more harmful for the environment.

The rest of the article contains more similar great ideas, and I will leave the interested reader to peruse them on his own.  Mercifully, Prof. Liao assures us that, “We are interested only in voluntary modifications.”  If that’s the case, by all means, let Prof. Liao and his like-minded colleagues tinker with the genes of their offspring as they choose.  The most likely outcome will be that they and their cat-eyed offspring will go extinct, reducing their carbon footprint to zero, to the great relief of Mother Gaia.

I note in passing that, as is usually the case with the tribe of experts in ethics currently plying their trade in our academies of higher learning, the assumption implicit in all of Prof. Liao’s pronouncements on the subject is that an “ethics object,” the veritable “Good in itself,” is floating about in the ether, free of any base evolutionary origins, and perfectly discernible in all its nuances to anyone possessed of the necessary academic gravitas.  I’m sure he’s as innocent of any coherent explanation of why one environmentally relevant behavior is “really Good,” and another is “really Evil” as any of his scholarly forebears since the time of Plato.  Get a clue, my dear Prof. Liao.  All those noble sentiments of right and justice that seem so real to you, so independent of your own mind, do not exist outside of your own mind.  They are utterly dependent on it for their existence, an existence that is purely subjective.  They were hard-wired there by Mother Nature in just that way for one reason and one reason only – because your ancestors who were fortunate enough to have similar programming had the good fortune to survive.

Well, be that as it may, that particular bit of news, becoming ever more difficult to ignore as the evolutionary psychologists continue to busily ply their trade, is most unwelcome to the “experts” in ethics.  You might say it’s bad for the bottom line.  No matter, let us be charitable to Prof. Liao.  According to Google Scholar he has published a sufficient number of papers to be at least respectable, and has a tolerable if not imposing record of citation.  If you feel that’s sufficient to trust him on the matter, by all means, take a closer look at the feasibility of spawning a brood of cat-eyed children.  Barnum and Bailey will love you for it.

The title of the article gives a broad hint about the quality of the rest of the piece.  It simply assumes the existence of something that doesn’t exist; an objective ethics.  The authors don’t refer to “our ethics,” or, as Marx might have put it, “proletarian ethics,” or “the ethics currently prevailing among professors at the University of California at Berkeley,” the source of the “studies.”  No, they simply make the bald assumption that Good and Evil exist as objective things.  Perhaps it will finally start to dawn on you, dear reader, why I am always harping about the nature of morality in this blog.  Among other things, understanding the distinction between subjective and objective “ethics” may prevent you from publicly making an ass of yourself in academic journals.

It is, of course, obvious that individuals of our species, like those of thousands of others, recognize differences in status, and that, in all these species, there are behavioral differences between high and low status individuals.  However, authors of articles documenting these differences in, for example, European jackdaws or hamadryas baboons, don’t commonly coach their readers to distinguish which of the animals are Good and which Evil.  Suppose, however, we ignore for the moment the author’s conflating of behavioral traits in Homo sapiens with their own subjective moral judgments, and consider the quality of the article aside from this rather glaring fault.

In one of the studies, the authors investigated whether upper-class drivers were more likely to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection with stop signs on all sides.  They began by making the rather dubious assumption that “upper-class drivers” are identical with those who drive nice cars.  To ”prove” this assumption, they refer to a “pop sci” book entitled Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy In An Era of Excess, written by Robert Frank, a professor at Cornell whose subjective moral predispositions, if we can judge by the reviewer comments at the Amazon link, are entirely similar to their own.  “Observers” stood near the intersection, “coded the status of approaching vehicles, and recorded whether the driver cut off other vehicles by crossing the intersection before waiting their turn.”  To add weight to the claim that such behavior is “unethical,” they helpfully note that, such behavior “defies the California Vehicle Code.”  Sure enough, “A binary logistic regression indicated that upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles at the intersection, even when controlling for time of day, driver’s perceived sex and age, and amount of traffic, b = 0.36, SE b = 0.18, P < 0.05.”  I will not cavil at the fact that such observations were made.  After all, who would dare to doubt a binary logistic regression?  One can, however, question the bias of the observers.  What were their attitudes towards “high status individuals?”  Was any attempt made to determine whether they were more likely to conclude that nice cars had cut them off than clunkers in identical situations?  Do the authors give us any hint at all that they have ever heard of such a thing as a double blind procedure?  None of the above.

There are similar rather obvious faults in the rest of the seven studies.  One of them at least provides comic relief by measuring whether rich people are more likely (no kidding!) to steal candy from a baby, or, as the authors put it, “individually wrapped candies, ostensibly for children in a nearby laboratory.”  All of them contain statements such as, “Greed, in turn, is a robust determinant of unethical behavior,” “These results suggest that upper-class individuals are more likely to exhibit tendencies to act unethically compared with lower-class individuals,” “These results further suggest that more favorable attitudes toward greed among members of the upper class explain, in part, their unethical tendencies,” etc., with the implicit assumption that “ethics” is some objective, scientifically quantifiable thing-in-itself, hovering out there in the ether independent of the subjective judgments of mere mortals.

One wonders about the quality of peer review of stuff like this.  Far from any shred of intellectual honesty or scientific integrity, it appears the PNAS reviewers lacked even something as elementary as common sense.  Did it never occur to them to consider such obvious indicators of the association of social class with “unethical behavior” as the population of our prisons?  Presumably, most of the inmates have committed offenses even more serious than “defying the California Vehicle Code.”  What is the distribution of “rich” and “poor” among them?  Ah, but I forget!  All those people are in prison to begin with because of the exploitation and injustices of rich people!  We’ve heard it all before, haven’t we?

Apart from the wretched nature of the “science” in these articles, one wonders whether the authors ever considered the results of similar jihads against “rich people” in the past.  They used to be called “bourgeoisie,” and mountains of similar “scientific studies” demonstrated that these “bourgeoisie” were also “unethical.”  Once all was said and done, 100 million of the “bourgeoisie” had been murdered to atone for their lack of ethics.  Do we really want to go there again?  To judge from these “studies,” a good number of us do.  It would certainly bring a smile to the faces of some of those earlier “scientists,” now no doubt ascended to that great Workers Paradise in the Sky.

One wonders why, if the big man in the sky is really so worried about the behavior of creatures infinitely further below him than amoeba are to us that he devotes his time to continually monitoring the interactions of all seven billion of us, and is so subject to human emotions that he flies into a rage and tortures them with fire for quadrillions and quintillions of years if they don’t do what he wants, in spite of their ignorance, and yet is merciful and compassionate, and genuinely wants us to do good, he doesn’t just step out from behind the curtain, manifest himself to us in a way that could leave no doubt about his existence, and explain to us all clearly what he wants.  Surely he’s capable of such an act, and, assuming he exists, it would be the obvious and reasonable thing to do.  The problem is that he doesn’t exist, and the fact that he never has stepped out from behind the curtain in the manner described is an obvious demonstration of that fact for anyone willing and able to think rationally.

Of course, the religious have had hundreds of years to think up all sorts of specious replies to this and all of the other obvious arguments against the existence of their magical superheroes.  You can find lots of them against the argument I’ve given above by typing in a few obvious search terms on Google.  The problem is that none of them make the slightest sense to anyone who isn’t wearing religious blinders because they’re afraid of dying, is afraid life will have no “purpose” unless they believe in a pack of lies, agree with Victor Davis Hanson that societies become “ill” unless their citizens are all delusional, or is just simply too intellectual lazy to do other than blindly accept the “truths” he was indoctrinated with as a child.

Of course, it’s particularly difficult for people on the right of the political spectrum in the US today to give up their religious illusions because, on top of the reasons cited above, those illusions also happen to be an important board in the ideological box they live in.  Sometimes the results are comical.  For example, one constantly finds them harping on the mention of God in our Declaration of Independence.  The only problem is that the God in the Declaration of  Independence isn’t their God.  It’s the God of its author, Thomas Jefferson, who was a deist, as was Voltaire, Thomas Paine and so many of the other great names of the 18th century Enlightenment.  No matter, they just strap Jefferson down on the Procrustean bed of their faith and rack him and squeeze him until he becomes the best of Christians.  I once ran into one of these worthies on another blog, who cited a bit from one of Jefferson’s letters approving of some of the teachings of Christ, rather than the faith itself, as “proof” that he was a Christian.  Here is my reply:

Allow me to also remind you of some of the other things Jefferson said.

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting “Jesus Christ,” so that it would read “A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians. (letter to Richard Price, Jan. 8, 1789. Richard Price had written to TJ on Oct. 26. about the harm done by religion and wrote “Would not Society be better without Such religions? Is Atheism less pernicious than Demonism?”)”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.”

Does that sound like a “Christian” doctrine to you? Even his famous quote on the Jefferson memorial was taken from an attack on the Christian clergy of Philadelphia:

“The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes, & they [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: & enough too in their opinion, & this is the cause of their printing lying pamphlets against me. . .”

He was a great man indeed.  Would that we could find leaders like him today.

The above does not in any way imply, however, that we should strive to be amoral, or Machiavellian schemers, or moral relativists in our day to day interactions with other individuals.  You might say that, at that level, morality is the only game in town.  We simply lack the intelligence to to come up with reason-based solutions to all the complex problems that arise in our relationships with others on the fly.  To the extent that we make rational decisions at that level at all (or at least feel like we are making rational decisions if you believe Jonathan Haidt), they are generally decisions that implement what our moral emotions prompt us to do.  In a word, as far as interactions between individuals are concerned, morality wins by default.  The best we can do is attempt to come up with a system of morality that is as simple as possible, enables us to get along with each other reasonably well, and accommodates our behavioral predispositions as they really are rather than as we want them to be.

And what of the moral relativists?  I suspect the number of us who really fit that description is vanishingly small.  We’re not programmed to act that way.  If anyone did, they would probably regret it.  Mother Nature would have been remiss if she had come up with moral beings lacking an acute ability to detect and deal with cheaters.

In all movements which undertake the championship of the oppressed, and demand rectification of injustices and inequalities, there is, as in Don Quixote, a strong admixture of egotism.  Their leaders are usually heroic; but when their heroism is no longer required, they are left disconsolate, and sometimes embittered.  It seems cruel that they should be deprived of the limelight, or at best deserve as veterans only occasional acclamation, for no other reason than that what they agitated for has been wholly, or largely, obtained.  In their case, nothing fails like success.

The doom of all who invest imaginative hopes in earthly enterprises and mortal men, is for these enterprises to triumph.

In other words, as Skinner might have put it, the positive “reinforcement” for this sort of behavior lies not in actually achieving some hypothetical goal, but in the process of, or, perhaps more accurately, in the appearance of “struggling” to achieve that goal.  To put it more pithily, the pose is everything, and the reality nothing.

There’s nothing surprising or unexpected about this particular aspect of human behavior.  It’s perfectly “normal” manifestation of the human traits associated with morality.  As is usually the case, it requires the Don Quixote in question to perceive the Good as an object, existing independently, outside of the subjective mind.  We are all programmed to perceive the Good in that way, even though no such object actually exists.  Evolution doesn’t arrive at solutions that respect abstract truth.  It arrives at solutions that promote genetic survival.

It is not difficult to understand why we should be programmed to perceive the Good in this way.  Assuming moral behavior promoted our ancestors’ survival in the first place, it is more plausible that it would do so in the form of emotional imperatives rather than as a mix of subjective alternatives for cave dwelling philosophers to chew the fat over around the campfire at night.  This sort of programming apparently worked well enough in our prehistoric past.  After all, we’re still here.  In those days, the Good was associated almost exclusively with ones own tribe or group, and the Evil with ones neighbors.  The problem is, human societies have changed rather significantly since then.  We can now perceive the Evil in ways that Mother Nature never imagined during the long millennia in which we existed as small groups of hunter-gatherers.  Victor Davis Hanson provided just a few of the almost countless possibilities from a point of view on the political right in a recent article:

…there are new monsters in America, and I am starting to wonder whether I am to be considered among them: those of the uninvolved and uninformed lives, the bar-raisers, the downright mean ones, the never deserving of respect ones, the Vegas junketeers, the Super Bowl jet setters, the tuition stealers, the faux-Christians who do not pay higher taxes, the too much income makers, the tormenters of autistic children, the polluters, the enemies deserving of punishment, the targets to bring a gun against, the faces to get in front of, the limb-loppers, the tonsil pullers, the fat cats, the corporate jet owners, the one-percenters, the stupidly acting, the not paying their fair sharers, the discriminators on the “way you look”, the alligator raisers and moat builders, the vote deniers, the clingers, the typical something persons, the hunters of kids at ice cream parlors, the stereotypers and profilers, the cowards, the lazy and soft, the non-spreaders of money, the not my people people, the Tea party racists, the not been perfect and mistake makers, the disengaged and the dictating, the not the time to profiteers, the ones who did not know when to quit making money, and on and on.

Those on the left could compose a similar list, and it would be just as accurate.  One finds saviors of mankind occupying all points on the political spectrum, and they all perceive Good and Evil in a bewildering array of real and imagined entities that didn’t exist when the tendency to conceptualize Good and Evil as real, independent objects evolved.  As a result, human moral behavior is becoming increasingly dysfunctional.  If the preceding ages weren’t sufficient, the 20th century provided us with ample experimental confirmation of the fact.  Never before had so many people been slaughtered in the name of defending the Good in its Communist, Nazi, and assorted other ideological manifestations.

As one who cherishes the whim that our species should survive, I suggest that it’s high time that we a) realize we have a problem, and b) do something about it.  We have at least taken the first baby step towards this goal by finally realizing, after a bitter struggle, that there is such a thing as human nature, and that it exists because it evolved.  It seems to me that, once we have accepted these elementary facts and done a little thinking about their implications, we may be able to start breaking ourselves of the very satisfying but increasingly dangerous habit of inventing ever more imaginary Goods and the imaginary Evils of the sort noted by Mr. Hanson that invariably come along with them.

The advantages would be many.  For starters, we could finally dismiss all the pretentions of the pathologically pious, the obnoxiously self-righteous, and the permanently outraged among us to an exclusive knowledge of the ingredients of Virtue.  Instead of taking them seriously, would it not be better to smile in their faces, explain to them that the particular Good object that seems so real to them doesn’t actually exist, and, if they persist, house them in comfortable asylums?  The alternative is to wait and hope they go away, as we did so often in the past.  Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn’t and, as history has so copiously demonstrated, eventually they can accumulate enough power to start murdering those of us who are unfortunate enough to fit their description of Evil.  From a purely utilitarian point of view, it seems better not to take the risk.

Before taking up the article in question, let me lay my own cards on the table.  I consider human morality to be the expression of behavioral traits that exist because they evolved in a species with a large brain.  Thus, good and evil are subjective categories that depend for their existence on emotional responses in the minds of individuals.  As such, it is impossible for them to have any independent objective existence as things in themselves.  As subjective emotional responses elicited in individual minds, there is no way in which they can acquire objective legitimacy.  Elaborations on this theme may be found here and here.

Of course, one can dispute my take on morality, but, in that case, it will be necessary to somehow explain away the increasing flood of findings relative to what some call hardwired morality now appearing in academic and scientific journals and the popular media, not to mention the increasingly compelling evidence of analogs of the behavioral traits we associate with morality in other animals.

What does all this have to do with the ethics of terraforming?  Simply this – arguments about whether terraforming is morally good or evil are absurd, and efforts in futility.  They amount to attempts to apply behavioral predispositions that have evolved over millions of years in circumstances utterly unlike the present, and that exist for the sole reason that they promoted the genetic survival of the creatures who carried them, to a situation completely unrelated to the conditions and causes under which they evolved in the first place.  Such arguments are completely senseless failing the assumption, long cultivated by philosophers, but nevertheless delusional, that good and evil can somehow acquire an objective legitimacy and objective existence of their own.  In view of what we now know about the evolved roots of morality, belief in the existence of good and evil as things in themselves is no longer rationally supportable.

The article in question, entitled Does Mars have Rights, argues that terraforming is good, contradicting an earlier essay by Australian philosopher Robert Sparrow entitled The Ethics of Terraforming that claims that, at least for the present, it is evil.  Let’s take up Prof. Sparrow’s essay first.  He uses what he calls an agent-based virtue ethics to support his claim that advocacy of terraforming reveals “a shocking moral bankruptcy at the heart of our attitude toward the environment.”  An agent-based ethics is motivated by the observation that “It is much easier to point out those who are cruel or benevolent in a community than it is to provide a description of what counts as a cruel or benevolent act.”  It is based on the assertion that it is ”the virtuous (or vicious) character of the actor which makes the act virtuous (or vicious).”  As such it is easier to apply in practice that an alternative system of virtue ethics, namely, agent-focused ethics, which Sparrow describes in his essay.  Basing his conclusions on such an agent-based ethics, Sparrow argues that “terraforming reveals two serious defects of character.  First, it demonstrates that we are suffering from an ethically significant aesthetic insensitivity,” and, “Second, it involves us in the sin of hubris.”

Sparrow goes into a great deal of detail in describing these two “sins,” but their legitimacy as “real” sins is based on their validation as “vicious” according to whether some subset of a population of animals with large brains “feels” that persons committing such acts are vicious.  I say subset because it has been demonstrated that even infants, presumably without the benefit of having read the ancient philosophers, judge “agents” according to their actions.  Prof. Sparrow does not go into a great deal of detail as to how that subset would be chosen.  Clearly, this “feeling” test does not actually call the sins in question into existence.  Rather, it is merely a means of detecting them once they have been committed.  In other words, in order to accept the validity of the system, it is necessary for us to assume, a priori, that the sins in question exist as things in themselves, independent of the actors and agents that allow us to detect them.  If, however, as I have maintained, morality is really the expression of a subset of evolved behavioral traits in a particular type of animal, this assumption is absurd, and the system collapses.  Regardless of my opinions about morality, it is irrational to simply assume the objective existence and legitimacy of good and evil as entities in themselves, as Sparrow has done, without making the slightest attempt to explain the rationale on which their existence and legitimacy are based.

And what of Bailey’s post at Reason taking issue with Prof. Sparrow?  He either doesn’t seem to have understood Sparrow’s definition of agent-based ethics, or has simply decided to ignore it.  Instead, he explains to us why terraforming would be “really good” in terms of his own system of morality, which comes with rather less philosophical ballast courtesy of Aristotle and company.  Addressing Sparrow’s two evidences of moral deficit, he writes,

Sparrow acknowledged that he did not offer an objective account of beauty, so the notion still resides in the eye of the beholder, as does desolate ugliness.  And as awesome as the view down Valles Marineris might be right now, it would arguably be even more so if it were teeming with life.  With regard to the hubris of terraforming, one initial response whould be a hearty “so what?”  Terraforming offers the promise of helping humanity toward practical moral improvement by increasing our understanding of just how precious terrestrial life is, aiding us in managing it toward greater integrity, stability, and beauty.

To this, Sparrow’s virtuous agent would presumably reply, “Yes, and your point is?”  In fact, there is no point, because Bailey missed it.  His reply simply ignores the role of the virtuous agent in Sparrow’s ethics, a role which the philosopher explained clearly enough.  He could simply observe that Bailey has self-identified as an “unvirtuous agent,” and his remarks about beauty and hubris are, therefore, neither here nor there.  Bailey’s implication that terraforming would be morally good because it, “offers the promise of helping humanity toward practical moral improvement,” is simply a statement of the circular argument that terraforming is moral because it is moral.

Again, while both author’s arguments depend on the existence of objective good, they simply assume it a priori, without troubling themselves to explain to us how they have deduced the existence of that holy grail.  Presumably it floats somewhere out there in the luminiferous ether, independent of any crude animal intelligence, and we are to take it on trust that, while it remains invisible to vulgar eyes, they have beheld it in all its glory.  If all life in the universe ceased to exist, it would still remain, one gathers, as some kind of potential energy, ready to hop into the brain of any sentient beings that happened to evolve, guiding them towards the light.

Our consciousness certainly leads us to perceive the Good as an objective thing.  In spite of that it was clear enough to Hume, Mill, and any number of other pre-Darwinian thinkers that no such object existed.  Still, the illusion is so strong that even now, after the recent “discovery” by our social scientists that such a thing as human nature exists, and morality is a manifestation of that nature, objective Good is still taken for granted in deep, philosophical debates by people who should know better.

And what does all this have to do with terraforming?  Simply this; morality is completely irrelevant to the question of whether we should do it or not.  My personal opinion is that we should, as soon as we are able, because it will enhance the chances that both terrestrial life in general and our species in particular will survive and continue to evolve.  Is our survival objectively good?  Certainly not!  Call it a mere whim of mine, if you will, but I submit that it’s at least a natural whim.  Virtually everything about me exists because it happened to promote the survival of the genes responsible for putting me together at some point or other in the past.  Furthermore, subjective though they may be, such whims make life not only endurable, but exciting and enjoyable.  I hope that others will share this whim, this preference for survival over oblivion.  If enough do, then terraforming will some day become a reality.