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Ethics, evolution and culture

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Abstract

Recent work in the fields of evolutionary ethics and moral psychology appears to be converging on a single empirically- and evolutionary-based science of morality or ethics. To date, however, these fields have failed to provide an adequate conceptualisation of how culture affects the content and distribution of moral norms. This is particularly important for a large class of moral norms relating to rapidly changing technological or social environments, such as norms regarding the acceptability of genetically modified organisms. Here we suggest that a science of morality/ethics can benefit from adopting a cultural evolution or gene-culture coevolution approach, which treats culture as a second, separate evolutionary system that acts in parallel to biological/genetic evolution. This cultural evolution approach brings with it a set of established theoretical concepts (e.g. different cultural transmission mechanisms) and empirical methods (e.g. evolutionary game theory) that can significantly improve our understanding of human morality.

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Notes

  1. Wilson et al. (2003) make the point that while descriptive facts about ethical beliefs, such as whether they are the product of natural selection, should not be the sole basis for normative theories of ethics, this does not mean that evolutionary origins are entirely irrelevant for normative theories. It seems to us that a normative theory that begins with an accurate understanding of why people hold the moral beliefs that they do would be superior to a normative theory that has no grounding in reality. Singer (2005) makes the additional point that ethicists commonly appeal to their own and others’ moral intuitions when constructing or criticising normative ethical theories. If these intuitions have an evolutionary basis, as is argued by many moral psychologists, then normative theories are already being influenced by evolutionary history, whether this is explicitly acknowledged or not.

  2. Models constructed by Boyd and Richerson (1985), Aoki et al. (2005) and Whitehead (2007) support our claim that environmental stability favours genetic control over behaviour, while environmental fluctuation favours learning. Strictly, these models show that rapid environmental change favours individual learning rather than cultural transmission, which is favoured at intermediate rates of environmental change. This contradicts our claim that rapidly changing moral norms are primarily culturally transmitted, and suggests instead that they should be acquired through individual learning. However, the efficacy of different moral norms are likely to be costly or difficult to assess through individual learning alone (how might a single member of the public, for example, determine the long-term health risks of GM food from non-GM food?). Other models (Boyd and Richerson 2005, chapters 1–2) suggest that cultural transmission is favoured when individual learning is costly or difficult, supporting our claim that moral norms will be primarily culturally transmitted rather than individually learned.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Roger Stanev and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. This work was partly funded by Genome Canada through the offices of Genome British Columbia.

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  1. Centre for Applied Ethics, University of British Columbia, 227-6356 Agricultural Rd., Vancouver, V6T 1Z2, BC, Canada

    Alex Mesoudi & Peter Danielson

  2. Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RQ, UK

    Alex Mesoudi

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Correspondence to Alex Mesoudi.

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Mesoudi, A., Danielson, P. Ethics, evolution and culture. Theory Biosci. 127, 229–240 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-008-0027-y

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