As I mentioned in my post at the beginning of this week on Human Goodness, I was contacted by a guy named Duane who had put in a lot of effort to track down the original owner of a media player he bought online, so that he could send it back to him, First of all, that made my day, if not my week. Secondly, it got me thinking about moral behaviour. As we exchanged emails Duane or I mentioned the phrase “golden rule” – meaning not “he who has the gold makes the rules” 
but treating others as you would like to be treated yourself. Without presuming to put words in Duane’s mouth or ideas in his mind, I’d like to write a little about the things I started thinking this week following him contacting me initially.
When I replied to him that I thought it was great he was going to this trouble, he wrote that he works on the principle that he hopes someone else would do the same for him. That’s not a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” notion, mind you, as there’s no immediate or even necessarily likely tangible benefit to Duane. He’s not doing this so that someone will return a media player he lost the week before or something. What this shows to me is empathy. Duane knows how he would feel if he lost so many photos, and can suppose that the original owner must feel pretty much the same – and he wants to prevent/stop that.
Thinking some more, it occurred to me that empathy like this is an excellent candidate for explaining the evolution of moral behaviour. The idea is sometimes raised that without the existence of an external authority (for example a god) there can be no absolute morals. Unsurprisingly I disagree with this, and it seems to me that empathy goes a long way to explaining how various absolute morals have evolved.
Quite simply, if you can tell how someone else is feeling – or in fact to recognise how someone probably will feel given a certain set of circumstances/events, you’re just not going to want to do unpleasant things to them. You’re not going to beat them up, because you know you would feel sad and upset if you were beaten, and you don’t want to cause that distress to another. You’ll not steal from another, because you know how you’d feel if someone stole from you, and you can suppose that others would feel the same way. To the extent there are absolute morals, I think a strong capacity for empathy pretty much covers it.
Most animals seem to get by without empathy. I would suggest that this is because the groups are small enough and the interactions simple enough. Take say a group of cats (big or small): one bites another – it’ll get quickly smacked around the head for it, which is likely to reduce the probability it’ll do it again. That’s probably fine to manage group behaviour when there’s a limited and simple repertoire. As hominids began to do more complex things, in larger groups, this direct concrete feedback (aka being beaten about the head ) might not have been enough.
Enter empathy. Perhaps some of our ancestors happened to have some capacity for empathy, to recognise the way others were feeling, and to want to prevent them feeling bad. I can definitely see that leading to increased social cohesion (as they were doing good things for each other and not having to box each others ears quite so much), and that increased group cohesion could have led to better survival, compared to groups with fewer empathic individuals. Thus there could have been a positive selection pressure for the capacity for empathy, and as our species gradually evolved to be more empathic, we developed as moral agents; instead of not stealing each other’s food because if they caught us they’d hurt us, we’d not steal because if we did it would make them hungry and unhappy.
I thought as I started typing this that I should look to see what’s already written about morals and empathy. A book called “Empathy and Moral Development. Implications for Caring and Justice” (link is a pdf of the first 20 pages: introduction and overview) by Martin L Hoffman seemed to be the main thing coming up in my google search. I was a bit disconcerted to find that the idea that empathy is an important determinant of the development of morals seems to be held mainly by one guy, who’s been working on it for 30 years 
Does make me wonder a bit if perhaps an incorrect tree is being barked up … but it’s an idea that still does seem to me to make a lot of sense.
When I was a psychiatric registrar (trainee) I worked for 6 months in a forensic psychiatry unit. I was interested to find when we went through doing careful diagnostic reviews, that of my 25 patients, 5 or 6 had diagnosable pervasive developmental disorders (autistic spectrum disorders). Given that autistic spectrum disorders have a prevalence of about 6 per 1,000 that was a lot. One of the primary deficits in autistic spectrum disorders is in empathy; Simon Baron-Cohen talks about “mind-blindness“. That’s not to say that people with ASD are necessarily immoral; it just measn that because they lack some or all of a normal capacity for empathy, their moral development depends to a larger extent on other factors, such as actually paying conscious attention, for example. Their moral development is likely to be more susceptible than average to harsh, abusive and antisocial upbringings, so that combination could lead more easily to a poorly-developed moral sense.
The other 20 of course didn’t have ASD, but there was an unsurprisingly high incidence of antisocial personality and even psychopathy – both of which involve a lack of empathy. So reflecting back on my time there (anecdotal though it is) serves for me to reinforce the way I’m thinking about empathy and moral evolution.
Conclusion:
In summary, what I think might lie at the base of the evolution of a moral sense – and some moral absolutes – is the capacity for empathy. The more of someone’s else’s pain, unhappiness and distress you can recognise and feel yourself into, the less likely you will be to do something to cause pain, unhappiness or distress to others. That could have led to better group cohesion, as it allows for more complex social interactions than a box around the ears provides for, and that increased cohesion could have conveyed a survival advantage, thus creating a positive selection pressure for the capacity for empathy – and hence morals.
I’d be interested in any comments – especially from any moral philosophers or evolutionary scientists who might stumble across this.
Popularity: 12% [?]
