The Biology of Moral Systems (Foundations of Human Behavior) [Hardcover]

Richard Alexander's pioneering work of theoretical biology was one of the first attempts (in the current cycle of sociobiological interest) to apply Darwinian thinking to human morality. The book is profoundly disturbing. Like any work of theory, many of the specifics of Alexander's analysis will be revised but the main argument that morality can only be understood within the Darwinian framework is important. Subsequently many authors have pusued the same line of thought but Alexander's treatment is one of the most interesting. The discusison of deception is particularly provocative.

Where does morality come from? The traditional answer are from God, as revealed by theologians, or from Reason or Intuition, as revealed by philosophers. In fact, as Richard Alexander makes clear in this landmark book, morality comes from our evolution as a species. Individuals who developed ethical awareness and practiced moral behavior in the course of our emergence from the hoard of pre-human hominids had an evolutionary edge over those who did not. It follows that to understand morality, one must undertake a scientific and evolutionary approach. Ethics is thus something like linguistics, in that both are extremely complex human ideational forms that must be modeled, and the success of ethical theories is their capacity to explain how humans express and make moral choices.

The scientific approach to morality espoused by Alexander is a deeply refreshing alternative to the endless pious platitudes of the theologians, who believe they have a special line to the Almighty's will, and the supercilious meanderings of the philosophers who think their personal moral predilections are something more than mere personal prejudice. We owe to this book the reorientation of ethical theory from the prejudices of the privileged to the realm of the scientific. As such, Alexander's book is must reading for a student of ethics.

However, contemporary evidence shows that his major thesis is flawed. Here are some key quotes and my critique of the assertions made in the quotes.

Quote from p. 3: "ethics, morality, human conduct, and the human psyche are to be understood only if societies are seen as collections of individuals seeking their own self-interest..."

Critique: This is of course the model of human action in standard economic theory, and I have spent my whole life dealing with its inadequacies and proposing alternative models more in line with the empirical evidence on human behavior. Alexander's description of human behavior ignores such prosocial other-regarding behaviors as altruistic cooperation, altruistic punishment, and the tendency to conform to social norms independent from the possibility of being detected and punished for such behavior. We now have lots of behavioral evidence in favor of the existence of strong reciprocity (a propensity to cooperate in social dilemmas and to punish free riders without regard to personal material payoffs), as well as its ability to foster sustainable cooperation when self-interest would lead to social breakdown. See, for instance Herbert Gintis, "Strong Reciprocity and Human Sociality", Journal of Theoretical Biology 206 (2000):169-179 and Ernst Fehr and Simon Gaechter, "Cooperation and Punishment", American Economic Review 90,4 (2000). See also my web site.

I also believe that empathy and shame are counterexamples to Alexander's model. Indeed, sociopaths who have neither empathy nor shame can be considered as "self-interested" in Alexander's sense in that they refrain from harming other human beings only if they calculate that the personal costs (e.g., of being caught) exceed the benefits flowing from harming others.

Quote from p. 34: "That people are in general following what they perceive to be their own interests is, I believe, the most general principle of human behavior."

If this is not tautologous (whatever people want to do is in their interest by definition), then it is false, for the same reason as in my critique of the previous quote, since people who punish violators of group norms often "perceive" their actions to be for the benefit of the group, and understand quite well that it is not in their own self-interest.

But there are other problems with Alexander's statement. (a) If I am addicted to smoking I might perceive that I am not acting in my own self interest when I smoke, and do it anyway. (b) I may "perceive" it in my own interest to help the poor, or contribute to environmental groups, or perform other prosocial acts when in fact it is not. If humans systematically misperceive their self-interest, as in this case, and if the misperception is very likely in a prosocial direction, then violations of self-interest might be central to human social cooperation, even were Alexander's statement correct (which it is not). In fact, I do not believe that humans systematically misperceive their self-interest. Rather, they choose often to act altruistically against their self-interest because they have other-regarding preferences.

Quote from p. 77: "Moral systems are systems of indirect reciprocity."

This is the first statement of Chapter 2, "A Biological View of Morality." It is not an aside, but Alexander's fundamental explanation of moral systems. By "indirect reciprocity" he means almost exactly what Robert Trivers calls "reciprocal altruism," but which in fact is just enlightened long-term self interest. It is fundamentally wrong. The evidence is that virtually all moral systems exhort forms of altruism that do not reduce to self interest, even in the long run, and large numbers of people subscribe to and to some extent follow these non-self-interested principles.

I should note that even criminals and psychopaths often exhibit non-self-regarding behavior, as when, for instance, a man takes revenge on his "enemies" and then kills himself.

Of course, a lot of human behavior is self-interested, and some non-self-interested behavior is just random noise in the behavioral system. But the types of systematic prosocial behavior promoted by strong reciprocity, shame, empathy, and identification with "insiders" is, unless I am mistaken, the key to the particular strength of human cooperation.