The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom, and Morality.

Isaiah Berlin shrewdly divided deep thinkers into two basic categories: hedgehogs and foxes. The hedgehog (who rolls himself in a ball when in doubt) knows one BIG thing; the fox knows many (different) things. Despite similar titles, we have here one hedgehog book and one foxy book. Hedgehogs first.

Hedgehogs, knowing something BIG, are the grandest of philosophers: Plato, Spinoza, Nietzsche. The certain mark of the hedgehog is "things are not as they seem." The world, after all, seems awfully full of a number of things, viz., ships, and seas, and sealing wax, and kings. But if you know ONE big thing, the multiplicity of appearances must be resolved into the one Truth. Hedgehog philosophy is inherently exciting because it claims to strip away the veil of illusion. All is the Good, God, or the Will to Power.

There are in fact two classes of hedgehog: up-scale and, I suppose, down-scale. Up-scale hedgehogs see everything as mere parts of some magnificent whole. What is the hand but a part of the human body, what is humanity but a dream in the mind of God? Down-scale hedgehogs are convinced that the meaning of the whole is in the fundamental parts. Analysis of chemical complexity into atomic fundamentals is paradigmatic. It is important to recognize hedgehoggery in both modes--but also to note that in either mode the search is for reality behind the appearances, or the reduction of appearances to something else really real. Up-scale hedgehogs are rather out of favor these days, but down-scale types are under every avant-garde bush. The prevalence of the down-scale, analysis-into-parts type is not hard to understand: they proceed in the (or at least a) style of science. We may have lost faith in something grand going on over our heads, but not in the neurons inside our heads.

Robert Wright, the author of The Moral Animal, is a down-scale hedgehog--with a slightly "guilty" conscience. His thesis is that evolution, and specifically the revolutionary new science of "evolutionary psychology," will "explain" the moral characteristics of the human species. The down-scale move is, of course, that when it comes to explaining human behavior it is the simple parts (genes) that explain the complex moral appearances. We may think we are being altruistic, but the genes know nothing of altruism beyond reciprocity for their own good. Wright not only expounds this thesis in general, he conceives the ingenious notion of taking Charles Darwin as a case study in moral appearance and genetic reality.

Darwin was almost universally admired in his generation and by his later biographers as an exceptionally moral individual. Wright undertakes a revisionist analysis to suggest that his high-mindedness might also (or better) be understood as genetic survival tactics. What then is the "moral" conclusion of genetic reductionism? Wright himself suggests that his portrayal is "cynical." "So what's new about cynicism?" he says. "The question may be whether, after the new Darwinism takes root, the word moral can be anything but a joke." But theri, rather surprisingly, he seems to develop a guilty conscience and opts for compassion and J.S. Mill (Utilitarianism was published in 1858, the same year as Origin of Species). How does compassion arise from all those ruthless genes? What evolutionary psychology does for morality, says Wright, is to make us less arrogant. Understanding how we get pushed around by our genetic urges makes us cautious about condemnation, more tolerant, more forgiving.

Wright's book is long and based on multiple sources; I have emphasized "hedgehoggery" as the fundamental key to what is going on because it is so typical of all sorts of down-scale reductions perennially on the market. All these efforts have an air of excitement: a new science is about to be perfected (evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis of some sort) which will definitively explain the multiple confusions of everyday consciousness. These "sciences" are never quite perfected, but one can predict that in a few years, with a few more discoveries, the definitive truth will be established. Were these grand promises ever to be fulfilled, some deep philosopher (not a popularizing enthusiast) might want to consider at least two fundamental issues for down-scale reduction: freedom and truth.

It should come as no surprise that Wright has no place for "free will." Free will is an "illusion," a "useful fiction" because everything is determined by a combination of genetics ("knobs") and environment ("tuning"). But the notion that this brand of "determinism" is the key to compassion is perverse. The best that can emerge from thoroughgoing determinism would be a "morality" of excuses (victims are blame-less) never a morality (you have a moral responsibility not to blame victims!). I do not see how there can be a moral compulsion to forgive the victim, when there is no moral agent to whom one can appeal.

The final fatality for reductionism is the problem of truth. As Wright says, "Truth ... is a concept to which natural selection is indifferent." If it is true that we are merely the conditioned response of genes and environment, are there any grounds for truth? If the big Truth is genes, then there is no truth, only ideologies. If natural selection is true, then Origin of Species cannot be true, not to mention Wright's fervid extrapolations. This is a self-defeating line of analysis. For example: Is it insignificant that a "theory" of natural competitiveness in which status hierarchy is all-important arises in Victorian Britain, then at the crest of world empire? Darwin is not a "scientist" but the alphamale ideologue of an imperial class. And so on with similar destructive and delusory arguments.

One of my philosophy mentors, Warner Wick, wrote a lovely little essay called "Truth's Debt to Freedom": if there is no freedom--just knobs and tuning--not only is there no morality worth mentioning, there is no truth either. Proclaiming indifference to truth is a poor prospectus for Wright's sensational new science.

In turning to Mary Midgley's The Ethical Primate, one moves into the same range of topics but with a wholly different--and refreshingly rational--approach. Midgley is a sure-footed philosophical fox. Where hedgehogs ask: What is the ultimate whole? What are the ultimate parts?, foxes ask: What is the problem? Aristotle, the founding fox, gives an excellent example of the approach. If, he says, one is building a trireme (ancient boat) one would have to know something about the wood it is made out of--but not as much as a botanist would know; one would have to know something about how it would be used--but not as much as an admiral would have to know. The problem at hand sets the dimensions of analysis. Pushing to the ultimates on either end not only does not help us to build the boat, the very idea of boat dissolves completely into cellulose molecules or the final ends of the universe--neither of which has much time for triremes--or the ethical constitution of certain biological primates.

Foxes are definitely not reductionist; life has lots of different problems and it does no good to analyze the multiplicity of reality away in one swell foop. If one turns to the problem of human morality, the philosophic fox will not seek to reveal it as an illusion, but to understand its constitution. The problem is how to relate the biological material to our peculiar moral function. Up-scale hedgehogs may think this an impossible task: humans are souls trapped in bodies and the sooner we forget the biological the better. Down-scale hedgehogs will tread the Wright path and insist that it is all biology. Mary Midgley, in contrast, holds that we are both primates and peculiarly human--and not in some mechanical composite, but in an integrated, if complex and messy, whole. We are rational (and moral) animals.

The surest sign of the difference between Midgley and Wright is that while the latter can see nothing but determinism in evolution, Midgley is interested in showing why "freedom" is a plausible outcome of our evolutionary status. She imagines a creator, C, who wants to create free beings. This ambition is scorned by fellow creators who consider it philosophically confused. C proceeds, nevertheless, to fashion a creature with multiple desires, and he makes sure that the desires conflict. He then makes the creatures bright enough to see that they have to do something about the conflict. The conflicts are not simple like drink and don't drink but between drink and finish building your house. As a sort of "ballast," C gives the creatures instinctive sociability so that they will tend to take a broader and longer-range view of what they desire. These beings will have all sorts of individual differences of temperament, sex, and age, as well as different social traditions. The fact that they are both "sociable" and "among aliens" (other sexes, other tribes) will bother them and make them step back from their own motives and decide how to make a whole out of their own lives. As C says, "That is surely the point of freedom."

The point of "free will" is not to establish an "uncaused cause" but to fix on humans as rational agents who, as such, are held to be the responsible causes of at least some of their actions. Midgley elegantly defends the notion of humans as peculiarly rational agents. Because of the bother of making a whole out of the conflicting desires and social nature bequeathed us by our primate cousins, we are forced to deliberate and decide on actions for which we not our genes) take praise or blame.

Is it all genes and environment? Yes, in the sense that we have to learn to deliberate, we have to learn what promises mean, when to praise and blame. Freedom (being able to make decisions) does not come by nature. Note that we also have to learn mathematic but the meaning of arithmetic is not reduced to our grammar-school social conditioning.

Human decision and deliberation are fundamentally different from the resolution of desires common to animals. Darwin noted the behavior of migratory birds who, when the migration begins, simply abandon all, including fledglings in the nest. Migratory urges always triumph. If humans were migrating birds, they too might be overcome by the urge to flight--but there might be some regret at leaving the youngsters behind. In fact, a few might refuse to go or might turn back. Wright views humans as radio receivers: all knobs and tunings. But when the stations get tuned out, the radio does not regret missing the last movement of the Brahms Third.

Midgley points out that all the great and little reductionisms of history are driven by a powerful moral motive--even if, like Wright, they finally can't justify the morality preached. Lucretius, a great and poetic down-scale hedgehog, wanted to rid the ancients of superstition. Materialist reduction removed false fears of nonexistent deities. Wright wants to remove the superstition of blame and retribution. As Midgley notes, this is a worthy enough idea for specific cases, and our moral sense has been much refined by coming to appreciate the immense psychic pressures that can determine action. The appeal of the argument rests, however, on its direction toward the past and toward others. If we turn to our own actions and our view of the future, "the categories of freedom exist primarily to help us think our way forward, about what we ourselves ... should do next and thereafter. For that purpose, it is absolutely vital for us to distinguish what we can help from what we cannot. And, bad though we may be at doing this, muddled though our accounts of the situation may be, we have no choice but to press on with them and make them better."