Comments on Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape

In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris argues for moral realism, and a version of consequentialism in which the proper target for moral concern is the maximization of human well-being. Furthermore, he says the substance of well-being consists in the qualities of conscious experience, and modern neuroscience is giving us the tools to assess conscious states: hence answering moral questions is properly within the domain of science.

UK Fetal Awareness Metastudy

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released an updated report on fetal awareneess with a focus on pain (summary here, pdf of full report here, hat tip: Parableman). Its key conclusion is that there is no fetal pain prior to 24 weeks of gestation. This is because “connections from the periphery to the cortex are not intact before 24 weeks” and “most neuroscientists believe that the cortex is necessary for pain perception.”

Getting Moral Truths from Non-Moral Truths

David Chalmers has been posting chapters of a draft manuscript entitled “Constructing the World”. The project has to do with the idea of “scrutability”: given some set of base truths and ideal reasoning, can all truths be known? He thinks so, and the work is mainly about fleshing out (in much detail) variations on this thesis.

Chalmer’s arguments engage the more technical side of analytic philosophy, which makes it more difficult reading for me. But, there is good stuff here to be sure (I thought the chapter which confronts Quine’s critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction was very valuable by itself).

In Chapter 6, Chalmers briefly discusses “hard cases” of truths which seem difficult to derive from a more limited set of truths: these include some mathematical truths, philosophical truths, and moral truths. The case of moral truths was on my mind given the recent discussion of Sam Harris’ remarks on developing a science of morality. Chalmers seems to think that if moral truths are real, then they should be scrutable from the set of non-moral truths.

Mark Johnston's Surviving Death

I read Mark Johnston’s book, Surviving Death, which was based on his 2006 Carl G. Hempel lectures at Princeton. I had liked his previous book, Saving God (which I mentioned here); in comparison, Surviving Death is more densely argued and challenging, relative to the “payoff”. But I’m glad I read it: Johnston is an interesting and unique thinker.

In the book, Johnston looks for and finds a naturalistic sense in which a person could be said to survive death: a good person can truly identify with all of humanity by directing his or her actions in concert with this concern. He or she will then live on in the “onward rush of humanity.” A highly condensed summary follows below.

Morality: Not Natural or Supernatural?

Sean M. Carroll, the Caltech cosmologist who blogs at Cosmic Variance, has had a couple of posts responding to Sam Harris’ recent arguments that we should be able to develop a science of morality (he doesn't think this is possible in principle, although his reasoning reads to me as a list of challenges about the practical difficulty).

His discussion offers a clear example of exactly why a materialistic worldview inspired by science leaves one out to sea when it comes to issues crucially important to us.  (I say all this as a big fan of Carroll; he is a great representative of a new generation of scientist-popularizers.)

I Agree With Sam Harris on Science and Morality

Sam Harris has a short talk here on why he thinks "science can answer moral questions."  A follow-up to some initial criticism is here, and a brief discussion of "getting an ought from an is" is here.  He evidently has a book forthcoming related to all this.

While the philosophically more talented will have issues with his arguments (and with my brief discussion of this complex topic below), I agree with his main thrust.  There are two key steps here:  first, we include first-person experiences in our view of nature, and second, we locate the target for our (natural) moral instincts in the qualities of the experiences of sentient creatures.

Kriegel on Animal Rights, Part Two

(Note: part one of this post is here)

In section 5 of his paper, Uriah Kriegel outlines a proposal for a different, non-consequentialist, ethical framework for animal rights. He starts by saying he admires the part of Kantian (deontological) moral philosophy known as the “humanity formula”: one should treat another’s humanity (or one’s own) as an end in itself, not as a means to an end. To extend this approach, he suggests substituting “conscious creatures” for “humanity”.

With some alterations (including what he calls a “virtue-ethical” twist), the formula becomes:

“One should have the stable, dominating disposition to treat conscious creatures as ends in themselves and not merely as means to other ends.”

The “stable, dominating disposition” phraseology allows us to avoid absolutism in the formula. Including “merely” allows for cases where an animal might be treated in some fashion as a means as well as an end in itself. Kriegel notes that much more could be said about all of the nuances here, but he moves on to give examples of how this kind of formula would result in different results compared to a consequentialist formula. Importantly, they differ on whether it is right to kill or exploit an animal if could be done painlessly. By assigning conscious animals intrinsic moral worth, one expands the animal rights case (for those animals considered conscious).

I liked this proposal very much, since I have long been attracted to the idea of assigning intrinsic moral status on the basis of consciousness (although I came to the idea from a different direction – see an old post on this here and other posts with the Morals tag). And while I certainly don’t read a lot of philosophical papers on this topic, I hadn’t seen this proposed before in the literature.

In the last section of the paper, Kriegel returns to the risk that we err in our empirical assessment of the presence of consciousness in various animals. Here he proposes that, given the uncertainty involved, we should assign probabilities to the presence of consciousness. Further we should use a function which maps this probability to an even more generous probability that a given animal should be afforded rights. While all of the numbers we might assign are going to be imprecise, by being cautious about what we know and building in a cushion in our formulas, we can reduce mistakes while pressing the circle of moral generosity outward.

My own view is that in our judgments we should explicitly consider that consciousness comes in degrees, rather than being an all-or-nothing phenomenon. But working with Kriegel’s probabilistic formulas, one could easily get to the same answers in most cases.

Kriegel’s “Animal Rights and Conscious Experience”

(Note: this is half of what will be a two-part post. UPDATE 20 July 2009: the second part is here)

Uriah Kriegel, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, has posted this draft paper which seeks to advance the discussion on animal rights in light of progress in the study of consciousness. The most important part of the paper, in my view, is his formulation of how to explicitly make the (likely) presence of conscious experience the key component of a framework for assigning moral status to animals.

Before getting to his own proposal, Kriegel considers how the most influential consequentialist approach to animal rights (prominently associated with Peter Singer) suffers from a lack of an up-to-date analysis of the science of consciousness. This consequentialist framework, which emphasizes maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, typically doesn’t incorporate a sophisticated understanding of exactly which animals might have conscious experience of pleasure and pain, as opposed to an unconscious functional analogue of these feelings. The former are presumably the intended recipient of moral consideration, not the latter.

Kriegel uses his own work on (human) consciousness to show how the view of animal rights would be influenced by a more detailed account of consciousness. Kriegel starts with his own proposal for locating the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) in humans. This proposal, which he calls the cross-order integration hypothesis (COI), is detailed in a paper published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. Then he argues that a comparison of brain structures between animals and humans should inform a view of whether animals share the NCC, and hence are conscious.

Without getting into all the details here, Kriegel’s COI theory implicates activity in cortical structures, presumed to be involved in higher order monitoring work, as a necessary part of the NCC. Because our mammal cousins share these structures while non-mammals lack it, this would provide evidence that the former are conscious, but the latter are not. In considering the consequentialist approach to animal rights sketched above this analysis would serve to help define the circle of moral consideration: in this case, mammals are on the inside, other animals are on the outside (“looking in”).

While Kriegel has some confidence in his approach, he clearly notes in the paper that his moral stance will be tempered by the uncertainty around the empirical conclusions underlying such a moral calculus (his preference is to couch any moral formulas incorporating the empirical claims in terms of probability). And I should stress that the general point on methodology has value even if one’s theory of the NCC differs: just plug in your own preferred NCC and try to judge how far it extends into the animal kingdom. For myself, while I like Kriegels’s “top-down” approach to the question of locating the NCC (i.e. beginning with a theory before you look at the experimental data – see an old post on Kriegel’s philosophy of mind here), I don’t have a high level of confidence in his (or any other) specific NCC proposal yet. The field is still in its early stages.

Still, even if one gains confidence in identifying the NCC in humans, there is a very big step to cross when considering the consciousness of animals, which Kriegel may underestimate. Because brains and bodies have demonstrated a robust ability to adaptively implement analogous functions using distinct structures, I would be very cautious in assuming that the work performed by our late (evolutionary) vintage neural structures couldn’t be implemented differently in animals. Even cephalopods, whose nervous systems have little in common with ours, show behaviors very suggestive of consciousness. Reinforcing this concern is my own philosophical bias to see consciousness as something which comes in degrees. An animal without a cortex could have an attenuated version of consciousness, as opposed to a lack of consciousness.

After the lengthy discussion of the how his kind of empirical analysis can help in evaluating the consequentialist ethical approach, Kriegel shifts gears and discusses a different non-consequentialist framework for the problem.

(To be continued.)

Fetal Pain Article in New York Times

There was an interesting article on fetal pain in the New York Times magazine. I’m not an expert, but I thought it gave a pretty good overview of current scientific/medical viewpoints based on things I had previously read (a previous lengthier post on this topic is here).

My opinion is that given the trend in research findings here (and in related areas like awareness in brain-damaged patients and animals) it is increasingly untenable to keep to a view that only fully developed healthy human nervous systems “count” when assessing whether meaningful first-person experience exists. The pain experience felt by a 20-week old fetus that lacks a developed cerebral cortex will almost certainly differ from ours, perhaps to the point that it shouldn’t be called “pain” at all. But to assume that the stress responses observed are not accompanied by some meaningful correlated experience seems highly dubious. Given the limit on our ability to know “what it’s like” in the absence of a first-person report, it makes sense to err on the side of caution.

UPDATE (25 Feb.2008): please see also the post on this at Conscious Entities.

Fetal Pain

Recently, JAMA published a survey article on Fetal Pain (the abstract is here, the full text requires a fee). The authors reviewed a large number of research papers relevant to the stage of development at which a human fetus feels pain, and, secondarily, on techniques available for direct fetal anesthesia or analgesia in the case of abortion (or therapeutic interventions). Despite the evidence of reflex responses and hormonal responses by the first and second trimester respectively, the authors conclude that analysis of nervous system development indicates fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester (29 or 30 weeks gestational age). They note that withdrawal reflexes only require peripheral sensory nerves which connect to motor neurons through the spinal column. They assert psychological awareness of pain requires relatively full cortical functioning, which they conclude comes at about 29-30 months.

The article includes a paragraph acknowledging the context: proposed federal legislation which would require physicians to inform women seeking abortions at 20 or more weeks that the fetus feels pain and to offer anesthesia for the fetus (evidently statutes like this have been enacted in Georgia and Arkansas).

Given the highly charged politics of abortion, the article caught a good deal of attention in the press, and a number of critics have disputed the conclusions and/or complained about pro-choice bias given some of the authors’ past affiliations (links here and here: William Saletan’s take on Slate here). I argue below that a different conclusion from the authors' can be reached from the same set of facts.

My interest in this was similar to my angle in my Terri Schiavo and animal consciousness posts: we have a tendency to think of conscious experience as an all or nothing thing, and I’m interested in exploring the evidence that there is more of a continuum of first person experience from minimal to full tilt.

Echoing what I’ve read elsewhere, the authors say the seat of awareness is in the thalamocortical circuitry. While they found no studies of such circuits in fetuses as they relate to pain specifically, they (reasonably) infer conclusions from looking at work on other pathways (like visual and auditory). Now, curiously, the specifics of these studies don’t seem to precisely support the survey article’s conclusion, since they show thalamic projections reaching the cortex at 23-27 weeks. A later part of the paper on electrical activity is invoked to buttress the 29-30 week figure in the conclusion, but this seemed to my amateur eyes less compelling (more indirect) evidence on the question.

Importantly, the authors include a paragraph noting that others have proposed that connection to the cortex could be established indirectly if afferents from the thalamus reach a transient cortical subplate which appears earlier while the layers of the mature cortex are still forming. This happens by 20 to 22 weeks. Given the lack of firm evidence that this connection conveys pain information (as we understand it in fully developed context) the authors don’t give it weight in their conclusion.

The authors do not address the broader question of whether something similar to pain (if more primitive in some sense) exists during development absent any pathway to even a primitive cortical subplate. Is there something in-between the reflex arc and the cortical arc which gives rise to pain-like sensation? At this point we probably have no evidence and can only speculate. But I think it is a reasonable intuition that in different stages of development, intermediate stages of experience may exist.

My problem with this article is not with the factual content, but with the way this is parsed to reach a conclusion. In the absence of compelling evidence that fully developed pain awareness exists prior to 29-30 weeks, the authors conclude it doesn’t. I might place the emphasis differently: while we lack definite confirmation, something similar to our pain awareness might exist at 20-22 weeks, and we just don’t know if a neural response worthy of being compared to pain might exist earlier than that.

I continue to support the legality of abortion; however, I also continue to believe relatively more emphasis should be placed on the procedure being done as early as possible.

Ethical Stance toward the Brain-Damaged

Now that the political and media circus surrounding Terri Schiavo has quieted, let me try out my “ethics of subjective experience” perspective on the issue. I don’t know the specifics of Schiavo’s neurobiology, so I’ll keep the discussion general.

I have been tentatively trying out the idea of assigning moral value to the quality and robustness of subjective experience as a crucial (but never sole) guide to ethical issues (see posts here and here). The healthy human represents the pinnacle of high quality, robust first-person experience, but some level of subjective experience exists in other natural systems as well (see for instance this recent post).

Severe damage to the neocortex might eliminate higher cognitive brain functions, and radically diminish experience. But if other parts of the brain (as well as the rest of the body) were functioning, and if we could determine that the patient was not in pain, it would be wrong to assign zero value to the patient’s subjective experience. Not to be flippant, but what if the person’s experience were akin some kind of lower mammal, or bird or fish? I would assign some value to this status. I object to the term “vegetative state”, which seems to make so many implicit assumptions. Of course the more we can learn about the neurobiology of the patients, the more we can infer about their experience.

Beyond the experience criteria, other positive considerations for valuing the person’s life would include special consideration that the person is a member of the human family, and not actually an animal (some limited species-ism is OK, in other words); and an “uncertainty premium” associated with our imperfect knowledge of neurobiology. Weighed with these issues would be the expressed wishes of the patient (absent in Schiavo’s case), then the wishes of kin (unfortunately conflicting in Schiavo’s case), and finally the cost to broader society (modest in Schiavo’s case).

As usual there are shades of gray. Given the above considerations, I must disagree with those who argue that loss of distinctively human cognition is equivalent to death. Of course, those who likened removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube to murder are wrong also. Given a very low but positive value to be placed on a patient’s subjective experience, it is appropriate that the decision lay in weighing some of the secondary issues mentioned above such as the wishes of kin and the cost to society.

Post-post-modernism

I just read an interesting post on the navigation between realism (objectivism) and relativism/nihilism on DuckRabbit. It inspired me to offer my brief take on these issues below.

Human beings have evolved as natural systems embedded in the larger network which is the world. Our view of the world is a view from the inside. There can be no strictly objective truth as if from a standpoint outside the world. Insistence on such a standard leads to confusion. However, our participation in the world's activity provides a solid ground for knowledge and for value. We are not separate from the world, our experience is directly of the world. There is no basis for nihilism.

Also, there is no basis for extreme forms of relativism: human beings are extremely homogeneous with regard to their biology, and their position in space and time. There is therefore an underlying inter-subjective truth we share with one another. Science is based on a methodology constructed to reach this authentic intersubjective agreement. In other spheres of life, like the moral, it is much more complex and difficult, but there is no reason we can't have increasing success as our global culture evolves.

Hobbits, Aliens & Morality

Actually, the impulse behind this post started with my reflections about Neanderthals. Over time (and most recently on a NOVA special) I have been exposed to the finding that modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for thousands of years prior to the extinction of Neanderthals (only 35,000 years ago). The poignant and tragic dimensions of the story emerge as we consider how similar Neanderthals were to us, and how nearly certain it is that modern humans were the proximate cause of their dying out (through competition for resources and very likely direct warfare).

Recently, an archeological discovery was made in Indonesia of a tiny hominid relative, homo floresiensis (immediately nicknamed “hobbits” -- see the review of the initial findings by Carl Zimmer and more recent follow up). It looks like these small folks lived as recently as 18,000 years ago! Again, we find a species of hominids which were contemporaneous to us. Again, modern humans likely played a role in their demise.

If through some circumstance one of these species had lived long enough to have been part of our more recent recorded history, there is unfortunately little doubt of what the outcome would have been. Given our grim history of racism, war and genocide with regard to our own species, there seems no question that our treatment of near-humans would have been even worse, had they continued to exist up to the present day.

But putting aside what we would have done and instead considering what one ought to do, I ask: should killing a Neanderthal or a hobbit be considered the equivalent of murdering a human in a contemporary moral system?

For humans, the natural origins of our moral impulses and conceptions of how we ought to treat one another can be in harmony. Genetic science has shown that we modern Homo sapiens are a strikingly homogeneous bunch. Experts estimate we can all trace our origins to common ancestors (mitochondrial Eve, for instance) who lived a very brief 60,000 to 150,000 years ago or so.

This seems like an unqualified good and fortunate state of affairs. All of us are close relatives to each other. Therefore, as I argued in a recent post, our naturally grounded impulses to treat our own kin with kindness and generosity can readily come to the fore on behalf of all humans, as our global culture evolves.

Would we extend this circle to include near-humans, or is there a justification for “species-ism” in favoring human life?

Now, ethical treatment of animals is already a great moral challenge of our time. Here, most all agree a moral system must include an imperative to treat animals well, but at the same time it is our undeniable inclination to value their lives less than those of fellow humans. Looking at the reasons for this, we begin with our ancestral need for animal products as tools for survival. Furthermore, it makes evolutionary sense that we lack natural impulses to treat genetically distant species with care as we do our close kin. But what ought we to do? Can an argument be made that the lives of animals are as valuable as our own? Can we come up with an objective argument that they are of inferior value? I have taken a stab at this and thought about a theory which places a value on the robustness and complexity of subjective experience (see this old post). But my confidence in such a model is tentative at this point.

I come away from these musings thinking we should feel grateful that we don’t currently face the moral dilemmas which would accompany sharing our planet with near-humans. I’m pretty sure we’re still not up to it.

One parting thought: What if we were faced with aliens with comparable or even greater intelligence than us? Could we recognize their worth, or would we fall back on our natural species-ism? Of course, this could be a moot consideration if they don’t appreciate our value and have bigger guns.

Faces of Nature

The devastation caused by the tsunami is taken by many commentators to be a dramatic reminder of the impersonal, mindless destructive power of nature.

Remember, though, that humanity is part of the natural world. The worldwide response of sympathy and aid needs to be reckoned with to consider what this episode means for one’s view of nature.

I do not believe developments in our world feature a higher purpose in the usual top-down theistic sense. However, I believe the story of evolution (cosmic, biological and most recently cultural) gives indications of progression – an expression of purpose built from the bottom-up.

In terms of human cultural evolution, I see a positive trend. Our expressions of generosity, altruism and cooperation (all grounded in our nature) have expanded through time to include larger and larger groups: from kin-based clans to larger tribes, to cities and nations (this point was featured in Robert Wright’s book Nonzero). The conclusion of this trend is to consider all of humanity part of our group, and to end the depersonalization of the other which is a feature of wars and of the national and religious conflicts which still trouble the world.

It’s hard not to see signs of continued movement in this direction in the wake of the tsunami.

Morals Predate Religion

I haven’t read much lately on evolutionary psychology or game theory, but enjoyed reading this talk by Karl Sigmund on Edge.org. Those who have followed this area even casually know that researchers have offered compelling reasons to think that diverse impulses such as generosity, altruism, cooperation, forgiveness, a sense of fairness, care for reputation and a desire to punish defectors are all grounded in natural selection. The combination of enlightened self-interest and our development as inherently social animals provided the basis for these impulses, which formed the backdrop for the later cultural evolution of moral codes and precepts in oral and written form.

Now, many have written eloquently on the topic of having why it is possible to have morality without religion. See for example this post from AnalPhilosopher. I think it seals the arguments to also note that morality predates religion (unless you are a “young-earth” creationist!)

Many are now studying the origins of religion itself from an evolutionary standpoint, but my impression is that this is a complex subject and there is no consensus yet on key points. However, it is pretty easy to speculate on the advantageous roles religion could have played in strengthening a pre-existing moral system among a social group (it seems obvious to anyone who is a parent): Religion adds both putative authority and a promise of punishment/reward to moral instructions, thereby giving them some extra oomph.

Ethical Implications: Abortion and Animal Rights

In past posts I’ve presented my argument that subjective experience is a fundamental, irreducible and ubiquitous part of the natural world. I have also thought about implications of this worldview for ethics. I’m tentative about addressing such a difficult topic, and I am less well-read on the subject. However, let me introduce the idea that this worldview can indeed inform one’s ethical system, and to illustrate I’ll begin by sketching what it implies in the cases of animal rights and abortion.

The key concept I’m introducing is that the intrinsic, qualitative richness of subjective experience is a good. The greater the number of subjective experiences in the world, the better. Further, more complex and intricate experiences are an increasingly higher good, since they represent a concentration and focusing of the essential quality. Harming or killing something which is a subject of experience is wrong, and is generally a greater wrong the greater the robustness and complexity of that experience.

Now, clearly there are caveats and exceptions to any simple statement of an ethical imperative. In particular, the idea of trying to assess the relative value of different experiences is fraught with difficulty. Another issue that springs immediately to mind is that one should also consider the potential for higher-level experience on the part of a given subject in the future (as in an embryo for example). I’m sure readers can offer many more suggestions and criticisms of what I present here: I would appreciate them.

Animal rights:
Some kind of proto-experience exists in the inorganic world, but it is living things which have the most elevated experience we are familiar with. There is something special about the way a cell “leverages” the potential for experience in the world, and an organism leverages it further. The increasing complexity of nervous systems which evolved in the animal kingdom can be thought of as concentrating further the inherent experiential quality of the universe in a single being. The human being is indeed the pinnacle of the animal kingdom in this respect, and by a large order of magnitude.

While humans have the greatest weight in our ethical system, we must also value animals. And our intuition that animals which have more highly evolved brains and nervous system are of greater value is correct.

Now given our evolutionary heritage, it is natural to propose that it is not per se immoral to kill animals for food and shelter. For the vast majority of our history, it was imperative. However, as we develop the means to survive without resort to animal products, our treatment of animals must change. I am not a vegetarian and I have struggled with this issue. At times the idea that we kill animals just for the convenience and culinary pleasure of it seems repugnant. Other times, the fact that I realistically place a much higher value on human experience than on that of animals ameliorates the vigor of my feelings. I do believe we must at a minimum steadily reduce the proportion of animals used; and we should focus greatest attention on the mammals first. Also, I strongly believe animals have feelings which are similar to ours, if less complex, and therefore an emphasis on reducing suffering in the slaughtering process is right.

Abortion:
For my view, what is important is that an embryo has steadily more human-like experience as it develops (there is no one moment where a fully-formed soul suddenly appears). Interestingly, I believe the intuitions of many Americans on abortion track fairly closely the perspective drawn from my emphasis on subjective experience. Most people intuit that abortion is wrong, but believe it is less wrong than murder. While the case is made difficult by the issue of “potential” mentioned above, a greater value should be placed on the human experience over that of the unborn, all else equal. I would note that even people who are vigorously against abortion rights make an exception if the life of the mother is in danger. Also, a large majority of people feel a late-term abortion is more wrong than an early-term abortion – and many would say a “morning-after” abortion may not be wrong at all. The further along the unborn child is in development, the greater its experience. The Supreme Court made a crude gesture in this area with its distinctions among trimesters, but the idea of putting proportionally greater emphasis on reducing late-term abortions is right.

This lateness-of-term dimension has traditionally gotten less attention in the public debate. This is perhaps because advocates of abortion rights worry about the “slippery slope” potential and feel (I think rightly) that they fare better when abortion is an “all or nothing” argument. But while I can’t quantify the relative reduction of harm which comes from reducing the average term of abortions vs. reducing the number, I feel that it has been underappreciated.

On this issue, as on animal rights, I am not an abolitionist. And my perspective shows this is not a black and white issue. But it is an imperative to steadily reduce the number of and, importantly, the lateness of abortions.

This post only just scratches the surface of a couple of moral issues. While I think the perspective given here is helpful, the balancing of competing ethical interests is not made simple. But as I continue to spend more time on “big” questions about reality, I hope to develop further thoughts on the ethical implications.

The Origin of Morals

In my last post I argued that our access to truth is authentic, however it is true that a dualism of perspectives -- the subjective and the (simulated) objective -- leads us to have two ways of interpreting what we learn. On the one hand, we discover facts; on the other hand, we form values. This is another dichotomy which I think we can and should resolve.

A theme of my posts has been that we can help bridge the hard division between the scientific and religious worldviews by placing our first person experience squarely into a revised picture of the natural world. When it comes to first person values and human morality, we come to one of the most challenging parts of this project. Most people think that the ability to distinguish good and bad is unique to humans and is a critical contribution of our great religious traditions to our lives.

However, an increasing body of work in the field of evolutionary psychology has begun to provide natural explanations for human feelings and behaviors which have a strong moral or ethical content. Love of family and altruistic behavior are grounded in our evolutionary heritage according to some of this work (and by the way aren’t unique to humans). Negative impulses and behaviors such as war making can be similarly studied in the context of how our species developed.

A big key to accepting these explanations as valid is to realize that a scientific (third-person) analysis doesn’t devalue what the first person experience really means to the person having it. To give an example: an evolutionary psychologist might say my feelings of love for my children are an outgrowth of our species’ need to “invest” in the rearing of offspring until they reach reproductive maturity in order to perpetuate genes. How cold and uninspiring is that? It takes some practice to learn to simultaneously accept such an explanation while rejoicing in the experience of that parental love. Understanding why we can explain altruism as a natural impulse (helping each other aided our survival in primitive societies) doesn’t mean I still shouldn’t view it as morally good thing to aid someone in need. Our first person perspective is authentic; it is not any less real or important for the fact that it is grounded in our evolutionary past.

Now, this field of evolutionary psychology is still young and there is a long way to go in providing a fuller picture of how it all works. Because the topic is so complex, there is a lot of room for misunderstanding and drawing incorrect conclusions. One of the best examples is the recent popularization of the idea that men are more naturally prone to promiscuity compared to women given their greater potential to spread their genes widely through this activity. Obviously, some might succumb to using this as a scientific rationalization for bad behavior: it turns out that an urge to be a faithful mate also has a strong natural grounding. At the end of the day, living a moral life remains a challenging and nuanced personal journey, and the fact that our mix of moral impulses was shaped by evolution doesn’t change this. However, understanding the evolutionary origin of our values and ethics in the natural world helps further close the gap in how we consider the most fundamental questions of being. We are moral beings and we are grounded in the most fundamental stuff of the universe: therefore, we live in a moral universe.

One other point I’d like to make is that the natural grounding of morals in evolution does not mean that our moral progress is frozen in the hunter-gatherer era when our physical make-up was primarily formed. Because we are social animals, evolution continues in societal and cultural domains. Obviously, we see cultural evolution in many areas such as the spreading of tools and technology or development of new artistic forms. But moral development can continue in the form of cultural evolution, too. I think one example of this is to consider the impact of the progressive enlarging of our societal units. Beginning with our naturally selected impulses to care for kin and to engage in altruistic behavior, we came to identify with the collective welfare of a kinship-based clan. Over time, people extended their group identity to encompass larger tribes, cities and nations. There is an optimistic idea which comes out of this trend. As we absorb more of humanity into what we think of as our societal group, there is progressively less room for viewing other humans as enemies. If this process could develop to the point where the whole species is viewed as part of our extended clan, war could diminish. More speculatively, one might imagine we can extend our empathy even beyond our species. Given that we are seamlessly integrated into the larger natural world, I believe we can think of our moral connections extending without limit.