I stopped being able to follow your argument, Martin, when you brought up the soldiers. But, if you’re arguing that self-sacrifice is somehow biologically inherent in people. which as everyone has pointed out is a giant assumption, then using as an example soldiers who are trained to be self-sacrificing probably won’t help. If it was natural then it wouldn’t need to be trained. Also, self-preservation is probably a larger motivating factor in human behavior than self-sacrifice.
Regardless, soldiers probably shouldn’t be help up as moral examplars.
Who said it's unproblematic? Who's ignoring anything? Reductionist from what? Of what?
I'm liberal, humanist, utilitarian, socialist, peace making blah-di-blah, di-bloody-dah, at least as much as you. You seem to know something I can't about the magic of and behind altruism however.
Who said it’s unproblematic? Well, I rather took your dismissal of concerns about the wider role of soldiers as ‘liberal and pacifistic’ as saying they didn’t need to be addressed.
Who’s ignoring anything? I think I’ve already covered this. You have consistently treated eusociality-within-groups as an example of altruism, with issues such as war and genocide as sort of meaningless externalities to that eusociality. These seem like large things not to account for.
Re: reductionism, I was referring to a hierarchy of causal explanations earlier drawn with (IIRC) physics at the bottom, genetics at a level of above that, and so on, with sociology at the top. From everything I’ve seen on this thread, genetics and evolutionary selection for you and @Colin Smith is the preferred level of explanation (why not physics? Hmmm ...), to the extent that there’s not really any unpacking of anything beyond it. ‘Higher order’ phenomena are waved away by words such as ‘emergence’, ‘complexity’, ‘ifs’, and ‘blur’, and then self-sealed by the claim that agent-provided accounts regarding altruistic motivations are deluded or irrelevant. AFAICT, the attitude is that no sensible account can be made of levels upwards of genetics, and as such, I feel like the reciprocal altruism account of altruism ends up being a kind of circular ‘just-so’ story that always ends the same way.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re referring to as the ‘magic’ accounting for altruism. If by that term you mean things like agency, rationality, personal factors, social context, psychohistory, narratives, education, or reflection .... well, sure. Possibly I do know more about that magic, just because I think these are all necessary parts of any account of morality, and thus interesting in the moral dimension amongst others. But then again, I wouldn’t describe any of this as ‘magic’. I’d say this is ‘common experience’.
I see why you like St Francis of Assisi because he was remarkably counter cultural, creative and attractive in living out his faith. So much so that he revived the church in C13th. He founded the Friars Minor, the Order of St Clare for women and the Third Order for lay people so he was radically inclusive. He engaged with those on the margins such as lepers and is the patron saint of animals. His friars were committed to education and went out preaching in the local villages. And they radically lived out what they believed. We owe the Christmas Nativity and the Stations of the Cross to the creativity of the Franciscans.
Yes, that's exactly why I find St. Francis and his spiritual ideals so inspiring: they're so radical, and yet also so straightforward in some ways.
I wonder what a modern St. Francis would diagnose as our greatest contemporary social and spiritual evil?
Yes, we could do with a modern St Francis to revive the church. People today are looking for something authentic just as they were in C13th. He overcame his fear of the other by kissing a leper. And he took the precepts of Christ literally by cutting off his sleeves to clothe beggars and selling the only community Bible to provide money for a poor woman. Which I find is rather wonderful. When his human fear was replaced with the love of God he was able to live like Christ.
I think fear of the other is very much present today.
Yes, and I think what is counted as ‘other’ is getting deeper and deeper. The phrase ‘atomised individual’ is kind of a cliche in some circles. But I think it’s been the case that our openness to the world and to each other has been steadily diminishing for some time. Everything is experienced as a threat.
I've been recently very impressed by the writings of Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shane Claiborne and Rob Bell (I'm listening to his Blood, Guts and Fire chapter-by-chapter, almost verse-by-verse examination of Leviticus). They are far from lukewarm in their speech and actions.
Can't parse much of what you say, which is mutual I'm sure. Your first para I take to mean that I dismissed your concern about soldiers' altruism mixed in with being killing machines as liberal and pacifistic. Well sorry if that's how it came across. As I said I'm at least as liberal and pacifistic as you. What is your concern? That normal human beings are easily mobilized altruistic killing machines? What? I want us to transcend our remarkable war making capacity in to fighting non-violently for universal social justice so that peace ensues, by refusing to have enemies. It's glacially slowly happening. Too slow for the Earth. Etc, etc.
Why the redundant phraseology? Eusocialism within groups? As opposed to beyond them? To the ultimate ones? Humanity? The Planet? For at least the third time, you can't do genocide of out-group without being eusocial in-group. Etc, etc.
Your 3rd para. No I didn't. Etc, etc.
Your 4th. Etc.
What do you know that I can't? Please make your claim clear.
snip
I find it unlikely that the variance in religious belief can be explained by reference to biological evolution or genetics, which is another one of the points at issue. Doc Tor AIUI is arguing that behavioural evolution is in some important ways a separate process from biological evolution.
Well, of course it's nothing to do with genetics. The evolution of behaviour is memes not genes.
That's not true. It's genes AND memes. More importantly, it does not preclude individual choice as a determinant of action.
Whatever historical inheritance has been passed on via genes or memes, we still have to decide what to do. Decisions are determined, not necessarily pre-determined.
That you yourself say 'there are enough members of the group' indicates that altruism doesn't have a purely biological/evolutionary explanation. If it did, you would be saying 'the vast majority of the group' or 'all of the group'.
That's really not how evolution works. Many traits are not shared by the whole of a species. In a species that has social cooperation, all that is needed for a trait to be selected is "enough." There are arguments from "group selection" or "survival of the fittest group" for sociopathy and homsexuality, even though these traits are a vast minority (if you will) of the population
Group selection (operating on groupish genes?), much as I want it to be real (as it would accelerate evolution), hasn't overcome individual and kin selection by selfish genes as a valid explanation of behaviour.
Can't parse much of what you say, which is mutual I'm sure ... What is your concern? That normal human beings are easily mobilized altruistic killing machines? What? I want us to transcend our remarkable war making capacity in to fighting non-violently for universal social justice so that peace ensues, by refusing to have enemies. It's glacially slowly happening. Too slow for the Earth. Etc, etc.
Why the redundant phraseology? Eusocialism within groups? As opposed to beyond them? To the ultimate ones? Humanity? The Planet? For at least the third time, you can't do genocide of out-group without being eusocial in-group. Etc, etc.
I suspect part of the problem in parsing comes from where my argument is pointed. Much of this thread has been about the basis of altruism, while I suppose most of my questions have been directed at an equivalence drawn earlier in the logical chain, between morality and altruism. I'm glad you want 'universal social justice' and so forth - but the fact that you seem to be grounding this in the same mechanism in which you ground war and genocide makes me curious as to how you're drawing the lines between the start point (reciprocal altruism grounded ultimately in agent self-interest) and the envisaged end result of universal peace. Apparently we're going to somehow 'transcend' the various negative results we have witnessed so far at some point in the very distant and perhaps unrealisable future - a choice of words and vision that makes me feel you're smuggling in some claims in all this you would see as magical thinking in others. And at the very least succumbing to the teleological fallacy in evolution.
As for the rest of it, I'm going to try to rebase the conversation a bit, as I think a lot of the difficulties are coming from overly-abstract starting points.
The problem I've been concerned with, as stated upthread, is how to ground moral action. By which I mean: at various points in my life, I have been uncertain what to do. These include, for example
- knowing that sexual abuse is taking place within a family, while knowing that the victim of this abuse did not want it revealed, partly out of shame, but more because it would unquestionably blow the family apart and quite likely result in violence, maybe murderous violence
- being asked by a close friend to advise him regarding a wildly inappropriate relationship that nevertheless brought him great happiness and ended a prolonged period of social isolation and despair for him
- trying to balance a job that I felt was ethically actively harmful but just down the road from me, against taking one I thought ethically actively beneficial, but that separates me from my family a great deal
- working at a soup kitchen, and wondering how much this band-aid solution was helping to support an austerity regime slowly crushing the people I'm trying to help with the work at the soup kitchen.
- any of innumerable questions about the right thing to do, asked to me by my child
- living in a democracy as I do, innumerable questions about voting. Do I support intervention in Libya? In Syria?
To answer any of these, I have to balance out all sorts of intuitions, instincts, deliberations, judgements. I have to think a lot. I have to feel a lot. I have to judge when I'm overthinking things, or allowing emotion too much room in my thinking. There is an innumerable range of things I have to consider, not the least of which is that I don't have an infinite amount of time to consider them. And this is what I mean by 'grounding' a moral judgement, a moral action: the account I tell to myself and tell to others about why I have done what I have done, and why I think it is the right thing.
To this mix, the statement (or even the knowledge) 'well, whatever decision I arrive at, I can be sure that the possibility for contemplating it is biologically grounded' adds, really, nothing much at all. The kind of reflection needed is of another order entirely.
Biology simply doesn't explain altruism and not-altruism. We have to look elsewhere.
Biology seems the only possible source of explanation for the human potential for empathy.
If you empathize with someone then you feel for them, you want for them what you would want for yourself in the same situation, and so you help them because you want to.
Feeling more empathy for one's own tribe than for other tribes is something that evolution could conceivably select for.
But expecting biology to explain the exact situations in which you feel different degrees of empathy for others in the modern world is unrealistic.
Martin54 is right - that's emergent behaviour. Which isn't magic, just so complex as to prohibit comprehensive explanation.
But expecting biology to explain the exact situations in which you feel different degrees of empathy for others in the modern world is unrealistic.
Martin54 is right - that's emergent behaviour. Which isn't magic, just so complex as to prohibit comprehensive explanation.
In a way, this has been exactly my point. Biology isn’t sufficient to explain the ‘exact situations’ in which we find ourselves. For this we need a different (‘emergent’, if you insist on this) order of explanation. And explanations are badly needed, because we are always in some exact situation. To say that this is ‘complex’ is the beginning of the enquiry. Not, importantly, the end.
snip
I find it unlikely that the variance in religious belief can be explained by reference to biological evolution or genetics, which is another one of the points at issue. Doc Tor AIUI is arguing that behavioural evolution is in some important ways a separate process from biological evolution.
Well, of course it's nothing to do with genetics. The evolution of behaviour is memes not genes.
And Colin, it's predicated on genetics. We are pre-wired for experience (as @Barnabas62 imlies I infer). You agreed to that.
I can't do you @Timo Pax justice in particular here on the phone, I'll have to goof off at work. No internet at new home yet.
Damn good thread. I'm see-sawing away as I write, on Doc & Russ.
... how to ground moral action. ..for example
- knowing that sexual abuse is taking place within a family...
- being asked by a close friend to advise him regarding a wildly inappropriate relationship that nevertheless brought him great happiness...
- trying to balance a job harmful but just down the road from me, against actively beneficial, but that separates me from my family a great deal
- working at a soup kitchen, and wondering...
- living in a democracy as I do, innumerable questions about voting...
I very much share & appreciate your angst over these questions. FWIW, after much thought & reading I have come to some conclusions that serve me well right now:
1. The end does not justify the means (so we just need to do "the next right thing")
i.e. we can't know all the possible outcomes of our actions or inactions, so if we choose to do the right thing, we leave the rest in God's hands. ("how convenient" I used to think - BEFORE my savior intervened)
When I really don't know what the right thing is, and Jesus' words seem all over the place, I go back to the commandments. They are pretty black-and-white.
As for the rest of it ... well, we can keep talking about this, depending on how much patience our respective workplaces have with it. But in a way I'm not even sure we're disagreeing. We're just talking about different things, and on that basis we can agree to each having a different focus and interests, a bit like @Colin Smith and I did a while back.
... we leave the rest in God's hands. ("how convenient" I used to think - BEFORE my savior intervened)
When I really don't know what the right thing is, and Jesus' words seem all over the place, I go back to the commandments. They are pretty black-and-white.
I know what you mean about the 'how convenient' thought. I used to think the appeal of religion was that it gave certainties. Now I realise that's not the case!
In my own case, I guess what emerged for me as general principles over the years were 'details matter', 'people over principles (while reminding people of the principles)' and 'mercy over justice (but reminding the spared of the injustice)'. Now that I have a religious focus, this is something I see in the NT as well (e.g., the story of the woman caught in adultery). But as this conversion is a recent one, I'm just proof-texting at this point.
Right-O @Timo Pax. Should we start again? You operate at a level way above mine, so you will have to stoop to conquer. I accept that your prime focus here is in how we as individuals ground moral action, in which I accept that the evolution of our moral sense is not immediate. As a philosophical naturalist I would argue that it's close to that surface.
Your dilemmas are most real:
- knowing that sexual abuse is taking place within a family, while knowing that the victim of this abuse did not want it revealed, partly out of shame, but more because it would unquestionably blow the family apart and quite likely result in violence, maybe murderous violence
EZ answers: encourage them to get the hell out. Can you take FULL financial responsibility for that? Thought not! In working with desperately broken people I have learned the hardest way over 10 years that nothing works 99% of the time but being helplessly present. Corleone rules 1 & 2.
- being asked by a close friend to advise him regarding a wildly inappropriate relationship that nevertheless brought him great happiness and ended a prolonged period of social isolation and despair for him
Turn it round! What do they think? They're using you as a white board anyway. They have to take full responsibility. You have NONE at all.
- trying to balance a job that I felt was ethically actively harmful but just down the road from me, against taking one I thought ethically actively beneficial, but that separates me from my family a great deal
In The Happiness Hypothesis, one of the basics is do NOT commute. Walk to work. How ethically harmful? Working in a corner shop and selling foodless food, tobacco, booze, scratch cards and porn to the poor? With a smile? Or some corporate equivalent. See Corleone rule number 8. And 1. And 2.
- working at a soup kitchen, and wondering how much this band-aid solution was helping to support an austerity regime slowly crushing the people I'm trying to help with the work at the soup kitchen.
If you don't the austerity regime will still be there in 10 years. As it has been and more.
- any of innumerable questions about the right thing to do, asked to me by my child
Ask them. And always have 'Because I'm your parent that's why!' as the final line.
- living in a democracy as I do, innumerable questions about voting. Do I support intervention in Libya? In Syria?
I always vote Labour. End of. Intervention in Libya gave us the Manchester Arena bombing. Syria gave us the London mass stabbings and car killing. Intervention in such theatres, even with a utilitarian calculus, must include such consequences: they ALWAYS happen. And we therefore have that blood on our hands too.
Back to your: "Much of this thread has been about the basis of altruism, while I suppose most of my questions have been directed at an equivalence drawn earlier in the logical chain, between morality and altruism."
I see altruism as high end morality, which is a pretty shallow pond.
"I'm glad you want 'universal social justice' and so forth - but the fact that you seem to be grounding this in the same mechanism in which you ground war and genocide makes me curious as to how you're drawing the lines between the start point (reciprocal altruism grounded ultimately in agent self-interest) and the envisaged end result of universal peace. Apparently we're going to somehow 'transcend' the various negative results we have witnessed so far at some point in the very distant and perhaps unrealisable future - a choice of words and vision that makes me feel you're smuggling in some claims in all this you would see as magical thinking in others. And at the very least succumbing to the teleological fallacy in evolution."
Excellent. Aye, we'll never get there. Not even close. Even assuming we survive global warming beyond a century or three. But it's a worthwhile goal. If our hive switch isn't thrown throwing us up in to the noosphere we're doomed. Oh for an evolutionary leap! Greg Bear's sublime Darwin's Radio & Children. Population will crash by the end of the century apart from sub-Saharan African. Evolution has no purpose at all of course, but it avails possibilities of greater complexity, ecological pluralism (the noosphere).
"Such genes are now poised for discovery. In this article, we develop a set of intuitive criteria for the recognition and analysis of genes for altruism and describe the first candidate genes affecting altruism from social insects and humans."
"Such genes are now poised for discovery. In this article, we develop a set of intuitive criteria for the recognition and analysis of genes for altruism and describe the first candidate genes affecting altruism from social insects and humans."
tl;dr no such genes have been found yet.
How confident are you that they won't be?
From the same source source:
"Neurobiology
...the first evidence for the neural bases of altruistic giving in normal healthy volunteers, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. ...showed that both pure monetary rewards and charitable donations activated the mesolimbic reward pathway, a primitive part of the brain that usually responds to food and sex.
However, when volunteers generously placed the interests of others before their own by making charitable donations, another brain circuit was selectively activated: the subgenual cortex/septal region.
These structures are intimately related to social attachment and bonding in other species.
Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
One brain region, the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex/basal forebrain, contributes to learning altruistic behavior, especially in those with trait empathy. The same study has shown a connection between giving to charity and the promotion of social bonding.
...Damasio and his colleagues showed that subjects with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lack the ability to empathically feel their way to moral answers, and that when confronted with moral dilemmas, these brain-damaged patients coldly came up with "end-justifies-the-means" answers, leading Damasio to conclude that the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when they were confronted by a difficult issue — in this case as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city — these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.
...one of this study's implications is that society may have to rethink how it judges immoral people: "Psychopaths often feel no empathy or remorse. Without that awareness, people relying exclusively on reasoning seem to find it harder to sort their way through moral thickets. Does that mean they should be held to different standards of accountability?"
...Harbaugh... concluded ...people are motivated to give for reasons of personal prestige and in a similar fMRI scanner test ...Mayr, reached the same conclusions of Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman about giving to charity, although they were able to divide the study group into two groups: "egoists" and "altruists".
One of their discoveries was that, though rarely, even some of the considered "egoists" sometimes gave more than expected because that would help others, leading to the conclusion that there are other factors in cause in charity, such as a person's environment and values.
...
There has been some debate on whether or not humans are truly capable of psychological altruism."
I was thinking about de Waal's discussions of empathy and altruism in animals. However, this stuff is well complicated, and beset with many problems, for example the costliness of altruism might stimulate sexual interest in potential mates, (costliness showing that you are reproductively fit). However, examples of rats helping another rat in trouble, don't seem to involve sexual interest. There is also the issue of kinship. I think I will have to read de Waal's book, "The bonobo and the atheist".
"Such genes are now poised for discovery. In this article, we develop a set of intuitive criteria for the recognition and analysis of genes for altruism and describe the first candidate genes affecting altruism from social insects and humans."
tl;dr no such genes have been found yet.
How confident are you that they won't be?
I'm neither confident or unconfident. Just that the paper you linked didn't say what you thought it said.
No altruism gene has been identified, and it says that in the abstract.
"Such genes are now poised for discovery. In this article, we develop a set of intuitive criteria for the recognition and analysis of genes for altruism and describe the first candidate genes affecting altruism from social insects and humans."
tl;dr no such genes have been found yet.
How confident are you that they won't be?
I'm neither confident or unconfident. Just that the paper you linked didn't say what you thought it said.
No altruism gene has been identified, and it says that in the abstract.
Well, this is separate from my earlier concerns about orders of explanation (and thank you, @Martin54, for your examples of advice you might give me when confronted by various situations; this is indeed the kind of advice I can use!), but ... where isn't biology?
Well, it depends what exactly you mean by 'biology'. But, to start with the paper you first quoted, on a limited definition it's not in the phrase:
'This inference implies that genes underlying altruism should be conditionally expressed as a function of their social environment. Specifically, these genes should be environmentally switched ‘on’ in altruistic helpers, yet remain unexpressed and switched ‘off’ in reproductive recipients'
If I'm reading this correctly, the point is that whether a social insect is a member of a reproductive or non-reproductive caste is epigenetic; the genetic potential is there for either outcome, but outside (and I guess probably insect-mediated) triggers cascade the process in one direction or another.
More fundamental than this, there is the truism that the 'genes vs the environment' causal question is to some extent a false antithesis, because what selects for genes is, in fact, the environment.
Other, more explicit, non-biological (in the narrow sense) aspects in the snippets you've quoted are the references to how altruistic behaviour is learned, to social prestige as a motivator for giving (which seems to contradict the conclusion that the reward system is 'hard-wired', but without more context I'm not sure what's going on here), and the concluding statement that there seem to be 'other factors' at play, including 'environment and values'.
There also seems a weird indeterminacy about the involvement of the subgenual cortex: if the reward system gets activated even without the ol' SGC getting involved, why involve it at all? Is it triggering the reward system? Or what? But without more context I can't really say.
What I can say is that it doesn't seem like biology, if construed in a narrow sense of 'genes replicating themselves', is really explaining everything here. What's pointed to in the citations you've made is a rather wider notion of 'biology', involving a complex and interacting mesh between genes, the environment, and society, whether insectoid or humanoid - a sort of ecology which includes history and culture in its remit.
So sure ... maybe biology explains everything. But that's at least in part because everything ends up being included in 'biology' :-).
People get a serotonin reward when they gut someone with a knife.
Ok, perhaps altruism is gene-linked, but the noise surrounding it is so huge it may as well not be. We know through our everyday experience that the occurance of altruism is, frankly, patchy, unlike body hair and the appendix.
There are better, more complete explanations of the (limited) expressions of altruism we see than the Power of Genetics Compells Thee! (Oh that was so).
Yep. There's been a strong whiff that genes are sufficient in themselves to explain everything, and that mention of other causes is some kind of invocation of weird juju magic.
Yep. There's been a strong whiff that genes are sufficient in themselves to explain everything, and that mention of other causes is some kind of invocation of weird juju magic.
Even environmental causes? Dinosaurs might disagree.
It's thought that in the Stone Age men would have been more likely to do the sewing than women. It took a lot of strength to bore the holes in animal skins with a flint awl and then stitch them together with a bone needle and sinews.
Given that we are compiled from inherited genes, yes. People are saying exactly that.
Well, are geneticists saying that?
As far as I can tell, some are. There are a lot of geneticists out there searching for the gay gene, the altruism gene, the intelligence gene and such. O brave new world!
As far as I can tell, some are. There are a lot of geneticists out there searching for the gay gene, the altruism gene, the intelligence gene and such. O brave new world!
Yeah, I grew up with 'the gay gene' being a thing. Then I saw the other day it had been debunked. And I feel as though there have been at least half-a-dozen iterations of the schizophrenia gene theory since I was in my early twenties. And a bunch of stuff about facial symmetry and mate selection, once upon a time.
I spent most of last year working as an IT guy in the medical faculty at the university, and I got the strong impression that a lot of researchers were very disappointed in how non-deterministic genes are 'in the wild'. There's epigenetics of course; but in medical research, anyway, there's also been an explosion from genomics into metabolomics, proteomics, ionomics .... there's just so many possible slips between genotype and phenotype that genetics in its 'pure' form tells you much, much less than a medical researcher would like about the organism.
If I'm sounding a bit bitter about this, it's because I briefly fell in love with botany as a student at Uni in the 90s, but was told further study would be entirely genetically based: if I was getting into it because I found plants interesting, I was out of luck, because the future belonged to the combinatoric number-crunchers. So I ran off and did other, and ultimately less satisfying, things. A decade later, however, and the pendulum had swung back again, all the way into ecology as the master-science that would make sense of everything .... but by then it was too late for me ....
@Timo Pax what else would everything end up being? Genes express neurobiology in which behaviour including personal morality emerge. And that ain't reductionism if you reverse it. It ain't linear one way and the other. It's exponentially complex... biology. Anything else? Arguably chemistry (bags of enzymes realizing that they are bags of enzymes; the lab is empty but the chemicals talk), physics, logic down the chain of being. So theoretically (but never really, not as a single human brain is more complex than the entire physical universe and then a few) it could be reproduced in silico.
So what other causes in the chain of being emergent up from logic-biology could there be? Or is there another unnatural layer of existence above we intersect with? Are we antennae for a supernatural field? What? 'Spirit'? What are you and @Doc Tor suggesting? Not that of course, so what?
@Martin54 I think we're agreeing with each other, sort of. I agree that if you draw a sort of complexity-hierarchy with genes at the bottom moving up through neurobiology into morality and agency and so forth, it 'ain't reductionism if you reverse it', and admit causation running down again through society and agency and morality through to neurobiology and gene selection. That's just fine. It's just that it starts getting a bit strange to talk about it as all "just" being 'biology'. And then the language starts getting a bit tangled: if I'm understanding you rightly, you're saying there's "only" biology, chemistry, and physics - which seems to imply that only physical things are "really real" and emergent (as you put it) properties are only ... kind of real? Unreal? Or what?
I'm not even sure what to do with the fact that 'logic' seems to exist alongside all the "really real" things, or what to make of the phrase 'logic-biology' - these are ontological depths that make my head spin. The closest I can get to striking sense out of it is an implicit belief on your part that it's in principle (if only very rarely in practice) possible to reason deterministically about "really real" things and not about levels of complexity beyond that, so the rest of it fits into the weird domain of 'spirit'.
But as I say, I'm not entirely clear on what you're saying.
Sorry for the inarticulacy. The emergent is as real as everything in between. It's like geology as musical chairs, the strata are where the music stopped. Repeatable observations, the determinate do-re-mi stuff of logic, physics, chemistry, biology, are silent strata; we're just reading their music. The emergent cacophonies are in between. Ja get mi? There is the general determinacy of increased complexity on a par with cosmic inflation in leap and the hindsight we bring to that ("so that's why we're bipeds with binocular vision and opposable thumbs"), in seeing such efficiencies, geometries; logic. Logic underpins mathematics underpins quantum physics underpins chemistry etc. And they're all really real. The ground of being is either the previous Planck tick back for eternity or Spirit below that.
Reading de Waal's "The bonobo and the atheist", disappointing as it's so anecdotal. I remember old Bob, a handsome young chimp, who would help old chimps up trees, and give them food, when they were sick or injured. Well, OK, but this is one of the authorities on animal proto-morality in the world, where's the beef?
In one of the above posts, the phrase 'gene selection' was used. As in the phrase 'natural selection', I wish Darwin had thought of a more exact word! Selection does tend to imply a picking of this gene rather than that one and of course the process was not that at all. The DNA replicated itself, including slight or not-so-slight errors. Various mutations happened but all were random, none at all selected, i.e. by anything.
The DNA might replicate itself, but it still requires a vessel to live long enough to get to that stage. We understand that 'natural selection' doesn't involve anything actively selecting anything (unless they have access to a conscious mind and/or a CRISPR), and is the phenonemon of survivors of environmental pressure breeding with each other. Which is how Darwin meant it.
Comments
Why not? And it's certainly. Not probably.
Who said it’s unproblematic? Well, I rather took your dismissal of concerns about the wider role of soldiers as ‘liberal and pacifistic’ as saying they didn’t need to be addressed.
Who’s ignoring anything? I think I’ve already covered this. You have consistently treated eusociality-within-groups as an example of altruism, with issues such as war and genocide as sort of meaningless externalities to that eusociality. These seem like large things not to account for.
Re: reductionism, I was referring to a hierarchy of causal explanations earlier drawn with (IIRC) physics at the bottom, genetics at a level of above that, and so on, with sociology at the top. From everything I’ve seen on this thread, genetics and evolutionary selection for you and @Colin Smith is the preferred level of explanation (why not physics? Hmmm ...), to the extent that there’s not really any unpacking of anything beyond it. ‘Higher order’ phenomena are waved away by words such as ‘emergence’, ‘complexity’, ‘ifs’, and ‘blur’, and then self-sealed by the claim that agent-provided accounts regarding altruistic motivations are deluded or irrelevant. AFAICT, the attitude is that no sensible account can be made of levels upwards of genetics, and as such, I feel like the reciprocal altruism account of altruism ends up being a kind of circular ‘just-so’ story that always ends the same way.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re referring to as the ‘magic’ accounting for altruism. If by that term you mean things like agency, rationality, personal factors, social context, psychohistory, narratives, education, or reflection .... well, sure. Possibly I do know more about that magic, just because I think these are all necessary parts of any account of morality, and thus interesting in the moral dimension amongst others. But then again, I wouldn’t describe any of this as ‘magic’. I’d say this is ‘common experience’.
Yes, that's exactly why I find St. Francis and his spiritual ideals so inspiring: they're so radical, and yet also so straightforward in some ways.
I wonder what a modern St. Francis would diagnose as our greatest contemporary social and spiritual evil?
I think fear of the other is very much present today.
Can't parse much of what you say, which is mutual I'm sure. Your first para I take to mean that I dismissed your concern about soldiers' altruism mixed in with being killing machines as liberal and pacifistic. Well sorry if that's how it came across. As I said I'm at least as liberal and pacifistic as you. What is your concern? That normal human beings are easily mobilized altruistic killing machines? What? I want us to transcend our remarkable war making capacity in to fighting non-violently for universal social justice so that peace ensues, by refusing to have enemies. It's glacially slowly happening. Too slow for the Earth. Etc, etc.
Why the redundant phraseology? Eusocialism within groups? As opposed to beyond them? To the ultimate ones? Humanity? The Planet? For at least the third time, you can't do genocide of out-group without being eusocial in-group. Etc, etc.
Your 3rd para. No I didn't. Etc, etc.
Your 4th. Etc.
What do you know that I can't? Please make your claim clear.
That's not true. It's genes AND memes. More importantly, it does not preclude individual choice as a determinant of action.
Whatever historical inheritance has been passed on via genes or memes, we still have to decide what to do. Decisions are determined, not necessarily pre-determined.
Absolutely. Sorry Colin!
Group selection (operating on groupish genes?), much as I want it to be real (as it would accelerate evolution), hasn't overcome individual and kin selection by selfish genes as a valid explanation of behaviour.
I suspect part of the problem in parsing comes from where my argument is pointed. Much of this thread has been about the basis of altruism, while I suppose most of my questions have been directed at an equivalence drawn earlier in the logical chain, between morality and altruism. I'm glad you want 'universal social justice' and so forth - but the fact that you seem to be grounding this in the same mechanism in which you ground war and genocide makes me curious as to how you're drawing the lines between the start point (reciprocal altruism grounded ultimately in agent self-interest) and the envisaged end result of universal peace. Apparently we're going to somehow 'transcend' the various negative results we have witnessed so far at some point in the very distant and perhaps unrealisable future - a choice of words and vision that makes me feel you're smuggling in some claims in all this you would see as magical thinking in others. And at the very least succumbing to the teleological fallacy in evolution.
As for the rest of it, I'm going to try to rebase the conversation a bit, as I think a lot of the difficulties are coming from overly-abstract starting points.
The problem I've been concerned with, as stated upthread, is how to ground moral action. By which I mean: at various points in my life, I have been uncertain what to do. These include, for example
- knowing that sexual abuse is taking place within a family, while knowing that the victim of this abuse did not want it revealed, partly out of shame, but more because it would unquestionably blow the family apart and quite likely result in violence, maybe murderous violence
- being asked by a close friend to advise him regarding a wildly inappropriate relationship that nevertheless brought him great happiness and ended a prolonged period of social isolation and despair for him
- trying to balance a job that I felt was ethically actively harmful but just down the road from me, against taking one I thought ethically actively beneficial, but that separates me from my family a great deal
- working at a soup kitchen, and wondering how much this band-aid solution was helping to support an austerity regime slowly crushing the people I'm trying to help with the work at the soup kitchen.
- any of innumerable questions about the right thing to do, asked to me by my child
- living in a democracy as I do, innumerable questions about voting. Do I support intervention in Libya? In Syria?
To answer any of these, I have to balance out all sorts of intuitions, instincts, deliberations, judgements. I have to think a lot. I have to feel a lot. I have to judge when I'm overthinking things, or allowing emotion too much room in my thinking. There is an innumerable range of things I have to consider, not the least of which is that I don't have an infinite amount of time to consider them. And this is what I mean by 'grounding' a moral judgement, a moral action: the account I tell to myself and tell to others about why I have done what I have done, and why I think it is the right thing.
To this mix, the statement (or even the knowledge) 'well, whatever decision I arrive at, I can be sure that the possibility for contemplating it is biologically grounded' adds, really, nothing much at all. The kind of reflection needed is of another order entirely.
Biology seems the only possible source of explanation for the human potential for empathy.
If you empathize with someone then you feel for them, you want for them what you would want for yourself in the same situation, and so you help them because you want to.
Feeling more empathy for one's own tribe than for other tribes is something that evolution could conceivably select for.
But expecting biology to explain the exact situations in which you feel different degrees of empathy for others in the modern world is unrealistic.
Martin54 is right - that's emergent behaviour. Which isn't magic, just so complex as to prohibit comprehensive explanation.
[citation needed]
In a way, this has been exactly my point. Biology isn’t sufficient to explain the ‘exact situations’ in which we find ourselves. For this we need a different (‘emergent’, if you insist on this) order of explanation. And explanations are badly needed, because we are always in some exact situation. To say that this is ‘complex’ is the beginning of the enquiry. Not, importantly, the end.
And Colin, it's predicated on genetics. We are pre-wired for experience (as @Barnabas62 imlies I infer). You agreed to that.
I can't do you @Timo Pax justice in particular here on the phone, I'll have to goof off at work. No internet at new home yet.
Damn good thread. I'm see-sawing away as I write, on Doc & Russ.
I very much share & appreciate your angst over these questions. FWIW, after much thought & reading I have come to some conclusions that serve me well right now:
1. The end does not justify the means (so we just need to do "the next right thing")
i.e. we can't know all the possible outcomes of our actions or inactions, so if we choose to do the right thing, we leave the rest in God's hands. ("how convenient" I used to think - BEFORE my savior intervened)
When I really don't know what the right thing is, and Jesus' words seem all over the place, I go back to the commandments. They are pretty black-and-white.
As for the rest of it ... well, we can keep talking about this, depending on how much patience our respective workplaces have with it. But in a way I'm not even sure we're disagreeing. We're just talking about different things, and on that basis we can agree to each having a different focus and interests, a bit like @Colin Smith and I did a while back.
I know what you mean about the 'how convenient' thought. I used to think the appeal of religion was that it gave certainties. Now I realise that's not the case!
In my own case, I guess what emerged for me as general principles over the years were 'details matter', 'people over principles (while reminding people of the principles)' and 'mercy over justice (but reminding the spared of the injustice)'. Now that I have a religious focus, this is something I see in the NT as well (e.g., the story of the woman caught in adultery). But as this conversion is a recent one, I'm just proof-texting at this point.
Your dilemmas are most real:
- knowing that sexual abuse is taking place within a family, while knowing that the victim of this abuse did not want it revealed, partly out of shame, but more because it would unquestionably blow the family apart and quite likely result in violence, maybe murderous violence
EZ answers: encourage them to get the hell out. Can you take FULL financial responsibility for that? Thought not! In working with desperately broken people I have learned the hardest way over 10 years that nothing works 99% of the time but being helplessly present. Corleone rules 1 & 2.
- being asked by a close friend to advise him regarding a wildly inappropriate relationship that nevertheless brought him great happiness and ended a prolonged period of social isolation and despair for him
Turn it round! What do they think? They're using you as a white board anyway. They have to take full responsibility. You have NONE at all.
- trying to balance a job that I felt was ethically actively harmful but just down the road from me, against taking one I thought ethically actively beneficial, but that separates me from my family a great deal
In The Happiness Hypothesis, one of the basics is do NOT commute. Walk to work. How ethically harmful? Working in a corner shop and selling foodless food, tobacco, booze, scratch cards and porn to the poor? With a smile? Or some corporate equivalent. See Corleone rule number 8. And 1. And 2.
- working at a soup kitchen, and wondering how much this band-aid solution was helping to support an austerity regime slowly crushing the people I'm trying to help with the work at the soup kitchen.
If you don't the austerity regime will still be there in 10 years. As it has been and more.
- any of innumerable questions about the right thing to do, asked to me by my child
Ask them. And always have 'Because I'm your parent that's why!' as the final line.
- living in a democracy as I do, innumerable questions about voting. Do I support intervention in Libya? In Syria?
I always vote Labour. End of. Intervention in Libya gave us the Manchester Arena bombing. Syria gave us the London mass stabbings and car killing. Intervention in such theatres, even with a utilitarian calculus, must include such consequences: they ALWAYS happen. And we therefore have that blood on our hands too.
Back to your: "Much of this thread has been about the basis of altruism, while I suppose most of my questions have been directed at an equivalence drawn earlier in the logical chain, between morality and altruism."
I see altruism as high end morality, which is a pretty shallow pond.
"I'm glad you want 'universal social justice' and so forth - but the fact that you seem to be grounding this in the same mechanism in which you ground war and genocide makes me curious as to how you're drawing the lines between the start point (reciprocal altruism grounded ultimately in agent self-interest) and the envisaged end result of universal peace. Apparently we're going to somehow 'transcend' the various negative results we have witnessed so far at some point in the very distant and perhaps unrealisable future - a choice of words and vision that makes me feel you're smuggling in some claims in all this you would see as magical thinking in others. And at the very least succumbing to the teleological fallacy in evolution."
Excellent. Aye, we'll never get there. Not even close. Even assuming we survive global warming beyond a century or three. But it's a worthwhile goal. If our hive switch isn't thrown throwing us up in to the noosphere we're doomed. Oh for an evolutionary leap! Greg Bear's sublime Darwin's Radio & Children. Population will crash by the end of the century apart from sub-Saharan African. Evolution has no purpose at all of course, but it avails possibilities of greater complexity, ecological pluralism (the noosphere).
I've used Huffpost's 10 Corleone Golden Rules
Thought Post's 15 are nonetheless succinctly given.
Citation given.
"Such genes are now poised for discovery. In this article, we develop a set of intuitive criteria for the recognition and analysis of genes for altruism and describe the first candidate genes affecting altruism from social insects and humans."
tl;dr no such genes have been found yet.
How confident are you that they won't be?
From the same source source:
"Neurobiology
...the first evidence for the neural bases of altruistic giving in normal healthy volunteers, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. ...showed that both pure monetary rewards and charitable donations activated the mesolimbic reward pathway, a primitive part of the brain that usually responds to food and sex.
However, when volunteers generously placed the interests of others before their own by making charitable donations, another brain circuit was selectively activated: the subgenual cortex/septal region.
These structures are intimately related to social attachment and bonding in other species.
Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
One brain region, the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex/basal forebrain, contributes to learning altruistic behavior, especially in those with trait empathy. The same study has shown a connection between giving to charity and the promotion of social bonding.
...Damasio and his colleagues showed that subjects with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lack the ability to empathically feel their way to moral answers, and that when confronted with moral dilemmas, these brain-damaged patients coldly came up with "end-justifies-the-means" answers, leading Damasio to conclude that the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when they were confronted by a difficult issue — in this case as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city — these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.
...one of this study's implications is that society may have to rethink how it judges immoral people: "Psychopaths often feel no empathy or remorse. Without that awareness, people relying exclusively on reasoning seem to find it harder to sort their way through moral thickets. Does that mean they should be held to different standards of accountability?"
...Harbaugh... concluded ...people are motivated to give for reasons of personal prestige and in a similar fMRI scanner test ...Mayr, reached the same conclusions of Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman about giving to charity, although they were able to divide the study group into two groups: "egoists" and "altruists".
One of their discoveries was that, though rarely, even some of the considered "egoists" sometimes gave more than expected because that would help others, leading to the conclusion that there are other factors in cause in charity, such as a person's environment and values.
...
There has been some debate on whether or not humans are truly capable of psychological altruism."
Where isn't biology?
I'm neither confident or unconfident. Just that the paper you linked didn't say what you thought it said.
No altruism gene has been identified, and it says that in the abstract.
True. Behind the neurology are genes.
Well, this is separate from my earlier concerns about orders of explanation (and thank you, @Martin54, for your examples of advice you might give me when confronted by various situations; this is indeed the kind of advice I can use!), but ... where isn't biology?
Well, it depends what exactly you mean by 'biology'. But, to start with the paper you first quoted, on a limited definition it's not in the phrase:
'This inference implies that genes underlying altruism should be conditionally expressed as a function of their social environment. Specifically, these genes should be environmentally switched ‘on’ in altruistic helpers, yet remain unexpressed and switched ‘off’ in reproductive recipients'
If I'm reading this correctly, the point is that whether a social insect is a member of a reproductive or non-reproductive caste is epigenetic; the genetic potential is there for either outcome, but outside (and I guess probably insect-mediated) triggers cascade the process in one direction or another.
More fundamental than this, there is the truism that the 'genes vs the environment' causal question is to some extent a false antithesis, because what selects for genes is, in fact, the environment.
Other, more explicit, non-biological (in the narrow sense) aspects in the snippets you've quoted are the references to how altruistic behaviour is learned, to social prestige as a motivator for giving (which seems to contradict the conclusion that the reward system is 'hard-wired', but without more context I'm not sure what's going on here), and the concluding statement that there seem to be 'other factors' at play, including 'environment and values'.
There also seems a weird indeterminacy about the involvement of the subgenual cortex: if the reward system gets activated even without the ol' SGC getting involved, why involve it at all? Is it triggering the reward system? Or what? But without more context I can't really say.
What I can say is that it doesn't seem like biology, if construed in a narrow sense of 'genes replicating themselves', is really explaining everything here. What's pointed to in the citations you've made is a rather wider notion of 'biology', involving a complex and interacting mesh between genes, the environment, and society, whether insectoid or humanoid - a sort of ecology which includes history and culture in its remit.
So sure ... maybe biology explains everything. But that's at least in part because everything ends up being included in 'biology' :-).
Ok, perhaps altruism is gene-linked, but the noise surrounding it is so huge it may as well not be. We know through our everyday experience that the occurance of altruism is, frankly, patchy, unlike body hair and the appendix.
There are better, more complete explanations of the (limited) expressions of altruism we see than the Power of Genetics Compells Thee! (Oh that was so).
Well, are geneticists saying that?
Even environmental causes? Dinosaurs might disagree.
Cultural not genetics - use Occam's razor.
As far as I can tell, some are. There are a lot of geneticists out there searching for the gay gene, the altruism gene, the intelligence gene and such. O brave new world!
Sorry, wrong way round.
Yeah, I grew up with 'the gay gene' being a thing. Then I saw the other day it had been debunked. And I feel as though there have been at least half-a-dozen iterations of the schizophrenia gene theory since I was in my early twenties. And a bunch of stuff about facial symmetry and mate selection, once upon a time.
I spent most of last year working as an IT guy in the medical faculty at the university, and I got the strong impression that a lot of researchers were very disappointed in how non-deterministic genes are 'in the wild'. There's epigenetics of course; but in medical research, anyway, there's also been an explosion from genomics into metabolomics, proteomics, ionomics .... there's just so many possible slips between genotype and phenotype that genetics in its 'pure' form tells you much, much less than a medical researcher would like about the organism.
If I'm sounding a bit bitter about this, it's because I briefly fell in love with botany as a student at Uni in the 90s, but was told further study would be entirely genetically based: if I was getting into it because I found plants interesting, I was out of luck, because the future belonged to the combinatoric number-crunchers. So I ran off and did other, and ultimately less satisfying, things. A decade later, however, and the pendulum had swung back again, all the way into ecology as the master-science that would make sense of everything .... but by then it was too late for me ....
So what other causes in the chain of being emergent up from logic-biology could there be? Or is there another unnatural layer of existence above we intersect with? Are we antennae for a supernatural field? What? 'Spirit'? What are you and @Doc Tor suggesting? Not that of course, so what?
I'm not even sure what to do with the fact that 'logic' seems to exist alongside all the "really real" things, or what to make of the phrase 'logic-biology' - these are ontological depths that make my head spin. The closest I can get to striking sense out of it is an implicit belief on your part that it's in principle (if only very rarely in practice) possible to reason deterministically about "really real" things and not about levels of complexity beyond that, so the rest of it fits into the weird domain of 'spirit'.
But as I say, I'm not entirely clear on what you're saying.
...sorry for the inarticulacy.
And who can tell the dancer from the dance?