[Previous entry: "If You've Got a Moment, I've Got a Vivid, Articulate Account of One Mind Seeking to Set Itself Aright to Share With You"] [Next entry: "Two Different "Triune" Brain Theories But the Same Crucial Conclusion: We Are Makeshift Entities Still Under Development, and That Can Creates Serious Problems for Us"]

06/14/2006: "As Our Understanding of Our Human Nature Changes and Our Abilities to Employ Such Understandings Grow, It Stands to Reason That Our Ethics Are Evolutionary, Too"

I’m prepared to argue that ethics evolve—and are evolving. The reason, of course, is that how we think about human nature and about ethics is evolving.

I'll admit that this notion is off-putting to more than a few philosophers, most notably those who seem to think, or so it appears to me, that philosophical and ethical truths are “out there,” and that it is the philosopher’s task to sniff them out, sort them out and then weigh the merits of it all, not to get caught up in the messy task of explaining how they have evolved and are evolving.

British philosopher Charlie Broad comes to mind. He was of the opinion that what goes around “out there” eventually comes around. He once wrote, “[We] can amuse ourselves, if our tastes lie in that direction, by noticing which well-worn fallacy or old familiar inadequacy is characteristic of the latest gospel, and whether it is well or ill-disguised in its new dress.”

Philosophers of such a mind strike me as being more historians of science and philosophy than philosophers. (In fact, the quote above is from a larger Broad quote at the front of Oregon State U. historian of science Paul Farber’s little book, “The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics.” Just from that title, you can tell that Farber doesn’t have a strong regard for the idea that as human thinking systems evolve, human ethics are also evolving as, in fact, “evolutionary ethics.”)

The whole idea of evolving is to get somewhere. One philosopher who takes a charming approach to this issue is D.Z. Phillips of the University of Wales and Claremont Graduate School. In his book, Philosophy’s Cool Place, Phillips says that he’s spent the whole of his career as a philosopher seeking to get exactly nowhere. He prefers to see philosophy as contemplative, not “destructively creative” in a Joseph Schumpeter sense. He thinks philosophy is on stronger moral footing being contemplative as opposed to, say, competitive. (His book—again, a little one—is quite readable and often instructively amusing. At one point, he tells about the monastic order that, desperate to be known for something noteworthy, said, “Well, at least we’re tops in humility.”).

Personally, though, I’m much more comfortable in the hands (and with the minds) of philosophers like Tufts University’s Daniel Dennett, who just refuses to see idols or icons in much of anything, including views of ethics. In books like his Freedom Evolves, Dennett, an expert on the cognitive sciences, finds the heart of the human story anchored in an ever-evolving drama.

He writes, “[It] has taken thousands of years of communication for us to begin to find the keys to our own identities. It has been only a few hundred years that we’ve known that we are mammals, and only a few decades that we’ve understand in considerable detail how we have evolved, along with all other living things, from those simple beginnings [perhaps four billion years ago, when the first simple life-forms emerged].”

Dennis argues that it is human culture, exercising choices, that has made possible the evolution of cooperation and ethical norms of free will and freedom itself. It is an ongoing process, he says.

“My aim,” he says in the closing pages of Freedom Evolves, “has been to demonstrate that if we accept Darwin’s ‘strange inversion of reasoning’ we can build all the way up to the best and deepest human thought on questions of morality and meaning, ethics and freedom. Far from being an enemy of these traditional explorations, the evolutionary perspective is an indispensable ally. I have not sought to replace the voluminous work in ethics with some Darwinian alternative but rather to place that work on the foundation it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place in nature….We are in the best position to decide what to do next, because we have the broadest knowledge and hence the best perspective [because we are the planet’s nervous system] on the future. What that future holds in store for our planet is up to all of us, reasoning together.”

May that vision, in the best sense of both words, continue to evolve, along with our ethics.

The three books mentioned above can be ordered here: "The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics”. "Philosophy’s Cool Place”. "Freedom Evolves”