PHIL2623: Moral Psychology
Lecture 11
Luke Russell
University of Sydney
Take home exam
• Questions out on Monday 20th May in the lecture.
• Officially due on Friday 24th May. Actually due on Wed 29th May
(with automatic simple extension). We will not deduct any late
penalties if it is in by the 29th.
• You can discuss your take home exam plans with your tutor in final
tutorials. After that, you are on your own. Tutors will not give you
guidance on drafts.
• You must reference this like a normal essay. (Exclude bibliography
and referencing footnotes from your word count.)
Explaining morality
• Where does morality come from?
• How can we explain morality?
• Is morality cultural or biological?
• Is morality innate?
• All of these questions are too vague! Let’s
precisify.
Explaining Morality
• The Explanatory Target? There are several:
• Our practice of making moral judgments, i.e. judging that people
ought or ought not do certain things regardless of their desires,
praising and blaming people for their actions, rewarding and
punishing people. Why do human beings do this?
• The content of our moral judgments. Why do humans morally
approve of cooperation, compassion, charity, courage, honesty
justice, etc. and why do we morally disapprove of dishonesty,
unprovoked aggression, cowardice, etc.?
• Our actual good and bad behaviour. Why do people perform the
actions that they do, be they right or wrong actions? E.g. Why do
people cooperate? Why do people assist those in need?
Explanatory Timescales
• Synchronic (focused on a single time: the time of
acting, or the short interval preceding action).
• Diachronic (across time).
• Diachronic questions can have very different
time-scales.
• Developmental or ontogenetic, i.e. across the life
span of an organism.
• Historical or evolutionary time-scale, i.e. across
many generations of human beings.
Distinct questions
• What motivates adult humans to make moral judgments and
perform right actions? (synchronic)
• What causes us to grow into adults who possess such motives?
(developmental diachronic)
• What causes us and our ancestors to be creatures who possess
such motives? (historical or evolutionary diachronic)
• Causal explanations at different temporal levels are not
necessarily in competition e.g. What caused the Twin Towers to
collapse?
Nature v. Nurture
• Some creatures' behaviours occur ‘by nature'
from the time that they are born. e.g. A horse can
run very soon after birth, a snake can slither and
catch mice, etc. Are humans like this?
• Four types of learning:
• Trial and Error
• Imitation
• Training/Habituation
• Rational Argument and Instruction
Aristotle
• Virtue is not in our nature. We learn to be virtuous.
• We learn to be virtuous not by trial and error, nor by imitation, nor
by rational argument, but via habituation.
• Aristotle claims we are not good by nature, but neither against
nature:
• “… nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its
nature. For instance, the stone which by nature moves downwards
cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to
train it by throwing it up ten thousand times…. Neither by nature,
then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are
adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.”
(p.26 in Singer)
Aristotle
• “It makes no small difference, then, whether we
form habits of one kind or of another from our
very youth; it makes a very great difference, or
rather all the difference.” (p.27)
• Habituation requires:
• Natural desire for pleasure and aversion to pain.
• Rewards and punishments
• Then virtue becomes second nature
Perception and skill
• Is this just conditioning?
• One has one's eyes opened to moral reasons.
• Learning to be virtuous is like learning a skill, which, unlike a basic
conditioned behavioural response, can be applied in both familiar and
novel situations.
• “Arguments and teaching surely do not influence everyone, but the soul of
the student needs to have been prepared by habits for enjoying and
hating finely, like ground that is to nourish seed. For someone whose life
follows his feelings would not even listen to an argument turning him
away, or comprehend it [if he did listen]; and in that state how could he be
persuaded to change? And in general feelings seem to yield to force, not
to argument.” (1179b24)
Morality and Natural
• Ancient Chinese Philosopher Mencius.
• Kao Tzu said, ‘Man's nature is like whirling water. If a breach is made to the
east it will flow to the east. If a breach is made to the west it will flow to
the west. Man's nature is indifferent to good and evil, just as water is
indifferent to east and west.'
• Mencius said, ‘Water, indeed, is indifferent to east and west, but is it
indifferent to high and low? Man's nature is naturally good just as water
flows naturally downward. There is no man without this good nature;
neither is there water that does not flow downward. Now you can strike
water and cause it to splash upward over your forehead, and by damming
it and leading it you can force it uphill. Is this the nature of water? It is the
forced circumstance that makes it do so. Man can be made to do evil, for
his nature can be treated in the same way.’
Morality and the Natural
• Mencius says that morally good feelings are "not drilled
into us from outside. We originally have them with us." (p.
28)
• cf. Hume’s natural sentiment. Rousseau’s universal
sentiment of pity.
• Some behaviours are unlearned, but also not present from
birth.
• Where do these traits come from? (NB Developmental
question plus long term diachronic question)
Darwinian Explanations
• Evolution via natural
selection:
• The original variation
arose (usually via
mutation)
• One variant conferred a
fitness advantage on its
bearers (i.e. enhanced
their ability to survive
and produce viable
offspring),
• The variant was inherited
by the bearers' offspring.
Adaptation
• Heritable variation that differentially affects fitness
will lead to evolution via natural selection.
• Whatever is the product of natural selection is called
an adaptation. NB This is a diachronic explanation on
an evolutionary timescale. It tells us nothing about the
ontogenetic development of the trait.
• Not everything that is adaptive (fitness-enhancing) is
an adaptation. E.g. mobile phone use, immunisation.
• Not everything that is an adaptation is adaptive, e.g.
the human appendix.
The Evolution of Altruism
• “Altruistic” creatures = those which lower their
own fitness while raising the fitness of others.
• Much human moral behaviour seems to be
altruistic. E.g. sharing, assisting, punishing.
• Since morality seems to require altruistic rather
than selfish behaviour, it seem that there will be
natural selection against moral behaviour and for
selfish behaviour.
Standard explanation
• The morally virtuous human being sacrifices his time/energy/life for
the good of the group, and this raises the fitness of the group. Since
fitter groups will do better, altruistic organisms will be selected.
• This process is called group selection.
• Darwin put forward this kind of claim in the Descent of Man, where
he said that cooperative groups of humans would do better than
non-cooperative groups, and thus that helping behaviour might be
favoured by natural selection.
Standard Objection
• Even if it is true that an altruistic group is fitter than a selfish group (i.e. a
group full of selfish individuals, not a group which restricts altruism to its
own members), within a predominately altruistic group the few selfish
members will do better than the altruists, and hence altruism will be
undermined by natural selection from within the group.
• If human nature is the product of natural selection, it seems, then human
nature will prompt selfish behaviour.
• Kim Sterelny’s objection: Once creatures have the ability to recognise and
punish freeloaders, or even to exclude them from the group, group
selection will favour cooperative behaviour.
Cooperate or I’ll punish you!
Reciprocal Altruism
• "I'll help you but only if you help me".
• Game Theory was first applied to biology in 1972 by Maynard-Smith
• Prisoners Dilemma:
• You and another prisoner have been trying to break out of jail, and
you are interrogated separately. There are two possible behaviours
you can exhibit: cooperate (C) or defect (D). To cooperate with your
fellow prisoner is to keep the escape plan a secret (i.e. to cooperate
with the other prisoner, not to cooperate with the authorities), and
to defect is to rat on your partner.

Payoffs
• No matter what your partner does, the way you get the best benefits for yourself
is to defect.
• So, if natural selection works on a situation where fitness costs and benefits fit
the pattern of a prisoners dilemma, it should select an "always defect" strategy,
even though each individual player would be best off as part of a group in which
everyone had an "always cooperate" strategy.
• Iterated prisoners dilemma, i.e. when you play for an unspecified number of times
with the same partner, and you can remember what the partner did in the
previous games.
• The dominant strategy, which maximised each individual player's score was called
Tit-For-Tat, or TFT: Cooperate on the first move and, on all subsequent moves, do
what your opponent has just done.
Share accommodation
• TFT is the best strategy only if, from the
perspective of the interactors, the string of
interactions is of an indeterminate length.
• Counting backwards from the final defection.
• Cf. Surprise hanging paradox.
• Cf. Who is going to do the last lot of washing
up in share accommodation?
Natural Selection of Reciprocity
• If natural selection operates on a situation in which
organisms undergo an iterated prisoners dilemma, and
the organisms can remember what each partner did to
them on the last occasion, then TFT will be the strategy
that is naturally selected.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
• Is TFT altruism?
• Is TFT moral behaviour? It’s not very generous!
• cf. Reward, punishment, resentment, forgiveness.
Reciprocity = Morality?
• Confucius: the "eye for an eye" laws..
• Jesus' recommendation that we turn the other
cheek, and love our enemies.
• Is this an “always cooperate” recommendation?
• cf. Gandhi on non-violence, even recommending
that the Jews practice non-violent resistance in
Nazi Germany. Is this what is morally best?
Kin Selection
• Selection of the fittest organism v. selection of the fittest genes.
• Organism A helping out organism B might lower A's own chances of
surviving and reproducing, but raise the chances that A's genes get
into the next generation. How?
• Because in some cases B possesses a high proportion of copies of
the same genes as A.
• So, roughly, if A's behaviour helps B have offspring, then A can be
enhancing the fitness of its own genes (i.e. enhancing its inclusive
fitness).
• Who has a high proportion of genes just like yours? Members of
your family. Hence, altruistic behaviour towards family members
could evolve via kin selection.
“Gay uncle” behaviour
Kin and Morality
• Is human moral behaviour caused by sentiments
that we possess due to kin selection?
• A parent's care for a child, siblings care for each
other. Do we have special obligations to family?
• To some people, this nepotistic cooperation
seems to not really be moral behaviour at all,
because they think that morality is essentially
impartial.
• Underlying question: What exactly is the target of
explanation?
Explaining morality
• It is possible for natural selection to produce organisms that
cooperate, that put themselves out to help others.
• Have we any reason to suppose that our altruistic moral behaviour
can be explained by this combination of evolutionary processes?
And what about morality generally?
• Even if the evolutionary story is true, it does not answer the
question of which specific psychological states cause moral
behaviour (the synchronic question), nor does it explain how those
psychological states develop in the life of an organism (the
developmental diachronic question).
Aristotle v. Darwin?
• Does a moral training story, such as Aristotle's, clash
with an evolutionary explanation of morality?
• Aristotle's story aimed to explain all of morality,
including the fine-grained content of moral judgments,
practices of reward and punishment, etc. The
Darwinian story seems to be aimed at a smaller target:
cooperation and basic reward and punishment of
freeloaders.
• Richard Joyce: Evolution of moral judgment, reward
and punishment, and then social explanations of
specific content of many moral judgments.
Aristotle v. Darwin?
• Note also that Aristotle's story was told on a different
timescale to the evolutionary Darwinian story. Aristotle
asks what causes a human baby to grow into a virtuous
adult. The Darwinian story does not address this question,
other than to claim that we inherit our moral behaviour.
• Is there any clash here?
• If x is an adaptation, then x is innate rather than learned.
• Morality is not innate rather than learned.
• Therefore, morality is not an adaptation.
Non-Genetic Inheritance
• Developmental systems theorists, e.g. Paul Griffiths,
argue that genes are not inevitable causes of traits, and
that evolution occurs via the inheritance of non-
genetic parts of the developmental cycle just as much
as via inheritance of genes.
• Rhesus monkeys deprivation experiment.
• Cultural inheritance. Boyd and Richerson.
• Claims about evolution of traits do not tell us about the
developmental flexibility of those traits.