Moral Foundations Theory as an Evolutionary Psychological Theory
Thursday, 17 Nov 2022, 21:00
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One of Haidt's early concerns in the development of Moral Foundations Theory is to explain how the moral intuitions evolved. He argues that moral intuitions are innate, and in so doing feels the need to provide an evolutionary story for their existence. For instance in regards to the care/harm foundation, he argues that the emotions involved in looking after infant children through their development are the basis for the evolution of a cognitive module programmed to react to perceived sources of harm that is passed genetically through the population. These emotions provide an advantage through preserving offspring and thus the future of the species. A mother who feels no emotion to spur care for her child will not likely be a successful mother given the long development of human children.
If we ignore the critique of the modular theory above, the evolution of caring for infants must be one of the least controversial evolutionary psychological theories. Mammals have quite vulnerable young, and in order to be a successful mammal species, parents must be motivated to care for them. In social mammals, where caring for others is expanded to kin and clan members, that is an arguably helpful adaptation for a species in terms of keeping more breeding pairs and children alive. Humans have been very successful as a species in comparison with related species like Neanderthals or Homo Florensis; Haidt and others believe this is because humans are capable of large scale-cooperation. This co-operation is theorised to have been supported by our ability to maintain trust through pro-social behaviour. I feel that I am in no way well-read enough on the topic to be able to say whether this is correct or not, and I am not going to critique this aspect of the theory.
Instead, I want to focus on what Haidt says about moral matrices and group selection. Group selection has been furiously debated in evolutionary biology. Briefly, it is the hypothesis that some traits are selected for at the level of the group, and that groups which can more successfully fill the world with their offspring than other groups will eventually come to dominate other groups. Whether this is true or not is not really my concern; my concern is that Haidt implicates moral foundations in the success or failure of a social group to reproduce. He does this not only to explain the survival of Homo Sapiens over Homo Neandethalensis, but also to explain the dominance of different cultural groups over others. Perhaps if you are strong on Haidt's liberal foundations, you begin to see the problematic implications of such a theory that "more morally developed cultures" are destined to dominate others. However, I think the real problem with this is that there is very little evidence provided for such a claim.
The one concrete example Haidt gives in The Righteous Mind is that of the cohesion of the Greek warriors under the command of Macedonian king Alexander the Great, who were able to defeat the much larger forces of the Persian Empire. This is the one human v human example of group selection that he references in the book, however he does not cite any historian to back up his implied claim that the Macedonian armies had a more developed innate moral sense that led to cohesiveness in battle. A simple Google search turns up an article that cites Alexander's own tactical genius as the key difference between the Greeks and Persians. There is no suggestion that the Persian "immortals" were a less cohesive fighting force. Furthermore, the defeat of the Persian army did not result in the selection of "Greek people" over the Persians. They were a small occupying army that eventually splintered into rival factions; Alexander took a Persian bride, we can safely imagine that the genes of "the Persians" survived the occupation.
In case it could be argued that this was actually an illustration of the necessity of moral emotions (the Greeks could not have succeeded without them); let's take a look at another case, the colonization of America, for an example of how they are neither sufficient or necessary. This is a clear case in which one group comes to dominate another group, but it is far from clear that "developed moral intuitions" were the cause, or even that the oppressed group has been selected against. The brutal colonisation by Europeans of the Americas occurred over centuries and resulted in a massive depopulation of the indigenous occupants of the land. But when we think of the cause of such domination, do we think of it as the destiny of moral development? Instead it seems an insult to morality; the conquest by a more numerous people with an abundance of technological and material advantages of another people hardly makes a good case study for the potency of moral emotions. In reality, the Europeans could do this because settled agriculture had been developed in Europe for millennia and intensified to produce a huge population. When they arrived in the Americas with guns and smallpox, they simply overran indigenous communities who subsisted on broadly less "land-efficient" methods. It could be argued that their moral sense had to be aligned with co-operation on their mode of production, but which came first? Furthermore, indigenous communities and their genes survived this deadly exchange, making up the broader moral community of the present day Americas.
However, we could move evolutionary thinking from the level of biological to cultural formations such as certain regimes or empires, and ask whether their moral foundations make them adaptive and likely to survive in a population or not. One example might be the Nazi regime, whose ethics of obedience, sacrifice, purity and 'strength' led them to attempt colonization of the east. It could be argued that they had drifted too far into the conservative side of moral foundations, becoming blind to the others. For instance, the Nazis undervalued the importance of the ability to critique authority or ideas of the sanctity of the nation, and so didn't properly evaluate the risks of invading the USSR. This ultimately led the regime to its downfall (though the population of Germany itself was preserved).
Perhaps this is making the mistake of treating a qualitative difference like a quantitative difference. Saying something like "the Nazis made errors because they were twenty points higher in authority orientation, leading to group think at the level of a society," rather than focusing on the actual content of the moral discourse: "the Nazis made errors because the criticism of Hitler was made discursively impossible in the moral discourse of Nazism." This starts to drift into the more general critique of MFT as an ethical theory; it is not enough to say we have certain moral foundations without specifying the content of the moral discourse. Can we really say whether a particular foundation is 'adaptive' without looking at the actual instances and behaviours that are considered morally relevant in that particular time and place?
It's clear from these short examples that proposing "developed innate moral intuitions" as the cause for the victories and defeats of history is not well thought out. However, Haidt's real concern is that without a full suite of moral emotions his own present day US society will decline and fall. This is something I will examine more in depth in the next blog post about MFT as a sociological theory.
Moral Foundations Theory as an Evolutionary Psychological Theory
One of Haidt's early concerns in the development of Moral Foundations Theory is to explain how the moral intuitions evolved. He argues that moral intuitions are innate, and in so doing feels the need to provide an evolutionary story for their existence. For instance in regards to the care/harm foundation, he argues that the emotions involved in looking after infant children through their development are the basis for the evolution of a cognitive module programmed to react to perceived sources of harm that is passed genetically through the population. These emotions provide an advantage through preserving offspring and thus the future of the species. A mother who feels no emotion to spur care for her child will not likely be a successful mother given the long development of human children.
If we ignore the critique of the modular theory above, the evolution of caring for infants must be one of the least controversial evolutionary psychological theories. Mammals have quite vulnerable young, and in order to be a successful mammal species, parents must be motivated to care for them. In social mammals, where caring for others is expanded to kin and clan members, that is an arguably helpful adaptation for a species in terms of keeping more breeding pairs and children alive. Humans have been very successful as a species in comparison with related species like Neanderthals or Homo Florensis; Haidt and others believe this is because humans are capable of large scale-cooperation. This co-operation is theorised to have been supported by our ability to maintain trust through pro-social behaviour. I feel that I am in no way well-read enough on the topic to be able to say whether this is correct or not, and I am not going to critique this aspect of the theory.
Instead, I want to focus on what Haidt says about moral matrices and group selection. Group selection has been furiously debated in evolutionary biology. Briefly, it is the hypothesis that some traits are selected for at the level of the group, and that groups which can more successfully fill the world with their offspring than other groups will eventually come to dominate other groups. Whether this is true or not is not really my concern; my concern is that Haidt implicates moral foundations in the success or failure of a social group to reproduce. He does this not only to explain the survival of Homo Sapiens over Homo Neandethalensis, but also to explain the dominance of different cultural groups over others. Perhaps if you are strong on Haidt's liberal foundations, you begin to see the problematic implications of such a theory that "more morally developed cultures" are destined to dominate others. However, I think the real problem with this is that there is very little evidence provided for such a claim.
The one concrete example Haidt gives in The Righteous Mind is that of the cohesion of the Greek warriors under the command of Macedonian king Alexander the Great, who were able to defeat the much larger forces of the Persian Empire. This is the one human v human example of group selection that he references in the book, however he does not cite any historian to back up his implied claim that the Macedonian armies had a more developed innate moral sense that led to cohesiveness in battle. A simple Google search turns up an article that cites Alexander's own tactical genius as the key difference between the Greeks and Persians. There is no suggestion that the Persian "immortals" were a less cohesive fighting force. Furthermore, the defeat of the Persian army did not result in the selection of "Greek people" over the Persians. They were a small occupying army that eventually splintered into rival factions; Alexander took a Persian bride, we can safely imagine that the genes of "the Persians" survived the occupation.
In case it could be argued that this was actually an illustration of the necessity of moral emotions (the Greeks could not have succeeded without them); let's take a look at another case, the colonization of America, for an example of how they are neither sufficient or necessary. This is a clear case in which one group comes to dominate another group, but it is far from clear that "developed moral intuitions" were the cause, or even that the oppressed group has been selected against. The brutal colonisation by Europeans of the Americas occurred over centuries and resulted in a massive depopulation of the indigenous occupants of the land. But when we think of the cause of such domination, do we think of it as the destiny of moral development? Instead it seems an insult to morality; the conquest by a more numerous people with an abundance of technological and material advantages of another people hardly makes a good case study for the potency of moral emotions. In reality, the Europeans could do this because settled agriculture had been developed in Europe for millennia and intensified to produce a huge population. When they arrived in the Americas with guns and smallpox, they simply overran indigenous communities who subsisted on broadly less "land-efficient" methods. It could be argued that their moral sense had to be aligned with co-operation on their mode of production, but which came first? Furthermore, indigenous communities and their genes survived this deadly exchange, making up the broader moral community of the present day Americas.
However, we could move evolutionary thinking from the level of biological to cultural formations such as certain regimes or empires, and ask whether their moral foundations make them adaptive and likely to survive in a population or not. One example might be the Nazi regime, whose ethics of obedience, sacrifice, purity and 'strength' led them to attempt colonization of the east. It could be argued that they had drifted too far into the conservative side of moral foundations, becoming blind to the others. For instance, the Nazis undervalued the importance of the ability to critique authority or ideas of the sanctity of the nation, and so didn't properly evaluate the risks of invading the USSR. This ultimately led the regime to its downfall (though the population of Germany itself was preserved).
Perhaps this is making the mistake of treating a qualitative difference like a quantitative difference. Saying something like "the Nazis made errors because they were twenty points higher in authority orientation, leading to group think at the level of a society," rather than focusing on the actual content of the moral discourse: "the Nazis made errors because the criticism of Hitler was made discursively impossible in the moral discourse of Nazism." This starts to drift into the more general critique of MFT as an ethical theory; it is not enough to say we have certain moral foundations without specifying the content of the moral discourse. Can we really say whether a particular foundation is 'adaptive' without looking at the actual instances and behaviours that are considered morally relevant in that particular time and place?
It's clear from these short examples that proposing "developed innate moral intuitions" as the cause for the victories and defeats of history is not well thought out. However, Haidt's real concern is that without a full suite of moral emotions his own present day US society will decline and fall. This is something I will examine more in depth in the next blog post about MFT as a sociological theory.