Humans define the groups to which they belong in abstract terms. Often they strive for lasting intellectual and emotional bonding with anonymous others, and make their greatest exertions in killing and dying not to preserve their own lives or to defend their families and friends, but for the sake of an idea – the transcendent moral conception they form of themselves, of “who we are” (Bowles & Polanía-Reyes Reference Bowles and Polanía-Reyes2012). This is “the privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only” of which Hobbes wrote in Leviathan (Hobbes Reference Hobbes1651/1982, Pt. 1, Ch. 5). In The Descent of Man, Darwin cast it as the virtue of “morality … the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy” (Darwin Reference Darwin1871, p. 66) with which winning groups are better endowed in history's spiraling competition for survival and dominance. Across cultures, primary group identity is bounded by sacred values, often in the form of religious beliefs or transcendental ideologies, which lead some groups to triumph over others because of non-rational commitment from at least some of its members to actions that drive success independent, or all out of proportion, from expected rational outcomes (Atran & Ginges Reference Atran and Ginges2012).
Here, I would like to raise the issue of whether mutualistic calculations of costs and benefits may account for this transcendent sense of morality, which likely got us out of the caves, made civilizations possible, and propelled competition and cooperation among larger and larger groups of genetically unrelated strangers.
Baumard et al. define morality in terms of a naturally selected propensity for fairness. They elaborate on an evolutionary rationale along Golden Rule lines of quid pro quo, fairly standard since the pioneering works of Trivers (Reference Trivers1971), Axelrod and Hamilton (Reference Axelrod and Hamilton1981), and Alexander (Reference Alexander1987). For the authors, morality stems from an environmental adaptation that leads individuals to share costs and benefits of cooperation equally, developing into a “specific and non-instrumental preference for fairness … as a distinct ‘moral sense’” (sect. 4, para. 4). They argue that this “mutualistic” model of morality provides insight and unity in understanding now classic problems in the cross-cultural development of human morality, including unselfish behavior in economic games, cooperation with anonymous strangers, and taboo trade-offs that defy short-term utilitarian interests.
The authors' prodigious synthesis goes well beyond oversold findings from trolleyology and even economic gaming in welding cognitive, social, and evolutionary insights into a comprehensive framework for understanding mundane moral reasoning across cultural settings. In a variety of situations (distributive justice, retributive justice, duty to help, moral dilemmas, economic games), a moral sense grounded in the logic of mutualism seems more parsimonious and persuasive than the logic of altruism and sacrifice proffered by theories of biological or cultural group selection.
But the issue here is whether the author's arguments about people's everyday moral sense of equality and mutual advantage can illuminate those transcendent moral percepts critical to the competitive creation of cultures. For Darwin himself, moral virtue was most clearly associated not with universally mundane intuitions, beliefs, and behaviors about fairness and reciprocity, emotionally supported by empathy and consolation, but with an unevenly distributed propensity to what we nowadays call “parochial altruism” (Choi & Bowles Reference Choi and Bowles2007): especially extreme self-sacrifice in war and other intense forms of human conflict, where likely prospects for individual and even group survival had very low initial probability (Darwin Reference Darwin1871). Heroism, martyrdom, and other forms of self-sacrifice for the group appear to go beyond the mutualistic principles of fairness and reciprocity. Indeed, core cultural values and norms associated with sanctity and ingroup loyalty appear to have distinct neuro-cognitive signatures, and may be activated while suppressing care-based values and norms of fairness and do no harm (e.g., in cases of systematic violence, Blair et al. Reference Blair, Marsh, Finger, Blair and Luo2006).
Of course, Darwin acknowledged that the brave warrior may gain more power, wealth, status, or mates, and so improve chances for producing healthy and successful offspring in greater numbers. But if risk of death is very high and the material prospects for victory low, or if odds for success are too difficult to calculate, then gain could not reasonably outweigh loss. Indeed, cross-cultural studies show that prospects of crippling economic burdens and many deaths do not necessarily sway people from their positions on whether going to war, or opting for revolution or resistance, is the right or wrong choice (Ginges & Atran Reference Ginges and Atran2011). Because of outsize commitment, revolutionary underdogs often prevail against far more powerful foes (Arreguín-Toft Reference Arreguín-Toft2001). For example, regardless of the practical reasoning of terror-sponsoring organizations, suicide bombers appear to act as devoted actors, willing to make extreme sacrifices that use a logic of appropriateness rather than a cost–benefit calculus (Atran Reference Atran2010). The results of brain-imaging studies suggest that people tend to neurally process sacred values as rules to be implemented regardless of consequences, rather than through utilitarian calculation (Berns et al. Reference Berns, Bell, Capra, Prietula, Moore, Anderson, Ginges and Atran2012).
As groups naturally expand into resource-rich environments, competition and conflict tend to increase. To galvanize group solidarity and common defense, which includes blinding group members to possible avenues of defection to other groups, hitherto material interests and preferences become sacralized (Dehghani et al. Reference Dehghani, Atran, Iliev, Sachdeva, Ginges and Medin2010, Sheikh et al. Reference Sheikh, Ginges, Coman and Atran2012). Sacralization, which often involves attachment to unquestionable and inviolable religious or ideological beliefs, is usually proprietary to the group in the sense that symbolic markers are displayed by, and used to, identify cooperators, (who alone learn how to properly interpret otherwise ineffable and even absurd beliefs, avoid taboo behaviors and trade-offs; Atran & Henrich Reference Atran and Henrich2010; Atran & Ginges Reference Atran and Ginges2012). This increases in-group cooperation, but also disbelief and distrust towards other groups, thus further increasing competition and potential conflict.
Further ratcheting fosters larger and larger groups of cooperators, with greater potential to fracture (Roes & Raymond Reference Roes and Raymond2003). To keep these groups intact, transcendental belief systems emerged, including high moral gods (Norenzayan & Shariff Reference Norenzayan and Shariff2008) and quasi-religious -isms (Atran Reference Atran2010), with unassailable rules for regulating social and material transactions, and beliefs compelling enough for self-monitoring and punishment of taboo transgressions. By contrast, fully reasoned social contracts operating on mutualistic principles that regulate individual interests to share costs and benefits of cooperation can be more liable to collapse: with awareness that more advantageous distributions of risks and rewards may be available down the line, then (by backward induction) defection is always justifiable and possible. Thus, even ostensibly secular national ideologies and transnational movements usually contain important quasi-religious rituals and beliefs (Anderson Reference Anderson1991): from sacred ceremonies, anthems, and flags (Carter et al. Reference Carter, Ferguson and Hassin2011), to postulations that Providence or Nature make people equal and endow them with inalienable rights and liberties (although, except for the last 250 years or so – about one-tenth of a percent of our species' existence – infanticide, slavery, cannibalism, subordination of minorities, and suppression of women predominated) (Atran & Axelrod Reference Atran and Axelrod2008; Hunt Reference Hunt2007).
Baumard et al. acknowledge that “[v]arious religious obligations that play an important role in human cooperation are not aimed at fairness and often conflict with it” (sect. 4, para. 3); and that it is, at least in part, a matter of terminology as to whether one wishes to include such religious obligations as “moral.” But I suspect that even if the authors were to grant that religious devotees or revolutionaries were more conscientious, or at least consciously aware, in following some moral sense, still they have the same mutualistic rather than altruistic moral intuitions. In any event, how, from mutualism, do we get to the sense of moral transcendence that binds and divides the cultures of our species?
Humans define the groups to which they belong in abstract terms. Often they strive for lasting intellectual and emotional bonding with anonymous others, and make their greatest exertions in killing and dying not to preserve their own lives or to defend their families and friends, but for the sake of an idea – the transcendent moral conception they form of themselves, of “who we are” (Bowles & Polanía-Reyes Reference Bowles and Polanía-Reyes2012). This is “the privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only” of which Hobbes wrote in Leviathan (Hobbes Reference Hobbes1651/1982, Pt. 1, Ch. 5). In The Descent of Man, Darwin cast it as the virtue of “morality … the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy” (Darwin Reference Darwin1871, p. 66) with which winning groups are better endowed in history's spiraling competition for survival and dominance. Across cultures, primary group identity is bounded by sacred values, often in the form of religious beliefs or transcendental ideologies, which lead some groups to triumph over others because of non-rational commitment from at least some of its members to actions that drive success independent, or all out of proportion, from expected rational outcomes (Atran & Ginges Reference Atran and Ginges2012).
Here, I would like to raise the issue of whether mutualistic calculations of costs and benefits may account for this transcendent sense of morality, which likely got us out of the caves, made civilizations possible, and propelled competition and cooperation among larger and larger groups of genetically unrelated strangers.
Baumard et al. define morality in terms of a naturally selected propensity for fairness. They elaborate on an evolutionary rationale along Golden Rule lines of quid pro quo, fairly standard since the pioneering works of Trivers (Reference Trivers1971), Axelrod and Hamilton (Reference Axelrod and Hamilton1981), and Alexander (Reference Alexander1987). For the authors, morality stems from an environmental adaptation that leads individuals to share costs and benefits of cooperation equally, developing into a “specific and non-instrumental preference for fairness … as a distinct ‘moral sense’” (sect. 4, para. 4). They argue that this “mutualistic” model of morality provides insight and unity in understanding now classic problems in the cross-cultural development of human morality, including unselfish behavior in economic games, cooperation with anonymous strangers, and taboo trade-offs that defy short-term utilitarian interests.
The authors' prodigious synthesis goes well beyond oversold findings from trolleyology and even economic gaming in welding cognitive, social, and evolutionary insights into a comprehensive framework for understanding mundane moral reasoning across cultural settings. In a variety of situations (distributive justice, retributive justice, duty to help, moral dilemmas, economic games), a moral sense grounded in the logic of mutualism seems more parsimonious and persuasive than the logic of altruism and sacrifice proffered by theories of biological or cultural group selection.
But the issue here is whether the author's arguments about people's everyday moral sense of equality and mutual advantage can illuminate those transcendent moral percepts critical to the competitive creation of cultures. For Darwin himself, moral virtue was most clearly associated not with universally mundane intuitions, beliefs, and behaviors about fairness and reciprocity, emotionally supported by empathy and consolation, but with an unevenly distributed propensity to what we nowadays call “parochial altruism” (Choi & Bowles Reference Choi and Bowles2007): especially extreme self-sacrifice in war and other intense forms of human conflict, where likely prospects for individual and even group survival had very low initial probability (Darwin Reference Darwin1871). Heroism, martyrdom, and other forms of self-sacrifice for the group appear to go beyond the mutualistic principles of fairness and reciprocity. Indeed, core cultural values and norms associated with sanctity and ingroup loyalty appear to have distinct neuro-cognitive signatures, and may be activated while suppressing care-based values and norms of fairness and do no harm (e.g., in cases of systematic violence, Blair et al. Reference Blair, Marsh, Finger, Blair and Luo2006).
Of course, Darwin acknowledged that the brave warrior may gain more power, wealth, status, or mates, and so improve chances for producing healthy and successful offspring in greater numbers. But if risk of death is very high and the material prospects for victory low, or if odds for success are too difficult to calculate, then gain could not reasonably outweigh loss. Indeed, cross-cultural studies show that prospects of crippling economic burdens and many deaths do not necessarily sway people from their positions on whether going to war, or opting for revolution or resistance, is the right or wrong choice (Ginges & Atran Reference Ginges and Atran2011). Because of outsize commitment, revolutionary underdogs often prevail against far more powerful foes (Arreguín-Toft Reference Arreguín-Toft2001). For example, regardless of the practical reasoning of terror-sponsoring organizations, suicide bombers appear to act as devoted actors, willing to make extreme sacrifices that use a logic of appropriateness rather than a cost–benefit calculus (Atran Reference Atran2010). The results of brain-imaging studies suggest that people tend to neurally process sacred values as rules to be implemented regardless of consequences, rather than through utilitarian calculation (Berns et al. Reference Berns, Bell, Capra, Prietula, Moore, Anderson, Ginges and Atran2012).
As groups naturally expand into resource-rich environments, competition and conflict tend to increase. To galvanize group solidarity and common defense, which includes blinding group members to possible avenues of defection to other groups, hitherto material interests and preferences become sacralized (Dehghani et al. Reference Dehghani, Atran, Iliev, Sachdeva, Ginges and Medin2010, Sheikh et al. Reference Sheikh, Ginges, Coman and Atran2012). Sacralization, which often involves attachment to unquestionable and inviolable religious or ideological beliefs, is usually proprietary to the group in the sense that symbolic markers are displayed by, and used to, identify cooperators, (who alone learn how to properly interpret otherwise ineffable and even absurd beliefs, avoid taboo behaviors and trade-offs; Atran & Henrich Reference Atran and Henrich2010; Atran & Ginges Reference Atran and Ginges2012). This increases in-group cooperation, but also disbelief and distrust towards other groups, thus further increasing competition and potential conflict.
Further ratcheting fosters larger and larger groups of cooperators, with greater potential to fracture (Roes & Raymond Reference Roes and Raymond2003). To keep these groups intact, transcendental belief systems emerged, including high moral gods (Norenzayan & Shariff Reference Norenzayan and Shariff2008) and quasi-religious -isms (Atran Reference Atran2010), with unassailable rules for regulating social and material transactions, and beliefs compelling enough for self-monitoring and punishment of taboo transgressions. By contrast, fully reasoned social contracts operating on mutualistic principles that regulate individual interests to share costs and benefits of cooperation can be more liable to collapse: with awareness that more advantageous distributions of risks and rewards may be available down the line, then (by backward induction) defection is always justifiable and possible. Thus, even ostensibly secular national ideologies and transnational movements usually contain important quasi-religious rituals and beliefs (Anderson Reference Anderson1991): from sacred ceremonies, anthems, and flags (Carter et al. Reference Carter, Ferguson and Hassin2011), to postulations that Providence or Nature make people equal and endow them with inalienable rights and liberties (although, except for the last 250 years or so – about one-tenth of a percent of our species' existence – infanticide, slavery, cannibalism, subordination of minorities, and suppression of women predominated) (Atran & Axelrod Reference Atran and Axelrod2008; Hunt Reference Hunt2007).
Baumard et al. acknowledge that “[v]arious religious obligations that play an important role in human cooperation are not aimed at fairness and often conflict with it” (sect. 4, para. 3); and that it is, at least in part, a matter of terminology as to whether one wishes to include such religious obligations as “moral.” But I suspect that even if the authors were to grant that religious devotees or revolutionaries were more conscientious, or at least consciously aware, in following some moral sense, still they have the same mutualistic rather than altruistic moral intuitions. In any event, how, from mutualism, do we get to the sense of moral transcendence that binds and divides the cultures of our species?