in defence of morality as philosophy

7/31/2019 In Defence of Morality as Philosophy

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in defence of morality as philosophy

a b s t r a c t

In this essay I wish to offer a defence of morality, which has come under attackfrom the so-called debunking arguments either from Darwinians or those

inspired by accounts from evolutionary biology of morality revealed as social

instincts. The ground on which I stand asserts morality as a philosophical

discipline, the conceptual distinctiveness of which may not be challenged by

scientific evidence of what we arebecause morality exists to show us what we

could be. I also defend the claim that what Darwinians explain, and intend to

explain, is human sociality. Acknowledging that it is a dead-ringer for morality, I

have also seen it as my task to extricate morality from sociality by clarifying the

relationship between the two: what makes a belief moral is not its content but its

epistemological genesis.

Moreover, I suggest that moral beliefs impugned by debunking arguments are

those which would not qualify as moral, in the sense defined in this essay; on the

other hand, that the debunking arguments against them might yet fail for not

taking into account the fact of cultural diversity, which suggests that beliefs about

what constitutes sociable behavior are man- and not gene-made. Accordingly, I

complete my defence of morality by presenting Searles theory of social

institutions as an alternative account of sociality which has the benefits of (a)continuing where the Darwinian story ends; (b) explaining both the intuition

that social behavior occurs by an instinct, i.e. spontaneously, and its manifest

rule-likeness. What Searle adds to the Darwinian story is the indispensable fact of

languagewhich, conveniently, also explains cultural diversity. I conclude, then,

that the object of recent scientific curiosity is a socialphenomenonand not, in fact,

morality.


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contents

i n t r o d u c t i o n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 m o r a l i t y a s p h i l o s o p h y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

1 . 1 t h e p r e s u m p t i o n o f m o r a l i t y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1 . 2

t h e n o r m a t i v e q u e s t i o n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

1.2.1 It must be ananswer to thenormative question.... .............................. ........................... 51.2.2 It must betransparent withrespectto motivation............................. .............................. 61.2.3 It must speak towho we are, to oursense of identity..................................................... 6

1 . 3 a c r u c i a l d i s t i n c t i o n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1 . 4 n o t s u r v i v a l , b u t e n q u i r y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

2 d e b u n k i n g d a r w i n i a n t h e o r i e s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2 . 1 m o r a l i t y i s a p r o d u c t o f n a t u r a l s e l e c t i o n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.1.1 the fact of sociality ............................ ............................. ............................ ............... 92.1.2 the myth of morality ............................ .............................. .............................. ...... 102.1.3 social reality, 1; religious myths, 0 ......................... ............................ ................... 10

2 . 2 a d a r w i n i a n d i l e m m a f o r r e a l i s t t h e o r i e s o f v a l u e . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 2.2.1 a remarkable coincidence ............................ ............................ ............................. .. 132.2.2 evolutionary instincts make no moral evaluations.......... .......................... ........... 14

2 . 3 n o e p i s t e m o l o g i c a l w a r r a n t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 5 2.3.1 there are no moral facts ............................ .............................. ............................. . 152.3.2 what has not been cannot be a considered judgment ........................... ............... 16

2 . 4 w h a t i s c u l t u r e t o y o u i s r e a l i t y f o r u s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 2.4.1 the cultural constitution of value conceptions ........................... ....................... 172.4.2 its real life, not our way of life .......................... ............................ ................. 172.4.3 social instincts+cultural dispositionsour values ........................... ............... 18

3 s e a r l e s s o c i a l o n t o l o g y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 3 . 1 a s t o r y o f s o c i a l i t y ( w i t h o u t t h e s i n ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3

3.1.1 the darwinian mythrevisited.. .............................. ............................. .................... 233.1.2 socialityfor the love of mother, not the fear of god .......................... .......... 23

3 . 2 t h e d i f f e r e n c e o f l a n g u a g e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 4 3.2.1 from social instincts to social institutions ........................ ........................... ....... 243.2.2 from institutional fact to interpersonal relationship.................. ...................... 24

3 . 3 s o c i a l i n s t i n c t s 2 . 0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 5 3.3.1 learning by doing .......................... ............................ ............................. .................... 253.3.2 social glue ............................ ............................. .............................. ........................... 253.3.3 cultural attachment: being at home in ones society ....................... ................. 263.3.4 right and wrong ............................. .............................. .............................. ................ 263.3.5 fact & value ........................... .............................. ............................. .......................... 26

c o n c l u s i o n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 7


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introduction

In this essay I wish to launch a defence of morality, as philosophy, something that seems to have

become necessary in light of recent debunking arguments advanced against it. The term debunking

implies that morality is not what you think it is, and in so doing they intend to reveal what morality

really isand this essay endeavors to do just that.

On the Darwinian view, morality is falsely believed to consist in the laws of social cooperation decreed

by a sovereign authority with the power to oblige on pain of sanctions, necessary to enact and maintain

order amongst those who would otherwise degenerate into savagery. In truth, they say, these laws are a

gift from nature written into our genetic code, urging us to our socialized destiny. The new debunkers

concur, but on their view, morality is falsely believed to consist in pearls of philosophic wisdom that,

despite a veneer of respectability suitable for a post-religious age, do no more than echo the voice of

our evolutionary instincts. Both the debunkers and their interlocutors are agreed on the idea that

morality is the socializing force on human behavior that keeps human society together; they simply

disagree on what its made of.

Like the debunkers, I contend that there are widely-held misconceptions as to the nature of morality;

unlike them, I aim to dispel these in its defence. I believe that morality faces this existential threat only

because it has been mistaken for sociality. Perhaps well it would be if this were the case only for a bunch

of philosophers, but recent experimental work by psychological scientists has shown that most people

are quite prepared to judge each other by the rules of social behavior in ways that would seem to

confirm the assertion of one prominent Darwinian debunker, Michael Ruse, that morality is just a

matter of emotions no more than liking or not liking spinach(Ruse 2010)all in all, a resounding

refutation of morality as the thoughtful, considered productions of rational cogitation par-excellence,

borne in the tradition of venerated thinkers such as Kant, Mill, Williams and Rawls.

Yet it is their conception of morality that I defend in this essayone that, I claim, could not be

impugned by evidence of what people actually do or believe, anymore than science may be indicted by

the fact that the Azande believe in witchcraft. Beneath this furore, I believe, lies a fundamental

misunderstanding about the conceptof morality itself: it is not a means to compliance, but a guide to

cognition devised upon the presumption that humans are thinking, reasoning beings fully capable of

designing their own actions with others in mind. It assumes, in fact, that humans have an innate

capacity for sociable behavior and aims, instead, to address the person who is moved to question the

social order that forms part of his cultural inheritance. Morality, so construed, is constituted in the

1st-person: it consists in those beliefs one comes to endorse by a journey that begins with doubt and

culminates in a considered judgment upon which one may act with the full confidence of justification.

What is moral action, then, is distinguished not so much by in-situ deliberationdrowning children

and potential trolley victims might not have that long to waitbut by the fact that you are prepared to

claim it as your own, to be identifiedwith it in the eyes of others.

This is a view I intend to support by showing that what the debunkers explain with social instincts is a

concept apart from morality as I conceive and define it. For one thing, Darwinians explicitly propose to

explain why people behave sociably, which on the one hand assumes that moral means sociable,

hil h h h d l fill i h b l di b h i l d il f h i i


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In other words, Darwinian no rules required arguments may only debunk those beliefs that are made

by social instincts, exactly the kind you dont need to act from, andfor that reasonnot moral in the sense

here defendedone that also covers any other moral=sociable beliefs that lead to evidently sociable

behaviors, amongst which are culturally-specific rules of social behavior social instincts may not likely

explain. I believe it is necessary to complete my defence of morality by filling the cultural hole left by

Darwinian accounts, to which end I offer Searles theory of social institutions, which, by introducing thefact of language, not only explains cultural variation but may thus resolve the apparent paradox of how

what are complex social rules are nevertheless expressible by an instinct.

Here is a brief summary of the essay:

In section 1, I give a definition of morality as I intend to defend it, and present Korsgaards conditions

for an account of morality which I will use to illustrate the conceptual distinction, as I see it, betweenmorality and sociality. Because they clearly resemble each other, I spend the rest of the section prising

them apart to prepare my case against the debunking arguments, which I come to next.

In section 2, I tackle the debunking arguments head on by first observing that Darwinians always

meant to explain why humans are sociable, with which they debunk anything else you might have

heardespeciallyreligion. Next, I turn to Streets arguments against value realism, according to which

the remarkable similarity between common-garden judgments and what our instincts would say if theycould talk cannot just be a coincidence. I endorse this view, and explain that this is precisely why they

cannot be moral judgmentsthey are beliefs you never need to know you have to act on them. This

characteristic feature of instinct-judgments is related to debunking arguments against those moral

beliefs that also sound suspiciously like our social instinctswhich brings out the point that morality

is debunkable only to the extent that it just is our call to social behaviorthough the fact that these are

rule-like and the way these beliefs are culturally-constituted suggests that they are nothing our socialinstincts could have anticipated to give us. Whilst this could count against the Darwinians, I argue

instead that epistemologically speaking, these would amount to acting on an instinct that (as with

Streets survival dispositions) could compel you to act against your will (you might do it out of necessity

because it is the normbut grudgingly) or in ways you might not approve of yourself (social

compliance is no small part of ones survivalneeds must could necessitate anything). Above all,

sociality cannot be morality because it obviates what is usually considered the constitutive role ofconscience in moral action. Yet if we are in need of an account how people come to act in ways that are

sociable with respect to their cultural notions of the same, social instincts wont give itbut I believe

Searles theory can.

In section 3, then, I present Searles theory of social institutions as an alternate explanation of how

people come by these conceptions of sociality that are rule-like, yet executed by an instinct; proprietary,

yet may be held to with the force of moral necessity(i.e. one could feel like less of a person for notcomplying). The key to this apparent paradox is language: on the one hand, we learn as words the

social concepts that define both our relationships with others and how to live; on the other hand,

home is the place one understands and is understoodand where ones values are shared. This is not

to say that language and culture need divide us, only that it can.

I conclude then with the final defining difference between sociality and morality: no rule or principle


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1 m o r a l i t y a s p h i l o s o p h y1 . 1 t h e p r e s u m p t i o n o f m o r a l i t yWhat do you call that thing you do when you glower at someone for jumping the queue?which you

might not have, on a better day, a better mood, if you had just joined the queue, or if the queue didntseem miles long ahead of you? Amoraljudgment?

Or when you responded that time to the plaintive Got any change? with every last penny you had, just

because you had a particularly winning day at the office?even though you heard it at least a dozen

times before, and each time considered yourself justified for ignoring it because they would spend it

on drink and drugs anyway? Amoralact?

If so, yours is the conception of morality shared by various biologists, psychologists, neuroscientists

and likely as not, much of the population. That, however, is not the view of those who sought with their

philosophies to offer principles of right and wrong able to serve both as a DIY-guide to the matter of

ones own actions and as the grounds of ethical standards which inform social policy and professional

codes of practicealtogether, the means to a better society.

We could think of these philosophers as making a leap of faith with their ideas: they believed without

question the possibility that humans are capable of having morals and thus ofacting-morally. On the one

hand, they took for granted the human capacity to fashion ones own actionsboth the ends and

meansto ones own design, limited only by ones imagination and the awareness of the immense

responsibilities one undertakes in acting: that material-consequences ensue from ones actions; that

others might not interpret our actions as they were intended; that whatever we do here and now is apossible action for someone else. On the other hand, being thus capable ofacting for a reason(Korsgaard

2008) also means the ability to consider others when we act: we need only to take on their reasons as

our own, to find the reasons we can share(Korsgaard 1993). This takes no more than the appreciation

that every other human is a person like ourselvesjust as capable of their own ideas about how to act,

motivated by needs others cannot know, and a conception of the world all their own, made from

everything they would call me. What I claim for me in virtue of being a person islogically, evenequally valid for every other me.

The presumption of morality, then, is that each person is reason-capable, whose life is a unique

narrative that touches at least that of every other person he meetsreason enough to be mindful of

others in what he does. Architect of his own actions1, he is a pool of original ideas, a creative resource

who also faces the challenge of how to act in a way that doesnt compromise the likefreedom of others

to do the same.Morals, on this view, are grown, not born. Why does this matter? Because moral, thus conceived, is

assumed to be something someone can workat, getbetterat, to become a good personwhat sense a

meritorious attribution that cannot be earned? Moral pertains to ones actionslike everything else

you choose, you need guidance, even just to get started. Working out the contents of such guidance

l i i l i h l hil h d Th i bj i i fi h k b


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This, then, is the enterprise of morality and the purpose for which it was conceived. The quotidian

phenomenon mentioned at the start of this section doesnt have to be moralityone may be moral if

one chooses; its neither given nor compulsory, it takes all of ones willingness and just a little effort.

Morality, so conceived, merely asserts the possibilitynot the necessityof ones having morals and of

acquiring them; queue-jumper-frustration and inconsistent-beggar-responses are familiar features of

human social lifepart ofwhat wearethat thereby deserve attention as part of the human and social

sciences. These are complementary disciplines that service differentkindsof intellectual curiosities and

need not compete for title.

One could also argue, of course, that Kant, Hume, Smith and Mill got there first and have the claim

of possession; but the fact that these are named as examples of morality-in-action suggests that it may

well be what many people consider it to be. If so, this points to a confusion of concepts that poses an

unnecessary threat to the possibility on which morality is presumedmorals must be grown per-person,

and this requires society be alive to the concept and organized towards its promotion (see (Rawls 1999

(1971)), chapterviii for an explanation of this point).

Moreover, if morality can be the guide to a better society, we would be the worse for losing sight of it;

on the other hand, if we do lose sight of it, nothing would guide society either way that puts forth the

person as a priority concern. This last point may only be addressed in section 3 with Searles account

of how societies are made; suffice for now the claim that society, once made, includes mechanisms that

entail the persistence of its current constitution which may sustain indefinitely, barring externalinterventions such as natural disaster or foreign invasion. Without a guiding conception that offers the

confidence in proposals for change that promise to be worth the necessary pain of transition, societies

dont; the fact of lost civilisations suggest that cultures can run themselves into the ground and it is at

least possible that this was partly due to a failure to respond appropriately to conditions which

demanded it.

In addition, the view I here espousethat morality requires a philosophical defensealso forms part of

the canonical tradition of morality as a purposive conception, perhaps first given in Kants

Grundlegung (thirdsection in general, iv-459:15 in particular), later endorsed by Rawls ((Rawls

1989),p.113). For these reasons, then, I assert the distinctiveness of morality as a normative discipline,

the priority of the subject matter as it is still understood, and proceed to deny the claims from science

for the title on the grounds that (a) the existence of morality is not capable of being proven byscientific evidenceany more than one might expect to find evidence of science; and (b) the object

of scientific investigation is a social phenomenon, which I intend to identify and distinguish from

morality.

In case more is required, Ill add the point that the interests of science dont have to be affected by

what might from the scientific point of view seem a finickety philosophical distinctionespecially


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1 . 2 t h e n o r m a t i v e q u e s t i o nThe question how we explain moral behavior is a third-person, theoretical question, a question aboutwhy a certain species of intelligent animals behaves in a certain way. The normative question is afirst-person question that arises for the moral agent who must actually do what morality says.__________________________________________________________________((Korsgaard 1996),p.16)

All societies have laws and rules that must be obeyed on pain of legal sanctions, the loneliness ofsocial-ostracism and the dangers of social-exclusion. Thefactof compliance is necessary to getting-on,

but the actof compliance is notmost of these (as well see) are learnt with language or as technique

and done out of habit. These explain why people would do it, and do do it. But this is a different

question.

Consider the practice of offering inducements to expedite matters in ones favor, standard operating

procedure in certain countries. Bribery is a loaded English word that reflects cultural attitudes; thelocal word may have the same overtones as tax, and how a local speaker conceives of the practice that

he learns about as part of growing-up in his world. Suppose someone in that societybecause he has a

brain; he happens to be well-offwonders what exactly makes it ok, how it makes sense for the

better-endowed to get things done more quickly just because they are in a position to be more

persuasive, since more urgent or greater need seem better reasons for more-quickly than

better-benefits-packagefor the bureaucrat, of course, not the state-coffers. He knows itashow itsdone; hes asking whymust I do this? Why must it be done so? as a person. Morality, the intellectual

discipline, asserts that this lastisa question, one that requires an answer, one it endeavors to provide as

a collective, peer-reviewed effort. If this kind of question could be put to the practices of that society,

one that casts a critical eye on the constitution of these practices and is thought to deserve a reasonable

(and not merely acceptable) answer, then anyone in that society who asks why must I do it? may have

their genuine concerns addressed. This, I suggest3

, then serves to engender a culture in which whyis understood as an invitation to reason and dialogue, and not have to be assumed as a contentious

attempt to evade ones obligation.

If we think, as I shall assume, that persons door perhaps, even, shouldask the normative question,

and do need the internal coherence of being justified in ones actionsnot just a (welfare-preserving)

plausible excuse for ones behaviorthen we must accept that morality exists as it does to answer thisneed, and that accounts of morality are purposed to this end. If it is to do so, then, it must satisfy a few

conditions4:1.2.1 It must be ananswer to thenormative question1.2.1.1 It must be aresponse to arequestforjustification

The normative question would never arise for behavior that one performs habitually orotherwise with no thought to the possibility of an alternative, so an explanation in theseterms is not an account of morality: it wont be a response to a request for justificationbecause one will not have been made.

1.2.1.2 It must tellme what makes itthe right thing to do.The normative question demands an answer about it, to the first-person wanting to knowwhat makes it the right thing to do. By implication, it must address someone who iscognizant of its omission as a material possibility(see 1.2.1.1). This, then, requires a


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1.2.2 It must betransparent withrespecttomotivation1.2.2.1 It must be areason for action that isjustifiable belief

More fully, this is the condition that

society should be transparent, in the sense that the working of its ethical institutions shouldnot depend on members of the community misunderstanding how they work ((Williams1985),p.101)

and related to5 Rawls publicity condition ((Rawls 1999 (1971)), 23,p.115;29see also69:fn-1,p.398 on the noble lie). This requires that an account of morality cannot be onethe authority of which depends on the true nature of our moral motives being concealedfrom uscommon-sense; if its not, consider that ones reason for -ings being exposed asa lie or myth would tend to drain ones motivation to do so.

What is less obvious, perhaps, is that this would include the kind of exceptionalism woveninto a cultures (usually origin) myths used not just to elicit compliance to its rules but as abarrier against the infiltration of alien ideas which dont apply to us. Publicity in this sense,then, includes the conception of liberty familiar to the free world (and spelled out by Rawls).

1.2.2.2 It must be areason for action thatjustifiesAny normative theory, minimally, lights our way to actions that make sense to us. An accountof morality, in addition, must guide us to actions that we may believe ourselves justified in

doing; it cannot be one which includes motives that could influence us to act in ways wewould not approve of ourselves for doing.

` altogether, the condition oftransparencyrequires of an account of morality that explains our moralbehavior as actions, the sense of which is made by reasons we are justified in believing, and whichenable us to believe that we are justified in what we are doing.

1.2.3 It must speak towho we are, to oursense of identityOr: ones morality must be part of who one is; the demands of morality must be those we make ofourselves. Why? On the one hand, moral-action is something you do, so to that extent part of you;on the other hand, if only because

a man whose moral judgments always coincided with his interests could be suspected of havingno morality at all ((Rawls 1999(1971)),p.202)

the right thing to do can be unpleasantyet one would, because moral commands issue from

ones morals, and therebycouldmotivate as if ones life depended on it, so that to notdo what it

demands is to not be me. This is not so hard to understand if we consider that some of us wouldregard continuing to existe.g. with severe dementia such as Alzheimers a fate worse than death

because to be livingis to be me, or not at all. Morality, then, is something one would be prepared

to sacrifice ones life for.

And this, I argue, is no more or less than the morality of collective living memory, what can move

someone to act to their own apparent disbenefit or even in defiance of the biological imperative,

survivalnotably, in ways that contravene social rules and conventions; the sort of thing that couldmotivate the sheltering of Jews in Nazi Germany, evidenced in standing up for what one believes

in even knowing it would alienate ones fellows, or just in the child who refuses to join in with

the other kids kicking the neighborhood dog.

Korsgaard explains this condition by saying that morality can ask hard things of usno less, I

would add than being left out refusing to acquiesce in a status quo sitting uncooperatively on


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These, then, are the conditions that must be satisfied for an account to be of morality. We may note

that although moralityassumescertain possibilitiessuch as the need for justification, or that people

may act morally, so construedthese not only happen in fact, but are also attributed to morality. Whilst

this may lend weight to moralitys claim of its identity, what this claim really depends on is whether ornot we believe the normative question is both meaningful to ask and deserves an answer.

1 . 3 a c r u c i a l d i s t i n c t i o nPut otherwise, the question is whether or not we wish to uphold the notion that there is a conceptual

difference between doing it because its how its done and doing it because it is the right thing to

do, and whether or not this is the sort of distinction we think persons would do well to make, and

make for themselves. If we think that it is possiblefor a person to do the right thing in the absence of

deterrent or incentive either wayor even to figure out what that is, all by himself, and do it toothen

we not only believe that there is such a thing as morality, but also that its not the same thing as

sociality.

If it were, we would not have been able to distinguish between protester and riotor,

conscientious-objector and draft-dodger, or prisoner-of-conscience and plain-old-criminalall infact

socially-disruptive behaviors who might understandably be considered to deserving of societys

punishment; lest we forget, those we regard as prisoners-of-conscience may, in their own societies, be

held on locally-legitimate charges and duely processed through that countrys legal system. These

social-distinctions exist only because we do have a system of concepts that enable us to differentiate

between socially-disruptive behaviors in terms of the reasons for which they were donereasonswhich, for being socially-recognized, were able to steer the course of society towards the

now-established unsociableness of racist attitudes that were socially-normal just a century ago.

Under a social conception, societyjustisa place that couldnt hold together unless it had

a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate complex interactions

within social groups [which] relate to well-being and harm, and norms of right and wrong attach tomany of them. ((Bekoff and Pierce ),p. )6

and so long as it does, there is nothing to choose between slavery or not, static castes or no. Many

different suites could do the job, as evidenced in the fact that cultures may be diverse yet equally

long-standing and stable. On this view, it matters not the particular norms of right and wrong that

form the suite; social stability is what counts. There would be no way to rationallysuggest that slavery

is wrong and must be abolishedslavery would be right, in virtue of being the established way of life,the suggestion wrong even just for the social disruption abolitionwould entail, whatever it was that was

being abolished. What regulates complex interactions within social groups are social concepts, of which

(as we see in section-3) society is built and which do come with rules that its members must comply

with if they are to live there, what Searle calls the underlying glue that holds society together.((Searle


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All societies need to distinguish between, e.g. kidnap and incarceration, assault and resisting-arrest,

even murder and executionbut not all find the need to invent a way to scrutinize the distinctions that

have been socially-made. Concepts reflect cultural interests; the distinction between murder and

execution is made by social-concepts; interrogating that distinction takes moral concepts. Unlike the

Inuits, we dont need to distinguish between several dozen types of snow; likewise, not every society has

found it necessary to nitpick and analyse what are well-established systems of cooperation and

coordination. This requires morality, and its expressions may not only take the form of unsociable

behavior but demand the disruption of the social order. Society yields to its demands when convinced,

upon reflection, of its reasonableness and hence the necessity of social change, however painful

(cf.1.2.3). That is how morality differs from sociality, and what we need it for.

1 . 4 n o t s u r v i v a l , b u t e n q u i r yThe very idea ofmorality starts from the one aboutmorals, something each person possesses individually.

This sense that persons are innately capable of designing their own actions and thinking for themselves,

and that being good has something to do with honing that skillnotacquiescing in bare urges to

socially cooperative behaviorsgoes back to Aristotle. Modern moral conceptions differ on the content

of moral principlesand hence in their answers to moral dilemmasbut they all assume the possibility

of having morals, something no more or less than what someone exercises by reasoning their way to

their own assessments and actions, over and above the social demands that are a matter of survivala

point made by Darwinian theories, as we see next.

We dont, I think, go far wrong to say that morality is constituted by the question, not the given, and that

it starts in the personthe only place from which well ever get the original idea that might make a

better society. The thing that occupies moral philosophers, in this society at least, not only influences

social attitudes via what Mill called the intellectual culture ((Mill 2001), p.31)7, but now and again

also directly leads to changes in social policysuch as the abolition of slaverybecause social leaders

recognise the wisdom of its counsel. These are then inherited by the next generation as the norms of

society. The link between what is moral, and what is social is not accidentally made. So by way ofintroducing the next section, then, Ill end this one by agreeing with Michael Ruse when he writes that

Morality is not something handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai ((Ruse 2010))

but disagreeing with his point that

Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice-cream and sex and hating toothache and

marking student papers[But i]t has to pretend that it is not that at all! If we thought that moralitywas no more than liking or not liking spinach, then pretty quickly[]there would be no moralityand society would collapse (op.cit.)

because as I hope to have shown in this section, morality is nothing if not a way to reason. Emotion is

no more a part of it than getting frustrated with the child who seems intent on thinking that 2+2 is

anything other than 4 Societies dont collapse without morality though they might without the sort


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2 debunking darwinian theories2 . 1 m o r a l i t y i s a p r o d u c t o f n a t u r a l s e l e c t i o n 2 . 1 . 1 t h e f a c t o f s o c i a l i t yHuman sociality is a factand apparently, a bit of a mystery, perhaps partly because it fails explanation

with the standard homo-economicus model which prevailed throughout the 20th-century, a creature

who didnt do other-regarding social behavior. There was no explanatory model for sociality, nothing

that could explain why a human would act with others in mindor so it seemed, until Darwinian

theorists reminded us that socialization is not a uniquely human phenomenon: if we want to know what

its about, we might do better looking to the animal kingdom for answers. Frans De Waals (De Waal

1996) research, for example, shows several outstanding similarities between the social behavior ofhumans and other primates, up to and including the inclination to share ones food and the pointless

delights of dwelling in each others company that we would consider uniquely human only by a

conceit. Like humans,monkeys and apes care about the state of relationships in their own communitythey seem to strivefor the kind of community that is in their own best interest.(op.cit.p.205)

Capuchins, chimpanzees, even rats and vampire-bats seem capable of behaviors that so confoundedhomo-economicus. In fact:Altruistic and cooperative behaviors are also common in many species of animal []Vampire batswho are successful in foraging for bloodwill share their meal with bats who arent successful. Andtheyre more likely to share blood with those bats who previously shared blood with them []ratsappear to exhibit generalized reciprocity [] long been thought to be uniquely human._________________________________________________________((Bekoff and Pierce 2009),p.7)

There seems to be nothing short of a wealth of evidence to support the view that the now-classic suite ofsocialized behaviorscooperation, altruism, reciprocity, etc.are common by degrees to all social

animals, which Darwin attributed to the social instincts thatlead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy withthem, and to perform various services for them ((Darwin 1871),p.72).

There is no reason to suppose that humans should be any lesscapable of these behaviors, manifest as

they are in all mammals, and ever more human-like(even the sulking and petulance we see in our

youngsters) the more closely-related the species. Humans have social instincts. We are given and driven

to whatever behaviors are required to live in our societies. No society, human or otherwise, could stay

intact without some form of built-in community awareness that enables us to figure out how to adjust

our behaviors to each other in order to co-exist successfully. Socialization was natures idea; the

requisite adaptations were par for the course. So far, so social.


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2 . 1 . 2 t h e m y t h o f m o r a l i t y Where, then, does morality come into it? Well, the Darwinians are agreed on one thing:

other-regarding behaviors are to be found in a continuous line of species up to humans, in light of

which it is time to dispel the myth that begins with Adam and Eve, peaks at Sinai and concludes with

human-exceptionalismfor which morality has been frequently cited as evidence.

The God-angle is not without significance, since Darwinians face a constant battle with the so-calledreligious-right, or creationists, some of whom apparently believe that Godliterallymade the

world in seven days. Unfortunately, many of these also lay claim to the title of moral-guardians

morality, in this case, being the ten commandments and the tens of dozens more picked up on the

way to the Promised Land. Considering that the contents of these booksExodus, Leviticus, Numbers,

Deuteronomystill fill the sermons of hellfire-and-damnation preachers, those who would defend

morality as philosophy, like myself, are probably right with Ruse when he celebrates the fact thatWe can give up all of that nonsense about women and gay people being inferior, about fertilised ovabeing human beings, and about the earth being ours to exploit and destroy.((Ruse 2010))

except that according to him, this glorious day has come to pass because

Morality is flimflam.

Yetrevealinglyhe also says that this is because

God is dead.there is no celestial headmaster who is going to give you six (or six billion, billion,billion) of the best if you are bad.

2 . 1 . 3 s o c i a l r e a l i t y , 1 ; r e l i g i o u s m y t h s , 0A Darwinian account of morality consists in a Darwinian explanation of other-regarding behaviors.

The fact that these other-regarding behaviors are present in other social animals shows that

other-regarding behaviors are a product of natural selection. On the one hand, this would plug thegap in social-scientific explanations of behavior, hitherto stymied by their exclusive use of the

homo-economicus model. On the other hand, it refutes (debunks) previously-advanced accounts of

other-regarding behaviors, notably those by advocates of certain religions who champion the human

exceptionalism opposed by Darwinians. The morality that is debunked, then, by Darwinian accounts,

are alternative explanations of other-regarding behavior, what Ruse calls the

illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator.(op.cit.)

There are two senses of morality in use here. The reality that forms the central thesis of Darwinian

accounts is the other-regarding behavior that is said to be infactcaused, or otherwise explained by

social instincts that actually push us to behave as required to live socially. This is the sense of

morality addressed in this essay, which I intend to explain as social normativity in section 3.

The other, the illusion being debunked by these accounts consists of any other explanation of the

reality. The central thesis is used by De-Waal in ((De Waal 1996)) and Bekoff & Pierce in ((Bekoffand Pierce 2009)), in conjunction with evidence of morality=other-regarding-behaviors8 in other

animals, to debunk the idea that morality is an exclusively human phenomenon. This, in turn, is a

view which is usually understood to derive from morality=religious-rules/divine-commandments,

i.e. given by God, who saved the best for the last and seventh day of creation and created Man in his

i h h h d Wh d i h h f l i i l i R

l h h h d b k l d l


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In general, then, we may say that the target of Darwinian debunking is evolution-denying religious

conceptions and theiraccount of morality, whereas the one I attend to in this essay is what Darwinians

tout not as the illusion they debunk but the reality they offer with their theoriesitself in turn the

source of a different kind of debunking altogether, one given by Sharon Streets argument against

realist theories of value.

But for completeness, and also to show how Darwinians neglect the cultural factor, I will also attend to

Ruses debunking of the illusionI do not dispute its status as an illusion (though for different

reasons), but his explanation for its existence, I argue, is inconsistent with his theory of of the reality.

2 . 1 . 3 . 1 a c u l t u r a l a s i d e : p i c k i n g a h o l e i n r u s e s i l l u s i o nFrom the Darwinian perspective, any account of the reality that denies the role of natural selection is

bunkum. The view of morality I am defending disqualifies any account of morality constituted inblind-obedience (see 1.2.1.1)or false-belief(1.2.2.1), which therefore can neither guide nor

justify(1.2.2.2)because in these cases, compliance derives either from habit (not ones reason for

complying) or hellfire(not a reason for complying that holds in virtue of the behavior itself, and a

false belief if taken literally). Neither of because its the way it is/because its the rule/because its

laid on us10 is a reason to think itis right; it is perfectly possible to do itfor either of these reasons and

still fail to be convinced that one is justified in doing so. To the extent that these are just the sort of

reasons that Ruses illusions exist to provide, we are agreed that they are just that.

But the realitythat it is social instincts thatactuallydispose us to being goodshould be far more

reliable than any illusion we could create in ensuring that we are, or want to be good. Why does

Ruse then also suggest that without the illusion,before long, we would find ourselves saying something like: Well, morality is a jolly good thing from

a personal point of view. When I am hungry or sick, I can rely on my fellow humans to help me. Butreally it is all bullshit, so when they need help I can and should avoid putting myself out. There isnothing there for me. The trouble is that everyone would start saying this and so very quickly there

would be no morality and society would collapse and each and every one of us would suffer. (op.cit.)

Why would we, if our social instincts do exert an influence on our beliefs (which is the basis of Streets

argument)? Why would we need, as he suggests, an illusion on top ofwhat are already supposed to be

according to his theoryeffectively motivating by themselvesandsomething he reaffirms later in the

article by saying thatyou are still a human with your gene-based psychology working flat out to make you think youshould be moral. It has been said that the truth will set you free. Dont believe it []It doesntmatter how much philosophical reflection can show that your beliefs and behavior have no rationalfoundation, your psychology will make sure you go on living in a normal, happy manner.

which would again suggest that we never needed the illusion in the first place. Which is it?

I believe that the point Ruse wanted to make both in this article and Taking-Darwin-Seriously(Ruse 1986)

is simply that because our social instincts offer a complete explanation of socialized behavior, religious

explanations are false. He seems, at best, undecided about where the illusion that he denounces as

flimflam fits into the picture of the reality of social instincts. If it is a species-wide conception, we are

left without an account of how it extends in particular to cultures without gods or with those who


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But this, I suggest, is because the illusion he has in mind to debunk is the creationists-God, a fact barely

concealed in his writingseven Darwin himself does not escape criticism for harboring some theistic

notions(see Darwin-&-Design(Ruse 2003), chapter5). Without suggesting that his views carry a tint of

anti-theism, I believe it does explain how it has escaped his notice that theism 11 is not a species-wide

phenomenon. This rather limits his debunking to his intended target alone, because he leaves us

none-the-wiser as to what he would identify as flimflam in atheistic cultures12 (nor how they got by

without it where others could not).


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2 . 2 a d a r w i n i a n d i l e m m a f o r r e a l i s t t h e o r i e s o f v a l u e 2 . 2 . 1 a r e m a r k a b l e c o i n c i d e n c e The evolutionary explanation for human sociality was, in fact, the way Darwinians thought to debunk

morality. Theirs was the news that we are social cooperators because we are wired that way

something equivalently described as humans are naturally moral beings(Ruse 2010).Arguably, even those who live in blessed ignorance of evolutionary concepts would have little reason to

take that statement at face value. No need to be cynical; just consider what you might come up with if

you had to think of6 basic evaluative judgments that you would expect anyone to makeas Sharon

Street (Street2006) does:

(1) The fact that something would promote ones survival is a reason in favor of it.

(2) The fact that something would promote the interests of a family member is a reason to do it.(3) We have greater obligations to help our own children than we do to help complete strangers.

(4) The fact that someone has treated one well is a reason to treat that person well in return.

(5) The fact that someone is altruistic is a reason to admire, praise, and reward him or her.

(6) The fact that someone has done one deliberate harm is a reason to shun that person or seek his

or her punishment.

table 1:p.115

and reflect on the fact thatThere are so many other possible judgements about reasons we could makeso why these?[]Evolutionary biology offers powerful answers to these questions, very roughly of the form that these sortsof judgements about reasons tended to promote survival and reproduction much more effectively thanthe alternative judgements. (op.cit.)

Judgments like those are recognizably familiar, and they are also the ones that are easily explained with

the concepts of evolutionary biology. This is the thought that motivates Streets conclusion thatthe content of human evaluative judgements has been tremendously influenced[] by the forces ofnatural selection, such that our system of evaluative judgements is saturated with evolutionaryinfluence.

This, then, is the basis of the Darwinian Dilemma Street poses to Realist Theories of Value. Briefly,

it goes like this: realist theories of value claim that a statement such as:

is good/valuable (given thatis/has ) []

is an objectively-verifiable fact-of-the-matter, i.e. it is possible to state the conditions-in-the-world thatyield the truth of [] in terms of s properties. Good/valuable is an attribute, defined by an

evaluative standard, that attaches to in virtue ofs being or having (the conditions which would

obtain should be demonstrably in possession of the specified properties and thereby render the

statement true). The realist, then, claims with his theory that the factof having or being makes

good/valuable and therefore [] an independent evaluative truth. Yet, it is the realists evaluative

attitudes that account for his attributing value to -ness. According to Darwinian theories such asRuses, our evaluative attitudes are (more or less) wired-in, and may therefore be considered subject

to the distorting influences of evolutionary forces. The realist could either deny such influence on

his theoryand face the accusation that they have been(invisibly, as it were)or he could accept it,

which would amount to rendering his standard useless, since


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2 . 2 . 2 e v o l u t i o n a r y i n s t i n c t s m a k e n o m o r a l e v a l u a t i o n sStreets argument, I believe, comes to this: the fact that judgments like those in table 1

(a) are among our most deeply and widely held judgments;

(b)tend to increase the reproductive success of creatures who made them(p.116)

(c)have the sort of content one would expect if the content of our evaluative judgments had beenheavily influenced by selective pressures (p.117)

so thatthe observed patterns in the actual content of human evaluative judgements provide evidence infavor of the view that natural selection has had a tremendous influence on that content.(op.cit.)

Evolutionary pressures selectdispositions that have biological-value. Creatures who had them tended to

survive and reproduce successfully. They, not the ones who didnt have those dispositions, are our

ancestors, and its fair to say that this is why we dohave them, and why we dontnothave themand whythe fact thatpromotes my survival is a reason to do it []

effectively-movesus to . This doesnt mean that you willnecessarily, every time, but that you will, unless

you acquired a reason that you judgeto outweighbe better thanpromotes ones survival for you to

notand hence, neither [] nor your thereby-ing is a moraljudgment.

Why not? Start with : moral judgments are made from moral-motiveswith moral-reasoning; moral motives, a.k.a. your morals, are what makes your actions moral when you act on them moral reasoning is what you do to figure out how to act on your moral motives

and add, from section-1, that morals are not born, but grow from the normative questioni.e. why

should I ?you ask for the wantof a reason, so that an account of morality is one of the moral-motives

you acquire and come to accept in the course of this development.

Now, assume that for you, it is afactthat

has the property=promotes ones survival ()

Streets point is that for you, () entails [] by an evolutionary-determinationi.e. promotes ones

survival, being nature-given, cannotnotbe a motive for you. The forces of evolution would have selected

thatinstinct which ensuresthat you are disposed favorablyandnototherwise(p.116)to any in virtueof its having the property.

These instincts, then, are evolutionarily-pre-installed motives that may neither fail nor cease to be

effectiveand are therefore morally-inert: we have no choice about having them or how they influence

us. These are motives for which acceptanceis meaningless, since they have influence over us whether we

accept them or notor indeed, whether or not we acknowledge them.

Moreover, the fact that they exert regardless is not just the possibility that they could move us to actingin ways we wouldnt approve of (see1.2.2.2) but they are in fact well known for doing sobackstabbing

others for promotions, for example, or ditching old friends for more upwardly-mobile ones. I believe it

is fair to say that even iftable 1 judgments and the fact people do act on them are common enough,

the fact that (1) & (2), for example, can be responsible for some ugly behaviors is not disputedfor

(2): nepotism the Mafia the behaviors that ossify social divisions as the well off look after their own


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2 . 3 . 2 w h a t h a s n o t b e e n c a n n o t b e a c o n s i d e r e d j u d g m e n t I believe the points I made with respect to Streets sample judgments could in fact be otherwise stated

in the terms of these debunking arguments: beliefs earn their epistemological warrant on account of

their source (where they come from, how you come to believe them) and those the objective

credentials of which are suspect could not count as knowledgethat is, justifiablebelief. This argument isused to discredit the position of realism, according to which beliefs such as () could be true or false,

i.e.facts; my point has been, firstly, that beliefs like () are drawn from socialconcepts, so that it is to be

expected where these coincide with social instincts. Secondly, beliefs that do derive from instincts

survival or socialdemonstrate the characteristics I pointed out above in relation to Streets arguments:

they are essentially unfalsifiable to the human who has them, and(much more importantly) they are

easily behaviorally-efficacious in those who are not consciously aware of having these beliefs at all. Thelink with the epistemological debunking argument is that people dogenerallyactonbeliefs like (), but

notfromthem: I suggest thattable 1judgments are those which are, instead, retrospectively constituted

from observations of human behavior and which, not surprisingly, tend to be endorsed by those who do

tend to behave accordingly.

In other words, what tends to deprive these beliefs of their epistemological warrant is also what puts

them outside the scope of morality: epistemologically speaking, one may not decideto act the way onewas already disposed to do, nor can it be onesjudgmenta belief the absence or negation of which one

has either never considered, nor could imagine if one tries. Not, at least, a moraljudgment, minimally

those13in which our moral capacities are most likely to be displayed without distortion []those judgments[] given when we are upset or frightened, or when we stand to gain one way or the other can beleft aside. All these judgments are likely to be erroneous or to be influenced by an excessive

attention to our own interests. Considered judgments are simply those rendered under conditionsfavorable to the exercise of the sense of justice [] The person making the judgment is presumed,then, to have the ability, the opportunity, and the desire to reach a correct decision [] Moreover,the criteria that identify these judgments are not arbitrary. [] And once we regard the sense of

justice as a mental capacity, as involving the exercise of thought, the relevant judgments are thosegiven under conditions favorable for deliberation and judgment in general. ((Rawls 1999 (1971)),p.42, my emphases)

It is an odd kind of judgment that does not start from a question(see section-1), what does not arisefrom ones doubtas to the validity of ones beliefs, yet this can only be the case for those beliefs that are

born of the influence of evolutionary instincts. Together with my contention that social instincts

explain sociality and not morality, then, I feel I may conclude that these debunking arguments do not

debunk morality at all.

Indeed, I believe that these debunking argumentsas does Streetsdo us the service of pointing outwhy we should not consider a moral fact either what is in fact a social-necessitysociety could not exist

without social cooperatorsor a realists attribution of value. Given (a) the distinct flavor of

self-denial in many of such beliefs, complemented with a defence to the effect of the good of others,

and (b) that what are identified as objects of value (the good) tend to be those which are conducive

to or otherwise enhance the human existencei e the characteristic content of these beliefs and the


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2 . 4 w h a t i s c u l t u r e t o y o u i s r e a l i t y f o r u s 2 . 4 . 1 t h e c u l t u r a l c o n s t i t u t i o n o f v a l u e c o n c e p t i o n sMore important, however, is Streets point about the untenability of value-realism. I believe she has only

scraped the surface of the problem, because her sample judgments demonstrate but one of the many

distinctive patterns into which human evaluative judgments tend to fall. These were intended, I assume,

to be culturally-neutral enough for her to make her point; yet passing these through a cultural

interpretation could yield a different set of judgments that belie their apparent species-generality.

Consider, for example:

(4) The fact that someone has treated one well is a reason to treat that person well in return.

not in cultures where that someone is thought to owe you that treatment in virtue of their place insociety, e.g. those with rigid caste systems, or even the upstairs, downstairs-like social arrangements

whereby one family(downstairs) is linked to another(upstairs) by a tradition of servitude, so that

whether or not the former are in fact remunerated for their troubles, relations between them would

not be constituted by the symmetry implied in the judgment, and nor would it be expected. These are

cases, then, in which one person does not find it a reason to reciprocate the good treatment they have

received from another.

Moreover, it is also not unheard of for members of the family upstairs to behave badly to members of

the family downstairs, or even to cause deliberate harm, yet because that society would not

recognize it as harm as such, the victims of such abuse would not rationally be able to come to the

judgment that

(6) The fact that someone has done one deliberate harm is a reason to shun that person or seek hisor her punishment.

In fact, setting aside the social factors at work in these senarios, the downstairs family might be

considered altruistic for what they are willing to put up with, but we would hardly expect the

upstairs family or the society at large to think so, thus belying

(5) The fact that someone is altruistic is a reason to admire, praise, and reward him or her.

This illustrates the way seemingly straightforward attributions like altruistic(behaving better than

expected) or doing-harm(behaving as one ought not) are socially-constituted concepts: they pick out

behavioral patterns relative to a social context, and arguably only exist in cultures which were at some

point disposed to do so. We dontkidnapconvicted criminals, we incarceratethemthey have not been

wronged, although we arein fact holding them against their will.

2 . 4 . 2 i t s r e a l l i f e , n o t o u r w a y o f l i f e Human evaluations, as observed earlier, often, if not always, derive from that humans idea of what he

needs to survive. As Darwinian theories show us, nature determined that humans must live in society, to

which end nature outfits us with the inclination to socialized behavior requisite to social living. But the

fact that each society is constituted differently means that what a human considers his survival needs

also depend on his socialculturalcontext. Conceptions of value, then, are not only subject to

evolutionary influences but cultural ones.


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2 . 4 . 3 s o c i a l i n s t i n c t s + c u l t u r a l d i s p o s i t i o n s o u r v a l u e sIt seems, then, that social instincts do not fully explain human sociality. They account for the fact that

humans do live in societies, are thereby disposed to other-regarding behaviors, are given to

value-conceptions that determine their attitudes to social behaviorsbut not for why humans do battle

in the realm ofideasabout the relative superiority of their cultural conceptions. Nor, indeed, for whysome cultures grow myths for Darwinians to debunk and others dont. Each cultural conception

consists of what debunkers call moral beliefs and their interlocutors moral facts. Theseit may be

arguedexhibit enough intra-cultural consistency and inter-cultural diversity to suggest that they are

factsthat these beliefs derive their contents from something other than social instincts, that they are

contingently-consititutedmade from something in the world, not just the genesand sits nicely with

communitarians different cultures, different values view (see above point also).

But there is something for everyone here: diversities in substantive cultural conceptions of

other-regarding behaviors merely expresses, I believe, the fact that humans are complex enough to

have to do some inventing on the ground in order to pull of the feat of living together and adapt the

natural terrain to human needs. A cultures distinctiveness reflects the unique circumstances from

which it was wroughtit, too, is a product of evolution, and there is no more accounting for a culturestastes in food than their behavioral preferences. From the point of view ofmorality, then, the beliefs that

derive from cultural conceptions are of a piece with those caused by social instincts.

summary of section ii


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In this section, I have tried to unravel the tangled web of debunking arguments that are either

advanced with, or have derived from, Darwinian accounts of morality, and I hope to have made clear by

now that Darwinians identify morality with sociality. Or, more precisely, the moralitythey explain with

social instincts is the suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regular

complex interactions within social groups((Bekoff and Pierce 2009),p.7)evidence of which may befound to varying degrees in all mammals, even vampire-batsin light of which humans are (a) in fact

by nature disposed to the behaviors that constitute socialitynot quite the Hobbesian creature once

thoughtand (b) not the only species to be so.

The morality the Darwinians seek to debunk, where they do, is the conception favored by their greatest

detractors, the creationists. This debunking I endorsealong, I assume, with the non-creationist

universe, though for the different reasons I givebut I had a bone to pick with what I see as Rusesinconsistent explanation of why the morality he debunks exists at all, given the supposed efficacy of

the instincts that on his account cause the beliefs and behaviors of the social phenomenon that

Darwinians call morality, and the fact that not all cultures subscribe to these sorts of ideas. I think he

never considered the cultural factora theme I return to later.

Next I turned to Sharon Streets debunking of value-realism, which draws on Darwinian ideas about

instincts and the influence these exert on human evaluative judgments. It cannot be a coincidence, sheargues, that common-garden judgments of value are quite the match they are to what we might expect

our evolutionary instincts to tell us, and evidence, therefore, of evolutionary influences on our

evaluative attitudes. A similarly suspicious alignment between what our social instincts might prescribe

and what some call moral facts has been seized upon as proof positive that morality is no more than

the mouthpiece of our built-in social minder. It has not been my interest to refute these arguments, but

rather to show how these evaluative judgments and/or moral beliefs could not be morality as I havedefined it in section-1 because, on the one hand, what is acting on a disposition cannot count

barring self-deception, etc.as moral action and, on the other hand, what has not been cannot be a

considered judgment. What makes a belief moral is not what it contains, but how it was come by. As

a rule, ones morals have to be present at the conception, and beliefs one does not know how not to

have are always suspect. In a sense, then, these beliefs and judgments are debunkable for the same

reasons they could not count as moral.The debunkers are successful insofar as they can show how a moral belief could have been the work

of social instincts; but they do notbecause the only species-wide description of social behaviors (apart

from social) we could safely apply is other-regardingas I hoped to have shown using a few of

Streets examples. The contents of live, behavior-causing beliefs on the ground of any society exhibit

intercultural diversity that would stretch the social instincts explanation beyond all credibility

differences that make wars. I suggest, then, that any belief that possesses the general character ofsociality can only be accounted for by introducing the notion of a cultural conception that supplies the

contents of beliefs we may suppose social instincts primed us to receive. But what might well prove that

the beliefs thought debunkable are in fact caused by facts also entails an arbitrariness of constitution

that denies them the attribution of moral14. If this seems excessively fussy, consider that morality

i t i lit th t t d th i l i f bit il tit t d t d d th th


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3 searle s social ontology


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Morality is [] like liking ice-cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers []no more than liking or not liking spinach.((Ruse 2010))

Perhaps the most striking feature of a culture are its tastesas it is for an individual; likewise, there is in

fact much, much more to a culture than its likes or dislikes. Every culture comes with a social system

that describes the organizational structure of its society, social concepts which define social roles,relationships and practicesand a language, from which these are constructed. A culture, as we know,

may persist even when its lands are lost and sovereignty stolenit is not these, but its social institutions

that define a people, and it may live on in their hearts and minds through their language.

This, at least, is the picture of society painted by John Searles theory of institutions, first expounded in

The-Construction-of-Social-Reality ((Searle 1995), hereafter CSR), with an updated statement given in

Social-Ontology((Searle 2006), hereafter SO). It is not the purpose of this section to give a full accountof the theory, but by way of completing my defence of morality as defined by the philosophical

discipline; I believe that Searles theory offers an account of social normativity that is often mistaken

by proponents and debunkers alikefor morality.

As I hope to have shown in previous sections, what are named as moral facts or evaluative truths

thought debunked by Darwinian theories of morality are not part of the concept of morality, butneither are they the genetic illusions of our social instincts. Beliefs of this kind are systematic, coherent

and stickyit is not unimaginable for a child to feel more at home than an immigrant grandad who

has lived next door for 20 years. They are not moral, on account of how these are acquired and

more importantlythe fact that they are easily, and arguably more effectively, behavior-causing the

less-consciously they are held.

Recent experiments by psychological scientists ((Haidt2001),(Cushman, Young et al. 2006)) haveapprised us of the existence of social intuitions that we may suppose express behavioral attitudes that

reflect a societys conception of sociality, and that these may differ significantly between cultures

(O'Neill and Petrinovich 1998) in ways that are quite unexpected (Abarbanell and Hauser 2010). In

addition, their research has shown that these are held quite unaccountably and the evaluations they

produce are situationally-specific(Doris 1998) and vulnerable to what we might call ones state of

mind ((Schnall, Haidt et al. 2008), (Wheatley and Haidt2005))which, I suggest, is what one wouldexpect to discover about evaluative-judgments of spinach, or ice-cream: nice on a hot day, not so much

in Arctic conditions.

It is also fair to say, I think, that the phenomenon unearthed by these scientists constitutes evidence of

what we might have suspected: that these behavioral dispositions and evaluative attitudes explain the

occurrence of socialised behaviors in the per-culture patterns we have come to expect (and, indeed,caricature with cultural stereotypes). In fact, a set of attitudes and behavior [] appropriate to the

situation in its social context is how Searle defines a social concept, and for its participants, thinking

that those attitudes are appropriate is itself partly constitutive of that social situation((Searle 1991),

p.340). Moreover, in these situations

Now consider that we have on the one side Darwinian social-instincts that seemed to nicely


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Now consider that we have, on the one side, Darwinian social instincts that seemed to nicely

encapsulate the aforementioned instinctiveness with which social behavior is performed but which

cannot explain the rule-likeness that equally defines it, and on the other we have the realists15, who

believe that rules are involved, that each rule is constituted byfacts, andthat suitable generalizations of

these rules make for normative-truthsbut they are countered by Darwinian-inspired arguments whichclaim that these truths are mere echos of our social instincts, urging us to behaviors that in fact our

survival depends on. But they are at least agreed on the question: where do people get these

dispositions and attitudes from? The answer, I suggest, must be one which satisfactorily resolves this

paradox.

Here, then, is the challenge for Searle: if it isnt social instinctsper sethat makes people behave sociably,

why does it look so instinctive? If it really is a matter of rules, how do the rules get learnt, and why dopeople get so emotionalabout it? And, of course, the question that started it all: where does right and

wrong come into it?

3 . 1 a s t o r y o f s o c i a l i t y ( w i t h o u t t h e s i n )3 . 1 . 1 t h e d a r w i n i a n m y t h r e v i s i t e d


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The morality thought to be challenged by recent scientifically-based accounts is, as I hope to have

shown, is the traditional view ofmoralityas a set of rules about social behavior into which humans are

trained in order to tame the wild animal withinthe myth they sought to debunk with an evolutionary

explanation to the effect that humans are in factnaturallydisposed to socialized (civilised) behavior byour social instincts and not by the fear of God (or, presumably, similar forms of indoctrination).

It is worth pointing out that this is but one traditional conception of how the moral sentiments are

formed16notably, one historically rooted in the doctrine of empiricism17 and supplemented with the

idea of social utility, usually attributed to Hume, according to which ones conduct is right to the

extent that it is beneficial to others and society, and wrong where it is generally injurious. Central to

this conception is the presumption that humans come out of the box not only naturally motivated to dowrong, but lack sufficient motive to do the right, so construeddefects that society must

somehow make good. The application of various pleasure-pain processes (approval and

disapprobation, bestowal or withdrawal of affection) is thought necessary in order for the child to

finally acquire a desire to do what is right and an aversion to doing what is wrong((Rawls 1999

(1971)), p.401).

The two outstanding features in this account, which I believe debunking-Darwinians will recognize, are(a) get-them-young/good-habits-start-early: moral training should begin as young as possible,whilst the mind is most susceptible to moulding and indoctrination;

(b)original-sin: humans are conceived in evil and would remain so but for the baptism-of-fireeach receive in childhood in preparation for their entry into civilised society.

3 . 1 . 2 s o c i a l i t y f o r t h e l o v e o f m o t h e r , n o t t h e f e a r o f g o dSearles is a similar story of how humans come to behavioral dispositions and attitudes fit for society

but without the theology. It begins familiarly enough: we are each born in a society, and with a

remarkable capacity for language acquisition that we put to use soon after we are born18but a point

easily missed is that we are introduced to our first language within its social contextbe it

Sesame-Street or a parentand we dont learn words without picking up on the cultural nuances

encoded in every one, not least because the words and the structure of a language reflect the historical

interests and other dispositional peculiarities of a culture.

Moreover, inasmuch as cat refers to the meowing creature with whiskers and formidable claws,

mother is not just the looming figure who (if youre lucky) likes you, but someone who is extra-nice

when you do certain things and markedly less so on other occasionssomeone who could make you

cross bynotbeing there. You may figure out that the person who behaves a lot like your mother to that

child is theirmotherwhom you dont expect to be as nice to youand it might surprise you to learn

that some kid you meet doesnt have one.

Even ones first words are concepts acquired as a set of appropriate attitudes and behaviors. In like

manner, then, you learn your language with the social organization embedded therein even as you see

it expressed around you. And as you accumulate a list of behaviors you know how to perform, you may

detect patterns in how they are receivedfor example, that loudness is not-ok, whatever youre

saying. Most importantly you learnas with motherthat you stand in a relationshipwith every one you

This is the basic principle of how society works, from relationships to getting things done: find out what

its called, how it works, what you need to be or do to be eligible to take part, see if you can manage it.


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, , y g p , y g

Thats all there is to it.

3 . 2 t h e d i f f e r e n c e o f l a n g u a g e3 . 2 . 1 f r o m s o c i a l i n s t i n c t s t o s o c i a l i n s t i t u t i o n sConveniently, Searles theory begins where we do: with the assumption that

the capacity for collective behavior is innate []the selectional advantage of cooperative behavior is,I trust, obvious. _______________________________________________________ (CSR,p.3738).

So any species of animalhyenas, wolves, etc.with this capacity is capable of doing something

together and in so doing make a socialfactsuch as the wolf pack is hunting, or the Supreme Court

made a decisiona condition-of-the-world that came to pass because of whatwedid. Social facts, then,

may apply to the collective activities of all animals which we may suppose they are capable of so doingin virtue of Darwinian social instinctsany instance of cooperation, then, is a social fact.

But even by this point we have drawn the line between humans and other animals: a social fact is

attributable to the behavior of other animals, though never bythem. We are not the only social animals,

butyou cannot begin to understand what is special about human society, how it differs from primateand other animal societies, unless you first understand some special features of human language.

________________________________________________________________________ (SO, p.14)We could not have or attribute facts without the fact ofintentionality, a way of experiencing the world

peculiar to humans, in virtue of which coming up with a common language was an inevitable

consequence of humans otherwise living together just as other social animals do. Intentionality

describes the humans innate capacity to tell a 10-note from paper bylooking, and language is how we

made a 10-note from paper; intentionality is why humans perceive reality by an ought-is transition

from expectation(ought) to perception(is)and language is how we communicate our expectations toeach other.

I believe that intentionality enables each human to see his own possibilities for behavior in any

moment, and therefore why it became necessary for a bunch of humans to settle on how to do what

they had to do together. Sharing a language opened up a world of cooperative possibilities to a

human-collectives not available to other animals. Cultural diversity is nothing if not evidence of what

humans are capable of doing together. A social institution is simply what happened when humanshappened on a way of doing it that stuck.

3 . 2 . 2 f r o m i n s t i t u t i o n a l f a c t t o i n t e r p e r s o n a l r e l a t i o n s h i pThe term social institution that Searle favors may call to mind organizations with buildings, but it in

fact refers to patterns of interactions so established that they earned a name and thus became afactan

institutional fact. What makes something an institution for Searle is the way it is held together by the

mutual-expectations of its participants and sealed by the human proclivity to have and fulfill themsomething he calls, tellingly, a collectively recognized deontology (SO,p.28).

This, I think, is the central plank of Searles thesis: the basic unit of society is the social concept which

defines a relationshipwhether between two or more individuals or between an individual and the social

contextconstituted by obligations, rights and responsibilities(op.cit.), without which it wouldnt

3 . 3 s o c i a l i n s t i n c t s 2 . 0 What Searle adds to the Darwinian story is the vital component of language. With it, humans make a


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society from rules that each member of that society must follow in order to survive. Cultural diversity

follows from the fact of different languageshumans split up before they had language. What remains,

then, is the question of how the rules of a society become the behavioral dispositions and evaluative

attitudes of its people, how institutions become persistent(social glue) and why people becomeattached to their cultures.

3 . 3 . 1 l e a r n i n g b y d o i n gIn CSR, chapter 6, Searle gives a fantasy example of a tribe where children grow up playing baseball:

They never learn the rules as codified rules but are rewarded or criticized for doing the right thingor the wrong thing. For example, if the child has three strikes, and he says Cant I have another

chance? he is told, No, now you have to sit down and let someone else come up to bat. We cansuppose that the children just become very skillful at playing baseball. (CSR, pp.144-145)

It is clear, I hope, that this is the way children learn the rules of social behavior. As with baseball, so it is

with being a schoolpupil/sibling/son/daughter/friend: each one an institution, insofar as what it

takes to beitrequires that one comply with its constitutive rules. Most of us are thrust into roles from

birth; we learn to tell them apart easily enough because each maps to different people and come with

different expectations. We dont ever reallyneed to learn the rules of how to, e.g. be a sibling: wesense what our siblings expect, learn what to expect from themand if one of us feels the other has

overstepped the mark or been unfair, we may turn to the parental authorities for arbitration: how

they rule sets the bar for future sibling relations.

The paradox was founded on the assumption that rule-based behavior had to be learnt as rulesthat is,

it entailed accounting for the bridge between theoretical and practical reasoning. In fact we are capable

of this: we learn that2+2=4(theory), whereupon writing 4 in response to the question 2+2=?, wededuce, is the right answer and therefore the thing to do(practical) in the maths test. (Needless to say,

wronganswers make for lousygrades that can be upsetting.) What this baseball example shows is the

possibility of obeying the complex rules of society by simply learning it as how to do it. Rules are (as

his example continues) what a foreign anthropologist might deduce from his observations of the

children playing.

3 . 3 . 2 s o c i a l g l u eThe social-glue mentioned both by Searle and Bekoff-&-Pierce(see section-1), then, is partly due to

the way the rules are learnt and our instinctive expectation ((Howson 2000),p.110) that the future

will resemble the past: if we cant expect it from nature, we canexpect it from each otherand just

because humans are naturally unsettled when their expectations are violated, we learn not toas part of

how to get along with each other. So on the one hand, members of the society might have learnt asocial concept as the set of attitudes and behaviors that are appropriate to the situation as a fact,

from which they take their cue when they become participants themselves; on the other hand,

appropriatenesswhat to expect from each othercould be worked out by the participants as they

go, yet these would in turn be constrained by established notions(the fact) of the sameespecially

h fli i d di ll d i ( i h d ibli ) Ei h b

3 . 3 . 3 c u l t u r a l a t t a c h m e n t : b e i n g a t h o m e i n o n e s s o c i e t yh h ld h h h h h h h


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The point is, we should not say that the man who is at home in his society, the man who is chezluiinthe social institutions of his society, is at home because he has mastered the rules of the society, butrather that the man has developed a set of capacities and abilities that render him at home in thesociety; and he has developed those abilities because those are the rules of his society. (CSR, p.147)

Because members of a culture(what an outsider calls a society) will have learnt appropriate behaviors

not as such, but in the process of engaging in an interpersonal relationship(how social reality is lived), it

becomes personal (mine). The foreigner who challenges their way of life also threatens the person

whose way of life it is, the knowledge of which is entangled in the memories of relationships. Add the

fact that humans could never feel comfortable in an environment they cannot make intelligiblewe

are like fish out of water unless we can read the signs and feel reasonably confident that we will beunderstoodlanguage can be an impenetrable barrier between peoples. Social rules are part of the

language, too: the instinctive distance we stand from others, how loudly we speak, and (to recall

Streets judgments) what passes for altruism(if there is such a thing in the local tongue) or harm

doneeach and all wound up in our expectational structures that because we didnt learn as rules but

as technique, we do not usually know that we expect something from someone until they violate it.

Being mutually intelligible takes much more than merely consulting each others dictionaries.

3 . 3 . 4 r i g h t a n d w r o n gA different culture may not be an incommensurable conceptual scheme, but they do represent a

history of different interests that theyvaluebecause its theirsand because they got into it at some

point. For example, from the perspective of someone who has no appreciation for baseball, the

behaviors can seem bizarre: swatting the ball with a bat and running like hell and the audiencecheering just because he made it to the right spot in the field in time. But to the players on the

pitch, behaving according to the rules of the game is the difference between right and wrong. An

incorrect solution to an arithmetic problem is the wronganswer that can make a badstudent. We would

be mistaken to think that because its just baseball or just arithmetic that evaluative attitudes dont

come into force as much as they would in moral-dilemma-type situations, because

where human institutions are concerned, we accept a socially created normative component. Weaccept that there is something wrong with the personwho when the baseball is pitched at him simply eatsit[]something wrong with the person who goes around spouting ungrammatical sentences._______________________________________________________________ (CSR, p.146, my emphases)

3 . 3 . 5 f a c t & v a l u eAnd because just as a 10-note is fact because everyone thinks so, is the right behavior could only

be a factthat is, a statement the tr

in defence of morality as philosophy

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