Word: moral
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first the good news. Evolutionary psychologists say our "moral sentiments" do, as Darwin speculated, have an innate basis. Such impulses as compassion, empathy, generosity, gratitude and remorse are genetically based. Strange as it may sound, these impulses, with their checks on raw selfishness, helped our ancestors survive and pass their genes to future generations...
...news. Contrary to a misconception that flourished in Darwin's day, these impulses did not give this boost to genetic proliferation mainly by furthering the overall "welfare of society"--and certainly not by furthering the "welfare of the species." As a result, humans don't naturally deploy our "moral" impulses diffusely--showering love and compassion on any needy Homo sapiens in the vicinity. We tend to reserve major doses of kindness either for close kin (the result of an evolutionary dynamic known as "kin selection") or for non-kin who show signs of someday returning the favor (a result...
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of our nature is our natural blindness to it. According to some evolutionary psychologists, we are "designed" by natural selection to conceal selfish motives from ourselves--indeed, to unconsciously build elaborate moral rationales for our selfish behavior. Thus do wars routinely feature two sides convinced that they are in the right...
...scholar put it. By the lights of evolutionary psychology, an essential human weakness is indeed a tendency to be seduced by our seemingly godlike rationality into thinking we can readily know good and evil; our downfall is a lack of philosophical humility, a smug assumption that our "moral" intuitions can be trusted as a guide to true morality. The effects have ranged from homicide to genocide...
Certainly, as even Williams stresses, our moral sentiments have lots of upside, including a heartening plasticity. They can be deployed less self-servingly than they were "designed" to be deployed. Darwin himself often felt pangs of concern about the plight of slaves, even though there were none in England to reciprocate his empathy. And consider the flush of compassion we feel upon witnessing, via TV, famine that is a hemisphere away. When moved by such images to donate money or canned goods--the rough opposite of greed and gluttony--we are in some Darwinian sense "misusing" our equipment of reciprocal...