Long-term there’s reason for optimism: We're wired for morality

Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man. ~ Charles Darwin

     I was delighted to read some new research this morning produced by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Apparently, according to the research, our cells react positively to well-being produced through actions that are motivated by a noble purpose while well-being generated as a consequence of mere self-gratification has a negative effect - though well-being derived from either activity is better for us than little to no well-being at all.  It seems “feeling connected to a larger community through a service project” is associated with a decrease in a type of negative stress induced gene expression.    

    The view that we’re wired for morality is nothing new, though certainly much of the evidence for it is.  Long before anyone had heard of genetics, Adam Smith and Charles Darwin were articulating why social animals would necessarily be more moral than not.  However, at least if the evening news is any indication, there is a great deal of effort being put into making us forget it.  It seems every day around 6:00 p.m. there is a ‘public service’ announcement intended to instil gratitude for our fight or flight response rather than remind us that our ancestors were highly social creatures who only made it this far because they had learned to cooperate to a significant degree.

    The primatologist Frans de Waal has documented a sense of fairness in various primates, even if it is a bit less sophisticated than our own.  Using examples of cooperation and fairness in our closest relatives he argues persuasively morality has a solid foundation in biology. In the book Primates and Philosophers he states, “A human being growing up in isolation would never arrive at moral reasoning.  Such a [person] would lack the experience to be sensitive to others’ interests, hence lack the ability to look at the world from any perspective other than his or her own.  I thus agree with Darwin and Smith that social interaction must be at the root of moral reasoning.” (p. 174, emphasis added)

      Martin Luther King also shared this conviction stating that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  He was right, though there is little indication among progressives these days that they think so. Why do we seem so committed to doom and gloom?  While it is true the challenges we face are larger in both scale and scope than any in recent human history, giving up all hope is neither constructive nor justified given both our biological and cultural evolution thus far.  We shouldn’t be Pollyannas or ignore the problems we face and the injustices we commit, but we might as well if in fact we believe there is no reason for hope. 

    One can simply no longer imagine the evolution of social creatures in any universe other than a moral one, and we’re highly social creatures.  Moral truth exists not because it was handed down to us from on high, but because it emerges from below.  The Golden Rule works because there is no other mechanism that will enable social groups to function long-term.  It would be more accurate to refer to it as the Golden Law.  From both an evolutionary and sociological perspective it is as indispensable as gravity is to physics. Once a group has formed at any level, even if it only consists of two or three, the process of cooperation has begun and the arc starts to bend in the right direction; the circle has expanded beyond the individual to include another.  Add a third or fourth to that group and it’s expanded a little bit more, and so on. Life itself is impossible in a cosmos devoid of cooperation, and intelligent life capable of empathy is impossible without a very high degree of it.  Even if we do often fail to consciously grasp it or sometimes cooperate in factions against others to achieve less than ideal ends from the perspective of the whole, we shouldn’t be surprised that our cells consistently recognize the inherent value of cooperation.  I for one think that’s encouraging.  

Note: For additional information regarding this research please also visit The Atlantic (August 1, 2013)