0: Morals - An Evolutionary Perspective
There are no morals in nature.
Let me take you back to the dawn of time. At the beginning of the universe the big bang occurs, is that morally a right or wrong thing? Most would say neither. When intergalactic matter from the big bang cools to form galaxies and planets, do we assign it a moral value? When a lioness kills deer to feed her young, when we see gangs of monkeys fight over territory, we don’t say any one is right or wrong. But when we see a human kill another, we try to assign morality to it. Why? I’ll try to answer that.
We made up morals.
Humans are social animals. Alone out in the wild, we have exceedingly low chances of flourishing. Living together, we take over the world. Living together however, poses its own set of challenges. It is difficult to maintain order in large tribes. According to Yuval Noah Harari, for social animals, complex collaboration in large numbers tends to break down into chaos and tribes tends to split up once there’s more than 150 members involved.
According to him, humans solved this problem with this idea of fictions. Narratives and ideas (e.g. money, language, democracy etc) that human tribes came up with that when believed by all members of the tribe, enabled humans to maintain order and complex cooperation in large numbers. For example, the notes we think of as money, are what they are valued at only because we collectively agree on their value. With this fiction of a collective agreement on their value, we are able to conduct hyper-complex trades of value with each other, thereby advancing our economies and societies.
Without these fictions and shared beliefs, other organisms are limited to either collaborating in complex ways but small numbers, or collaborating simply and in large numbers. According to him, fictions gave us the competitive advantage that set us apart from the rest of the living things.
From this idea, we can imagine morality being a fiction, invented by humans that when believed and practiced by tribes, kept order in large tribes and gives them a better chance of future long term survival.
Imagine a primitive land with limited resources that numerous tribes are fighting over. Here, tribes whose members share the fiction that morally, “stealing is wrong” will punish members for stealing from another member, thus creating a much higher sense of security where it’s members can trust that their ownership rights will be respected and enforced, and focus their energy and resources on other more productive endeavours (farming, scientific innovation, competing against other tribes etc).
In contrast, a tribe without such a moral code, where it was ok to steal from one another just wouldn’t survive very long. It’s members would spend much energy and resources protecting their belongings from one another that they wouldn’t be able to do anything else effectively.
Morals helped the village (us) survive
From here, most of our instinctive ideas of morals, you can picture, help produce a tribe/ modern society with high levels of order in large numbers that will enable it to flourish and survive. Here are some simple examples:
Telling the truth: To be able to generally trust what others are saying without having to spend energy and resources to verify every single claim improves collaboration by leaps and bounds.
Caring for the weak: Lets tribe members know that if they ever get sick, the tribe collectively will take care of them, letting them have more confidence to go about their lives concentrating on productive endeavours (and making riskier moves that might have higher rewards).
Takeaway
Evolution has a very simple premise. Adaptations that help their hosts survive, end up surviving too. Adaptations that don’t help their hosts survive end up ceasing to exist, together with their hosts as they become extinct. The fiction of morals are simply such an adaptation. Every society has a slightly different version of morals and simply, the version that best helps its host society survive, survives along with its host society. The idea of what is right and wrong can only be written by survivors.
Therefore, when we discuss morals, the moral that is considered right is simply the moral that best ensures the survival of its society, so that the society can in-turn continue ensuring the survival of the particular moral idea.
