Are good and evil hard wired in our brains? I don’t know but I know a good place to kick ideas like that around.

I’m waiting for the an episode of Philosophy Bites, one of planet earth’s great podcasts, to settle a matter of evolutionary psychology.

Philosophy Bites is a great podcast. Nigel Warburton and David Edmunds have been interviewing philosophers since 2007. They apply philosophy to everyday life, political issues, and relentlessly use logic and critical interrogation to politely slice through bull to look for truth. No extraneous small talk. Drugs, pop music, midlife crisis, laughter: Nigel finds people and ways to apply philosophy to almost any topic.

This is Nigel Warburton

The hundreds of interviews can be abstract or personal. A particularly personal one, meaning of life kind of thing, “look at my life!,” involved an interview with a Brazilian philosopher at Harvard who decided to go back to Brazil and plunge into politics, all of this leading to this excellent discussion of his concept of deep freedom. Another episode that is quite relevant to the discussion that follows here in this essay was an interview with a researcher who found empirical evidence that philosophers who write about ethics are not more ethical than other similar people who don’t write about morality. In other words, there is no evidence that taking the time to consider ethics philosophically actually makes people ethical.

I would guess that most people who listen to philosophical discussions like these feel the urge to chime from time to time. I know I do. Listening to an interview the other day, I remember thinking, “This discussion of a deep grammar of morality is not taking the idea of amoral familialism seriously!” How can you say that morality is like language, as per Chompsky, with a deep structure in the brain, without at least addressing the possibility that for thousands of years murder may well have been (or may not have been) socially acceptable?

You know how that happens, right? I hate that: you’re listening to an excellent philosophical argument and you’re shouting back at the philosophers because they failed to consider evolutionary psychology, even to deny the relevance of this powerful idea.

Deep morality or deep amorality? We either evolved to understand ethics or to pretend to understand ethics while we consistently cheat.

The argument for deep morality I wanted to shout at was, in fact, pretty powerful, without any particular reference to evolution in the episode. There is, however, an evolutionary argument for an intuitive sense of morality among humans.

I remember taking a course in college with a rather doctrinaire professor insisting that evolution cannot work at the level of a group or species. Since then, I bumped into the following great thought experiment which may redeem the human soul:

Imagine two populations of animals, each living in their own valley: the greedy group and the getalong group. Each individual in the greedy group seeks to maximize their personal advantage and eats as much as possible and has as many offspring as possible. Eventually, the greedy animals eat up everything in their valley, they starve and their population collapses to a few individuals, or perhaps going completely extinct. Meanwhile, in the valley of the getalongs, they all reduce their intake as supplies run out and somehow punish cheaters who eat excessively. Their food does not run out, their population remains stable and eventually a few individuals find a route into the now empty valley of the greedy. The getalongs re-populate the valley of the greedy with their more communitarian population.

Neither population had an explicit ideology of ethics. The getalongs had some kind of proto-ethics hiding in their genetic make up.

This scenario of population collapse and repopulation is not entirely implausible in human evolution. Us, modern homo sapiens, dwindled to a few individuals, apparently, 72,000 years ago. The survivors might have made it due to chance, or, perhaps, the getalongs managed to pull together and survive, only to find Neaderthals and Denisovans who manage to survive the catastrophe and breed with them.

So, we have two views of our fundamental nature: either we were wallowing in amoral familialism for thousands of years or we were developing a deep grammar of ethics over millions of years due to the impact of crisis situations.

I would suggest that evolutionary psychology might lie behind the results of the research on ethicists not being ethical I noted above (professors of ethics are not all that ethical). There might be calculations of advantage behind everything, including publishing books on the philosophy of ethics. Maybe all art is nothing more than peacock feathers, showing off. Maybe all philosophy is window dressing on a story of power. Maybe evolutionary psychology is powerful enough to taint all human activities with ugly urges. Maybe not. I’m not really sure until I hear Nigel’s take on the issue, so, Nigel, your go. Amoral familialism is a mouthful of a term but quite significant, I would argue, to philosophy.

Amoral familialism: whatever is good for me and mine is good, period

Amoral familialism is a term that may have been coined by Edward Bankfield in 1955 to describe the residents of a Sicilian village. His idea was widely criticized and also influential.

I first encountered the idea in Napoleon Chagnon’s equally controversial book about the Yanomamo Indians. Basically, the idea, as it developed, can be quickly understood by a thought experiment.

You’re a man walking in a forest, far from any other people. You see a complete stranger, another man, sitting on the edge of a cliff. He isn’t doing you any harm but you also have no reason to suspect he might do you a favor. He hasn’t seen you. If you burst out between the trees and push him to his death, no one will ever know and you will not face any consequences.

The calculations would be different from a female point of view. As far as history records, Sultan Moulay Ismail, known as “the violent” or “terrible” king, fathered perhaps 1,100 children. Feodor Vassilyev’s wife, her name is not recorded, apparently gave birth to 69 children, including many multiple births. This fact of reproduction, that a man could in theory sire so many more offspring, is the fundamental difference in the calculation as per gender.

The claim of those that argue that amoral familialism is the natural state of humanity would imply that the many peoples who have not had contact with systematic moral systems, who have never heard of any philosophical system of ethics, living in small-scale hunter and gatherer or gardening societies without states, would freely admit that they would push the man off the cliff in the thought experiment above. From these people’s point of view, if pushing the man on the cliff to his death were to mean one fewer competitor for game, or land, or mates, then, morally, killing him is the right thing to do. A person living in the world of amoral famialism thinks that doing something that helps his family, or himself, by hurting other people’s families, and other people, is absolutely correct ethically and would be surprised that any other view of the world is possible. That’s the claim.

Amoral familialism is the cousin of sociobiology. Evolutionary psychological, or sociobiology, extends population biology and evolutionary theory into social organization for all creatures, including, of course humans. According to evolutionary psychology, we do what we do as members of a community, on a deep level, at least to some extent, in order to maximize our reproductive success, even if we don’t know it. Or, conversely, that the structures of our brains and the patterns of interaction we have with each other, our culture, grew out of a setting in which maximizing reproductive success was all important.

So, from the man in the story’s point of view, if I push a stranger off a cliff, that is one less person who might have sex with a woman with whom I would like to produce my offspring, one less person who might have children who would fight my children, one less person to compete for food.

Of course, he also might be your long, lost cousin with many of your genes and he might have a daughter who could marry your son. So, it’s not obvious that you made the right choice even on evolutionary terms in pushing him off the cliff. But if you don’t push him, according to sociobiology, you made that contrary choice to maximize your reproductive success just the same. Critics of sociobiology would argue that the theory is circular, since it would explain all results with a single theory.

One key point about the ideology of amoral familism is that once you are exposed to someone who is appalled by the idea of you pushing a complete stranger who has done you no harm off a cliff, especially is the appalled person has more power than you, you will not be as open about expressing your amoral familialism in the future and the explicit system of belief will fall apart. In other words, amoral familism was the primary ideology of humanity for 200,000 years but is still quite fragile in the face of new ideologies.

Now that people know they are not supposed to push strangers off cliffs, we don’t see amoral familialism as much as we used to back in the stone age. If amoral familism were the dominant ideology of all humanity for thousands of years, at least until the advent of civilization around 6,000 years ago, and remained the only ideology for many people into the 20th century, we should have plenty of evidence for its existence. The problem is, these amoralists have been lying about their true ethics for a few hundred years, the sneaky, stranger-pushers. If you go for a walk in a woods full of cliffs, look out for the amoralists.

At about the same time that systems of ethics developed, around the beginning of cities and states, maybe a few thousand years ago, we also saw a dramatic change in what determined male reproductive success. In other words, before we had social class — rich and poor status passed from generation to generation — male reproductive success depended on individual characteristics, like hunting ability, good looks, social intelligence, good parenting skills, etc. After the rise of class, rich men were able to buy or steal access to female reproduction regardless of their individual fitness in the normal evolutionary sense.

In the earliest piece of literature we have, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story starts with the king bothering his citizens by having sex with all the women. Only in 2016, about 4,000 years later, we had the release of Donald Trump’s “grab them in the pussy” tape. Trump has five children with three different women. His use of his higher status, based on inheriting 200 million dollars, to increase his evolutionary success is a practice that has been going on for a long time. Because we live in a country of laws, courts, DNA analysis to determine paternity, and an assumption of monogamy for status, Trump had to consider how a pregnancy out of wedlock might complicate his finances so confined his breeding activity within his marriages. So, instead of simply impregnated any woman without much concern for any reprecussions, as did Gilgamesh, Trump practices serial monogamy, dominating the fertility of a woman during her years of reproduction, then divorcing that woman and marrying a younger one until he gets too old to continue this practice.

Clearly, evolutionary psychology is not wrong about human behavior. Trump is nothing if not a naked ape, a textbook case of sociobiology made president. The link to other behavior, less explicitly Trumpish, and evolutionary success may be much more weak or convoluted. It’s hard to see how leaving France to volunteer to be a suicide bomber at the age of 20 and shaming your family in the process is likely to help a man’s reproductive success, for example, although one might be able to imagine a sociobiologist proposing an scenario by which such a strange act does confer some advantage.

Is there is sufficient proof of pervasive amoral familialism in historical times? Does evolutionary psychology in fact explains the deep basis of people’s behavior in most cases? Can evolutionary psychology be reconciled with deep morality or deep freedom? I don’t know because Nigel Warburton hasn’t done an episode of Philosophy Bites on these important topics. Nigel, can you? Also, thank you for a great podcast.