Evolution of Morality

[ See earlier posts on the concept of morality, and its context dependence ]

Dobzhansky wrote, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. I think the same holds true for sociology, and perhaps most other disciplines as well.

Origin of Morality

When the early humans learned to interact with their neighbors and formed tribes, they also must have had to make some simple rules about the conduct of the tribe-members to avoid avoidable conflicts. As the tribes grew, these rules likely became more numerous. And among these, there were some rules that were honored more than others, and passed on from generation to generation. Eventually, these well-accepted rules became so ingrained in these tribes that they started to be simply taken for granted by the majority in these early societies as to how things should be or should not be done. I suspect this is the origin of morality. And thus the criteria of morality, by their very origin, are dependent on the tribe or community.

Note that while these moral rules probably started as enforceable (‘legal’ in today’s terms) rules, some of them would eventually become ingrained enough to survive even if they weren’t enforced anymore, because the overall community is so used to them that it will respect them and pass on to the future generations. Thus it became feasible that the moral code could be slightly different from the legal code, even though they were the same to start with. This difference between legality and morality often varies greatly from community to community. In today’s world, an Arabic nation, for example, might have smaller distinction between law and morality compared to a European nation.

Growth, Conflicts and Resolutions

Moral precepts follow simple rules of logic. If A is morally right, and B can be deduced from A, then B is also morally right, in most cases. For example, it is bad to hurt someone, and since people figured that bad-mouthing someone can be hurtful to the subject, it can be inferred that it is bad to bad-mouth someone. One can infer rule B from A, C from B, D from A and B and so on. This recursive nature explains the presence so many moral rules. In a sense, it is good – this inference method allows one to check the morality of some new action by seeing how it relates to known action whose morality is known, without having to memorize every single rule. However, there is also a problem – the set of rules to start with is not self-consistent. What that means is that we can end up in contradictions through our inference approach. Consider the case of abortion. Freedom is moral; abortion is a matter of freedom of choice of the couple, so abortion should be moral. Killing is immoral; abortion is a matter of killing a baby that might otherwise be born, so abortion should be immoral. So starting with two well-established and accepted moral principles, we end up in contradictory conclusions. That is at the root of so much fight over what is moral and what is not, when different people try to justify their conclusion based on different starting precepts (besides other things of course).

The problem of internal inconsistency within moral code must have baffled early societies a lot. The problem arose because the set of moral rules was not scientifically designed to be internally consistent – these rules just got added over time haphazardly in the societies. In fact, the inconsistency would have been much larger, if it were not curbed from time to time, which happened in two ways I think:
1. By the institutions of nations/religions/creeds that attempted to provide a set of moral rules that were reasonably consistent internally. So within a homogeneous society following a single religion faithfully, there would be much less conflict.
2. By a process of correction/adjustment or clear specification: Even though slow and rare, moral rules can be changed with effort initiated by some people (who must convince the larger society). For example, while it was moral among some white communities to not interact with the black people, it is the opposite now. In other cases, for example killing, conflicts may be resolved by clear specifications such as killing an innocent person is immoral while killing a war-enemy or serious criminal is moral.
However, not all conflicts can be resolved amicably, especially the ones that have recursive ramifications for many moral rules, or the ones that have their preference ratio sharply divided in the society (a conflict with 95-5 distribution of supporters is likely to resolve more easily than one with 50-50). Also the larger the size of the population, for any given ratio, the more difficult the resolution will be (because more people need to be changed in their views).

A big problem arises in moral judgments when two societies that have grown in isolation from each other began to interact or merge with each other. These two societies may have many inconsistencies between their moral rules. For instance, there were a lot of moral conflicts (besides the political ones) in either community when British came to India and had the opportunity to interact. However, given a continued interaction (because of trade or cultural exchanges), the societies begin to mingle with each other, and their moral codes also begin to slowly align with each other through the process of adjustments. There are much less moral code differences between the people of Mumbai and London now, compared 100 years ago.

Future

This cultural homogenization leads to an interesting speculation. Since the size of the world is limited, and different societies are increasingly mixing with each other, ultimately leading towards a relatively homogeneous global society, the level of diversity in the moral code on the planet is also reducing. It seems that we might ultimately end up with, in engineering lingo, a steady state of moral code when the process of major changes in the code subsides (all resolvable conflicts having being resolved). If we look at the state-space of this global moral code, the steady state first achieved at the end of homogenization process might not be global minimum (conflicts reflect the energy of the system), it may just be a local minima that we happened to get trapped into! But the ray of hope here are the activists or revolutionaries who try to push the system into various directions, and even though most of these attempts will fail (as they lead to more conflicting states overall), a few rare ones might succeed in finding more optimal energy states (as in a Monte Carlo search method). Eventually we might find the global minima, after which the moral code will be sealed forever. Any more attempts to resolve conflicts or change the code will lead to even more conflicts, making the system fall back into the global minima again, and thus making it permanent for the life of earth!

Unless a giant comet hits the poor planet and restarts the game of creation of life: from non-living material to Homo sapiens.

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Disclaimer: (1) There are just my observations regarding the concept of morality/ethics in the world – my perception of “how things are”, and have nothing to do with “how things should be”. (2) I do not intend to claim any moral prowess here by stating these views – I am very likely more immoral than an average person.

p.s. These thoughts were seeded in a discussion with Aneesh, after watching a documentary on racial hygiene/eugenics, Homo Sapiens 1900.