Where good and evil come from

If ultimately there is no truly self-explanatory answer to “why” good is good and bad is bad, maybe there simply is no such thing as good and bad.

This is a tempting position on more than one level. First, it sweeps away the whole conundrum at one blow. If good and evil don’t really exist, but simply reflect a bunch of outdated commandments and dubious customs, then shovel them overboard and forget about them. Life is so much simpler that way.

Second, if there is no Good, there are no obligations. If there is no Evil, there is no cause for guilt and shame. Freedom is complete: we not only can do whatever we like, we may do whatever we like.

There are catches, of course. If we can do whatever we like, so can other people, including the ones who want to do it to us. Freedom is nice, but anarchy carries a big price tag.

More philosophically, if there were no good or evil, no basis for determining that some things are better or worse than others, it would be hard to justify anything at all. You would be free to do anything, but you couldn’t have much rational motivation for doing one thing over another. Your activity would either come to a standstill, or it would be completely random, or it would merely be a reaction to whatever internal or external forces nudged you along. Life would be inherently pointless.

Frankly, a life without any moral standards at all is just too repugnant to contemplate. Even if it were somehow true that there were no right and wrong, good and evil, better and worse, we couldn’t live that way. We’d have to pretend that these qualities existed. It has been said that if God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him. That’s not true. But it is true that if good and evil did not exist, we would have to invent them. We can’t live without them.

Of course, if we didn’t have minds, we could. If, like plants and the simplest of animals, we merely reacted to physical stimuli and never had to make a deliberate decision, morality would be irrelevant. Similarly, if we were solitary predators, we might dispense with it as well. If we simply had no conscience – and no need of one, because we had no responsibilities outside of our own personal survival and pleasure – then we could do without right and wrong. We might be motivated simply by our appetites and desires, which could be purely biological in nature with no moral component at all, and we would live until we died. It would still be pretty pointless, but it could happen – and possibly if you are a cougar or a hawk or a shark, that’s the way life is. Maybe it would even be fun (more fun to be the cougar than the cougee, at least).

What if you’re, say, a dog, though? Would this total selfishness work for you? Dogs are by nature pack animals. Wild dogs may be merciless toward their prey, but they work best when they work together, and that means that they need to cooperate among themselves. Domesticated dogs sometimes even carry this inter-social attitude to the point of actual devotion to their owners.

Depending on how you feel about pet dogs, you may believe that they have a true moral sense or not. Regardless of whether dogs are genuinely moral, however, they often act as if they are. Probably they are not doing so because they have given it a lot of thought – or because they are familiar with the Ten Commandments. No, they act that way because they have been bred – first by nature, then by humans – to act that way. If you are going to live well as a pet, or if you are going to live at all as a member of a wild dog pack, you have to be able to get along. You have to learn to play your role in the group, you have to learn to share with your peers, and you have to learn to yield your own comfort and convenience at times to the welfare of others, sometimes protecting them at physical risk to yourself.

In the early days of evolutionary theory, when the catch-phrase was “survival of the fittest,” and the image was of “nature red in tooth and claw,” any kind of altruistic behavior in the animal kingdom seemed hard to explain. But over time it has become clearer that, to a large extent, a plant or animal is a complex mechanism by which genetic material (mostly DNA) perpetuates itself.[1] One way for DNA to perpetuate itself is for the dog (let us say) who carries it to succeed individually, and to procreate. But another way for DNA to perpetuate itself is for that same dog to protect the life of a brother dog who carries most of the same DNA.

So a community of dogs that runs together can help each other in more than one way. They each survive better just by having the advantage of being more effective together than they are separately (e.g., a dog pack is a fiercer antagonist than an individual dog, so they all eat better together than they would apart). But beyond that, even if one dog in effect lays down his life for his fellow dog, the dog community benefits from it, and dog DNA is more likely to increase in the world.

Attitudes and actions that we tend to think of as moral, therefore, give an evolutionary advantage to some species of animals – though less, or even none, to others. So from the standpoint of evolution, it makes sense that dogs are loyal and affectionate, while cats (descended from mostly solitary hunters) tend to be aloof and untrustworthy.

Is there a clue here to our own morality?

The human animal

Let us assume that biological evolution is a reality, and that human beings rose to their current state out of the primate family (apes, chimpanzees, and the like). Let us further assume, as proposed earlier, that the human mind is simply the activity of the brain, and therefore the capabilities of the mind, like the features of the brain, are also a product of biological evolution. Does this help us explain anything?

It does, in fact, give us the beginnings of a solution to the problem of good and evil. We can observe, for starters, that the primates are social creatures, and we humans are no exception – if anything, we are more social than the others. Primate societies are relatively complex, too. There are leaders and followers – a general pecking order. There are roles that relate to age, and roles that relate to gender. There is mutual assistance (e.g., members grooming one another), communication, and cooperation in group activities. And in humans, of course, such connections are multiplied in number and complexity. In such a society, is it helpful or hurtful that members have some sort of moral sense?

Clearly it is helpful. Feelings of obligation and loyalty encourage members to work for the benefit of the group; feelings of guilt and shame punish those who slack off. A sense of subservience and awe reinforces the authority of the leader, and hence his or her ability to fulfill the role. Feelings of sympathy and caring promote the cooperation and sacrifices that benefit the group. A sense of justice inflicts punishment on those who harm the group, or drives bad characters out altogether, while rewarding those who behave well.

Presumably, the hairy primates do not intellectualize all of this. They presumably do not construct moral codes, commandments, or general rules – and if they did, it would not help much, because they cannot communicate them. It is all the more important, therefore, that these impulses to perform and reward good, and to avoid and punish evil, are deeply instinctive. With these moral impulses, a given community of monkeys or apes, for example, has a much better chance of surviving as a group and passing their DNA down to future generations. Without them, they would just be hanging around, waiting for disaster.

Of course, to say that there is an evolutionary advantage in possessing some basic level of moral instinct is to explain why a rudimentary moral sense would have evolved, but not how it evolved. Things don’t just happen in evolution because it would be nice if they did. After all, pigs don’t fly.

So how did this moral instinct evolve? At the current state of human knowledge, it is possible only to propose a general explanation. But it seems evident that animals at a much more primitive level than the primates already possessed consciousness. It also seems evident that animals at lower levels possess appetites. In a conscious and intelligent creature, it is not a huge leap from appetite to morality. Here’s how:

As a chocolate lover, I perceive chocolate as good. It is especially good when I have some, and best of all when I am eating it. Of course, I can make a distinction between chocolate being good to eat (i.e., pleasure-giving) and, say, saving a drowning child being morally good to do. But these two kinds of goodness have a lot in common.

Physical appetites create an attraction toward a certain object or goal or action, and therefore a motivation to achieve it. Having a goal means, simply, perceiving something as desirable (i.e., good) and actively moving in a way that will help one achieve the object or state that is desired.

Perceiving something as morally good rather than just instinctively attractive is mainly a matter of generalizing this desire. The first step is what we might call pre-moral. If you’re a near-human from a million years ago, a banana might be an object of desire. But once your intelligence has advanced to the point where you can generalize, you might think not just that a particular banana is good, but that bananas in general are good. This is now a judgment rather than an instinct, but it is not yet a moral judgment.

It begins to resemble something moral when the generalization advances one more step, when it becomes about the action rather than the object. So it’s not just that bananas are good, obtaining bananas is good. You might be thinking that this is really still just a practical generalization, not a moral one, and you are right about that.

But suppose the instinct being gratified here is not just physical hunger and enjoyment of something that tastes good. Suppose, as a proto-human, you also have the instinct to associate with your peers and pick lice out of their hair (as primates tend to do). In theory this could be a purely automatic, non-conscious sort of activity, but that would be doing it the hard way. We already have a creature who is conscious and capable of making simple generalizations. So just as the acquisition of bananas is generalized as good, so is mutual grooming. Now we are talking about doing something that benefits someone else, and perceiving this as a good thing. We are very, very close to morality here. Whatever distance remains is a pretty short hop.

When human intelligence enabled our ancestors to generalize in more abstract ways, they could turn the concepts of good action and bad action into rules and commandments and laws. Eventually, they could generate truly abstract concepts, like good and evil, right and wrong. These concepts helped them understand what they were doing, so they probably seemed worth perpetuating.

When good is bad

But perhaps in a different way they were not helpful.

Since we humans tend to intellectualize everything, we have ended up with generalizations about “the Good” and “the Evil” that probably do not correspond with anything real. We have turned an impulse to act in certain ways, ways that have advantages to our species, into abstract concepts that we have no valid reason to think actually exist anywhere outside of our own heads.

Because we tend to think (at least at times) in categories like right and wrong, good and bad, better and worse, we are naturally inclined to suppose that there really are such things. And it might be nice if there were. Arguably, if you believe that Good and Evil are objective realities in the universe, you might be more likely to obey the good and shun the bad.

And yet we can now see that our moral sense probably arises from our biological, animal nature combined with our species’ native intelligence. The idea of some Objective Moral Code out in the universe – something, as we saw a few pages back, that is superior even to God – is not needed to explain why we feel moral compulsions. Most likely, therefore, the reason we can never answer “why” we should be moral or where the Objective Moral Code comes from is that there is no such thing. Our impulse toward morality comes from within us, not from outside.

So we come to a rather unpleasant conclusion. We think in moral terms because it was both possible and advantageous for our species to develop that way. But there is no reason to believe that these terms correspond with anything real. The universe merely exists, and living creatures (including us) merely evolved. The moral impulse helps us survive, but it is just a way we think, not a true description of reality.

The moral imperative

So, what do we conclude from this? Do we decide that since right and wrong are nothing more than categories of thought that have appeared in an amoral evolutionary history, we should jettison them and choose to be immoral?

Nothing justifies that. First of all, note that it contains the word “should.” If there is no objective basis for one thing being more right than another, the word “should” loses a lot of its meaning. Even if there is no objective right and wrong – in fact, especially if there is no objective right or wrong – then we are not obligated to either accept or reject our customary moral conceptions. Either way is morally equal, objectively, if morality is a merely human conception. The universe would not notice if our entire planet simply disappeared. It certainly doesn’t care whether we play nice, or not.

But there is another level, a practical one, at which morality is not optional. Even if we do think in moral terms only because evolution makes us think that way, the fact remains that we do think that way. So while there is no objective, universal, cosmic reason why we need to think in moral terms, or why we need to do things we perceive as good rather than those we perceive as evil, we are fighting our own nature if we try to walk away from morality. And what is the point in that? We might as well give up eating or breathing, just because there is no cosmic Eatingness or Breathingness.

So there is a moral imperative after all. But it does not come from outside of us, it comes from within. We are moral, and we “should” be moral, because we are built that way. For practical purposes, unless you are a sociopath, you have no real choice. Moral concepts (right/wrong, good/bad, etc.) are built into you. You are wired to think that way.

Now it all makes sense. Now we can see why we cannot explain where morality comes from philosophically (since its basis is biological, not philosophical), yet why we cannot manage to drop the concept. Thinking in moral terms is simply a fact for us. So we had better learn to live with it.

Of course, none of this speaks to the content of morality, only to the fact of morality. How, under this scheme, can we ever establish that some things are really right and some things are really wrong? The moral imperative is just a door with nothing behind it. It says, “Be moral.” But it doesn’t tell us how.

Or maybe it does…

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[1] There actually is a correct answer to the question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg came first, hundreds of millions of years before the first chicken. Being big creatures ourselves, we are naturally inclined to think that the egg is the chicken’s way of reproducing itself. In reality, the chicken is the egg’s way of reproducing itself – or rather, of the chicken DNA reproducing itself.