Human Morality

Human Morality

Humans have an elaborate moral system, but animals don’t. We have all sorts of moral rules and think about right and wrong constantly, but animals hardly give it a moment’s thought. We are the moral (naked) ape. This fact is commonly taken to show that we are superior to animals, morally superior. They do all sorts of bad things and don’t give a damn, but we have a finely developed moral sense; we have a conscience, they just act any way they feel like. This is somehow connected to the fact that we have a soul while they are soulless. Perhaps God has given us morality, while letting animals wallow in a cesspool of unethical behavior. I think this point of view is complete baloney; if anything, the opposite is true. We have morality because we are so bad. This point is not difficult to appreciate: we are constantly lying, cheating, breaking promises, acting selfishly, being ungrateful, being cruel, being nasty, discriminating, betraying, bad-mouthing, committing adultery, and generally mistreating other people and animals. So it has always been, and so it is everywhere. Animals kill, fight, even rape and pillage, but they can’t match us for range of bad behavior; we are immorally superior. Original sin, bad seed, bad to the bone, rotten to the core—that kind of thing. Morally, we suck. We are experts in the art of unethical behavior. It is one of our native competences; we are really good at being bad. Animals are rank amateurs compared to us—scarcely immoral at all. There are no career criminals or miscreants or moral deviants among animals. Have you ever heard of an evil animal—a mass murderer, an abuser of children? Are there any baboon psychopaths and cold-hearted koala serial killers? Are there any feline Dorian Greys? Hitlers and Stalins? Envious plotters and lying con-men? Animals seem relatively innocent of these vices and moral shortcomings.

This is the reason we have morality—because we are otherwise so bad. We need morality, but other animals don’t. We need morality in order to curb our immoral enthusiasm. Every child has to be taught morality, because every child is naughty, sometimes grievously so. We have to be civilized out of it. We are good because we are bad—naturally bad, culturally good. The superego has to be added to the id; the Mr. Hyde in us must be subjected to the Dr. Jekyll. It is because we are morally inferior to animals that we need to inject some morality into our behavior. But this raises an interesting question: why do we bother? Why not just go around being bad all the time? Why not let it all hang out? In what way would this jeopardize our survival? Wouldn’t it be an advantage reckoned by the probability of gene propagation? Wouldn’t we expect a (selfish) gene for selfishness? Actually, no: for we are a social species essentially, and society requires regulation. You won’t do well at maximizing your gene replication if no one will be your friend, or work with you, or mate with you. You will be shunned and shamed, excluded from polite society, even exiled and thrown in prison. It’s prudent to be moral (also moral to be moral). So, we need a gene for unselfishness—a selfish gene for unselfishness (all genes are selfish). We need a morality gene to combat our genes for immorality. True, we are bad to the bone, but we have a veneer of goodness—a real veneer. We are naturally (natively) moral, because we are also naturally (natively) immoral. We have a morality instinct to counter our immorality instincts. We thus have a split nature, a division within the self (animals have a single unified self). That’s why we are constantly oscillating between the good and the bad: now acting selfishly and wickedly, now regretting it and paying penance. We are a wild bunch policed by a civilized sheriff. These two motivations exist side by side in the human psyche. Thus, we humans are a confused and divided lot. Both traits are natural to us, genetically encoded, part of human nature. But the good part only exists because the bad part exists. If we weren’t bad, we wouldn’t need to be good.[1] It is as if the genes said to themselves, “We had better get our act together morally, because all this bad behavior isn’t going down well with the social group”. They gave up hope of eliminating all the bad stuff (it served a purpose) and settled for an uneasy combination. Hence all those stern commandments about not doing what you feel like doing. It even became clear that being very good had its genetic advantages in terms of group affection and acceptance. Self-control, concern for others—it pays (and it pays not to know that it pays).

But why are we so bloody awful to start with? It doesn’t seem like a smart strategy. Other animals are not this nasty so it is not necessary for success in the gene wars. Why make a species as criminally inclined as the human species? Why are we so immoral as to need morality? It seems excessive, gratuitous. There is no Devil tempting us, so why do we succumb to the call of the immoral? Now that’s a tough one: we seem perversely unethical, stupidly so. Several suggestions suggest themselves, and they each might have some truth in them. The obvious theory is language, because we have it and animals don’t. Language and immorality are coextensive in the animal world. After all, you can’t lie and break promises unless you can speak, and many forms of misconduct are language-dependent (particularly plotting). Speechless criminals are apt to be not very good criminals. But language is a means not an end, and it doesn’t cover the full range of human iniquity. How about money and wealth? Animals don’t have that and we do, so is that the source of our immorality? You can see how this might lead to envy and acquisitiveness, but it seems too recent and parochial to explain the extent of our badness. Is it simple greed? By why so greedy—other animals aren’t. Is it social inequality, rank, status? But these apply to animals too and yet animals don’t seize immorality with open arms. Is it intelligence? This seems more on the right track: we have the brains to see how bad behavior might help us in life, but animals are too dim-witted to see the possibilities. We can plot and connive, anticipate the future, figure things out, rob banks. We are immoral because we are intelligent—and intelligence has its dark side. Capitalism. Family feuds. Master criminals. Sex: is it all about sex? Getting as much of it as possible. Some immoral conduct no doubt stems from this source, but not all: how does girl-on-girl bullying advance one’s sexual prospects? Maybe it’s an unholy alliance of all of the above—a speaking, envious, competitive, clever, sexually voracious, naked ape. This all leads us down the garden path of evil from which we need to be delivered by morality, in our own self-interest. If humans had no moral sense, their lives would be hell, given their propensity to unethical behavior. They would be unable to live together and their lives would be nasty, brutish and short. We are bad by nature and good by necessity. If we had never developed the morality trait, we would have gone extinct long ago. Indeed, all our pre-historic hominid relatives did go extinct—we are the only ones left standing—and this may be because they never discovered morality (or their genes didn’t). We need to cooperate and cohere as a group and immorality is not conducive to that; it gets you ejected from the group on which your life depends. Maybe we were once on the brink of extinction due to our wicked ways and morality came along to save us from ourselves. A meteor caused dinosaur extinction; our rotten souls nearly caused our extinction (and still might). We exist now because we became moral (to some degree), but it’s a battle we might lose as time goes by. Once society begins to fragment as a result human badness, the foundation of our existence is threatened; and morality as it exists now is a frail reed to prevent this from happening. Animals don’t have this problem because their bad behavior, such as it is, is not too extreme and widespread. No species ever went extinct because it was bad to the bone, just a really nasty piece of work. Apart from us, nature is fundamentally virtuous (or at least not vicious). To put it differently, animals don’t hate each other, despise each other, discriminate against each other, persecute each other, seek to annihilate each other. We do, so we need morality to keep us in check (or else it’s curtains). We are ethical because we are unethical. Animals are not ethical because they are not unethical. We should not be proud of our ethics, but ashamed that we need it.[2]

[1] I don’t mean to imply that animals never do any good, or that humans would lack altruism if they were not also morally bad. But the system of morality we have, which forms a kind of organic whole, is largely concerned with prohibitions, and that system would not exist if we never did anything worth prohibiting.

[2] It would be hard to maintain that animals are ever evil, depraved, cruel, and sadistic. I doubt they ever revel in the suffering of others. They don’t experience schadenfreude. Of course, they can be brutal and self-interested, but they are not corrupt, mean, duplicitous, prejudiced. Were any of our extinct hominid cousins as nasty as we are? Are there planets with worse people on them? What would they be like? We can just about imagine a worse species, but it isn’t easy. Even our greatest heroes have their weaknesses and peccadillos. But you can spend your life around animals and never witness a single unethical act—no false accusations, no back-biting, no mean-spiritedness, no viciousness. I wonder if animals ever intentionally produce pain (torture) as an end in itself; I rather doubt it. If not, you don’t need a moral law telling you not to cause pain unnecessarily. The gulf between man and beast is not so much that we are moral and they are not as that we are immoral and they are not. Our lives are thus governed by moral prohibitions, but theirs aren’t. They have no moral consciousness to speak of.